The “Anglo-Saxon” Orientation of Wartime Hungarian Foreign Policy: The Case of Antal Ullein-Reviczky

Abstract

The political élite of Hungary included a group that expected British and American support for Hungarian revisionist claims after the Paris Peace Conference. Their acknowledged leader was Count István Bethlen, the prime minister from 1921 to 1931 and an adviser to Regent Vice-Admiral Miklós Horthy until 1944. This analysis investigates a largely forgotten member of this group. Antal Ullein-Reviczky, a diplomat and scholar, shifted from being a Hungarian nationalist with an anti-Nazi attitude towards secret efforts to establish political relations with Britain during the Second World War. Press chief of the Foreign Ministry and the prime minister’s office, Ullein-Reviczky’s last appointment was Hungarian minister at Stockholm in 1943–1944. Both the Germans and the British put little trust in a man whose wife was the daughter of a British diplomat, yet who maintained superb connexions in pro-German Hungary. He changed his mind gradually when he realised that the price for revising the Treaty of Trianon was unacceptable. His long journey through international politics made him a significant player in a global drama, also assisting Raoul Wallenberg’s mission to Budapest. It is a political odyssey worth remembering.