06 September 2023
The recent statement made by Hungarian Transportation Minister János Lázár extolling Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, as a great Hungarian patriot, solder and statesman, who has yet to be fully appreciated, is a classic and reprehensible example of Holocaust distortion.
Horthy was the leader of Hungary from the passage of the first antisemitic law in 1920 through the first and main wave of deportations of Jews, almost exclusively to Auschwitz in spring 1944. Any attempt to assess Horthy without including his central role in the persecution and murder of nearly three quarters of Hungarian Jewry, amounts to the whitewashing of his and Hungary’s responsibility for their demise.
Such statements must not only be shown to be what they are, false, they deserve to be severely harshly condemned. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, urges Minister Lázár to retract his statement, correct it, and offer an apology to the Hungarian victims of the Holocaust as well as the few remaining survivors and their families who endured unimaginable atrocities at the hand of the Nazis and their collaborators.
