Miserable Hungarian Occupiers and Their Miserable Subjects: Review Article of Ungváry, Krisztián. A magyar megszálló csapatok a Szovjetunióban, 1941-1944. Esemény - elbeszélés - utóélet [The Hungarian Occupation Troops in the Soviet Union, 1941-1944. Event - Narrative - Afterlife]. Osiris, pp. 467. Maps, Photographs.

István Deák

doi:10.5195/ahea.2018.326

Abstract

It took some seventy years after World War II for the educated part of the Hungarian public to obtain comprehensive information on the double tragedy of Hungary’s participation in the German military campaign against the Soviet Union. Not only was the army’s defeat at the Don River in the winter of 1942/43 an unmitigated catastrophe, but as Krisztián Ungváry demonstrates, the Hungarian honvéd forces, performing occupation duty in Ukraine and a part of Belorussia, committed atrocities against the civilian population which nearly equaled those of the German occupiers. Moreover, the ill-equipped Hungarians’ main dilemma was a nefarious entanglement in local ethnic and nationalist conflicts, in which the Soviet Partisans played only a limited role.

Highlights

It took some seventy years after World War II for the educated part of the Hungarian public to obtain comprehensive information on the double tragedy of Hungary’s participation in the German military campaign against the Soviet Union
Was the army’s defeat at the Don River in the winter of 1942/43. an unmitigated catastrophe, but as Krisztián Ungváry demonstrates, the Hungarian honvéd forces, performing occupation duty in Ukraine and a part of Belorussia, committed atrocities against the civilian population which nearly equaled those of the German occupiers
Krisztián Ungváry is one of Hungary’s most celebrated, most stimulating, and most controversial historians cum public intellectual; forcibly, a review of his voluminous publication on the Hungarian occupation troops in the Soviet Union must broaden into an examination, brief, of his overall activities and writings

Summary

Introduction

It took some seventy years after World War II for the educated part of the Hungarian public to obtain comprehensive information on the double tragedy of Hungary’s participation in the German military campaign against the Soviet Union. An unmitigated catastrophe, but as Krisztián Ungváry demonstrates, the Hungarian honvéd forces, performing occupation duty in Ukraine and a part of Belorussia, committed atrocities against the civilian population which nearly equaled those of the German occupiers.

Results

Conclusion