# Arrow Cross Party Hungary's national-socialist party, led by **Ferenc Szálasi** under the ideology he called *Hungarism*, which governed the rump of the country from **15 October 1944** until the Soviet capture of Budapest in February 1945 and the fall of western Hungary that spring. ## Arc Founded in the mid-1930s and drawing on interwar Hungary's fusion of Trianon revanchism, agrarian grievance and antisemitism, the movement polled strongly in the 1939 election and was repeatedly banned and re-legalised. Regent [[Miklós Horthy]] regarded Szálasi as a dangerous crank and had him imprisoned before the war; the Germans regarded him as the instrument of last resort. When Horthy attempted to negotiate Hungary out of the war in October 1944, Germany deposed him and installed Szálasi. The Arrow Cross government's four months in power were catastrophic in a specific and documented way: - Deportations of Jews resumed, including forced marches west toward the Austrian border. - Budapest's Jews were confined to a ghetto in the closing weeks of the war. - Arrow Cross militiamen shot several thousand people on the bank of the Danube; the **Shoes on the Danube Bank** memorial marks the site. Szálasi was extradited, tried and executed in **1946**. ## The scale, and the argument about it Germany occupied Hungary on **19 March 1944**. Between **15 May and 9 July 1944** roughly **437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported**, overwhelmingly to Auschwitz — the fastest deportation programme of the Holocaust, run by [[Adolf Eichmann]]'s comparatively tiny unit and executed largely by **Hungarian gendarmerie and Hungarian civil administration**, *before* the Arrow Cross took power. Horthy halted the deportations in July. This chronology is why the Arrow Cross matters to present-day argument. Assigning Hungary's Holocaust to the four Arrow Cross months, or to the German occupation as a whole, is the move the 2014 Memorial to the Victims of the German Occupation makes architecturally. The gendarmerie is what the frame is built to obscure. > [!important] ⭐ The finding: the extremist party is sometimes the alibi for the respectable one > A fascist party that held power for four months makes a convenient sole author. **The deportations that killed most of Hungary's Jews were carried out by the ordinary state, under a conservative regent, using its own police.** Foregrounding the Arrow Cross is not a lie about who they were; it is a claim about who everyone else was. Compare [[Lost Cause]] and [[Holocaust Denial]]. ## See Also - [[Miklós Horthy]] · [[Adolf Eichmann]] · [[Holocaust]] · [[World War II]] - [[Hungarian History Hub]] · [[Treaty of Trianon]] - [[Fascism]] · [[Antisemitism]] · [[Ethnonationalism]] · [[Dictators in World History Hub]] - [[Italian History Hub]] · [[German History Hub]]