Father Zadravecz and the Failure of Right Radicalism in Hungary, 1919-23

[Kiev Communard]

Recently I have become subscribed to Questia online library, which lists a tremendous amoung of various books, journal and magazine publications. Therefore I have decided to begin sharing some of those sources here. As my first contribution, I would like to share the article by Bela Bodo, a Hungarian-American scholar from East European Quarterly, which is devoted to the subject of complex relationship between "traditional" reactionaries in the early Horthyist Hungary and the more militant, quasi-fascist right-wing radicals. The career of the infamous Father Zadravecz is explored here to substantiate the author's claim on the complete dependence of Hungarian fascist movement of the 1920s on the traditionalist layers of the ruling class. The first post is without references, as it would make it too long to get posted.





Father Zadravecz and the Failure of Right Radicalism in Hungary, 1919-23.


by Bela Bodo

Introduction

This essay deals with two larger issues: the source of right radicalism, including fascism in Central Europe after the First World War, and the intricate relations between conservatives and right radicals. I am particularly interested in the question of why after three years of close collaboration between the two groups, the authoritarian conservatives in Hungary decided to push into the background, and in many case break ties completely with, the right radical paramilitary leaders and their allies in state bureaucracy and the Catholic Church. Was their decision informed by tactical, mainly foreign-policy, considerations as Marxist historians believed, or did it have to do with more profound social and cultural causes? Can the paramilitary leaders and their allies described as members of the middle class, and therefore pro-fascism and fascism as the "radicalism of the middle?" Can traditional class analysis, with its focus on social origins, education, income bracket, consumption pattern and place of residence, grasp the sources of tension between the right radicals and the authoritarian conservatives? Or should we rather look at culture, especially culture of large bureaucracies and at the personality types and character features produced by large and hierarchically-structured organizations? Were the paramilitary leaders and their allies marginalized individuals, who could not, or did not want to, find their way back to civilian life, or were they only young and ambitious men on the move? Did the right radical and fascist movements, parties and pressure groups function as a refuge for the losers and the declasse elements of society? Or did they offer a home to the overly ambitious members of otherwise privileged groups who had been pushed aside only because they were too impatient to wait for their turn?

To answer these questions, I will examine the political life of Istvan Zadravecz, a Franciscan priest, close friend and ally of the paramilitary leaders in the early 1920s, and Army Bishop between 1920 and 1927. I am interested in Zadravecz mainly as a representative member of the group of young right radicals, who began their political careers in 1919, were influential in the early 1920s but gradually lost favor with the elite. They tried to regain power in the 1930s by criticizing the authoritarian regime from the right; with the exception of those who made their compromises with the conservatives however, they remained on the political margin until the German occupation of the country in March 1944. The right radicals I am considering here were failures, and they tended to blame their failure on the conservatives. What their and especially Zadravecz' remarks say about the relation between the authoritarian conservatives and the radial right in general, and the sources of tension and hostility between the two groups in particular is the subject of this essay.

Life and Political Career of Peter Zadravecz

Janos Zadravecz was born in the small and ethnically Croatian town of Csaktornya (Cakovec) in 1884. It was rather typical for members of the politically dominant ethnic group living ill ethnically diverse communities and provinces where they constituted only a minority to become extreme nationalists. Zadravecz was no exception: his intense nationalism, rooted in childhood experience, informed his hostility towards minority rights before the First World War and also hardened his stand on the issue of border revision in the interwar period. His name suggests Slavic, most likely Croatian, origins, which he desperately tried to hide by attaching the both noble and Hungarian sounding Uzdoczy to his surname and in the 1920s. In the early 1940s, his biographer argued that that his family name was originally Doczy, and his ancestors, escaping from Austrian rule and oppression, migrated into Croatia from Hungary proper sometimes in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. It is safe to say, since he admitted as much to his biographer, that, as a child, Zadravecz was pre-occupied with his ethic origins. Zadravecz' father was an upwardly mobile--he made a living as the manager of a local noble estate but also a relatively poor man. Thus the poor shape of family coffers, beside the influence of the local Franciscan priest, must have influenced the decision of the father, who had to take care of and educate five sons and three daughters, to allow his oldest offspring to enter the Franciscan order at the age of fourteen. In the Franciscan order, Zadravecz changed his first name to Istain (Istvan or Stephen means Christ's groom). He attended the gimnazium or humanist high school in Budapest; after gaining his certificate of graduation (erettsegi in Hungarian, Abitur in German), he first studied philosophy in the college of the Franciscan order in Zagreb for a year and then theology also at the order college in Baja. After the completion of his undergraduate studies, his superior in Baja sent him to Rome for further training. He received two doctorates, one in dogma and another in rhetoric, from the Franciscan order's main university, the Saint Anthony College, and was ordered to the priesthood in March 1907. (1)

Following what was a rather typical path, after graduation, Zadravecz taught theology and ethics to future priests and monks at the Franciscan schools in Baja and Gyongyos. In 1914, he was appointed as Superior of the Franciscan convent in the town of Szeged, in the southern part of the country. At the same time, he acquired a church of his own, the beautiful Gothic Matthias Cathedral in the most popular district of the city, Alsovaros. The district had a large working-class population, and both their poverty and their attachment to and affiliation with the "godless" Socials Democratic Party and socialist trade unions, increased the young priest's interest in Christian Socialism. The most articulate proponent of Christian Socialism, since the turn of the century, in Hungary had been Ottokar Prohaszka, the Bishop of Szekesfehervar, who, after 1920, became Zadravecz' closest friend and ally within the Catholic elite. Recognizing Zadravecz' talent as a propagandist, after the outbreak of the war in August 1914, his Franciscan superiors also appointed him as an army priest: his task was to give patriotic speeches to military units departing for the front from the Szeged railway station and to look after the emotional and spiritual needs of wounded soldiers in the city's hospitals. Given the increasing weariness and even growing hostility of the population to the war, after 1915, these must have been were increasingly difficult tasks to perform.

The front finally collapsed in October 1918, and revolution broke out in Budapest at the end of the same month. Zadravecz, as most Catholic priests, opposed the revolution, which, among other things, planned to separate church and state fully, redistribute the large estates of the Catholic Church among poor peasants and reduce the role of the Catholic Church in education and social welfare. Zadravecz' state of mind at the time can be read from the long speech that he delivered in his church on December 1, 1918. In this speech, he welcomed Hungary's independence from Austria but opposed the violation of Hungary's territorial integrity. Zadravecz described the republican form of government as both anti-Christian and unpatriotic, and encouraged his listeners to settle scores with speculators and war profiteers, the majority of whom he implied were unassimilated eastern Jews from Galicia. In the same speech, he railed against "class hatred" and "socialist terror" allegedly by the social democratic party and the socialist trade unions. (2) In both content and style, his speech bore a close resemblance and was most likely was modeled on the writings of the leading Catholic intellectual, Ottokar Prohaszka, and reflected the position of the Christian Socialist wing of the Catholic Church on issues such as democracy, workers' rights and secularization. (3)

If the policies of the new democratic regime had aggrieved Zadravecz and the Catholic hierarchy, the plans and actions of the more militantly anti-religious Communist dictatorship drove them into despair. After the takeover of power on March 21, 1919, one of the first actions of the new government was to create a new organization, the National Office for the Liquidation of Religion (Orszagos Vallasugyi Likvidalo Hivatal), within the Ministry of Education and Culture. The name of this institution spoke for itself, and clearly expressed the expressed the regime's long-term goal in regards to religion. At the end of March 1919, the government ordered the nationalization of church property and indeed by mid-June, control over the estates of the Catholic Church, which had owned more than 320, 000 hectares (790, 737 acres), was transferred into government hands. The savings of the Catholic Church, which amounted to 114 700, 000 korona in cash and bonds, were also confiscated, while the majority of church institutions, cloisters and bishops' residences were nationalized, plundered and often transformed into military barracks, hospitals and schools. The rigid separation of state and church in the sphere of education was especially painful since half of the educational establishments in Hungary from kindergartens to universities had been in Catholic hands before 1918. The nationalization of these institutions signaled a rapid decline in Catholic influence and power, in addition to creating the more immediate and pressing problem of finding employment and shelter for thousands of teachers, including monks and nuns, who were either not allowed or did not want to serve the new regime. To add insult to injury, the Communist government ordered the removal of crosses and other religious symbols from the walls of public buildings, and it also forbade the wearing of religious insignias. The services of priests and pastors were no longer required in the armed forces, and religion was removed as a compulsory subject from school curricula. At the same time, the Communist regime made divorce easier to obtain for both husbands and wives and, to the chagrin of conservative parents, introduced sexual education in public schools. It also arrested, tortured, put on trial and sentenced dozens of priests, including Bishop Janos Mikes of Szombathely and Chaplain Jozsef Pehm, who later entered the annals of Hungarian history as Prelate Mindszenty. Between the end of March and early August of 1919, at least seven Catholic priests were killed and one nun was left to die in prison for a having offered active resistance to the Communist regime. (4)

The openly anti-Catholic and heavy-handed methods of the Communist government in Budapest only marginally affected the people of Szeged, including Zadravecz, because the city came under French occupation in December. The most immediate concerns in Szeged in the spring and summer of 1919 were the fear of Serbian occupation, rising unemployment, high prices, spiraling inflation and plummeting living standards, accompanied as always by speculation, black-marketeering and rising crime rates. Since November 1918, the councils, i.e. the self-governing bodies of soldier and workers, had been sharing power with the conservative civil servants in the municipal government. The conservative wing of the social democratic party, which supported social reforms but opposed further political radicalization, including the formation of an alliance with the Communists, dominated the council movement in Szeged. The socialist workers and soldier sclashed with Communist forces on March 10; the battle on the street was so intense the city government felt obliged to turn to the socials democratic government in Budapest for help. The government did send a navy battalion under the command of a young soldier-of-fortune, First Lieutenant Frigyes Neuberger. The battalion imposed order by introducing martial law on the city on March 12 and collecting weapons; the high-handed methods of Neuberger and his underlings however, coupled with the requisitioning of goods, insulted and injured the middle-class and well-to-do elements in the city. In imitation of events in Budapest, a new municipal government, the directory, which included both socials democrats and Communists, was formed immediately after March 21, and this new institution ruled the city dictatorially. The French occupation army did not get involved at first in what it considered as a purely Hungarian matter; however, as a cautionary measure it ordered the collection of weapons and also limited the size of the Hungarian force in the town to 1300 men. More militant than the conservative civil servants and the majority of officers in the local garrison, both local Communists and those sent by the Budapest government sought to sabotage the order and to smuggle the badly needed weapons out of the city. Fearful of a clash with the Communist forces, the French commander asked for reinforcement from the nearby cities of Temesvar (Timisiora) and Belgrade. The directory and Neuberger's forces, however, did not wait for the arrival of fresh French troops; in the early morning of March 27, 1919, they slipped out of the town never to return. The Communist experiment in Szeged ended even before it earnestly began. After the departure of the directory, the old conservative municipal government was restored and the laws of the Budapest government were ignored for the next four months. (5)

Counter-revolutionary groups began to organize after the departure of Neuberger and the directory at the end of March. Dr. Bela Kelemen, Chief Sheriff (foispan) of Csongrad County, distinguished among four such groups. The first group included some of the prominent manufacturers and property owners in the city, such as Bernat Back and Fulop Wimmer. Heavily Jewish in composition, the first group pursued moderate goals: it sought to put an end to the workers' occupation of factories; weaken and if possible outlaw the councils; prevent the nationalization of factories and laws as planned by the Communist government in Budapest; put already nationalized enterprises back into private hands, and restore law and order in the city. The second group, organized by a retired Colonel, Mano Nagel, pursued more radical goals. Nagel wanted to organize war veterans, soldiers, peasants, civil servants and other middle and lower middle class elements into militias in order to destroy the remaining strongholds of the social democratic movements. His goals were to cleanse the municipal government, the police and the army of Social Democrats, to take control of the local garrison, and arrest and punish everyone who had worked for democratic and social democratic organizations and governments since October. The French military command however found these goals too radical; fearing further unrest, French soldiers arrested and later interred Nagel in the town of Nagykikinda (Kikinda), an event that also put an end to his nascent movement. The third group, organized by Zadravecz, was primarily motivated by resentment over the attempt of the democratic government to separate church and state, and by fear of further attacks on the Catholic Church. Zadravecz' and his group's primary objective was to put the Catholic Church and its personnel under the protection of the Entente powers and, after the expected collapse of the Communist regime, fully restore the power and privileges of the Catholic Church. The boundaries between Zadravecz' and Nagel's groups were so fluid, that the conservative head of the county administration, Bela Kelemen, considered the two movements one and the same. Zadravecz indeed shared Nagel's goal to destroy social democracy root and branch and, if necessary, through violence; both groups appealed to the middle and lower middle classes and sought to organize their members into militias. Neither Nagel not Zadravecz were skilled organizers however; according to Kelemen, the people of Alsovaros liked to listen to Zadravecz' haranguing but very few took him seriously enough to risk their lives on his behalf. The fourth group, which included mainly active and reserve officers, sought to restore order and discipline in the main garrison in the city first by replacing Colonel Zsolt Tabody, who had followed the orders of the Budapest government too closely since December, with a more conservative senior officer, and second by expelling the soldiers' councils and restoring the hierarchical structure of the army by re-instating ranks and distinctions. After some hesitation, the French military command in town, heading the advice of an increasingly anti-Communist government at home, gave in to the officers' demand and relieved Colonel Tabody from his post on May 4, 1919. Three days later, a group of reserve officers took control over of the main garrison in the city by disarming and arresting soldiers who still remained loyal to the Budapest government. Zadravecz played only a minor and far from heroic role in this event. He promised to organize a reserve company from the "hardy peasants" (szittyak) of Alsovaros and put it at the military command's disposal. His men however failed to show up at the crucial hour. (6)

Both Zadravecz and, for very different but equally political reasons, Communist historians exaggerated Zadravecz' role as an organizer and recruiter. (7) Zadravecz was indeed a founding member of the Anti-Bolshevik Committee (Antiboshevista Comite or ABC) in Szeged, and was elected into the executive board at the end of April. (8) However, his activities in the ABC can hardly be described as constructive. In the spring and early summer of 1919, the ABC still included individual and groups of very different background, interests and political agendas. In the ABC, Zadravecz allied himself with anti-Semitic extremists, such as the pharmacist Ferenc Szekesy; he also liked to pick fights with the Jewish member of the executive boards over issues such as workers' rights, Social Democracy and Christian Socialism. Jewish manufacturers in the ABC dismissed Zadravecz' argument that that the removal of middle-class and Jewish labor leaders from the leadership of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party and from the socialist trade unions, coupled with the muzzling of the "destructive press," would end working-class radicalism as overly optimistic and indeed naive. Deeply humiliated, Zadravecz responded that to their criticism by calling for pogroms as preludes to national revival. His radicalism shocked the conservative Kelemen: after all, conservative Jewish capitalists and intellectuals, many of whom were members of his friendship circle, had opposed both the democratic and Communist revolution and they channeled badly needed money into the coffers of the counter-revolution. Kelemen was also confounded by Zadravecz' radicalism because Jewish reserve officers had played a major role in the occupation of the Mars garrison and in the disarming of Communist soldiers and officers in early May 1919. (9) To add insult to injury, in early summer of 1919, Zadravecz and his Christian Socialist allies both within the ABC and outside organizations, including the local newspapers, led a political campaign against Kelemen demanding the immediate dismissal of the Jewish and free-mason members of the ten-member steering committee of the ABC. Kelemen described the protesters as "violent and half-educated people" deaf to rational arguments, and who had no right to question the patriotism of either assimilated conservative Jews or freemasons of Christian background. Crude and violent they may have been, Zadravecz and his political friends, nevertheless, seem to have been more in tune with the flow of events than the more conservative foispan. The arrival of anti-Semitic officers such as Pronay in May and June made the debate over the composition of the new Karolyi government, including the controversy over the possible entry of Jews into the government, even more acrimonious. The veracity of the debate, coupled with and news about the atrocities committed by Communist detachment in other parts of the country, favored the radicals; by early August, the majority of Jews and free-masons had been forced out of the ABC. (10)

While he could claim credit for the success of the purges, in the same period, Zadravecz had proved himself as a poor organizer: the numbers of young men who entered the National Army during the recruitment campaign in the summer of 1919 was among the lowest in his district. (11) It is therefore safe to say that Zadravecz owed his rapid rise in the Church hierarchy to his talents as an orator, propagandist and master of pageantry and ceremony. His church in the Alsovaros was always full on Sundays; even people who did not like Zadravecz as a man or politician found his sermons and political speeches inspiring. It was Zadravecz who, from the pulpit of his church, first announced the formation of Gyula Karolyi's government on June 1, 1919. The following day, on June 2, after an stirring speech, he administered the oath of office to the new government on the main square of the city. It was also Zadravecz who consecrated the flag of the first officers' company, the Pronay Detachment, on July 15, 1919. Pronay and his men endearingly called him, rendered here in loose translation, as "the merciless angel of revenge" (bosszuallas veres harsonaja), a title that Zadravecz cherished throughout his life. It was his talent as an orator and ceremonialist rather than his gift as an organizer and recruiter that recommended him to the Minister of War of the Karolyi Government, Admiral Miklos Horthy. Horthy in turn drew the attention of Prelate Archbishop Janos Csernoch to Zadravecz. (12) In early May 1920, he was elected into the seven-member Boards of the Etelkoz Alliance (Etelkozi Szovetseg or EX). In the early 1920s, the seven-member Board of the EX made and broke careers and often decided over issues of national significance. At Horthy's and Csernoch's request, the Vatican had appointed Zadravecz as the Army Bishop in May 1920, and the new Army Bishop was consecrated by Prelate Csernoch on August 24, 1920. (13)

Zadravecz' rapid rise in the church hierarchy was supported by the younger or more radical members of the Catholic establishment, such as the Bishop of Szekesfehervar, Ottokar Prohaszka, and the Bishop of Csanad, Gyula Glattfelder. His appointment as Army Bishop also reflected, and was the product of, the radicalization of the Catholic Church after October 1918. During the Communist dictatorship, the Catholic Church acted as one of the foci of resistance. There was virtually no anti-Communist demonstration, not to mention uprising, in 1919 in which Catholic priests or Christians Socialist politician did not play an important part. (14) The Catholic Church helped the National Army financially, and a handful of priests even joined the Hejjas and Osztenburg terror detachments. (15) The Catholic press conducted a public relation campaign on the behalf of the counter-revolution and the National Army; it rarely mentioned, however, the horrific crimes that the various militias had perpetuated. Priests advised the members of their flocks to join the Army and the rural police; encouraged by their superiors, including Prelate Csernoch, they also acted as informers reporting regularly to the newly created intelligence services of the National Army. Church dignitaries purged the schools of students and teachers with democratic, socialist or Communist sympathies and political ties. They took off the shelves and burned books whose content they found offensive to Christian ethic or in conflict with the teaching of the Catholic Church. Leading Catholic clerics such the Jesuit Bela Bangha, Bishop Ottokar Prohaszka, Dr. Vilmos Laky, teacher of the Benedict order, sat on the boards of the Union of Awakened Hungarians (Ebredo Magyarok Egyesulete or EME), one of the first fascist organizations in Europe, with mass murderers and racialist propagandists, such as Ivan Hejjas and Tibor Eckhardt. (16) On August 22, 1919, at the Conference of Catholic Bishops declared that the Church was fully behind the counterrevolutionary regime, but it also asserted that among all the political parties, it was the Christian Socialist Party was the most worthy of Catholic support. (17)

Thus Catholic resistance to both democracy and Communism laid the foundation of the interwar alliance, or rather division of labor, between the heavily Protestant Hungarian conservative state and the orthodox Catholic Church. Following this silent contract, the state defended the material and cultural interests of the Catholic Church; in return, the Catholic clergy used its influence, especially among the members of the middle class and among peasants, to make the regime more popular. The domination of Catholic Church power over its Protestant counterparts became even more pronounced after 1920, and the Church also played a more visible role in public life than before the Great War. These advances had to do with the strength and continued vitality of Catholic institutions, the wealth and global influence of the Church; with its traditional proximity to the state and last but not least with the role that the clergy played in the counter-revolution. While Zadravecz tended to exaggerate his own contribution to the counter-revolution, as the most visible priestly propagandists and ceremonialist in the early 1920s, he certainly did his share in making of what many contemporaries called the Catholic Renaissance possible.

Although Zadravecz as a politician was the product of the counterrevolution, he could not have become Army Bishop had he not possessed certain personal qualities and the requisite educational qualifications. Zadravecz' ancestors, as I have mentioned earlier, were mostly likely Croats. His non-Hungarian or mixed ancestry did not work against the Army Bishop. There were quite a few people like him in the Church hierarchy: prelates Csernoch and Seredi were of Slovak origins, while Bishop Prohaszka (Moravian-German) and the Jesuit priests Bela Bangha (Hungarian-German) can be described as cultural hybrids. Indeed, as Jeno Gergely's study has shown, over half of the Catholic elite were the scions of non-Hungarian, mainly German and Slovak, families. In other words, ethnic origins did not make or break careers in the Catholic Church, even though a Hungarian ethnic background, everything else being equal, was most likely an advantage. Zadravecz suffered no discrimination because of his provincial origins: after all, very few members of the Catholic elite in the interwar period had been born in Budapest or other large industrial towns. Gergely's study also indicates that the majority of the Catholic elite in the interwar period came from the lower middle class: hence, it is highly unlikely that Zadravecz had reason to complain about social discrimination either. There were still, it is true, people in the Catholic elite, such men as Count Janos Mikes, the Bishop of Szombathely, who did not even sit down at the table with ministers if they had lacked noble pedigrees, who wanted to make Zadravecz feel ashamed of his social origins. (18) Men like Mikes however represented a dying breed within the Catholic elite.

If anything, it was his Franciscan background that could have prevented or at least delayed Zadravecz' rise in the Catholic hierarchy. The Franciscan order enjoyed less prestige than its Jesuit or Benedictine counterparts; it was not an accident that it was under-represented within the Catholic elite. The Catholic elite attended high schools run by the Jesuits, the Piarist or the Benedictines rather than Franciscan establishments; as undergraduates, they listened to the lectures of famous theology professors at the Peter Pazmany University in Budapest, the University in Innsbruck, the University of Vienna or the Gregorianum in Rome. Zadravecz' educational background however, as we have seen, was more modest. The second unusual element in his curriculum vitae was his age: he became Army Bishop at the thirty five, while the majority of regular or county bishops (megyespuspok) were in their fifties. Even though the position of the Army Bishop did not entail all the privileges enjoyed by other bishops--his salary, for example, was lower and Zadravecz participated at the Bishops' Conference on invitation only--the rise of this young Franciscan into the Catholic elite was too sudden, and it therefore could not have happened without political patronage. (19)

Zadravecz' rise took place against the background of a temporarily alliance of four groups: the Catholic elite; the Christian Socialist movement; the young radical officers in the National Army and nationalist organizations; and the aristocracy. In 1919, and 1920, this uneasy alliance was held together by the shared desire for revenge and the rejection social democracy, pre-war liberalism and serious social reform. Shared concerns, even during the first years of the counter-revolutionary regime, could not conceal disagreement over issues, such as the return of Charles IV to the Hungarian throne. Even revenge became a controversial issue, as the murder of innocent civilians began to grab the headlines. Although many members of the Catholic elite and the aristocracy were anti-Semitic, they did not necessarily like pogroms. The Christian Socialists, especially its Budapest branch, and the younger members of the officer corps, on the other hand, supported and, to a large extent, were responsible for the White Terror. These groups also wanted radical rightwing rule and even played with the idea of a military dictatorship, whereas the Catholic hierarchy and the aristocracy sought to reform rather than completely abolish completely the old liberal-conservative political system. Both the Christian Socialists and the young and often gentry officers resented the power of the aristocracy, and wanted a greater say in domestic and foreign policy. Still, even the Christian Socialists and the gentried officers failed to agree on everything: the young right radical officers, many of whom were landowners and sons of gentleman farmers, for example, hated the idea of land reform. The Christian Socialists, on the other hand, were more reform-minded: in order to outflank of their competitors, i.e. the social democratic party in the cities and the peasant parties in the countryside, they had to make concessions to the lower orders by supporting social, including land, reforms. In addition to tactical considerations, many Christian Socialist leaders felt genuine sympathy for the poor. On the issue of land reform, the majority of Christian Socialists also disagreed with the Catholic elite, whose members were among the wealthiest landowners in the land and, of course, with the heavily rural-based aristocracy. Added to these disagreements over the White Terror and social and economic concerns, was the issue of the king's return. Here the lines of division ran differently: the majority of Christian Socialists and, with a few exceptions, the members of the Catholic elite and the aristocracy remained loyal to the Habsburg dynasty. These legitimist groups were opposed by the younger generation of officers in the National Army, nationalist and paramilitary organizations, the Calvinist elite, and the largest and also heavily Protestant peasant organization, the Smallholders' Party. The anti-legitimist group could also draw upon the support of the majority of the population. (20)

It would have required years of experience in political intrigue, flexibility of mind and deeper knowledge of his opponents and the forces at play, in short qualities and experiences that Zadravecz lacked,-to emerge unscathed from the political struggles of the early 1920s. Zadravecz owed his position as Army Bishop to Admiral Horthy, who in 1919 and 1920, still saw himself mainly as a military man, the head of the National Army and a friend and comrade of militia leaders such as Pronay, Hejjas and Osztenburg. However, he had also, very early on, developed strong ties with, and as time went on increasingly came under the influence of, conservative aristocrats, such as Pal Teleki and Istvan Bethlen, who wanted to rein in the radicals. In Szeged, Zadravecz was on excellent terms with the militia officers, but had only limited contact with aristocrats. To preserve his position, however, Zadravecz had to transfer his loyalty form from the right radical officers to the conservative aristocrats; in other words, he had to betray the people whom he knew and liked for those whom he did not know well and respected even less. Second, in the long run, he had to choose between the Christian Socialists and the Horthy group. The Christian Socialist movement was admittedly fragmented, and Zadravecz felt most at ease with the proto-fascist but also anti-legitimist Wolff group, which was Horthy's ally. Since the boundaries between the anti-legitimist and legitimist groups within the Christian Socialist movement often got blurred however, the Horthy supporters rightly remained suspicious of the openly Christian Socialist Army Bishop. The question was whether Zadravecz was politically talented enough dispel such suspicions and, at the same time, preserve his good standing with the legitimist Catholic elite and the legitimist wing of the Christian Socialist moment.

While Zadravecz' failure as a politician was perhaps in the long run inevitable given the seriousness of the dilemmas he faced, his rapid fall from Horthy's favor, combined with his simultaneous humiliation at the hands of his Catholic superiors, can be describe as his own fault. In the second part of this essay, I will argue that the fall of Zadravecz had to do with his political persona or character, which he shared with the paramilitary leaders. In the early 1920s, Zadravecz made three mistakes that hastened his political demise: his religious bigotry alienated Protestants and angered regular Catholic Church-goers within the military and political elites; his words and actions during and after the king's second attempt to return to power suggested to the increasingly paranoid Horthy group that he was not trustworthy; finally, his continued flirtation with paramilitary radicalism, as shown during the so-called Lajta adventure in the fall of 1921, raised doubt about his loyalty to the Bethlen government. His religious intolerance took many forms but always had the same result. His pet project was to make Saint John of Capistrano (Kapistran Janos) the patron saint of the National Army. Saint John of Capistrano served in the army of the famous medieval knight, John Hunyady, who defeated the Turks in a historical battle at the gates of Belgrade in 1456. Zadravecz felt a close affinity with the saint and was tactless enough to brag about the alleged similarity between the Saint John's exploits against the Turkish 'infidels' and his own fight against 'Godless Communists' in Szeged. Even his fellow Catholic bishops considered the whole discourse about Saint John of Capistrano as nothing more than a tasteless form of self-promotion. The real resistance to the cult of Saint John of Capistrano however came from Protestants officers and the Calvinist Reformed Church. After two years of acrimonious debate, the Ministry of War finally tabled the idea for good. The gist of its conclusion was that Zadravecz had overvalued the saint's contribution to Hungarian history and the new cult would create tension between Protestant and Catholic soldiers. (21)

The Ministry of War did not see eye-to-eye with Zadravecz on the role of the army priests either. The Army Bishop wanted a permanently politicized military clergy: priests, Zadravecz believed, should be allowed to wear uniforms almost identical to those of regular officers, carry weapons, display military insignias and decorations, live permanently with or in close proximity to soldiers, and be able to lecture on a weekly basis on a wide variety of topics from military technology and politics and to spiritual concerns. The Ministry of War however preferred de-politization, and after a long debate allowed only for the display of decorations and insignias on the collars of otherwise priestly dresses. (22) The Ministry of War also discouraged the use of Catholic flags and provided no assistance for the publication of military marches and religious songs composed at Zadravecz' request by allegedly famous musicians. He also torpedoed the plan for the publication of a Catholic army newspaper, the Kaszarnya (the Garrison). However, it was probably Zadravecz' attempt to make church attendance compulsory that stirred up the most resentment among soldiers. In March 1921, during a Sunday service, in the garrison church of Szekesfehervar, the Army Bishop openly chastised officers for failing to attend, to confess and to take communion regularly. The publicly humiliated officers denounced Zadravecz to the Minister of War and to his superiors in the Franciscan order. Two years later, in 1923, one senior military commander in Gyor told the Army Bishop to stop "tyrannizing his soldiers." The issue of regular church attendance was especially controversial in the religiously mixed eastern and southern parts of the country. In Szeged, the local commander, Colonel Kalman Shvoy simply ignored Zadravecz' requests; the Army Bishop blamed irregular church attendance among soldiers in Kecskemet on the "liberal indifference" of the Catholic officers, who displayed "too much deference towards their Protestant superiors." The situation was allegedly the worst in Budapest. According to Zadravecz, the "Jewish-liberal spirit" of the capital, combined with the seductive power of rich Jewish women, who supposedly liked to surround themselves with young and dashing counter-revolutionary officers, made the work of the Catholic Church, including that of the Army Bishop, exceedingly difficult. (23)

His attempt to turn officers and soldiers into devout Catholics, combined with his frequent outburst against the Protestant Church and miserable treatment of his Protestant colleagues, could not bur foster hostility between the Army Bishop and the military and the political elite. Zadravecz' vacillation on the issue of the king's return only added to the problem. His social and ethnic backgrounds (Croats were historically loyal to the Habsburgs) and his membership in the Catholic elite pointed towards a legitimist political orientation. Indeed, in the company of his legitimist colleagues, including Prelate Csernoch, Zadravecz often pretended to be a legitimist. Yet, as he knew it, Zadravecz owed his rapid rise to Admirai Horthy and members of the Szeged group, who wanted an ethnic Hungarian as king. Trying to walk a thin line, in the EX and other forums of the counterrevolution, Zadravecz, emphasized his nationalist and counter-revolutionary credentials and at the same time paid tribute to Horthy's leadership. He failed to convince anyone, however. His colleagues in the Church hierarchy remained wary of him, while Horthy's close associate, General Sreter, openly told him at a board meeting of the EX in March 1921 that "you have the reputation as a rabid legitimist." (24)

The moment of truth carne during the second legitimist coup in October 1921, during which Zadravecz, cast his lot, as the only Catholic bishop, with the Horthy group. After the failed coup attempt, he, at the request of the EX and Prime Minister Istvan Bethlen, also accompanied Horthy on a victory tour in the legitimist cities of Transdanubia. To his legitimist colleagues, Zadravecz' behavior confirmed what they had already suspected: namely that Zadravecz put his loyalty to Horthy above collegial solidarity, which suggested that he did not fully appreciate what the Catholic Church had done for him. Paradoxically, his behavior failed to impress many people in the Horthy camp either. Tom by conflicting loyalties and utterly confused by the quick sequence of events, Zadravecz adopted the role of an honest broker after the failed coup. He began to talk about the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation between the legitimist and the Horthy groups. Politically, this role was not well timed: in late 1921 and early 1922, wounds were still too fresh to talk about meaningful reconciliation. Second, there were material interests at stakes: the Horthy group feared the loss of their recently gained status and power as much as the legitimists wanted to regain their formal influence and avenge themselves on the nationalists. While his role as an honest broker was a nonstarter, his participation, in early April 1922, in Catholic ceremonies aimed at commemorating the king's tragic death only infuriated the nationalists. The Horthy group perceived these celebrations as legitimist demonstrations, and Zadravecz' role in them as an additional proof of his duplicity. (25)

His behavior during the militia uprising in Western Hungary, today's Burgenland, in the fall of 1921 only reinforced Horthy's and his conservative advisors' distrust. After the First World War, the Entente powers awarded the historically Hungarian but ethnically heavily German Burgenland to Austria. However, Hungarian public opinion did not accept the decision of the Western powers. In the early fall of 1921, Hungarian paramilitary units began to infiltrate the region in order to prevent its incorporation into the neighboring country. The Bethlen government secretly supported the uprising for two reasons: first, it sought to reverse the verdict of the Western powers; second, the insurgency presented an excellent opportunity to remove troublesome paramilitary units from form Budapest and its vicinity. The secret co-cooperation with the paramilitary units, the promise of territorial gains notwithstanding, made the conservative government's foreign policy too much dependent on the whims of ill-informed militia leaders. This became clear during the final phase of the uprising, after the Western powers had promised to allow the holding of a referendum in the town of Sopron (Odenburg) and its vicinity, but also asked for the immediate evacuation of the rest of the province by Hungarian paramilitary units. The militias, despite the urging of the government, did not want to give up the limelight, and repeatedly refused to obey the government's orders. In Western Hungary, Pronay and Hejjas carved out a separate state, a veritable militia haven. The new state possessed many of the features of an independent state: the militias erected border posts, issued postal stamps and printed their own currency. The Bethlen government at first tried in vain to reason with Pronay and Hejjas; at the same time, the regime mobilized loyal troops mainly in the capital to put down, if it became necessary, the uprising by military force. (26)

Bethlen also sent messengers, including Zadravecz who had been close to Pronay since the Szeged days, to talk sense into the militias. The choice of the messenger, in this case, was an ill-advised one. In his diary, Zadravecz boasted that he had been one of the main organizers of the uprising. It was he who allegedly convinced Pronay to come out of exile and join forces with Hejjas; Zadravecz and his Christian women's groups in Szeged also helped to cloth the militias. The fact that his secretary and close friend, Father "Archangel" Bonis, participated in the uprising as Hejjas' right-hand further underscores his role in the uprising. While it is unclear how important this role was, Zadravecz invested emotionally and politically too much into the enterprise to accept a negotiated settlement. Second, since the militia leaders, especially Pronay, did not have much respect for the messenger, they were likely to ignore his message as well. In his diary, Pronay made fun of Zadravecz' attempt to become a modern-day Saint John of Capistrano; he did not hesitate to describe the Army Bishop as a schemer and coward. (27) Zadravecz was indeed reluctant to take up the assignment; then, after this arrival in Western Hungary, he wined and dined with the insurgents and was more eager to convince Pronay about his unshaken loyalty to him than about carrying out his assignment. The failure of his mission further alienated Horthy and only reinforced Prime Minister Bethlen's suspicion of the Army Bishop. Thus, in the fall of 1921, Zadravecz was able to accomplish the impossible: he took the winner's side in both important battles and still ended up with his reputation damaged and his power significantly reduced. (28)

Retribution for what both the Catholic elite and the Horthy group saw as an absence of clear commitment and loyalty at best and a betrayal at worse was not long in coming. The Catholic hierarchy, to indicate the essentially political nature of the Army Bishop' office, had set Zadravecz' salary artificially low at his appointment in 1920. In order to humiliate him, his superiors failed to raise his salary to keep up with rapidly rising inflation during the next two years. Then, after incessant complaining by the Army Bishop, they paid his salary in kind. The value of the foodstuff that he received was a pittance compared to the income of many of his fellow bishops, however. (29) Zadravecz' dream was to receive a land grant, a small estate, carved out from the large estates of the Catholic Church. Zadravecz hoped to receive this land grand as a vitez (gallant). (30) Zadravecz' dream of becoming a landowner however, an aspiration quite unusual for a Franciscan priest but one that made sense in the context of his family and social background, floundered on the opposition of both the Catholic Church and the Ministry of War. By 1923, Zadravecz had grown weary of his quarrels with the Church his Catholic superiors and accepted civil service salary. From 1923 to 1927 he drew the salary of a colonel from the Ministry of War, which, while respectable, was still much lower than the income of his fellow bishops. Later, after abdication as Army Bishop, be lived in a very modest cell in the monastery of the Franciscan order in the Martirok Street. (31)

As a sign of his increasing marginalization, Zadravecz was sent on a six-month religious mission to the United States in March 1924. Both the Catholic and the political elite miscalculated, however, if they had believed that they could keep Zadravecz out of the limelight for long. Zadravecz always had a very shallow respect for the law and for the regulations and customs of his Church. In the early 1920s, to compensate for his declining income, he tried his hand at real estate speculation; through his secretary and protegee, Father Bonis, he even gambled on the stock market. Soon after his return from the United States, Zadravecz became involved in the franc forgery affair. The conspirators forged French currency in order to underwrite their irredentist activities. The Bethlen government, which knew about the conspiracy, decided to look the other way for two reasons: first, it hoped to benefit financially from the conspiracy; second, it wanted to avenge itself on the French for the mistreatment of Hungary after the war. The conspirators set up a printing press in Zadravecz' apartment; the Army Bishop's task was to check the quality of the counterfeit money by touching two banknotes, one real and one fake, simultaneously behind his back and trying to tell them apart. To the amusement of his fellow conspirators, such as Prince Lajos Windischgraetz, Zadravecz always picked the wrong note. The conspiracy was soon discovered and the Bethlen government, eager to cover up the scandal, put the two ringleaders, Windischgraetz and the police chief, Imre Nadosy, on trial. The show trial, as most contemporaries had predicted, handed down only light prison sentences. Zadravecz was called to stand to testify only as a witness and only because Bishop Janos Mikes of Szombathely reported one of his thoughtless remarks. According to Mikes, Zadravecz told him soon after the discovery of the conspiracy that nothing would happen to him because Prime Minister Bethlen was also involved in the forgery affair. During the trial, Zadravecz, with his hands on the Bible, denied that the conversation had ever taken place. No one believed him, however, and the spectacle of two bishops testifying against each other under oath created such as controversy that the government had to act. A few days after the conclusion of the trial, Zadravecz was forced to hand in his resignation, which was immediately signed by Regent Horthy. (32)

The scandal only reinforced the Vatican's stand on clergy participation in party politics. In 1927, The Vatican decreed that members of the clergy could not run for and hold elected office. Typically, the still heavily politicized Hungarian Catholic hierarchy failed to publish the Pope's letter. (33) Nevertheless, in the long run, the Vatican, by blocking the promotion of a number of priest-politicians, such as Bishop Ottokar Prohaszka who never became prelate, was able to make the Catholic elite less political. Under the impact of the Zadravecz scandal, the Holy See limited the government's input in the appointment of army bishops and simultaneously circumscribed their power and responsibilities. Professional qualifications became more strident and, to prevent the occurrence of similar scandals, the Vatican confined the role of the Army Bishop to looking after the religious and spiritual needs of soldiers. (34)

Zadravecz spent the rest of the 1920s and the first hall of the 1930s by writing sermons, going on pilgrimages, editing the periodical, Szentfold (Holy Land) and co-editing, with the another right radical priest, the Jesuit Bela Bangha, Katolikus Lexikon (Catholic Encyclopedia). He became politically active again after the contested election of 1935, an event also that witnessed the re-appearance of some of his old friends, such as Ivan Hejjas, on the political stage. On September 21, 1938, at the request of the government, he read up a memorandum on the Heroes' Square in Budapest demanding the immediate return of Upper Hungary (Slovakia) to Hungary. About the same time, at the behest of Horthy and his government, he also accepted the position of the President of the Union of National Associations (Tarsadalmi Egyesuletek Szovetsege or TESZ). The TESZ was an umbrella organization of various right radical and fascist organizations, such as the EX and Double Cross Blood Alliance (Kettoskereszt Verszovetseg). Simultaneously, he was elected to the editorial board of the Nemzeti Figyelo (National Observer), a fascist periodical with close ties to the Arrow Cross. The honorary chairman of the editorial board was the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. Ina radio speech, on in March 1942, he praised Hungary as one of the last bastions of Christianity, which, in 1919, had prevented Bolshevism from reaching the heart of Europe. He hoped that Hungary's participation in the Nazi military campaign against the Soviet Union would "push this bastion of Christianity forwards as far as the Black Sea." In December 1942, he entered the Upper House of the parliament as the representative of Zala County. In October 1944, before the takeover of power by the Arrow Cross, he became the member and deputy president of the National Union (Nemzeti Szovetseg), formed by fascist hardliners to keep Hungary in the Nazi camp until the end. He was the only Church dignitary present at the oath-taking ceremony of the Arrow Cross leaders, Szalasi, in the Buda Castle on November 4, 1944. (35) At the last meeting of the National Union a week later, be opposed the plan to move the seat of the government from Budapest to Sopron. He lived through the Russian siege of Budapest in the house of the Franciscan order in the Martirok Street. After the end of the battle he moved to Huvosvolgy, in the outskirts of the city, where the new Hungarian police arrested him by on May 8, 1945.

Considering his counter-revolutionary past and his barely disguised sympathy for the Arrow Cross, the judges were relatively lenient on Zadravecz after the war. At the end of his first trial in March 1946, he received a prison sentence of five years and six month prison sentence for his political activities during the Second World War. At the two subsequent trials in 1947, his sentence was reduced to two years. The judges' leniency is surprising, and the sentences should be understood in the context of larger political events. In 1947, the Hungarian Communist Party was still preoccupied with the struggle against it political opponents, such as the Smallholder Party and the right wing of the Social Democratic Party. The Communist leaders did not yet consider the time ripe for an offensive against the Catholic Church; it most likely feared that a rigged trial and severe punishment of one of the oldest members of the Catholic elite would create a backlash. Thus, Zadravecz, since the court took the time that he had spent in captivity since 1945 into consideration, left prison in 1947. In Stalinist Hungary, however, a man with Zadravecz' past was bound to be harassed by the police. From 1947 to 1955, he was forced to change residence frequently, spending much of his time in various internment camps and living often in extremely harsh conditions. After 1955, his life began to improve slowly: in the village of Zsambek, be was allowed, with restrictions, to practice his profession. The elderly priest died of a heart disease on November 13, 1965. (36)

The Political Persona

Zadravecz' story gives partial support to traditional Marxist interpretations of the White Terror and its consequences on two important points. For decades, Marxist historians believed that the Szeged radicals did not significantly differ from the older and more conservative members of Horthy's entourage; therefore, the retirement of the radicals from the political scene around 1923 was informed by tactical considerations, such as the desire to satisfy public opinion in foreign countries, rather than deep-seated ideological, cultural and political differences. This argument is not without merit. Marxist scholars were right to draw attention to the cultural similarities between the military elite and the members of the officers' detachments: the noble, mainly gentry, elements were, indeed, over represented in both groups; values and patterns of behavior were ser in both groups by noble officers; both the military elite and the members of the officers' detachments went through the same military training and shared the same professional culture. Similarly, the Army Bishop was closely tied to the Catholic elite; like his fellow bishops and superiors, he was trained in Rome at one of the best Catholic universities. The majority of his surviving speeches could have equally come from the more respected members of the Catholic elite, such as the famous philosopher, Bishop Prohaszka or Prelate Csernoch.

Marxist scholars also argued that the leaders and members of paramilitary units fared relatively well despite their forced retirement from national politics around 1923. As the members of the newly established vitez (gallant) order, the thesis goes, yesterday's terrorists received land grants in the framework of the conservative land reform. They continued to occupy important positions in the county administrations, the army and the rural police. The retired members of the terror detachments acted as enforcers; their presence acted as deterrents and they never hesitated to come to the regime's aid during contested elections, strikes and political demonstrations. (37) Here again, the Marxist argument has its merits: many vitezek were indeed veterans of the counter-revolution and, as Ferenc Kaiser has recently shown, the reconstituted gendarmerie after 1919 drew heavily on the militias for recruitment. (38) As I have tried to show in one of my recent articles, however, the most important paramilitary leaders, such as Lehar, Pronay, Osztenburg, Szabo and Hejjas did not fare well in the new counter-revolutionary regime. (39) (Likewise, the humiliated Zadravecz fell on difficult time after his resignation as Army Bishop in 1927. He began to play a role in politics, as a fascist, mainly Arrow-Cross, sympathizer only in the second half the 1930s and early 1940s; even during the war, however, he was not allowed to reenter the corridor of power.

Recent books and article on the topic suggest that paramilitary leaders did not necessarily need orders from Horthy to commit atrocities. (40) They were not puppets pulled on a string by conservatives, as Stalinist historians liked to portray the relationship between fascist and traditionalist leaders in the interwar period. Similarly, Zadravecz followed his own agenda; as we have seen, he dared to differ from his Catholic superiors on a number of issues, including the possible consequences of the king's return and the need for moderate social reforms. He was courageous, or politically ill-informed and reckless, enough to push for the Catholicization of the armed forces against the wishes of his military and political superiors. His involvement in the franc forgery affair was an outright embarrassment to both the Catholic and the political elite, even though many of them shared his dislike of the French. Zadravecz' flirtation with fascist groups in the late 1930s and early 1940s and his entry into the parliament as the representative of Zala County in 1942 made him even more of a maverick. As mentioned earlier, the Holy See disliked politically active priests and by the mid-1930s, it had slowly recognized the ideological and political threat that Nazism and other racist movements posed to the Church. Zadravecz was also the only ex-bishop present at the oath-taking ceremony of the Arrow Cross leader, Ferenc Szalasi, in the fall of 1944. His opposition to the Communist regime after 1947, while respectable, was not informed by any commitment to pluralism and tolerance, but fell into a well-established pattern. Zadravecz remained a maverick throughout his political life.

The removal of Zadravecz and many young right radicals from the political scene around 1923 and their continued marginalization in the interwar period thus cannot be attributed to tactical considerations alone. Many influential conservatives simply disliked the paramilitary leaders and radicals like Zadravecz. They accused him of being an "extremist," a "fanatic," a "dreamer," and a "hothead"--charges that Zadravecz remembered and resented twenty years after the events. (41) These charges should not be dismissed as a smokescreen for other, allegedly more important, causes. The perception of character weaknesses, in the case of Zadravecz and the paramilitary leaders at least, became destiny. Therefore, in this essay, I am also going to use character as a center concept or metaphor. While the term has been employed in political discourse mainly to stifle debates, a more flexible definition of character, I believe, can actually bring us closer to the cultural and social sources of tension between the authoritarian conservatives and the right radicals. Character, in my estimation, is like a kaleidoscope image: some elements are always in flux, while others stick to the glass more or less permanently and congeal into shapes. Outwards appearances, lifestyles, consumption patterns often belong into the first group: they tend to change with age and financial fortune. Mental habits, dialects and speech patterns, on the other hand, show more resilience, even though they are also not immune to change, in the case of downward socials mobility for example. Moral values, which also include social, ethnic, racial and religious prejudices, show even more resilience mainly because they are acquired at a young age. They were instilled through the meticulous application of punishments and rewards, including the threat of the withdrawal of parental love. Political ideologies and allegiances are internalized in a similar manner: they are often inherited from family and community members, or instilled by teachers or older friends acting as substitute parents. Political ideologies and allegiances, even more than moral values, reflect group membership. Emotional attachment to political ideologies and parties is a tribute to the strength and vitality of the group and the efficacy of its often cruel methods to keep members in line. Finally, memories tend to form the most enduring part of character. Yet, as historians who interview survivors on a regular basis know, memories are much more than an imprint of past events. The emotional and mental state in which they were conceived constitute an important part of memories, which tend to change as the person in question matures and he or she consciously or subconsciously reinterprets past events in the light of his of her experience. (42)

The real and perceived character faults therefore have to be examined in the context of relations between the two groups, their respective positions in the social and political hierarchies and their diverging political interests and ideas. The allegation of extremism leveled against both the paramilitary leaders and Zadravecz expressed the elite's desire to put an end to post-war chaos and revolution. The counter-accusation of timidity and spinelessness, on the other hand, encapsulated the wish of paramilitary leaders and their allies to perpetuate the circumstances that had made their rise possible in the first place. The charges of hotheadedness were related to differences in age (members of the military elite were in their fifties, while the majority of paramilitary leaders were in their thirties and early forties), in social status and personal accomplishments (paramilitary leaders tended to be poorer, less educated, knew fewer languages and traveled less than members of the military elite). (43) Similarly, the allegations of radicalism and unreliability leveled against Zadravecz by his fellow bishops and superiors in the Catholic Church cannot be separated from the Army Bishop's weak position, tied to his Franciscan background, less-than-ideal educational qualifications and his young age, in the Catholic elite.

Added to the charges of radicalism was the perception that Zadravecz, like the militia leaders, was no "team-player:" he could not get along with the majority of his colleagues in the Church hierarchy, and also tended to alienate civilians; people who, because of their political ideas and socials backgrounds, should have been his friends. This perception seems to have been based on facts. In his diary, the Army Bishop did not hide his hatred of his colleague, the legitimist Bishop of Szombathely, Count Janos Mikes, who had exposed his role in the forgery affair. Unrepentant and completely blind as to the real effects of the forgery affair, Zadravecz claimed that "the whole country had agreed with me; people called Mikes a man of no character and a good for nothing ... but what can you expect, his mother was after ali Jewish. (44) Like Pronay, Zadravecz always found the Jew or the freemason in his every opponent. In his diary, Zadravecz described Laszlo Ravasz, professor of theology at the University of Kolozsvar (Cluj, Klausenburg,) before the war and in the 1920s the Calvinist bishop in Budapest, as a dangerous man and incorrigible free-mason. He was angry at his fellow Board members in the EX for dismissing the Kolozsvar lodge "as a patriotic and well-meaning organization" and for failing to replace Ravasz with one of Zadravecz' proteges. (45) In a similar manner, Zadravecz portrayed Dezso Baltazar, the Calvinist Bishop of the Trans-Tisza region (Tiszantul) and a member of the upper chamber of the parliament in the 1920s, as "a revengeful little man with a dark soul," who "spits hate." Baltazar, in his opinion, was a "traitor many times over and in so many ways;" he allegedly "poured all his hatred and spite on the Catholic religion." He was dismayed that, despite his exposure of Baltazar, leading politicians, including Regent Horthy, continued to seek Calvinist Bishop's advice and friendship. (46) According to Zadravecz, the Calvinist Army Bishop, Elemer Soltesz, was born Catholic and converted to Protestantism as an adult; unhappy with this decision, he allegedly made many feeble attempts to find his way back to the true Church. Zadravecz described Soltesz as a venal and corrupt man, who "ran around a lot to find accommodation and employment for his family members." Soltesz supposedly neglected his duties as a pastor but "knew the opening hours of every important office." Even though his dream to have the state build him a new residence in the splendid Castle District in Buda failed to come true, with the help of his minister friends, Soltesz was able to move into a very nice building. He even became the de facto owner of a large tract of land, which only nominally belonged to the Protestant Church. Zadravecz informed his readers: "Thanks to his own skills and the good intentions of others, be ended up being financially much better off than the Catholic Army Bishop, who did not get the promised support from the Hungarian Church; on the contrary, it was exactly Csernoch and other leading priests who prevented his land reform proposals from bearing fruits." Zadravecz was so jealous of his Protestant colleague that he missed his swearing-in ceremony in December 1924. He failed to show up even though the entire political and military establishment, including Regent Horthy, was present, and despite Soltesz, as a sign of his good will, had delivered the invitation to him in person. Typically, Zadravecz took pride in his intransigence and brushed off any suggestion that his action might have been politically counter-productive. (47) To Zadravecz, only his opponents were religiously intolerant. Thus he reported Horthy's remark that he was forced to fire the Army Bishop because "Zadravecz was the cause of many religious conflicts, and he used the Bishop's cross to beat up Protestants," as both an additional proof of the Regent's and his Protestant opponents' intolerance and malice, and an evidence of his own martyrdom. (48)

Zadravecz listed among his enemies not only his Protestant colleagues but many respected members of the radical right as well. In his eyes, Istvan Friedrich, the Prime Minister of Hungary in the fall of 1919 and a fellow Christian Socialist, was nothing more than a "cheeky fellow and a busy body with no sense for reality." (49) Zadravecz was even ready to pick a fight with one of the most talented publicists of the radical and racist Right, Endre Zsilinsky. In an article published in the Szozat, the leading newspaper of the radical Right, Zsilinsky mildly reproached Zadravecz for his arrogant treatment of his Protestant colleagues. As a matter of course, Zadravecz dismissed the charge of religious intolerance by "the Protestant Endre Zsilinszky" as "baseless" and his entire article as "a true mirror of an over-sensitive Protestant mind." According to Zadravecz, Protestants, like Zsilinsky, "scrutinized every speech and every statement of mine; they were hysterical and never missed an opportunity to denounce me to my superiors, including the Regent." (50)

Among the younger military leaders, Zadravecz hated most Colonel Kalman Shvoy, his countryman from Szeged and fellow Board member in the EX. In his secret diary, he described Shvoy as a crypto-Communist. According to Zadravecz, Shvoy made his career during Bela Kun's Communist dictatorship by following the orders of the collaborationist and allegedly Communist commander of local garrison, Colonel Zsolt Tabody. To cover up this past, Zadravecz told his readers, Shvoy later denounced Tabody and even testified against him during his trial. (Contemporary newspaper articles and Shvoy' memoir shows however that the Colonel in fact came to the defense of Tabody during his trial. Thanks in part to his favorable testimony, Tabody left the courtroom as a free man. (51) In his diary, Zadravecz portrayed Shvoy as a Machiavellian politician prepared to use every means, including the destruction of others, to achieve his goals. This unscrupulous careerist, in Zadravecz' opinion, was also a petty tyrant and a sadist who took pleasure in abusing and torturing his subordinates. He was not only a Catholic agnostic but a true enemy of the Catholic Church and religion as well. To spite decent Catholics, Shvoy always organized the yearly officers' masquerade ball in Szeged during Lent. Once he got drunk and threw himself onto the floor to look under the ladies' skirts. He also seduced the wife of his underling, Lieutenant Foldes, and drove the poor man to the brink of madness and suicide. The young lieutenant was forced to divorce his wife bur finally, thanks to Zadravecz' help, he found his peace of mind as a simple brother in the Benedictine order in Pannonhalma. To protect the nation from such as a dangerous man, Zadravecz, to his own admission, denounced Shvoy, twice in 1923 alone, to the Ministry of War. Yet, when Shvoy asked Zadravecz in a letter to stop spreading rumors about him, the Army Bishop assured the Colonel about his fatherly love and the noblest of intentions. In his diary, he also noted that after this exchange of letters, he had no longer listened to the complaints about Shvoy's behavior but sent the denunciators directly to his superiors. (52)

Zadravecz was on a war footing not only with his colleagues and people of approximately the same rank, but with many of his superiors as well. Recriminations from both sides were common: while the Catholic elite considered the newcomer Zadravecz as generally unreliable, in his diary, the Army Bishop described Prelate Csernoch as careerist, a miser, an unpatriotic man and an obstructionist who had pigeonholed many of his brilliant ideas, including the plan to build a new cathedral in the honor of the Virgin Mary. (53) Zadravecz' relation with his military superiors was even more troubled. In February 1922, at a gathering of Catholic intellectuals, Zadravecz told his audience that the Croats, who had allegedly received their Catholic faith and culture from the Hungarians, were prepared to return to the Hungarian fold only if the country maintained its purely Catholic character. The speech, published in several newspapers, created uproar in Protestant circles and reached even the Army Chief of Staff, General Pal Nagy. During his meeting with Zadravecz, the General asked the Catholic Army Bishop not to describe Protestantism as a barrier to the recovery of the lost territories in the future. While Nagy was explaining the foreign and domestic implication of Zadravecz' speech, the Army Bishop, boiling with anger, kept his silence. The General, he confided to his diary, reminded him of Tibor Szamuely, the Communist commissar responsible for many of the atrocities between March and August 1919: after all, he argued, both Nagy and the Communist Szamuely hated and wanted to destroy the Catholic Church. Nagy's suggestion that in the future his speeches should be censored by the military infuriated him. His outrage reached its zenith when the General told him that the Army needed a bishop who was able to transcend religious divides and follows the order of his military superior irrespective of the opinion of the Pope. "In a thundering voice," he allegedly vowed "never to break ties with Rome" even if this meant that "I have to become a barefooted friar again, a free messenger of God." To show that he could not be intimidated, he allegedly told General Nagy that "I, who was good enough to recruit an entire army so that you can sit here in comfort, can still raise a second one, ten times larger than we have and it will sweep you out of here." According to Zadravecz, at this point the Army Chief of Staff became pale and dismissed him without shaking his hand. (54)

Zadravecz' remarks about Horthy in his diary bring us even closer to the deeper structural causes of his dismissal as Army Bishop. The Franciscan priest and the Protestant Regent had surprisingly much in common: both Zadravecz and Horthy loved uniforms, decorations, parades, marches and processions. Both enjoyed the political limelight and indistinctively understood the importance of myths and rituals as the basis of power. The Regent was keenly aware that the new counterrevolutionary regime, including his own leadership, rested on a precarious historical and legal foundation. He needed Zadravecz as a propagandist to fashion new rituals and myths. It was the Catholic Army Bishop who turned the consecration of military flags into one of the central rituals of the new Horthy regime. Zadravecz consecrated the first flag of the National Army in the summer of 1919; during his seven-year tenure, he played the role of the master of the ceremony in hundreds of similar events. The presence of "flag mothers," usually younger women, at these ceremonies suggests that Zadravecz was well aware of the importance of fertility symbols in modern nationalism. Zadravecz was also one of earliest proponents of the Horthy cult: already in Szeged, he drew a historical parallel between the anti-Communist Horthy and John Hunyady, the famous medieval knight who saved Hungary and Central Europe from the Muslim Turks in 1456. After 1935, in obvious imitation of the Nazi language, he also began to use the terra "the Leader" and "my Leader" first in reference to the late Prime Minister Gyula Gombos and later to Horthy. (55) As part of his new charm offensive Zadravecz also sought to draw Horthy's attention to the alleged similarities between him and the great Renaissance king, Matthias Corvinus, and between the Regent and Prince Ferenc Rakoczi, the famous freedom fighter and leader of Hungarian rebellion against the Habsburgs in the early eighteenth century. (56)

The charm offensive notwithstanding, Horthy and the authoritarian conservatives had a more or less clear idea of what Zadravecz and other members of the radical right, such as Pronay, really thought of them. In his diary, Pronay painted a highly unflattering picture of the Regent: Horthy, in his opinion, was a crude and stupid man, a babbler who put people to sleep with his sailor stories and jokes and a weakling completely controlled by his wife and Istvan Bethlen. (57) Using more sophisticated and somewhat less provocative language, Zadravecz repeated essentially the same charges. Horthy, according to Zadravecz, drank heavily; be loved to tell dirty jokes to his friends, and he regularly cheated on his wife. His long and open affair with a second-rate actress, Margit Jako, was, in his opinion, a national scandal. (58) Like Pronay, Zadravecz resented Horthy's refusal to punish "the liberals" after the entry of the National Army into Budapest in mid-November 1919. In the vocabulary of the radical Right, the terra "liberal" essentially meant Jewish; thus Zadravecz in effect faulted Horthy for failing to allow the paramilitary units to organize pogroms in the capital. He was also in full agreement with Pronay on the negative effects of Bethlen's and Horthy's cautious approach to revisionism and foreign policy. He perceived the Regent's remark that "our policies are evolving and will bring fruits slowly; rest assured, we will realize our goals gradually. [To be able to achieve them], however, we need cold reasoning and determination rather than Hungarian passion, not to mention the Hejjas-type of restlessness and stupidity" as both stupid and insulting to him and other heroes of the counter-revolution. (59) According to Zadravecz, it was Horthy's wife who, who under the influence of a dream, convinced the Regent to appoint Istvan Bethlen as his Prime Minister in 1921. In her dream, her husband and she got lost in a jungle and were surrounded by wild animals. Suddenly, the trees parted and the two refugees noticed a man coming towards them with his amas open. In this man, Horthy's wife recognized Count Istvan Bethlen, and "since then Bethlen has ruled and will rule, as everyone is convinced, until he wishes to rule; [on the other hand], Horthy stays in power until Bethlen needs him. Because it is not Horthy who controls Bethlen but it is Bethlen who controls Horthy." (60) Zadravecz registered with resignation that Bethlen had turned "an honest soldier into a degenerate politician flattered by the idea, put into his head by others, that politics based on cold reasoning is more effective than the one based on [the expressions] of our highly sensitive and rebellious Hungarian irredentist souls." (61)

The latter remarks could have equally come from Pronay and his friends and subordinates in the terror detachments. They expressed the anti-intellectualism of professional soldiers and their sense of discomfort and occasional helplessness in the presence of better-placed and educated civilians, such as Istvan Bethlen. That the Army Bishop shared Pronay's sentiments was not an accident: the Catholic Church, like the Amay, was suspicious of and often hostile to the outside world and its increasingly secular culture. Both the Church and the Amay were antidemocratic institutions--the Church hierarchy in fact had served as a model for the army, the civil service and large corporations in the early-modern and modern periods--and both fostered what Adorno used to call "authoritarian personality types." Professionalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, if anything, reinforced the insular nature of these institutions, further widening the emotional and cultural gap between soldiers and priests and the outside world. Meaningful contact was possible only to the extent to which soldiers and priests were able to develop alternative identities. Members of the elite, especially the aristocracy, because of their more varied experience and less reliance on their professions as the source of their identity and social power, were more likely to ignore and transcend the essentially petty bourgeois moral code of their professions than the scions of the middle and the lower middle classes. It is highly unlikely, for example, that the archconservative Bishop of Szombathely, Count Janos Mikes, could have raved about politicians in the same manner as Zadravecz and Pronay; many of his close friends, such as Count Pal Teleki, after all, were politicians. Mikes, who lived like, and was as arrogant as, a Renaissance prince, felt more at ease in their company of his aristocratic friends than in the presence of the lower-middle class Zadravecz. He had many Protestant friends as well and was courageous enough to speak out against the murder and physical abuse of Jews in his diocese at the height of the White Terror. In other words, racial and religious intolerance of the paramilitary leaders and radicals like Zadravecz were socially conditioned; they were to a large extent a function of insular professional cultures, which limited the members' intellectual and moral horizons by making meaningful interaction with other people difficult.

Zadravecz' obsession with Shvoy's and Horthy's sexual life and his tendency to notice and exaggerate everybody's weaknesses has to be understood in the same social context. In his book on Emperor Francis Joseph and his relation with the Hungarian people Andras Gero argued that the lower middle class took an interest in the life and scandals of the royal family because at the level of human virtues and weaknesses it identified with the elite. (62) The point about the conservative nature of popular culture is, I believe, is well taken, even though Zadravecz' and Pronay's malicious remarks about their superiors also suggest an alternative interpretation. They had to do, in my opinion, with the monotony of life in the garrisons and the monasteries; the predilection to gossip and spread rumors reflected rigid hierarchies and the essentially undemocratic nature of decision-making in the Army and the Catholic Church. Zadravecz and Pronay enjoyed gossiping and making up stories, such as the one about Mrs. Horthy's' dream, for two reasons: as outsiders, they lacked solid information; second, as upwardly mobile people, they wanted to appear well informed. The charge of sexual immorality leveled by Zadravecz against Horthy and Shvoy only highlights the cultural divide that separated this upstart from the real elite. Both branches of the Hungarian aristocracy, the aristocracy of the sword, and the heavily Jewish aristocracy of money and enterprise, were after all tolerant when it came to sexual escapes. The sexual rigidity of Zadravecz and Pronay, which complemented their cruelty and maliciousness, had to come therefore from middle-class and lower middleclass cultural milieus; it can be perceived, in my opinion, as one aspect of the essentially puritan culture of modern professions. It seems that Victorian and modern middle-class morality found its champions in the mass murderer Pronay and his ally in the Catholic Church, Father Zadravecz.

Anti-Semitism as an ideology was not confined to any particular group; in Hungary, however, the main proponents of anti-Semitism were the gentry and the so-called Christian middle class--groups that felt economically most threatened by Jews. (63) That the noble Pronay and the middle-class Zadravecz were anti-Semites cannot be divorced from the fact that the Army and the Catholic hierarchy recruited heavily from these two social groups. Zadravecz' anti-Semitism was of a Christian Socialist variety and was derived in part from the speeches and writings of Bishop Ottokar Prohaszka. As mentioned earlier, in the early December 1918, in a along speech, Zadravecz denounced the October Revolution as a national tragedy; at the same time, he made several references to Jews. He implied that Jews were war profiteers and "crooks without a homeland" (kazatlan bitangok). Jews allegedly dominated the social democratic party and the socialist trade unions, which "terrorized" decent and patriotically-minded workers by forcing them to enter these organizations. The non-practicing Jewish leaders of the Party and the trade unions hated Christianity and the Catholic Church with a passion, while they remained partial to Judaism and Jews. These dangerous internationalists did not care about Hungary and, if left unopposed, they would soon plunge the country into a civil war and Bolshevism. (64) In the summer of 1919, again in a public speech, he distinguished between two types of Jews: Hungarian Jews and immigrant Jews, and described the latter as the "more dangerous" (veszedelmesebbek). Immigrant Jews "did not stem from this soil. They are strangers; everything, the soil, the climate and the local customs all strange to them." These refugees allegedly used the war to enrich themselves; they were the ones, who "stroke the weapon out of our tired hands; to escape revenge they declared that we did not want to see soldiers any more.... They profited first from the revolution, and then from the proletarian dictatorship. They made us to fight each other rather than unite in the defense of this land. They put the weapons of the Reds into our hands; however, they did not want us to defend our long-suffering Homeland but only to kill each other, to murder widows and to steal. They plugged up all the sources of our livelihood." (65) In a separate speech, Zadravecz also claimed that the Jews in Szeged collaborated with the occupying French forces and that they tried to influence the composition of the government by pulling strings behind the scene. The Abraham government was allegedly in their pocket because its members visited the local synagogue and even asked for the rabbi's blessing. (66)

While it is safe to describe Zadravecz as a radial anti-Semite, his behavior was not without contradictions. In Szeged, Zadravecz was a regular visitor in the house of the rich Jewish manufacturer, Bernat Bach, who made generous financial contributions to the counter-revolutionary cause and whose two sons were members of the reserve officers' company that occupied and cleansed the local garrison of Communist sympathizers in early May 1919. (67) In the summer of 1919, Zadravecz also paid a visit to Immanuel Low, the chief rabbi in Szeged, whose son was also in the same officers' company, and asked the rabbi to support the counter-revolution publicly. Low listed as his precondition the dismissal of Gombos and Horthy from the Karolyi government. Instead of losing his temper, as he was wont to do, Zadravecz listened carefully and respectfully to "the smart and diplomatic arguments of this elderly rabbi." Later, in May 1921, he came to the defense of Low imprisoned for the passionate yet true and completely understandable remarks he had made during an interview with a Dutch journalist. Zadravecz' appearance at Low's trial as a friendly witness angered his colleagues in the radical anti-Semitic organization, the Association of Reawakened Hungarians which wanted Low's head. He even tried to raise the issue of Low's imprisonment with Horthy during an audience with the Regent in April 20, 1921. Horthy became agitated at the mere mentioning of Low's name however, and told the Army Bishop that he had had enough of people who wanted to help Low. Zadravecz kept his composure by quickly changing his stance he showed the Regent a caricature of Low, which he picked up at one of the EME meetings. The drawing showed Low on the gallows, but viewed from a different angle, one saw a donkey at the manger. The Franciscan priest and the Regent of Hungary shared a hearty laugh and then switched to other topics. (68)

If hypocrisy is the right terra to describe his relations with Jews, Zadravecz was certainly not the only person among paramilitary leaders who suffered from it. Ivan Hejjas, whose militia killed more than one hundred people, many of them Jewish, in Kecskemet and its vicinity in the fall of 1919, had several Jewish lovers; one of them still served in his father's store during the atrocities. (69) Lieutenant Denes Bibo, Pronay's right-hand man, the killer and torturer of countless Jewish victims, had been married to a Jewish woman before he joined Pronay's company in the summer of 1919. (70) What perversion motivated sadists such as Bibo and Hejjas is difficult to know. It is clear however that in his dealing with Jewish bankers and industrialists Zadravecz was motivated primarily with financial considerations. Baron Frigyes Ullmann, the banker Simon Krausz and the manufacturer Fulop Wimmer, who hated Communists as much as Zadravecz, helped to bankroll a number of right radical and anti-Semitic organizations, including the EX, and they also, especially Krausz, provided timely financial aid to Zadravecz on a number of occasions. Pronay and Hejjas knew about Zadravecz' ties to Jewish bankers, and during the militia insurrection in Burgenland, they turned to him form money. Zadravecz forwarded their request to the First National Bank (Elso Hazai Bank), bur the Jewish director of the bank asked for a supporting letter from either Prime Minister Bethlen or Regent Horthy. Bethlen refused to see Zadravecz however, while Horthy went hunting with the Prelate of Kalocsa and did not want to be disturbed. In his diary, the Army Bishop admitted that by hearing this news he had used foul language to vent his frustration; he failed to add, however, if he cursed at the political elite or at the Jewish director of the bank or both. (71)

Zadravecz, while ready to profit from making exceptions, was still relatively consistent in his views and actions when it came to Jews. In Szeged, at the meeting of the boards of directors of the ABC, he repeatedly bickered with conservative Jewish entrepreneurs over the issues of Christian Socialista. As mentioned earlier, he was one of the leaders of the group of radicals that demanded the expulsion of Jews and freemasons from the ABC. His advocacy of pogroms as a necessary part of the counter-revolution shocked old-style conservatives such as Bela Kelemen. Zadravecz saw himself as the comrade of the paramilitary leaders. As mentioned earlier, it was Zadravecz who consecrated the flag of the Pronay Company in the summer of 1919. Pronay also remained his hero throughout his life. In 1927, he still remembered with disgust the joy that the "liberal Jewish press" had allegedly showed over the political demise of "the Jew-castrator Pronay." (72) In the EX, Zadravecz was one of the few members who came to the deference of "brother" Gyula Osztenburg after of the failed legitimist coup, in which he had played a major role in 1921. Osztenburg and his detachment were also responsible for the death of hundred of Jewish Hungarians, including the editor of the social democratic daily, the Nepszava (People's Voice). As late as 1927, Zadravecz still held the marginalized paramilitary leader in high regard. (73) In the late 1930s, as mentioned earlier, he developed strong ties with various fascist and anti-Semitic groups, including the Arrow Cross. Although he avoided the topic of anti-Semitism in his speeches, his frequent use of Nazi terras in his speeches after 1935, such as face, blood, soil, racial feeling, racial instinct, and Leader, leave no doubt about the nature of his political sympathies. Thus, in a narrow legal sense, he may not have been guilty of genocide. Yet, because of his political past, his close working relation first with the leaders of the terror detachments and later with various racist groups, including the Arrow Cross, the Army Bishop certainly bore moral responsibility for what happened to more than half of million Hungarian Jews during the war.

Conclusion

The close examination of Father Zadravecz' political life has yielded some interesting results. Zadravecz did not come from a poor family: his father was an estate manager, an upwardly mobile man, and one that profited, to some degree, from modernization. Zadravecz lived the life of a privileged teenager and adolescent: after all, only a tiny minority of children in Hungary attended elite humanist high schools; even fewer were allowed to enroll at universities, and only the very privileged and lucky were awarded doctoral degrees from foreign institutions. Soon after graduation, he received his own parish in one of the largest and largest and fastest-growing towns in Hungary. The war did no damage to his career, and thanks to his talent as a speaker and propagandist, he became Army Bishop at the youthful age of thirty-five. His career is interesting to us because it mirrored closely the fortunes of leaders and rank-and-file of the officers' detachments that had been set up in the summer of 1919 and were responsible for some of the most heinous crimes in modern Hungarian history. The hard core of the right radical groups in Hungary after the First World War had much going for them. They either carne from the most rooted and influential strata of society, i.e. the nobility, or they had already made their transition from the lower middle class into the outer rings of the elite. The war if anything helped their careers, and even though they had reason to worry about their future, their problems were certainly minor compared to the rest of society. Their commitment to right radicalism, including fascism, and often violent behavior therefore cannot be blamed on misfortune.

Zadravecz and the young right radicals enjoyed the attention of the political and military elite between 1919 and 1923, but were slowly pushed into the background and in many cases completely eliminated from the political scene. The reasons for their removal were complex. Paramilitary leaders and their allies, including Zadravecz, were in many respects the younger versions of their superiors. Even their alleged failings or weaknesses in character reflected cultural proximity, since they were derived from the virtues of the elite: what the elite saw as recklessness was interpreted by the paramilitary leaders as courage, obstinacy as firmness and arrogance as noble pride. The narrow-mindedness, cruelty, intolerance and maliciousness of paramilitary leaders and their allies were also the functions of large and elite-controlled bureaucracies, such as the Army and the Catholic Church, where tasks were clearly delineated, information tightly controlled and success was measured by the speed of one's promotion. What separated the paramilitary leaders and people like Zadravecz from the elite was not so much their war-time experience bur their ability and readiness to take advantage of the postwar chaos. In other words, Zadravecz and the paramilitary leaders were the products of the revolution: they internalized its spirit and followed its demands. They either had charisma or developed it during the revolution; they all subscribed to the new "leadership principle" that emphasized the importance of personal loyalty and initiative at the expense of bureaucratic rules. Both ill-informed and increasingly intoxicated by either blood or early success or both, the young right radicals soon began to display signs of dysfuntionality: they no longer followed the elite's hints and orders; second, and more importantly, they could no longer function in a traditional bureaucratic setting. The elite had to address the problem of dysfuntionality not so much for economic reasons and foreign-policy concerns as traditional Marxist historians believed but in order to ensure the survival of vital institutions. They had to cleanse the structure from dysfunctional elements, such as Zadraveez.

Bela Bodo

Grand Valley State University


http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5017870013

[Kiev Communard]

The continuation of the first post:


Notes

(1.) Sandor Nagymihalyi, ed., P. Zadraveez Puspok. A Szegedi Kapisztran (Budapest: Hornyanszky Victor R.-T. nyomdai muintezet, 1941), Vol. 1, pp. 17-37.

(2.) Ibid., pp. 55-64; also Gyorgy Stoffan, Zadravecz-Passio, 1884-1965 (Los Angeles: Magyarorszagert Lap es Konyvkiado), pp. 11-22. Stoffan, an amateur historian, seeks to rehabilitate Zadravecz by portraying him as a martyr. His book, in my opinion, is poorly researched (the author did not use secondary sources at all). It has one great advantage: the book includes the photocopies of trial documents that were generated after 1945. Stoffan found these documents in the archive of the Franciscan order in Budapest.

(3.) See Ottokar Prohaszka, Kultura es Terror (Budapest: Szenci Molnar Tarsasag, 1997; originally published in 1918).

(4.) Gabriel Adrianyi, Funfzig Jahre Ungarischer Kirchengeschichte, 1895-1945 (Mainz: v. Hase & Koehler Verlag, 1974), pp. 53-59.

(5.) Dr. Bela Kelemen, Adatok a szegedi ellenforradalom es a Szegedi kormany tortenetehez. (1919). Szerzo kiadasa. (Szeged: Mars Grafikai Muintezet, 1923), pp. 1-47.

(6.) Ibid., pp. 52-53; 90-95; 118.

(7.) The title of Bela Balazs' book speaks for itself. Bela Balazs, ed., A klerikalis reakcio a Horthy-fasizmus tamasza (Clerical reaction as the supporter of Horthy fascista) Vol. 1, 1919-1930 (Budapest: Muvelt Nep Konyvkiado, 1953). Balazs argued, anal in my opinion he was wrong, that Zadravecz' men played a major role in the occupation of the Mars garrison and he recruited many members into the Osztenburg and the Pronay companies. See Balazs, A klerikalis reakcio, pp. 53-54.

(8.) Kelemen, Adatok a szegedi ellenforradalom es a Szegedi kormany tortenetehez, pp. 74-75; Mihaly Perneky, Shvov Kalman titkos naploja es emlekirata, 1918-1945 (Budapest: Kossuth Konyvkiado, 1983), pp. 43-44

(9.) Kelemen, Adatok a szegedi ellenforradalom es a Szegedi kormany tortenetehez, pp. 101-105.

(10.) Ibid., pp. 178-180.

(11.) Ibid., pp. 494-495.

(12.) Gyorsiroi jegyzokonyv Uzdoczy-Zadravecz Istvan Pusp6k II. Nepbirosagi targyalasanak Budapesten 1947.evi februar ho 15-en 12 orakor tartott Itelet-hirdeteserol (Trial Documents, Budapest, February 15, 1947). The document is cited by Stoffan, Zadravecz-Passio, pp. 92-93.

(13.) From the minutes of the Hungarian bishops, March 17, 1920, in Dezso Nemes, h'atok az ellenforradalom tortenetehez. Az ellenforradalom hatalomrajutasa es remurahna Magyarorszagon 1919-1921 (Budapest: Szikra, 1953), pp. 151-152

(14.) Bela Balazs, ed., A klerikalis reakcio a Horthy-fasizmus tamasza, Vol. 1., 1919-1930 (Budapest: Muvelt Nep Konyvkiado, 1953), pp. 23-25.

(15.) Istvan David, Bela Muha, Gyula Szigethy were members of the Osztenburg Detachment; Pater Bonis (Archangel) and Laszlo Hertelendy were members of the Hejjas Detachment. Balazs, A klerikalis reakcio, pp. 37-39.

(16.) Ibid., pp. 40-68.

(17.) Jeno Gergely ed,. A puspoki kar tanacskozasai. A magyar katolikus puspokok konferenciainak./egyzokonyveibol, 1919-1944 (Budapest: Gondolat, 1984), pp. 73-76.

(18.) Anton Broucek, ed., Anton Lehar. Erinnerungen Gegenrevohaion und Restraurationsversuche in Ungarn 1918-1921 (Vienna: Verlag fur Geschichte und Politik, 1973), p. 162.

(19.) See Jeno Gergely, A katolikus egyhazi elit Magyarorszagon, 1919-1945 (Budapest: Elte Sociologiai es Szocialpolitikai lntezet, 1992), pp. 15-65.

(20.) Miklos Szinai, Ki lesz a kormanyzo? (Budapest: Kossuth Konyvkiado, 1988), esp. pp. 66-80.

(21.) Gyorgy Borsanyi ed, Pater Zadravecz titkos naploja (Budapest: Kossuth Konyvkiado, 1967), pp. 48-74.

(22.) Ibid., pp. 36-38.

(23.) Ibid., pp. 40-44; 172.

(24.) Ibid., p. 144

(25.) Ibid., pp. 204-236.

(26.) See Maria Ormos, Magyarorszag a ket vilaghaboru koraban, 1914-1945 (Debrecen: Csokonai Kiado, 1998,), pp. 94-98.

(27.) Erwin Pamlenyi and Agnes Szabo, eds., A hatarban a halal kaszal. Fejezetek Pronayfeljegyzeseibol (Budapest: Kossuth Konyvkiado, 1963), pp. 326-327.

(28.) Borsanyi, Pater Zadravecz titkos naploja, pp. 152-181.

(29.) The Church paid him as his yearly salary 50 hectoliter wheat and two pigs. This was lower than a skilled workers wages, and simply did not compare with the salary of Catholic dignitaries.

(30.) The vitez (gallant) order was established by Horthy in 1921; its members, mostly distinguished war veterans and noted counter-revolutionaries.

(31.) Gergely, A katolikus egyhazi elit Magyarorszagon, pp. 81-82.

(32.) Borsanyi, Pater Zadravecz titkos naploja, pp. 195-203.

(33) Jeno Gergely, A katolikus egyhaz tortenete Magyarorszagon 1919-1945 (Budapest: Pannonica Kiado, 1999), pp. 14-23.

(34.) Ibid., pp. 24-25; 99.

(35.) Mihaly Perneky, Shvoy Kahnan titkos naploja es emlekirata, 1918-1945 (Budapest: Kossuth K0nyvkiado, 1983), p. 292.

(36.) Stoffan, Zadravecz-Passio, pp. 163-169.

(37.) Gyorgy Ranki, ed., Magyarorszag tortenete, 1918-1919, 1919-1945 (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1976), p. 479.

(38.) Ferenc Kaiser, A magyar kiralyi csendorseg tortenete a ket vilaghaboru kozott (Budapest: Pro Pannonia Kiado Alapitvany, 2002), pp. 21-32.

(39.) Bela Bodo, "Paramilitary Violence in Hungary after the Fist World War," East European Quarterly, XXXVIII, No. 2 (June 2004).

(40.) Thomas Sakmyster, Admiralis feher lovon (Budapest: Helikon Kiado, 2001), pp. 26-62; Ignac Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Budapest: Osiris, 1999), pp. 109-110.

(41.) Nagymihalyi, ed., P. Zadravecz Puspok, p. 10.

(42.) For an excellent discussion of the nature of memory see Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 143-212.

(43.) For the main qualities of the military elite, see Sandor Szakaly, A magyar katonai elit, 1938-1945 (Budapest: Magveto Konyvkiado, 1987).

(44.) Borsanyi ed, Pater Zadravecz titkos naploja, p. 200.

(45.) Ibid., pp. 139-140.

(46.) Ibid., p. 85.

(47.) Ibid., p. 88.

(48.) Ibid., p. 261.

(49.) Ibid., p. 160.

(50.) Ibid., pp. 93-94.

(51.) Szegedi Naplo, August 16, 1921; Szegedi Naplo, August 17, 1929; cited by Pemeki, Shvoy Kalman titkos naploja, p. 339.

(52.) Borsanyi ed, Pater Zadravecz titkos naploja, pp. 47-50.

(53.) Ibid., p. 35; 151.

(54.) Ibid., pp. 97-98.

(55.) Nagymihalyi, ed., P. Zadravecz Puspok, Vol. 2., pp. 164-167.

(56.) Ibid., pp. 73-82; 211-216.

(57.) Pamlenyi and Szabo, eds., A hatarban a halal kaszal, p. 131; 158; 208; 220; 244.

(58.) Borsanyi, ed., Pater Zadravecz titkos naploja, pp. 262-263.

(59.) Ibid., p. 248.

(60.) Ibid., p. 214.

(61.) Ibid., p. 257.

(62.) Andras Gero, Emperor Francis Joseph, King of the Hungarians (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 211-221.

(63.) For a short but excellent analysis of the social basis of anti-Semitism in Hungary see, Rolf Fischer, Entwicklungsstufen des Antisemitismus in Ungarn 1867-1939: Die Zerstorung der magyarisch-judischen Symbiose (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1988), pp. 71-94; Vera Ranki, The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Jews and Nationalism in Hungary (New York: Holmes and Maier, 1999), pp. 69-70.

(64.) Nagymihalyi, ed., P. Zadravecz Puspok. pp. 55-64.

(65.) Ibid., p. 163.

(66.) Borsanyi, ed., Pater Zadravecz titkos naploja, p. 239.

(67.) Kelemen, Adatok a szegedi ellenforradalom es a Szegedi kormany tortenetehez, p. 424.

(68.) Borsanyi, ed., Pater Zadravecz titkos naploja, pp. 240-241.

(69.) Jozsef Halmi, "17699/920 Belugyminiszteri akta Hejjas Ivanrol. A Becsi Magyar Ujsag munkatarsatol," in Gyorgyi Markovits, ed., Magyar pokol: A magyarorszagi feherterror betiltott es uldozott kiadvanyok tukreben (Budapest: Magveto, 1964), pp. 59-53; originally published in Orgovany. Fekete konyv Kecskemetrol (Vienna: Vernay, 1920).

(70.) Pamlenyi and Szabo ,eds., A hatarban, a halal kaszal, p. 157.

(71.) Borsanyi, ed., Pater Zadravecz titkos naploja, p. 162.

(72.) Ibid., p. 154.

(73.) Ibid., p. 120.