Publication Number: T-973
Publication Title: Guide to the Collection of Hungarian Political and Military Records, 1909­1945
Date Published: 1972
GUIDE TO THE COLLECTION OF HUNGARIAN POLITICAL AND MILITARY RECORDS, 1909-1945
Introduction

This guide is one of a series of finding aids describing those declassified, seized records of former enemies of the United States deposited at and microfilmed by the National Archives. The guide contains information from data cards identifying records that have been microfilmed. Pertiment copies of the data cards have been included at the beginning of each roll of film.
The guide describes 21 rolls of film of Hungarian records. This Hungarian "collection" is a body of records that once was apparently in the custody of the Arrow-Cross regime, which came to power as a result of the coup d'etat of Oct 15, 1944, and the deportation of Regent Miklos Horthy by the German occupation force the following morning. Ferenc Szalasi, leader of the Arrow- Cross Party, then assumed partial control, with the permission and encouragement of the German occupation authorities, of the western half of Hungarian, the eastern half being already in the hands of the Red Army. When Budapest became threatened by encirclement early in December, Szalasi and the members of his Arrow-Cross cabinet withdrew to Sopron and other towns in the westernmost part of Hungary and eventually fled, individually, to Austria and Bavaria. Most of them were captured, along with these records, by the American forces.
Many of the individuals arrested by the American forces were extradited to the postwar Hungarian Government, but these records, amounting to about 12 cubic feet, were kept and eventually taken to the United States with captured German and Italian records.
The records microfilmed and describes in this guide have no obvious internal organization. In American hands, they were loosely arranged according to "code" numbers as follows:

Most of these records were created by agencies or agents of the Szalasi government between Oct 15, 1944, and Apr 1945. The bulk of them consist of plans or projects that could not be implemented; they pertain to a future "Hungarist" state that would have been instituted by the Arrow-Cross leadership after the final victory of the Axis forces. There are other records, however, that pertain to actual diplomatic, military, and administrative problems—some of a routine nature, but others concerning personality conflicts, conflicts with the population (see roll 4), and even conflicts with the German allies (see roll 15).
In addition to the records described above, there are minutes of meetings of the Arrow-Cross Party leadership during the Horthy era, especially after 1941. Also included are collections of speeches, essays, and other writings of Ferenc Szalasi (see rolls 1, 5-10, and 13), which might well serve to complete Szalasi's diary, described by Professor Macartney as "in every sense an extraordinary production." In addition to the documents produced by the Arrow-Cross Party and the Arrow-Cross government, there are a number of particularly interesting items that appear to have fallen into the hands of the Arrow-Cross. Among these are minutes of meetings between Hungarian, German, and Italian general staffs in the period immediately preceding the war (see rolls 1 and 15), minutes pertaining to Prime Minister Miklos Kallay's visit to Italy to see the Pope and Mussolini in early Apr 1943 (see roll 1), the war diary of the Hungarian Chief of the General Staff covering the period Apr to Oct 1944, and other miscellaneous items.

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