Hungary's neutrality between 1939 and 1941 was a very precarious exercise in balancing between three powers. By paying lip-service to Nazi-Germany and, simultaneously, courting the West, particularly Great Britain, Hungary tried to restore its pre-First World War borders and maintain its non-belligerency. At the same time, no active Hungarian politician thought in terms of dealing with the Soviet Union, which they dreaded. They thought in terms of border revision without considering the cost they would have to pay for it.

‘THE UNWILLING SATELLITE’?

In a book published in 1947, America's longest-serving pre-Second World War minister to Hungary, John Flournoy Montgomery, erected a monument to Hungary's claim to have been an ‘unwilling satellite’ of Nazi Germany and urged that ‘the true story of Hungary's nazification’ be ‘presented to Americans’. Underlining the reluctant nature of official Hungary's friendship with Nazi Germany, Montgomery not only echoed official Hungarian opinions but spoke of his personal experience from 1933 to early 1941. Through his long years of increasingly intimate friendship with Hungarian political leaders such as Regent Admiral Miklós Horthy, former Prime Minister Count István Bethlen, members of the government and the diplomatic corps, Montgomery seemed to have agreed with former Foreign Minister Kálmán de Kánya in mid-1940 that ‘Hitler at this moment [was] the undisputed master of the European continent, and much as it distressed him and other Hungarians, if Hungary was to exist and to get any satisfaction in the way of revision it would be at the will of Mr. Hitler.’