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Introduction Public interest in Hungary’s role in World War II has perhaps never been greater than in the years since the change of regime in 1989–90. The full story of Hungary in World War II could not be told until the collapse of the Communist system, forty-five years after the end of the war. Hungary was occupied by the Red Army in 1945, and since the Soviets considered Hungary’s participation in the war a crime against the Soviet Union the war was not commemorated. Memorials were raised to the heroic Soviet dead, with memorial speeches and parades, but there were no Hungarian war memorials, no tributes to the fallen Hungarian soldiers. During the following forty years of Communist rule, history was presented from the Soviet point of view. As historian Domokos Kosáry explained: ‘‘The situation that facts are just now coming to light is not just that the detailed research was missing, but—much more—that in the service of the Stalinist type of history, the tendency was to select the data which supported that viewpoint, and to pass over or omit other data which did not. . . .’’1 After forty years of censorship, most people knew only the version of history they had learned in school; that the disastrous war had been brought on by the ‘‘fascist reactionary’’ wartime regime; that all political and military leaders of the period were war criminals, and that Hungary had been liberated by the Soviet Army on April 4, 1945—celebrated every year as Liberation Day. Other key elements of the official version included the assertion that only Communists had been participants in the resistance against the German occupation and the profascist Arrow Cross rule, and that all families that had fled to the West before the Russian invasion had been tainted with fascism. Even prisoners of war who returned from Soviet labor camps were sworn to silence, treated as second-class citizens, and prevented from speaking about their experiences. It is only in recent years that historians in Hungary have been free to examine and reevaluate their country’s role in the war. One by one former taboo questions have been addressed and a new generation of historians 2 | Introduction has begun to re-examine the period, but forty years of controlled propaganda and education cannot be eliminated easily, and there are still topics that are discussed only hesitantly or not addressed at all. My first contact with Hungarians came in 1957. As a recent college graduate on an extended tour of Europe, I met with young Hungarian refugees at the University of Edinburgh and again at the University of Vienna. Impressed with their patriotism and idealism, I returned to Yale and wrote my master’s thesis on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. In the 1970s and 1980s I visited Hungary, taking my children to visit their paternal grandparents and to learn a bit of the language and culture, but it was in 1984 that, as a PhD candidate at Rutgers University, I decided to study and write about Hungary. I had realized how little was known about Hungary by the English-speaking public, and how misleading the few references in the European history textbooks from which I had been teaching were. I arrived in Hungary on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1987, at a time of dramatic change, with the anticipation of greater changes to come. One rushed out every day to get the newspaper and read about the latest happenings. Censorship was loosening; dormant civic societies were being revived. People were suddenly willing—even eager—to tell their stories to an American historian or share their unpublished manuscripts, in hopes that their long-banned history would reach the American public. Two groundbreaking events, seemingly innocuous to the Western world, give an indication of the changing times. In 1988, an exhibit of the history of Hungarian scouting was allowed to be displayed in the provincial town of Szeged, much to the surprise of newspaper reporters and former scouts. Scouting, a vibrant movement in Hungary from the time the first scout troop was founded in 1911, had been condemned as a fascist organization and the Hungarian Scout Association disbanded in 1948, incorporated into the state-controlled Communist Pioneer youth movement. The second event was the opening in 1988 of an exhibit on the folk high school movement at the Belvarosi (Central City) Roman Catholic church in Budapest. Begun in the late 1930s, the movement was intended to educate peasant...

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