The Era of Explosions : Terrorism in Hungary in the First Years of the Horthy-Era, 1922–1924

Kántás, Balázs (2022) The Era of Explosions : Terrorism in Hungary in the First Years of the Horthy-Era, 1922–1924. Horthy-korszak Történetének Kutatásáért Társaság = Society for the Research of the Horthy-Era, Budapest. ISBN 978-615-6250-37-7

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Abstract

In the 1920s, paramilitary violence was a natural phenomenon in Hungary, like in many other countries of Central Europe. After the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic the new right-wing government, establishing its power with the help of the Entente powers, had difficulty ruling the quasi anarchistic conditions. In 1920–1921, Hungary was terrorized by irregular military formations that were formally part of the National Army, and radical right-wing soldiers committed serious crimes with anti-Semitic motivations. Although paramilitary violence ebbed out in 1921, the militia movement lived on in the form of secret paramilitary organisations. The government used these units, since the right-wing elite were afraid of another communist takeover. Their status as auxiliary police forces also helped circumventing the armament limits of the Treaty of Trianon. Finally, such groups promised cooperation with Austrian and German radical-right paramilitary groups including Hitler’s Nazi Party. It is less known how and why these irregular soldiers became involved in political terrorism, like the accidentally prevented bomb attack plan in Jászkarajenő in 1922, the bombing in Erzsébetváros (8 casualties on 2 April 1922), or the bomb attempt in Csongrád (3 killed) on 24 December 1923. All these actions were committed by the members of the state-sponsored secret military organisation called Double Cross Blood Union (Kettőskereszt Vérszövetség). Although the police did its best to investigate the cases, most perpetrators avoided prison. The age of the bomb raids, as the press of the opposition called this period ended when these murderous, anti-Semitic terrorists remained at large, and found their places in the authoritarian conservative regime of Hungary of the 1920s. The reconstruction of these rarely known terrorist deeds offers a micro-historical lens to investigate broader issues. The three interrelated bomb attacks provide a starting point for resituating Hungarian paramilitarism, hitherto limited to mainly the White Terror. The controversial and complex relationship between these paramilitary radical right-wing movements and the government, the role of several paramilitary commanders who also operated as influential radical right-wing politicians and the fact that the state stood behind a terrorist organization invoke analogies with the institutionalization of paramilitarism later in Nazi Germany, etc., and raises the issue of transnational transfer and finally the entanglement of typological categories based on state and violence as definitory factors for paramilitarism.

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