László Bárdossy de Bárdos (10 December 1890 – 10 January 1946) was a Hungarian diplomat and politician who served as Prime Minister of Hungary from April 1941 to March 1942. He was one of the chief architects of Hungary's involvement in World War II.
Bárdossy was appointed Foreign Minister in January 1941 and, following Pál Teleki's suicide in April, succeeded as Prime Minister. Seeking to recover more Hungarian territories lost after the Treaty of Trianon, he pursued a strong pro-German foreign policy and Hungary supported and subsequently joined Germany's invasion of Yugoslavia. Afterwards, during his office Hungary became belligerent with the Soviet Union, United Kingdom and the United States.
In March 1942, Regent Miklós Horthy dismissed Bárdossy from the post. He worked with the collaborationist governments after the German occupation of Hungary in 1944. After the end of the war, Bárdossy was found guilty of war crimes and collaborationism by a People's Court and sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad in January 1946.
Early life and diplomatic career Born at Szombathely on 10 December 1890 to Jenő Bárdossy de Bárdos and Gizella Zarka de Felsőőr, Bárdossy completed his secondary education at Eperjes (in present-day Slovakia) and in Budapest. His family were lesser nobility (i.e considered to be noble, but held no titles, a class that corresponded to the gentry). He trained as a lawyer in Budapest, Berlin and Paris, and learned German, French and English. He began his career in 1913 as an assistant clerk in the Hungarian government's Ministry of Culture and Education, by 1918 was an assistant secretary. Three years later he reached the rank of ministerial secretary, having been commissioner of education for Pest County. In February 1922, he transferred to the newly established Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as deputy chief then chief of the press department. As chief of the press department, Bárdossy reported to György Barcza, the chief of the political department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time. Barcza came from a more prominent and wealthier aristocratic family than Bárdossy and had a "grand seigneur" attitude towards his social inferiors, which led to embittered relations between the two men. In World War Two, the relationship between Barcza and Bárdossy was to be reversed with Barcza serving as the Hungarian minister-plenipotentiary in London and Bárdossy serving as foreign minister and prime minister.
Intelligent and ambitious, but highly irascible, Bárdossy quickly rose up the ranks of Hungarian diplomacy. In March 1930 he was appointed as a counsellor to the Hungarian legation in London, latterly as chargé d'affaires. His wife was the sister-in-law of the prime minister Gyula Gömbös, which greatly aided his career. Bárdossy's wife was a divorcée, which under the British customs at the time, meant she could not be presented at court before King George V and Queen Mary, a snub that greatly embittered Bárdossy and made him into something of an Anglophobe. From October 1934, Bárdossy was the Hungarian envoy to Romania.
The aristocracy held over-sized importance within the Kingdom of Hungary as the open ballot along with laws that disfranchised poorer men from voting or holding office (Hungarian women regardless of income level were not allowed to vote or hold office until 1946) allowed the greater aristocracy and the lesser aristocracy to dominate politics. Owning to the disfranchisement of most of the population and the fact that upper-class men were the only ones allowed to vote, the political left was not a factor in Hungarian politics and the main divisions in politics were between a right-wing faction known as the conservatives vs. an even more right-wing faction known as the radicals. The American political scientist Ibrahim Zabad wrote the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklós Horthy, managed to "keep a foot in both camps of the right", but he tended to more adopt the rhetoric of the radicals while governing more like the conservatives. Both the conservatives and the radicals favored anti-Semitic policies, but the conservatives tempered their antisemitism by arguing that Hungary needed its Jewish middle class to maintain the economy while the radicals did not. Until his death from testicular cancer in 1936, Gömbös was the leader of the radical faction and Bárdossy was associated with the radicals. Broadly speaking, the office of prime minister tended to alternate between the conservatives such as István Bethlen, Pál Teleki and Miklós Kállay vs. radicals such as Gyula Gömbös, Béla Imrédy and Bárdossy. The British historian C.A. Macartney argued that the way that the prime ministership alternated from 1932 to 1944 between the conservatives and the radicals was clear evidence that Admiral Horthy was the man in ultimate control of Hungary and that Horthy had played a balancing act between the conservatives and the radicals.
Foreign minister
Hungary did not abandon the idea of reuniting the "Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen" after the Treaty of Trianon. Based on this doctrine, Hungary sought the revision of the treaty, claiming territories from Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, including regions with no significant ethnic Hungarian population, such as Croatia. Between 1938 and 1940, following German–Italian mediation in the First and Second Vienna Awards, and the Hungarian invasion of Carpatho-Ukraine, Hungary enlarged its territory. It absorbed parts of southern Czechoslovakia, Carpathian Ruthenia and the northern part of Transylvania, which the Kingdom of Romania ceded. One of the ethno-cultural areas that changed hands between Romania and Hungary at this time was the Székely Land. The support that Hungary received from Germany for these border revisions meant that the relationship between the two countries became even closer. On 20 November 1940, Hungary formally joined the Axis Tripartite Pact.
To simplify the planned invasion of Greece, Germany and Italy wanted to neutralize Yugoslavia. For this purpose, Germany was ready to guarantee the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia. News of the German offer annoyed Hungary which had already started negotiations with Yugoslavia. At the initiative of Prime Minister Pál Teleki, Hungary and Yugoslavia signed a treaty of eternal friendship and non-aggression on 12 December 1940. The treaty referred to the possibility of the revision of the frontier in favor of Hungary after bilateral negotiations, but Hungary explicitly abandoned her claim to Croatia. Through the treaty, Hungary wanted to offset German pressure and to improve her relationship with the United Kingdom.
When István Csáky died in January 1941, Bárdossy was appointed to replace him as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Teleki's cabinet. From the beginning, Bárdossy agreed with Teleki's approach to foreign affairs, which placed high priorities on Hungarian independence and staying out of World War II. However, unlike Teleki, Bárdossy believed that the war would end in German victory or a negotiated settlement. In February, György Barcza the Hungarian ambassador to Great Britain, advised Bárdossy that the British had broken off diplomatic relations with Romania due to the presence of German troops on its soil, and expressed disquiet over the fact that Hungary had allowed them to transit through Hungary on their way to Romania. Bárdossy replied that Hungary had allowed the transit of German troops at the request of the Romanian government. The British Foreign Office response was that Bárdossy's explanation was just a pretext, as Hungary's actions had enabled Britain's enemy to establish itself in Romania, thus creating a base for further German operations. They further explained that while they understood that Hungary and other smaller nations were in extremis, Britain was trying to extend a level of "understanding and patience" with them beyond usual diplomatic practice. Bárdossy also remonstrated with the Germans regarding the guarantees they had offered the Yugoslavs, emphasising that Hungary had not given up its territorial claims. Consistent with their practice of making conflicting promises to different countries, the Germans replied that Germany recognised Hungary's revisionist claims, and that the assurances offered to the Yugoslavs would not interfere with them.
On 27 February, the Yugoslav Foreign Minister, Aleksandar Cincar-Marković, arrived in Budapest to exchange the documents ratifying the Treaty of Friendship, and Teleki and Bárdossy met with him. Cincar-Marković was alarmed by the imminent Bulgarian accession to the Tripartite Pact. In early March, Teleki wrote a long memorandum regarding the expectations that the British and Americans could have of Hungary. He saw his chief responsibility as conserving Hungary's resources to the end of the war, and listed the dangers she faced, one of which was that from Yugoslavia, despite the recently signed Treaty of Friendship. He described as unreasonable the British expectation that small nations such as Hungary should oppose Germany. Despite this, he listed a number of ways in which Hungary had held firm against unreasonable German demands, including her refusal to let German troops transit through Hungary to attack Poland in 1939.
On 4 March, Bárdossy gave a note to the British ambassador reiterating that the transit of German troops through Hungary at been at the request of the Romanian government. In communications with Barcza, his ambassador in London he accused the British of "malice" and "considerable ignorance", and may have allowed his dislike of his ambassador to colour his assessment of the British position. Bárdossy had deeply disliked Barcza since the 1920s when he had to report to him as chief of the press department, and his feelings of personal animosity towards him influenced his assessment of Anglo-Hungarian relations. Furthermore, Barcza was an Anglophile while Bárdossy was an Anglophobe, which was another strain on their relations. On 12 March, Teleki wrote to his ambassador in London, upbraiding the British for "reproaching others for non-resistance", and claiming that the British had failed to bring the nations in the Balkans and Danube basin together, whereby they may have been able to resist the Germans. The ambassador did not receive the letter until late March, and when he went to visit Eden, the Foreign Secretary told him that he expected that Teleki would have to succumb to German pressure sooner or later, but warned that Hungary would have to face the "gravest consequences" if she allowed German troops to pass through her territory to attack a country allied with Britain, and that even worse consequences would accrue if Hungary joined in any such attack.
On 25 March, the Yugoslavs acceded to the Tripartite Pact, but two days later the Yugoslav government was overthrown by a military coup. Adolf Hitler immediately ordered his generals to prepare to attack Yugoslavia, and summoned the Hungarian ambassador to Berlin, Döme Sztójay. Hitler told him that:
Germany would act to prevent any enemy bases being established against herself; if fighting occurred, Germany would not oppose any Hungarian revisionist claims on Yugoslav territory; Germany supported Croatian aspirations for autonomy; and Hungary might consider taking military action herself.