Hungary in World War II: Caught in the Cauldron, Deborah S. Cornelius (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), ix + 519 pp., paperback $28.00, electronic version available

Abstract

Hungary does not—but could very well—form a part of Timothy Snyder's famous monograph Bloodlands (2011), on the vast region extending from the Baltic States to the Black Sea and from the German-Polish border to the eastern part of the Ukraine. Here is a region that suffered endless cruelty, hatred, civil wars, deportations, and genocide in the interwar years and during World War II. In Hungary, perhaps a million people from among thirteen million inhabitants (depending on which political boundaries one considers as valid in an eternally fluid situation) died from unnatural causes. About half of the victims were Jews, killed mostly by the Germans but delivered into their hands by the Hungarian authorities, with the approval of much of the population. No wonder then, that the debate still rages as to who was responsible for Hungary's defeat in two world wars; its truncation after World War I and its devastation during World War II; the Holocaust; the moral collapse; and the massive flights and expulsions. Because only a few of Hungary's many excellent historians have attempted to write a comprehensive national history of the period, one must laud Deborah Cornelius's effort to achieve such an important goal. One would laud her unconditionally had she shown a little more balance in her treatment of Regent Admiral Miklós Horthy's regime—a government that guided, and more often than not misguided Hungary in the interwar and the World War II years.