Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya was a Hungarian admiral and statesman who was the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary during the interwar period and most of World War II, from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944.
John Gunther was an American journalist and writer.
Angela Maria "Geli" Raubal was an Austrian woman who was the half-niece of Adolf Hitler. Born in Linz, Austria-Hungary, she was the second child and eldest daughter of Leo Raubal Sr. and Hitler's half-sister, Angela Raubal. Raubal lived in close contact with her half-uncle Adolf from 1925 until her presumed suicide in 1931.
William Lawrence Shirer was an American journalist and war correspondent. He wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of Nazi Germany that has been read by many and cited in scholarly works for more than 50 years. Originally a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the International News Service, Shirer was the first reporter hired by Edward R. Murrow for what became a CBS radio team of journalists known as "Murrow's Boys". He became known for his broadcasts from Berlin, from the rise of the Nazi dictatorship through the first year of World War II (1939–1940). Together with Murrow, on Sunday, March 13, 1938, he organized the first broadcast world news roundup, a format still followed by news broadcasts.
Dorothy Celene Thompson was an American journalist and radio broadcaster. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and was one of the few women news commentators broadcasting on radio during the 1930s. Thompson is regarded by some as the "First Lady of American Journalism" and was recognized by Time magazine in 1939 as equal in influence to Eleanor Roosevelt. Recordings of her NBC Radio commentary and analysis of the European situation and the start of World War II were selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2023, based on their "cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage."
The Second Vienna Award, also known as the Vienna Diktat, was the second of two territorial disputes that were arbitrated by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. On 30 August 1940, they assigned the territory of Northern Transylvania, including all of Maramureș and part of Crișana, from Romania to Hungary.
The German Nazi Party adopted and developed several pseudoscientific racial classifications as part of its fascist ideology (Nazism) in order to justify genocides and racism against ethnicities which it deemed genetically or culturally inferior, invasions of Poland and the USSR, and distant intention for war against Japan. The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping and it was accepted by Nazi thinkers. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race" with Germanic peoples as representative of Nordic race being best branch, and they considered Jews, mixed-race people, Slavs, Romani, Blacks, and certain other ethnicities racially inferior subhumans, whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. In these ethnicities, Jews were considered the most inferior. However, the Nazis considered Germanic peoples such as Germans to be significantly mixed between different races, including the East Baltic race being considered inferior by the Nazis, and that their citizens needed to be completely Nordicized after the war. The Nazis also considered some groups such as Sorbs, Czechs, Northern Italians, Greeks, and Iranians to be of Germanic and Nordic origin. Some non-Aryan ethnic groups such as Turks, Chinese, and Japanese were considered to be partly superior, while some Indo-Europeans such as most Slavs, the Romani, and most Indians were considered inferior.
Malchiel Gruenwald (1882–1968) was an Israeli hotelier, amateur journalist, and stamp collector, who came to public attention in 1953, when he accused an Israeli government employee, Rudolf Kastner, of having collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Robert Henry Best was an American foreign correspondent who covered events in Europe for American media outlets during the interwar period. He later became a supporter of the Nazis and a well known broadcaster of Nazi propaganda during World War II. After the war, Best was arrested and returned to the United States to stand trial for collaboration. In 1948, Best was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1952.
During World War II, the Kingdom of Hungary was a member of the Axis powers. In the 1930s, the Kingdom of Hungary relied on increased trade with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to pull itself out of the Great Depression. Hungarian politics and foreign policy had become more stridently nationalistic by 1938, and Hungary adopted an irredentist policy similar to Germany's, attempting to incorporate ethnic Hungarian areas in neighboring countries into Hungary. Hungary benefited territorially from its relationship with the Axis. Settlements were negotiated regarding territorial disputes with the Czechoslovak Republic, the Slovak Republic, and the Kingdom of Romania. On November 20, 1940, Hungary became the fourth member to join the Axis powers when it signed the Tripartite Pact. The following year, Hungarian forces participated in the invasion of Yugoslavia and the invasion of the Soviet Union. Their participation was noted by German observers for its particular cruelty, with occupied peoples subjected to arbitrary violence. Hungarian volunteers were sometimes referred to as engaging in "murder tourism."
The Kingdom of Hungary, referred to retrospectively as the Regency and the Horthy era, existed as a country from 1920 to 1946 under the rule of Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary, who officially represented the Hungarian monarchy. In reality there was no king, and attempts by King Charles IV to return to the throne shortly before his death were prevented by Horthy.
The Budapest offensive was the general attack by Soviet and Romanian armies against Hungary and their Axis allies from Nazi Germany. The offensive lasted from 29 October 1944 until the fall of Budapest on 13 February 1945. This was one of the most difficult and complicated offensives that the Soviet Army carried out in Central Europe. It resulted in a decisive victory for the USSR, as it greatly sped up the ending of World War II in Europe.
John Flournoy Montgomery was an American businessman and diplomat. His sole diplomatic posting was as U.S. Minister to Hungary, between 1933 and 1941. This ambassadorial assignment placed Montgomery at the center of the seething intrigue and gathering storm that characterized 1930's Hungary and Central Europe; in particular he was witness to the rise of Adolf Hitler's influence in Budapest, and the complex struggle over the alliance between Hungary and Nazi Germany. His memoirs, entitled Hungary: The Unwilling Satellite, are considered a valuable document of that era.
The Anschluss, also known as the Anschluß Österreichs, was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich on 13 March 1938.
Karl Pfeifer was an Austrian journalist.
George Eric Rowe Gedye, often cited as G. E. R. Gedye, was a British journalist and foreign correspondent for eminent British and American newspapers, who rose to prominence for his early warnings about the dangers posed by the rise of fascism in Germany and Austria.
Tibor Frank was a Hungarian historian who was professor of history at the School of English and American Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). He was director of its School of English and American Studies. From 2013 he was corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), as of 2019 he was a full member.
Mary MacPherson Lane is an American non-fiction writer and journalist specializing in Western European art and history.
Reuben Henry Markham was a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor who wrote numerous books, including "an attack on fascism,"The Wave of the Past, which urged American intervention in World War II. After the war he published four works condemning the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.
John Chrysostom Segrue, also reporting under his initials as J. C. Segrue, was an English journalist. He worked as foreign correspondent for the News Chronicle and its predecessor, The Daily News, for almost 30 years, reporting on current events throughout continental Europe. Expelled from Berlin and Vienna for his critical reporting of the Nazis and his condemnation of their persecution of the Jews, Segrue was named in the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B., commonly referred to as ‘The Black Book,’ a list of people whom the SS had marked down for immediate arrest in the event of the Germans’ successfully completing the invasion of Britain. He was captured in 1941, whilst escaping from Belgrade during the German invasion of Yugoslavia, and interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where he died as a result of tuberculosis in 1942. He was later honoured by the Guild of Jewish Journalists for "alerting the world, through his dispatches, to the true evil of Nazi philosophy."
