Although most citizens of the Allied countries tend to assume Horthy and Hungary were wholehearted allies of the Nazis, hostility between Hitler and the Hungarians was such that in March 1944 a German army invaded Hungary and arrested its leaders. At war s end Hungary held a war crimes trial and, just like France, executed the country s leading Nazi collaborators. Photographs of Hungary s postwar trials and hangings are on conspicuous and permanent display in Budapest s National History Museum. No Hungarians were hanged for collaborating with the Soviets, of course, but Budapest has hit on a rather whimsical way of remembering the Soviet occupation. Bela Kun himself, having fled to the Soviet Union, disappeared in the Moscow purges of the 1930s and was only rehabilitated after Stalin s death.
Enthusiastic crowds fill performances at almost every one of Budapest s forty theaters.
Driving about today s Budapest, one is constantly reminded of what are still felt to be this former imperial city s greatest days in the modern period what the French call La Belle Epoque the decades about one hundred years ago, when Budapest was the fastest growing city in Europe, and one of the largest and richest cities in the world. Budapest had a bustling, cosmopolitan, commercial sector. Hungary was at the time three times its present size, and included much of present day Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, and southern Poland. Europe s great pleasure capital, with a flourishing high culture literature, theater, art and, on the wicked end of the spectrum, an abundance of high class brothels, gambling dens, casinos, and race tracks. When, talking to a Hungarian friend, one hears a reference to a great defeat for Hungary, or, by contrast, the beating back of an invader, it is not always clear which invader the Hungarian friend is talking about.