page_title: History of Hungary
section_title: World War II
hierarchical_section_title: History of Hungary / Modern history / World War II
caption_attribution_description: Hungary 1939 This Agfacolor photo (invention from 1936) was not colorized. Life before the Second World War.Magyar: 25-ös túrajolle. Location: Hungary, Lake Balaton Tags: colorful, sailboat Title: 25-ös túrajolle.
context_page_description: Hungary in its modern borders roughly corresponds to the Great Hungarian Plain.
  During the Iron Age, it was at the boundary of Celtic, Illyrian and Iranian cultural spheres.
  The name "Pannonian" comes from Pannonia, a province of the Roman Empire. Only the western part of the territory of modern Hungary formed part of the ancient Roman Province of Pannonia. The
  Roman control collapsed with the Hunnic invasions of 370–410 and Pannonia was part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom during the late 5th to mid 6th century, succeeded by the Avar Khaganate.civil
  The Magyar invasion takes place during the 9th century.
  The Magyars were Christianized at the end of the 10th century, and the Christian Kingdom of Hungary was established in AD 1000,
  ruled by the Árpád dynasty for the following three centuries.
  In the high medieval period, the kingdom expanded beyond Pannonia, to the Adriatic coast. In 1241 during the reign of Béla IV, Hungary was invaded by the Mongols under Batu Khan. The outnumbered Hungarians were decisively defeated at the Battle of Mohi by the Mongol army. King Béla fled to the Holy Roman Empire and left the Hungarian population under the mercy of the Mongols.
context_section_description: Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sought to enforce the claims of Hungarians living in territories Hungary lost in 1920 with the signing of the Treaty of Trianon peacefully, and the two Vienna Awards (1938 and 1940) returned parts from Czechoslovakia (southern Slovakia and southern Carpathian Ruthenia) and from Romania (Northern Transylvania) to Hungary. The 1939 annexation of the remainder or Carpathian Ruthenia was an own action initiated by Hungary after the breakup of Czechoslovakia.
  On 24 July 1939 Pál Teleki wrote to Adolf Hitler that Hungary would not participate in war against Poland as a matter of national honor.  He added that Hungarian authorities did not agree to the passage of the German army through Hungary. On 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started the Second World War. Poland quickly collapsed and Hungary allowed 70,000 Polish refugees to enter, much to Hitler's annoyance.
  On 20 November 1940, under pressure from Germany, Pál Teleki affiliated Hungary with the Tripartite Pact.  In December 1940, he also signed an ephemeral "Treaty of Eternal Friendship" with Yugoslavia.  A few months later, after a Yugoslavian coup threatened the success of the planned German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), Hitler asked the Hungarians to support his invasion of Yugoslavia.  He promised to return some former Hungarian territories lost after World War I in exchange for cooperation. Unable to prevent Hungary's participation in the war alongside Germany, Teleki committed suicide. The right-wing radical László Bárdossy succeeded him as prime minister. Following the Invasion of Yugoslavia and the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia, Hungary annexed Bácska, the remainder of Baranya, Muravidék and Muraköz.
  After war against Russia broke out on the Eastern Front in 1941, many Hungarian officials argued for participation in the war on the German side so as not to encourage Hitler into favoring Romania in the event of border revisions in Transylvania. Hungary entered the war and on 1 July 1941, at the direction of the Germans, the Hungarian Karpat Group advanced far into southern Russia. At the Battle of Uman, the Gyorshadtest participated in the encirclement of the 6th Soviet Army and the 12th Soviet Army. Twenty Soviet divisions were captured or destroyed.
  Worried about Hungary's increasing reliance on Germany, Admiral Horthy forced Bárdossy to resign and replaced him with Miklós Kállay, a veteran conservative of Bethlen's government. Kállay continued Bárdossy's policy of supporting Germany against the Red Army, while he also surreptitiously entered into negotiations with the Western Powers.
  During the Battle of Stalingrad, the Hungarian Second Army suffered terrible losses. Shortly after the fall of Stalingrad in January 1943, the Hungarian Second Army effectively ceased to exist as a functioning military unit.
  Secret negotiations with the British and Americans continued. Aware of Kállay's deceit and fearing that Hungary might conclude a separate peace, Hitler ordered Nazi troops to launch Operation Margarethe and occupy Hungary in March 1944. Döme Sztójay, an avid supporter of the Nazis, become the new prime minister with the aid of a Nazi military governor, Edmund Veesenmayer.
  The infamous SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann went to Hungary to oversee the large-scale deportations of Jews to German death camps in occupied Poland. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, the Hungarians deported 437,402 Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
  In August 1944, Horthy replaced Sztójay with the anti-Fascist General Géza Lakatos. Under the Lakatos regime, the acting Interior Minister Béla Horváth ordered Hungarian gendarmes to prevent any Hungarian citizens from being deported.
  In September 1944, Soviet forces crossed the Hungarian border. On 15 October 1944, Horthy announced that Hungary had signed an armistice with the Soviet Union. The Hungarian army ignored the armistice. The Germans launched Operation Panzerfaust and, by kidnapping his son (Miklós Horthy, Jr.), forced Horthy to abrogate the armistic
caption: Lake Balaton in the Thirties just before the Second World War.
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