Hungarian Volunteer Anti-Fascist Armed Groups during the Great Patriotic War

Abstract

Using the example of the history of Hungarian volunteer anti-fascist groups created during the Great Patriotic War, the author identifies the factors that became decisive in the formation of a “foreign” military unit. The source base used in the research includes both published and unpublished documents from three federal archives - the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the Russian State Military Archive, and the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. The creation of Hungarian military units was complicated by the lack of an organized anti-fascist movement among prisoners of war, who for the most part remained loyal to the regime of Miklós Horthy. The changes in the domestic and foreign political situation of Hungary in 1944 contributed to the development of the volunteer movement and the beginning of the process of forming Hungarian volunteer anti-fascist groups. The author comes to the conclusion that the decisive factors that influenced the formation of the Hungarian volunteer units were the external ones. They contributed to the growth of anti-fascist and anti-German sentiment among prisoners of war, which led to a change in the attitude of the Hungarians to the idea of creating volunteer units; it allowed the Soviet command to begin their deployment at the final stage of the Great Patriotic War.