Miklós Horthy

Miklós Horthy rose from sub-lieutenant to rear admiral in the Austro-Hungarian Navy, commanding the fleet after mutinies in the final year of World War I. When revolutions swept Hungary, he returned to Budapest with the National Army, and in 1920 the Diet made him regent of a formally dethroned monarchy. His interwar government banned both communists and the Arrow Cross, pursued recovery of territories lost in the Treaty of Trianon, and twice turned back the former king Charles IV under Allied pressure. By the late 1930s he had aligned with Hitler, reoccupying ceded lands and joining the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, though he sheltered Polish refugees in 1939 and historians debate his enthusiasm for the German war effort. Before the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944, 63,000 Jews had been murdered; afterward, 437,000 were deported to Auschwitz, most gassed on arrival. In October 1944 Horthy declared an armistice with the Soviets, was arrested by the Germans and taken to Bavaria, then spent the postwar years in Portuguese exile, publishing his memoirs in 1953.