Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, was a Hungarian admiral and statesman who served as 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.
Otto Johann Anton Skorzeny was an Austrian-born German SS-Obersturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS during World War II. During the war, he was involved in a number of operations, including the removal from power of Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy and the Gran Sasso raid which rescued Benito Mussolini from captivity. Skorzeny led Operation Greif in which German soldiers infiltrated Allied lines wearing their opponents' uniforms. As a result, he was charged in 1947 at the Dachau Military Tribunal with breaching the 1907 Hague Convention, but was acquitted.
Ferenc Szálasi was a Hungarian military officer, politician and leader of the Arrow Cross Party who headed the government of Hungary during the country's occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Dieter Wisliceny was a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and one of the deputies of Adolf Eichmann, helping to organise and coordinate the wide scale deportations of the Jews across Europe during the Holocaust.
The Arrow Cross Party was a far-right Hungarian ultranationalist party led by Ferenc Szálasi, which formed a government in Hungary they named the Government of National Unity. They were in power from 15 October 1944 to 28 March 1945. During its short rule, ten to fifteen thousand civilians were murdered outright, including many Jews and Romani, and 80,000 people were deported from Hungary to concentration camps in Austria. After the war, Szálasi and other Arrow Cross leaders were tried as war criminals by Hungarian courts.
The Kolozsvár Ghetto was one of the lesser-known Jewish ghettos of the World War II era. The ghetto was located in the city of Kolozsvár, then Kingdom of Hungary. Between the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 and the Second Vienna Award in 1940, Cluj was a part of Greater Romania.
Operation Panzerfaust was a military operation undertaken in October 1944 by the German Wehrmacht to ensure the Kingdom of Hungary would remain a German ally in World War II. When German dictator Adolf Hitler received word that Hungary's Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, was secretly negotiating his country's surrender to the advancing Red Army, he sent commando leader Otto Skorzeny of the Waffen-SS and former special forces commander Adrian von Fölkersam to Hungary. Hitler feared that Hungary's surrender would expose his southern flank, where Romania had just joined with the Soviets and cut off a million German troops still fighting the Soviet advance in the Balkans. The operation was preceded by Operation Margarethe in March 1944, which was the occupation of Hungary by German forces, which Hitler had hoped would secure Hungary's place in the Axis powers. This had also enabled the deportation of the majority of Hungarian Jews, previously beyond the reach of the Nazis, through uneasy cooperation with Hungarian authorities. This policy was, however, terminated as Soviet forces drew closer and the USAAF, based in Italy, began bombing Hungary, including Budapest.
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."
László Baky was a leading member of the Hungarian Nazi movement that flourished before and during World War II.
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. Hungary under Horthy was characterized by its conservative, nationalist and fiercely anti-communist character. The government was based on an unstable alliance of conservatives and right-wingers. Foreign policy was characterized by revisionism — the total or partial revision of the Treaty of Trianon, which had seen Hungary lose over 70% of its historic territory along with over three million Hungarians, who mostly lived in the border territories outside the new borders of the kingdom. Hungary's interwar politics were dominated by a focus on the territorial losses suffered in this treaty, with the resentment continuing until the present.
George Mantello, a businessman with various diplomatic activities, born into a Jewish family from Transylvania, helped save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust while working for the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, Switzerland from 1942 to 1945 under the protection of consul Castellanos Contreras, by providing them with fictive Salvadoran citizenship papers. He publicized in mid-1944 the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which had great impact on rescue and was a major contributing factor to Hungary's regent Miklós Horthy stopping the transports to Auschwitz.
László Endre was a Hungarian right-wing politician and collaborator with the Nazis during the Second World War.
Andor Jaross was an ethnic Hungarian politician most active in interwar Czechoslovakia and later in Hungary during World War II. He also notably collaborated with the Nazis.
The Government of National Unity was a Nazi-backed puppet government of Hungary, which ruled the German-occupied Kingdom of Hungary during the Second World War in eastern Europe. After the joint coup d’état with which the Nazis and the Arrow Cross Party overthrew the government of the Regent of Hungary, Miklós Horthy, the Arrow Cross Party established the coalition Government of National Unity on 16 October 1944.
Gábor Vajna was a Hungarian politician, who served as Minister of the Interior from 1944 to 1945.
András Kun, O.F.M. was a Roman Catholic priest of the Franciscan Order. During the Holocaust in Hungary, Kun was also the commander of an Anti-Semitic death squad for the Arrow Cross Party. After the Second World War, Kun was prosecuted for war crimes by a Hungarian People's Tribunal after Hungary's occupation by Soviet armies. He was convicted and hanged.
Tibor Baranski was a Hungarian-American man credited with saving more than 3,000 Hungarian Jewish women, men and children from the Nazis during the Holocaust.
The Working Group was an underground Jewish organization in the Axis-aligned Slovak State during World War II. Led by Gisi Fleischmann and Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl, the Working Group rescued Jews from the Holocaust by gathering and disseminating information on the Holocaust in Poland, bribing and negotiating with German and Slovak officials, and smuggling valuables to Jews deported to Poland.
"Zigeuner" is a science fiction short story by Harry Turtledove, first published in the September/October issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in August, 2017. It was reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. St. Martin's, 2018. It won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for best short form work in 2017. It would also be reprinted in Turtledove's short-story collection The Best of Harry Turtledove in 2021.
László Ferenczy was a lieutenant colonel in the Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie and member of its "central dejewification unit" during World War II and the Holocaust.
