Miserable Hungarian Occupiers and Their Miserable Subjects: Review Article of Ungváry, Krisztián. A magyar megszálló csapatok a Szovjetunióban, 1941-1944. Esemény - elbeszélés - utóélet [The Hungarian Occupation Troops in the Soviet Union, 1941-1944. Event - Narrative - Afterlife]. Osiris, pp. 467. Maps, Photographs

In: Hungarian cultural studies: e-journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association, Band 11, S. 120-135

Abstract

It took some seventy years after World War II for the educated part of the Hungarian public to obtain comprehensive information on the double tragedy of Hungary's participation in the German military campaign against the Soviet Union. Not only was the army's defeat at the Don River in the winter of 1942/43 an unmitigated catastrophe, but as Krisztián Ungváry demonstrates, the Hungarian honvéd forces, performing occupation duty in Ukraine and a part of Belorussia, committed atrocities against the civilian population which nearly equaled those of the German occupiers. Moreover, the ill-equipped Hungarians' main dilemma was a nefarious entanglement in local ethnic and nationalist conflicts, in which the Soviet Partisans played only a limited role.