The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War [1st ed.] 9783030512248, 9783030512255

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction (Andrea Pető)....Pages 1-18
Invisible Party Members (Andrea Pető)....Pages 19-35
Invisible Political Actors (Andrea Pető)....Pages 37-60
Invisible Defendants (Andrea Pető)....Pages 61-71
Invisibility on Photographs (Andrea Pető)....Pages 73-88
Conclusions (Andrea Pető)....Pages 89-93
Back Matter ....Pages 95-96

Citation preview

The Women of the Arrow Cross Party Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War

Andrea Pető

The Women of the Arrow Cross Party “For several decades, gender studies have sought to lift the invisibility of women, forgotten or ignored by the dominant discourses despite being major actors in history. Rare are the studies that show how this invisibility has, on the contrary, been able to hide the contribution of some women to systems of domination, in this case Hungarian fascism. Andrea Pető’s study is particularly stimulating in removing unexpected taboos.” —Henry Rousso, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (Paris) “Isn’t it amazing that even two decades into the 21st century we still need proof for the importance of gender history in order to explain past and present phenomena and their entanglement? The present book by the internationally renowned scholar Andrea Pető is one of these proofs and a brilliant one: by reconstructing the hidden story of female contribution to Hungarian fascism, she is able not only to dissect the specific functions of gendered memory politics, but also to shed an illuminating light on contemporary developments.” —Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism (Berlin) “Feminists often point out the invisibility of women in historical accounts. But rarely do they do what Andrea Pető does: bringing a gender lens to the Hungarian far right, she brilliantly exposes the long-term effects of the erasure of the Arrow Cross women’s complicity from history, judgement, responsibility and memory. Meticulously researched and sharply analyzed, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the current rise of the far right.” —Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University (New York)

Andrea Pető

The Women of the Arrow Cross Party Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War

Andrea Pető Central European University Budapest, Hungary

ISBN 978-3-030-51224-8    ISBN 978-3-030-51225-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Barna Ildikó, Bárd Károly, Gyáni Gábor, Kovács András, Örkény Antal and Sipos Balázs; as well as Klaartje Schrijvers, Selma Leydesdorff, Elenore Lappin, Ayșe Gül Altınay, Patricia Chiantera-Stutte, and Zonneke Matthée. I am especially grateful for the different archives and their archivists supporting my work in Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára (Historical Archive of State Security Services), Budapest Főváros Levéltára (Budapest City Archives), Magyar Fotográfiai Múzeum (Hungarian Museum of Photography), Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtára (Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department), Nyílt Társadalom Alapítvány Archívuma (Open Society Archives), Budapesti Ügyvédi Kamara Irattára (Archive of the Budapest Bar Association), Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (National Archives of Hungary), Politikatudományi Intézet Levéltára (Archive of the Institute of Political History), Országos Széchényi Könyvtár (National Széchényi Library), Rendőr Múzeum Fotóarchívuma (Photoarchive of the Police Museum), MTVA Nemzeti Fotótára (Photoarchive of the National Broadcasting Foundation), and the CEU Library. The writing of this book was possible because of a research leave from the Central European University between 2017–2019, and the distinguished fellowship of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte Zentrum für Holocaust-Studien (München) in 2019. Thanks to Petra Bakos for her work supporting this publication.

v

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 Invisible Party Members19 3 Invisible Political Actors37 4 Invisible Defendants61 5 Invisibility on Photographs73 6 Conclusions89 Index95

vii

Abbreviations

ÁBTL ÁVH BFL MANSZ MONE MOOE MTI MÜNE

Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára/Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Services Államvédelmi Hatóság/Hungarian State Protection Authority Budapest Főváros Levéltára/Budapest City Archives Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége/National Association of Hungarian Women Magyar Orvosok Nemzeti Egyesülete/National Association of Hungarian Doctors Magyar Orvosnők Országos Egyesülete/Association of Hungarian Female Medical Doctors Magyar Távirati Iroda/Hungarian News Agency Magyar Ügyvédek Nemzeti Egyesülete/National Association of Hungarian Lawyers

ix

List of Photos

Photo 2.1

Photo 3.1

Photo 3.2 Photo 5.1 Photo 5.2 Photo 5.3

Meeting of the Great Arrow Cross Council in the House of Loyalty, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/ Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, no. 1489–1954 24 Handkerchief made by the women’s section of the Arrow Cross Party for Ferenc Szálasi. MTVA Archívum/ Photoarchive of the National Broadcasting Foundation, FMAFI 1945–34036 42 Ferenc Szálasi at the women’s section of the Arrow Cross Party in Kosice. Štátny archív v Košiciach/The Kosice State Archives. Zbierka fotografií, 1873–2000, no. 0565 50 Meeting in the House of Loyalty. Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, no. 1511–1954 77 Perpetrators of the Maros Street massacre (Budapest). Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, no. 2916 79 The execution of Manci. (Yad Vashem Photo Archive, no. 144BO8)81

xi

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  The book’s introduction offers a general historical introduction into Hungary’s situation after the First World War as far as women’s radical political mobilization was concerned. Another introductory section analyzes the forms, causes and consequences of women perpetrators’ invisibility. Keywords  Hungary • First World War • Political mobilization • Women • Gender “The Arrow Cross Party therefore differs from other parties as it has a spirit.” Woman in the movement. A Nép, December 17, 1942. 4. “We will veer Hungarian women back to the sacred duty of motherhood. The Hungarian nation emanates from the Hungarian mother. The mother is the first teacher of the nation, and she sows the seeds of Hungarian thought and spirit when together with a prayer she lets the Hungarist thought, the Arrow Cross idea pour into the child’s soul. Don’t let women wither at workplaces, don’t let them become victims of those who believe that money can buy everything, including morality.” Politikatörténeti Intézet Levéltára = PIL 685. 1/4. April 25, 1940. 60.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5_1

1

2 

A. PETŐ

It would be a fatal mistake to use these textual instances to speculate the reasons why women found far-right politics so attractive during Second World War.1 It would be easy to assume that the Arrow Cross women’s movement’s sole aim was to veer women back from the workplace to their “sacred duty” that is motherhood.2 A similar fallacy was made by researchers of Nazi women’s politics when they omitted the fact that the reason of the National Socialists’ popularity among female voters was that they reached working women: nurses and other white collar workers (Sneeringer 2002). The triangle of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (“child, kitchen, church”) remained an ideological goal never fully accomplished. Based on contemporary Hungarian press the Arrow Cross Party’s ostensible goal was to establish the Hungarian National Reproduction Fund, introduce regular family allowances, follow German and Italian “biopolitical results” and create a national body of “20  million Hungarians,” after which “the biologically sound families with many children would be organized into the Order of Patriarchs.”3 My research on the Arrow Cross Party’s political praxis arrived to different results. These results confirm that far-right politics was a rather flexible framework into which the main actors, members and allies imported their own views, convictions and everyday practices. The Hungarian far right gave the “woman question” utmost importance in an era when it was obvious for political parties that women voters are key to electoral victory.4 Although the Arrow Cross Party never won elections and posited itself “outside” of the Hungarian political spectrum, it still needed members and activists. According to estimates, the Arrow Cross Party had 15,000 women members. The membership lists found in the Budapest Főváros Levéltára (BFL; Budapest City Archives) show that this number varied with time. Partly because sometimes membership “only” signaled strong emotional ties, and since allies did not pay membership fee, they were not on record; and partly because fluctuation among members was fairly large.5 After the war about one third of these women got interned and imprisoned for supporting the occupying German forces and for collaboration. Their people’s tribunals’ files are giving a rare insight in their world—after serious methodological considerations.6 Another potential mistake would be to interpret the Arrow Cross movement’s gender politics as a simplified and belated mirror image of Nazi German politics. The Arrow Cross Party’s women’s program was not a duplicate of the Nazi or the Fascist program, but a well-thought-out system of ideas, which was necessarily self-contradictory as it

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

simultaneously advocated for women’s mobilization and anti-modernist emancipation. Ulrich Beck calls the Nazi program “anti-modern” because it questioned and demonized everything that was related to modernity (Beck 1997). The cult of motherhood was the centerpiece of official Nazi gender ideology (Pickering-Iazzi 1995). Their program was focused on mothers whose task was to birth children for the nation, as Paul Danzer put it in his 1937 book Geburtenkrieg (Birth War).7 At the same time in Germany 90 percent of single women and 36 percent of married women performed waged work before the Second World War (Schwarz 2002: 126). In January 1945 there were more than 360,000 women in the Wehrmacht’s medical service, 140,000 women in the civilian military workforce, and 3000 women in the SS women’s corps8 (Schwarz 2002: 131). As wives of SS officers, settlers in the Eastern regions, nurses, midwives, teachers and doctors, women actively contributed to the execution of Hitler’s racial politics.9 The third mistake that one can make when analyzing far-right women’s politics is to over-emphasize “national specificities” or “historical context.” This approach presupposes that Fascism is “one” only it takes on various national forms (Eatwell 1996). Roger Griffin rejects the idea that fascism would mutate into various forms in order to adapt to different local circumstances, all the while keeping the myth of “national revival” intact as its constitutive ideological element.10 The far-right movements and parties were in connection, thus the national and the international elements in their programs were intertwined (Bauerkämper and Rossoliński-Liebe 2017). It would be another mistake to think that young, inexperienced women, especially with a male Arrow Cross member relative were more prone to join the party. The analysis of the people’s tribunals’ database in the BFL showed that ten percent of those indicted with war crimes were women.11 The proportions were thus similar to the proportion of women and men in contemporary Hungarian politics. However, before 1945 women seldom took public roles, therefore their ten percent share was high. The documents of women indicted by the Budapest people’s tribunals show that twenty-one percent of them were born before 1896, more than a half of them were born between 1896 and 1914 and the remaining almost one-fifth after 1914. Therefore, most of the accused women were middle-­ aged, therefore educated and socialized under the Horthy regime. So, the perpetrators were not the young and reckless who could not judge the

4 

A. PETŐ

potential consequences, but those who in possession of ample social experiences deemed that their deeds could remain unpunished. Although “perpetrator” has recently become a contested concept the heuristic value of which has been questioned (e.g. Williams and Buckley-­ Zistel 2018), this book still applies it for a number of reasons. Firstly, the bulk of primary sources used to map Hungarian far-right women’s activity before and during the Second World War are legal documents of the people’s tribunals. This source material makes those women visible who fit into the category of perpetrator as defined by the law of people’s tribunals—this is why the book also analyzes their gender politics: to show how certain crimes and therefore certain individuals became invisible for the legislation and its implementation. Not all far-right women discussed in the book were perpetrators in legal terms, but they became visible as “perpetrators” for this research as they got on the radar of the people’s tribunals because of different, very often political reasons. All women discussed in this book supported Hungary’s war efforts and the exclusionary ideologies behind this. These political views themselves would not have been enough to name them as ‘perpetrators’ unless in the particular framework of political justice after the Second World War in Hungary. The use of the politically normative category of perpetrator is also justified by a recent trend in Hungarian historiography, which questions the lawfulness of the people’s tribunals’ processes. Though the criticism against post–Second World War political justice is legitimate, this revisionist trend often dismisses the crimes committed during the Horthy regime, which led to the economic, moral and political collapse of Hungary and the killing of 600,000 of its Jewish citizens (Pető forthcoming). Also, this scholarship only focuses on high-profile cases of the political elite, whose people’s tribunal trials obviously were political trials. Analyzing the life story, motivation, actions and then punishment of “ordinary” women who were supporting far-right politics gives a rare insight in the rank and file of women who were active in different forms of anti-modernist politics. The data about convicted women show that the share of middle-class women was significantly higher—20 percent higher—than in the general population. Four-fifths of the women had been born in Hungary, while onefifth had been born in areas ceded by Hungary under the Treaty of Trianon (1920). The proportion of women born outside of Hungary was thus significantly higher than their 7 percent share for the female general population. Coming from beyond the country’s Trianon borders may have been a significant factor influencing these women’s political radicalism (Papp-Sipos

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

2018). The left-wing alternatives to a radical transformation of society—the trade union, social democratic or communist movements—were closed to these women, since for them the question of border revision was of central significance. Thus, as the arena for their political activity, they chose political organizations that offered them social integration and a response to their grievances over the loss of Hungarian territories (Pető 2008). Analyzing the people’s tribunals’ documents, we found no correlation between the date of the trials and the origins of the indicted, i.e. whether the accused was from within or outside the borders of Hungary. An analysis of the accused women by type of settlement reveals an over-­ representation of women from small towns. Ten percent of the women belong in this category—which is more than one would expect based on the ratio for the general population. Women from cities (nagyvárosok) were under-represented by 7 percent and those from small towns (nagyközségek) were under-represented by 5 percent. Further analyzing the women indicted for war crimes, we discover that a surprisingly high proportion had intellectual professions. In 1941, 6 percent of female wage earners in Hungary were working as public servants or in the intellectual professions, but among the indicted women the corresponding ratio was at least one in five. This is an important piece of data, because women with good contacts—most of whom were intellectuals— tended to more easily evade justice. The list of women convicted by the people’s tribunals does not include those female members of the Arrow Cross who published articles in national socialist newspapers from the 1930s onwards. Many of them fled to the West, but since they were not considered important, their extradition was never sought, they were left out of history, and thus became invisible. The same applies to the women’s branch of MONE (Magyar Orvosok Nemzeti Egyesülete/National Association of Hungarian Doctors), which played a key role in the intellectual embedding of the far-right movement. The right-wing radicalization of female physicians from demanding equality before the law to supporting state eugenics is briefly discussed in Sect. 3.3, but the topic would require a separate study. A surprisingly high proportion, 46 percent, of the indicted women were classified as housewives, widows or wives. Another relatively striking feature was that in 1945 eight percent of the indicted women were concierges or assistance concierges—whereas in the general sample their share was just five percent. These latter were the common criminals that emerged from the lower middle class and working class and whose specific aim was

6 

A. PETŐ

to get their hands on Jewish property. The post-war authorities were well acquainted with the concierges; those that did not flee were the first to be reported by residents. In 1950, agricultural laborers were also strongly over-represented: 14 percent of indicted were from this group while among the general population their share was six percent. Thus, contrary to popular belief, not only members of the Volksbund were put on trial but also large numbers of Hungarian peasants. Women’s participation in conservative-nationalist and especially in far-­ right movements brings up several theoretical questions  (Blee 1991, Passmore 1999). So far approaches to this area of research failed to acknowledge the agency of these women, i.e. they questioned whether women autonomously decided to participate in right-wing political movements. This argument lessens the critical potential these women’s organizations exhibited against patriarchy, which I wish to emphasize in this volume, without forgetting their ideological-political involvement with racism and the Holocaust. Other analytical questions to be examined are whether women members of far-right parties necessarily emerged from among the losers of social-economic processes, and whether they were mentally unstable as the post–Second World War explanations held. As opposed to the aforementioned explanatory frameworks which saw far-right women as victims, losers or lunatics, I propose an alternative theoretical framework which takes the agency of these women in consideration when trying to explain what kinds of women joined far-right movements and why. I use the concept of agency according to Saba Mahmood, for whom agency is “a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create” (Mahmood 2006: 34). Far-right women really questioned social norms but primarily by reshaping the relationship of women and violence through their participation in violent actions. Following Griffin, this book looks at Hungarian far-right movements, primarily the Arrow Cross Party, as “revolutionary nationalist” formations, and analyzes them in comparison with other European far-right movements (Griffin 1991). Furthermore, it looks at these movements from within, focusing on their inner structure and the way they self-­ narrated. If these movements had “only” reached women as mothers, then the Arrow Cross Party, the first Hungarian anti-modernist populist party, could not have mobilized women in such high numbers.

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

1.1   Reasons of Invisibility Through the concept of invisibility this book analyzes how “Arrow Cross women” are remembered in Hungary. Remembrance is not a descriptive category, but a concept actively constructed by those who remember in relation to the context and the space of remembering. Via remembering we select, cover up, silence, invisibilize, change, exaggerate, minimize, praise and demonize. In this volume I analyze the processes through which remembrance and those who remember filtered and invisibilized certain events and actors in comparison with all accessible relevant documents. Invisibility is caused by a variety of factors. In relation to memory politics it should be noted that the victory of the liberating Red Army came with atrocities against civilians, especially against women (Pető 2018). Then the Cold War’s anti-communist discourse made it possible to depict Nazi collaborator far-right forces as victims of Soviet violence, and after 1989, during the rehabilitation process these perpetrators were once again framed as the victims of communism. Currently the German and the Soviet occupation are both widely discussed in Hungary but there is no mention of the role Hungarian collaborators played. The Cold War defined the remembrance of the far right’s culpability and responsibility, as well as the way we approach present-day followers of these movements. After the Second World War, Soviet and Western occupation zones were similar in one aspect: when the people’s tribunals examined women’s role in the warmongering regime, they either minimized it or posited it as out of the ordinary. In every case they perceived the acts of women war criminals as entirely opposing the traditional role of women, and as a result, most far-right women became marginalized and forgotten. After the war women were cornered back into the traditional “woman’s place” with the aim to annul the “matriarchy born in need,” i.e. women’s increased public presence and employment during wartime. This held true for military nurses, factory workers, pacifist feminists and far-right women alike. Only the robbers, looters and murderers, as well as the celebrities and female relatives of party members gained visibility, because they fitted into a public discourse that sought to restore the male-dominated social order upset by the war.12 This invisibilization worked effectively in the case of the girl scouts movement too, despite the fact that wartime work and activities within the movement represented a formative experience for tens of thousands of young girls (Árvai 2003).

8 

A. PETŐ

The first period of fascism research (1960s) renounced the idea that fascism had been a form of pathological nihilistic irrationalism that had a singular aim: totalitarian oppression. The second period of research (from the early 1990s, after the fall of communist regimes) shifted the focus from economic and psychological factors to political ones. This research relied on national myths and imagined communities as interpretative frameworks for explaining the popularity of the far right. Currently the third period of research aims at tracing the inner logic of fascism to account for its resurging appeal using the explanatory principle of culture. This principle posits that fascism is a unique cultural expression of the idea of “true community,” and as such it is the symbolic representation of anti-­ modern society. Research on women’s relationship with fascism also started in the third period. Previously such research was not possible partly because of certain generic problems in women’s historiography, such as that it ignored “evil women,” and partly because of earlier fascism research’s political choice to focus on political history exclusively. The quickly developing field of perpetrator research (Täterforschung) also finds it difficult to integrate women perpetrators as a legitimate topic of research. Holocaust-related perpetrator research started in the second half of the 1990s, and for a long time solely focused on men. Following the logics of the Nazi state’s activities,13 research represented perpetrators either as psychopaths or as banal bureaucrats.14 Primarily as a result of the debate surrounding Goldhagen’s book (1996), which had argued for nuanced scientific inquiry devoid of stereotypes, research has finally turned towards the issue of ideological commitment, and, therefore, towards the intellectual elites that provided the ideological background of the Holocaust (Pendas 2006: 294). Perpetrator research gained further relevance when the children of famous and well-known Nazis had published their books one after another.15 But the real step in the right direction was when research began on how someone from the “everyday” level of common people becomes a perpetrator, and how the memory of perpetrators evolves on the individual level. Throughout its journey, perpetrator research had to dismantle several taboos including easy dichotomy of victim and perpetrator. The current position of this research emphasizes that simplifying typologies should be left behind, instead focusing on various subgroups whose common features may provide the grounds for a taxonomy, which will then facilitate a multi-faceted understanding. However, the typology of women perpetrators not only identifies the various types but also outlines the social spaces

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

where women could play a role (Pető 2014). Most research projects examine the social and psychological (though the latter is progressively considered analytically inappropriate) condition of perpetrators, and set up typologies of perpetrators, without taking gender into consideration. None of these typologies mention women perpetrators. Conjured typologies thus far that I will shortly introduce were based on intentions and behavioral explanations, thus they can potentially offer easy explanations, which could prepare the grounds for forgiveness and the avoidance of punishment. Other explanations simply name self-interest as the cause, which could be manifested in carrier aspirations, ambitions or the hope of material wealth. But these feelings should always be interpreted within their specific social context. Perpetrator research in Hungary as well in other former communist countries faces multiple obstacles. Firstly, the historical category of perpetrator is an ambivalent one because it is still debated whether the Horthy and the Arrow Cross regimes represent a historical continuity.16 Secondly, the extensive scholarship on Germany contributes to making research on collaborating states and parties invisible. Thirdly, though many far-right politicians’ diaries and memoires got published, research on the far right is still dominated by the political history angle.17 Also, women were so far omitted from research, as it was aimed at the main actors, who were exclusively men. Lastly, after 1990 the new political system was based on anti-­ communism, including major and very legitimate criticism of the people’s tribunals. However, the fact that the legal framework was flawed should not bring into question that the war crimes were committed. In the 1960s, during the first period of fascism research, women’s stories were not examined and hence the history of “evil women” sunk into oblivion, only to be later discovered by German historiography, which then made a mark on other countries’ research too (Pető 2009). At first, this research was oriented towards notable women and the wives of famous men, i.e. concentration camp guards, actors, journalists, and the wives of various politicians, at the same time it made invisible those masses of women who were active party members and were not “just” wives of important men (Sigmund 2000). As the expression “evil women” used in the research shows, all of these women were relegated to a special and extreme category, which therefore did not necessarily deserve proper scientific attention (Schwarz 2000).

10 

A. PETŐ

In the 1970s the Frankfurt School explained the popularity and mobilizing force of Nazism among women with Hitler’s charismatic sexual attractiveness, by which they relegated women into the category of irrational political agents (Evans 1976). The first attempts at a gendered examination of the far-right women as real political agents were in the 1980s. This research used the framework of political history to analyze women’s participation in the German national socialist movement, in order to find out what kinds of social groups were mobilized by this movement as an effect of the First World War and the ensuing economic crisis. There was a prolonged debate between Gisella Bock and Claudia Koonz, which, after the famous Historikerstreit on the responsibility of Germans in Nazism, was called the Historikerinstreit.” This debate was about the definition of collaboration, and its aim was the invalidation of the assumption that German women were all victims of Nazi “sexism.” This assumption sweeps under the carpet the fact that German women profited from racist German politics partly through the social institutions of the eugenics program, and because of the new forms of employment available for them. During the debate, Bock criticized Koonz for enforcing a “collective guilt” onto German women and homogenizing them as a group (Grossmann 1991). During the Cold War, research in the countries of the Soviet bloc was determined by the inaccessibility of state archives and the presence of ideological taboos. Although the local far-right movements—albeit selectively—were considered culpable for wartime collaboration in post-1945 anti-fascist historiography, women’s participation in the process was left unexamined. The reason why research on extreme right-wing politics remained gender blind for a long time was that the “glass ceiling” of political organizations made women invisible (Pető-Szapor 2004). Furthermore, during communism, accessing the files of extreme right-wing political movements was a state dispensed privilege, and the privileged researchers did not consider the women found in the files as “worthy” subjects. Now, three decades after the collapse of communism, a complete and reliable inventory of these files is still not available (Pető and Schrijvers 2006). After 1989 there were still only a few women historians active in the newly reconceived historical research of the former Soviet bloc, and they were primarily interested in the history of communist, leftist and liberal movements. These inquiries followed the logic of early feminist historical research and aimed at examining whether there were women’s movements that could be examples as well as sources of legitimacy for current campaigns for women’s equality. The ever-growing presence and influence of

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

contemporary “non-progressive” women’s movements turned research on women’s connections with the far-right into a political necessity (Pető 2004). Soon after the 1989 collapse of the earlier hegemonic historical remembrance culture various, social groups started to support their political claims with “just memories,” which were questioning the leftist version of history writing (Pető 2011). This newly emerging Eastern European counter-canonic history writing was again lenient towards far-right women as they were primarily seen as victims of the communist legal system, and only secondarily as war criminals. At the same time the aspects that made them anti-leftists did not fit into the agenda of feminist historians either. This is why in Eastern Europe research on this topic is still in its early stages (Vonyó 1996). One generic reason is the ideological taboo, another is the state of gender historiography in the region. After the illiberal memory political turn of the 2000s, the rehabilitation of certain Nazi collaborator politicians, such as the Ukrainian Stefan Bandera, became possible on grounds of anti-communism. Therefore, presently the picture is quite disparate: while in the Baltic States and Ukraine anti-communist forces that collaborated with the Germans became political reference points (Petrenko 2015), in East Central Europe far-right politicians such as Szálasi or the Slovakian Tiso are still considered unacceptable. Since the memory political turn was framed by “neoliberal neopatriarchy,” women of the past are once again visibilized as victims or as suffering mothers that symbolize the nation. The difficulties of research on the relationship between women and the far-right movements are caused just as much by the blind spots of mainstream historical research as much by the shortcomings of gender studies. The most important issue to examine is whether women’s presence in politics truly and inevitably represents “progress.” For a long time, the dominant position was that women members of organizations that are not pro women’s rights are undoubtedly victims of male manipulation. This sheds light on why false consciousness played such an important role in the explanatory framework of research on conservative-nationalist and far-­ right women’s organizations. On the other hand, traditional feminist historians held that right-wing women’s movements were necessarily anti-feminist because their members supported men, or more accurately, they supported the perpetuation of patriarchy by entering the “patriarchal pact” (Cooke and Wollacott 1993).

12 

A. PETŐ

The second difficulty is caused by a gaping lack of amply complex analytical concepts. The concepts developed and applied by feminist scholars on leftist and liberal movements are not always applicable for researching the far-right mobilization of women. For instance, these movements were attractive for women because they could join them directly, i.e. they did not have to establish a separate “women’s organization,” and therefore they could avoid being judged by gender when acting as members of these organizations. At the same time, the far-right discourse about saving the “nation” had a powerful impact on women’s mobilization as well, so much so that women regularly created separate sections within far-right parties. Within this organizational space, women activists often challenged the official program of far-right parties, causing serious internal tensions. The party leadership wanted women to focus on social politics alone, while the women themselves wanted to engage in real politics by developing an alternative vision of leftist and liberal women’s emancipation. Invisibility was also furthered by certain preconceptions, for instance that civil society organizations generally contribute to the strengthening of democracy. This was not necessarily true for Hungarian civil society organizations between the two world wars (Pető 2001). In the Horthy era plenty such organizations existed with the aim to increase the social capital of participating individuals. The analysis of woman perpetrators’ resumes revealed what a great part these civil society organizations played in far-­ right recruitment. These organizations were founded on existing social capital and network, i.e. they did not represent new opportunities of social mobility for their membership. As the Horthy regime weakened, these otherwise not too influential civil organizations got radicalized and eventually turned into venues of far-right recruitment. Thus far literature did not pay ample attention to this. The fourth difficulty is the limited scope of research in political history. On the one hand, researchers mainly examined the membership of parties and other political organizations and hence missed women’s movements that were frequently established outside of the traditional political institutional system (Pető 2003). On the other hand, political institutions and their historical sources frequently invisibilized women active in their ranks. Without a gendered lens in research it is easy to skip areas that do not conform to what is commonly perceived as “important” in politics, such as social work, the regulation of family duties or household activities, etc.; in other words, areas in which women were politically involved. Tea parties, for example, whether organized by conservative or liberal feminists or the wives of far-right party leaders, were important platforms for women’s

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

organizations, but they never made it in the limelight of historical research as they left behind very few sources due to their informal nature (Szapor 2018). With this volume I would like to dissolve the invisibility of these women—an invisibility caused by political, theoretical and methodological reasons. Therefore, this book did not take a famous politician as its main protagonist but, to use Christopher Browning’s expression, the “ordinary” perpetrator (Browning 1992). The fact that these perpetrators are women calls for gendered analysis on two levels. Through a social history approach, we can examine “where the women were” among the perpetrators, and with a gender analysis we may shed light on the gender(ed) dynamics within the far-right movements and in post–Second World War transitional justice. By reconstructing the life and court trial of “ordinary women” perpetrators, this book reveals those factors that attracted women to far-right movements. The recent reemergence of extreme right-wing radicalism in Europe with masses of “ordinary women” engaged in violent forms of protests underlines that further critical study of the life stories of far-right women is not only an academic but also a political imperative. The book includes previously published material: Pető, Andrea. 2012. “I switched sides”. Lawyers Creating the Memory of Shoah in Budapest.” In Confronting the Past. European Experiences. Ed. Davor Paukovic, Vjeran Pavlakovic, Viseslav Raos, 223–235. Zagreb: Political Science Research Centre; Pető, Andrea. 2012. “Women and Victims and Perpetrators in World War II: The Case of Hungary.” In Women and Men at War. A Gender Perspective on World War II and its Aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Maren Rogen, Ruth Leiserowitz, 81–97. Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag; Pető, Andrea. 2009. Who Is Afraid of the ‘Ugly Women?’: Problems of Writing Biographies of Nazi and Fascist Women in Countries of the Former Soviet Block? Copyright © 2009. The Journal of Women’s History. This article was first published in The Journal of Women’s History 21:4 (2009): 147–151. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Notes 1. For a comparison with the Netherlands see Matthée, Zonneke and Pető Andrea. 2008. A ‘kameraadskes’ és a „testvérnők”. Nők a holland és a magyar nemzeti szocialista mozgalomban: motiváció és akarat. In Határtalan nők, eds. Bakó Boglárka, Tóth Eszter Zsófia, 285–303. Budapest: Nyitott Könyvműhely. About motherhood see: Koonz, Claudia. 1994. Motherhood and Politics on the Far Right. In Politics and Motherhood, eds. A.  Jetter et al., 229–246. Hanover: University Press of New England.

14 

A. PETŐ

2. Contemporary historians make the same mistake. See, for instance: “[Szálasi] clearly defined women’s place within the family.” says Rudolf Paksa. See Rudolf Paksa. 2009. Szélsőjobboldali mozgalmak az 1930-as években. In A magyar jobboldali hagyomány 1900–1948, ed. Ignác Romsics, 275–304. Budapest: Osiris. 3. Interview with Dr. Antal Lajos in A Nép, February 17, 1939. On eugenics and Turanism see Rudolf Paksa. 2009. Szélsőjobboldali mozgalmak az 1930-as években. In A magyar jobboldali hagyomány 1900–1948, ed. Ignác Romsics, 275–304. Budapest: Osiris, especially 276–281. 4. See Ginderachter, Maarten van. 2005. Gender, the Extreme Right and Flemisch Nationalist Women’s Organisations in Interwar Belgium. Nations and Nationalism, 11: 265–284; Nash, Mary. 1994. Pronatalism and Motherhood in Franco’s Spain. In Maternity and Gender Policies. Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s–1950s, eds. Gisella Bock, Pat Thane, 160–177. London: Routledge; Banac, Ivo and Katherine Verdery (eds.). 1995. National Character and National Ideology in Interwar Eastern Europe. New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies. 5. Some people’s tribunals’ files suggest that the interrogators had access to membership fee payment lists. For example, ÁBTL V 81760, the case of Mrs. Farkas. The list itself is at BFL X. 5. 6. The quantitative research took place at the Central European University in Budapest. Preliminary results were published in Barna, Ildikó and Pető Andrea. 2012. A politikai igazságszolgáltatás a II. világháború utáni Budapesten. Budapest: Gondolat. 7. About the German cult of motherhood see: Weyrather, Irmgard. 1993. Muttertag und Mutterkreuz. Der Kult um die „Deutschen Mutter” im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag; Heineman, Elizabeth D.. 2001. Whose mothers? Generational Difference, War, and the Nazi Cult of Motherhood. Journal of Women’s History, 12: 140–163. 8. On women in the SS see Schwarz, Gudrun. 1997. Frauen in der SS. Sippenverband und Frauenkorps. In Zwischen Karriere und Verfolgung. Handlungsräume von Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, eds. Kirsten Heinsohn, Barbara Vogel, Ulrike Weckel, 223–244. Frankfurt— New York: Campus. and Gersdorf, Ursula von. 1969. Frauen in Kriegsdienst 1914–1945. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1969; Maubach, Franka. 2005. Als Helferin in der Wehrmacht. Eine paradigmatische Figur des Krigesendes. Osteuropa, 4–6: 275–281. 9. Stibbe, Matthew. 2003. Women in the Third Reich. London: Arnold., especially “Women as Agents of Racial Policy”, pp.  75–80., Manns, Haide. 1997. Frauen für den Nationalsozialismus. Nationalsozialistischen Studentinnen und Akedemikerinnen in der Weimar Republik und im

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

Dritten Reich. Opladen: Leske + Budrich Verlag; Lower, Wendy. 2018. German Women and the Holocaust in the Nazi East in Women and Genocide. In Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, eds. Elissa Bemporad, Joyce W. Warren, 111–136. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 10. See the debate: Fascism in East Central and Southeastern Europe: Mainstream Fascism or „Mutant” Phenomenon? East Central Europe, 37. (2010.) 331–371. Especially Roger Griffin: 338–339. 11. See Barna, Ildikó, and Andrea Pető. 2007. A “csúnya asszonyok”. Kik voltak a női háborús bűnösök Magyarországon? Élet és irodalom, October 26. and Pető Andrea. 2009. Arrow Cross Women and Female Informants. Baltic Worlds, 2: 48–52. I am grateful to Ildikó Barna for her help with methodology. The data base does not contain the sentences received by those who were found guilty. The reason is that this information could be gathered only through the individual examination of each file of the 70,000 cases. See more on this research in: Barna, Ildikó and Pető, Andrea. 2015. Political Justice in Budapest after World War II. Budapest: CEU Press. 12. See recent studies: Mailänder, Elissa. 2015. Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942–1944. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press; Heise, Ljiljana. 2009. KZ-Aufseherinnen vor Gericht. Greta Bösel. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 13. Kretzer, Anette. 2009. NS-Täterschaft und Geschlecht. Der erste britische Ravensbrück-Prozess 1946/47 in Hamburg. Berlin: Metropol Verlag; Taake, Claudia. 1998. Angeklagt. SS-Frauen vor Gericht. Oldenburg: Universität Oldenburg; Schwarz, Gudrun. 1992. Verdrängte Täterinnen. Frauen im Apparat der SS (1939–1945). In Nach Osten. Verdeckte Spuren nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen, ed. Theresa Wobbe, 197–227. Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik. 14. Summary of the research results see Paul, Gerhard. 2002. Von Psychopathen, Technokraten des Terrors und „ganz gewöhnlichen” Deutschen. Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung. In Die Täter der Shoah. Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche?, ed. Gerhard Paul., 13–90. Göttingen: Wallstein; and: Gross, Jan. 2000. Themes for Social History of War Experience and Collaboration. In The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath, eds. Deák István, Jan Gross, Tony Judt, 15–35. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 15. For example: Bormann, Martin. 2000. Leben gegen Schatten. Gelebte Zeit, geschenkte Zeit. Paderborn: Bonifatius; Nissen, Margret. 2005. Sind Sie die Tochter Speer? München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt; Schirach, Richard. 2005. Der Schatten meines Vaters. München: Carl Hanser Verlag. 16. Püski, Levente. 2006. A Horthy-rendszer (1919–1945). Budapest: Pannonica; Sipos, Balázs. 2011. A Horthy-korszak politikai rendszere. In

16 

A. PETŐ

Magyarországi politikai pártok lexikona (1846–2010), ed. István Vida, 137–147. Budapest: Gondolat—MTA–ELTE Pártok, Pártrendszerek, Parlamentarizmus Kutatócsoport. 17. See Paksa, Rudolf. 2013. Szálasi Ferenc és a hungarizmus. Budapest: Jaffa Kiadó; Karsai, László. 2016. Szálasi Ferenc. Politikai életrajz. Budapest: Balassi.

Bibliography Árvai, Tünde. 2003. Honleányok. Honvédelmi nevelés és munka a leánylevente-­ mozgalomban. Századvég 2: 23–41. Bauerkämper, Arnd, and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, eds. 2017. Fascism without Borders. Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe, 1918–1945. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Beck, Ulrich. 1997. The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order. Munich: Taschenbuch Verlag. Blee, Kathleen M. 1991. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Browning, Christopher R. 1992. Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins. Cooke, Miriam, and Angela Wollacott. 1993. Gendering War Talk. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eatwell, Roger. 1996. Fascism. A History. London: Allen Lane. Evans, Richard J. 1976. German Women and the Triumph of Hitler. Journal of Modern History 48: 125–128. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf. Griffin, Roger D. 1991. The Nature of Fascism. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Grossmann, Atina. 1991. Feminist Debates About Women and National Socialism. Gender and History 3: 350–358. Mahmood, Saba. 2006. Feminist Theory, Agency, and the Liberatory Subject: Some Reflections on the Islamic Revival in Egypt. Temenos 42 (1): 31–71. Papp, Barbara, and Sipos Balázs. 2018. Modern, diplomás nő a Horthy korban [Modern University Graduate Women in the Horthy Era]. Budapest: Napvilág. Passmore, Kevin. 1999. ‘Planting the Tricolor in the Citadels of Communism’: Women’s Social Action in the Croix de feu and the Parti social français. Journal of Modern History 4: 814–851. Pendas, Devin O. 2006. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. 1963–65. Genocide, History and the Limits of Law. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pető, Andrea. 2001. Kontinuität und Wandel in der ungarischen Frauenbewegung der Zwischenkriegperiode. In Feminismus und Demokratie: Europäische Frauenbewegung der 1920er Jahre, ed. Ute Gerhard. Königstein: Ulrike Helmer.

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

———. 2003. Hungarian Women in Politics 1945–1951. Boulder and New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2004. Writing Women’s History in Eastern Europe: Toward a Terra Cognita? Journal of Women’s History 4: 173–183. ———. 2008. The Rhetoric of Weaving and Healing: Women’s Work in Interwar Hungary, a Failed Anti-Democratic Utopia. In Rhetorics of Work, ed. Yannis Yannitsiotis, Dimitra Lampropoulou, and Carla Salvaterra, 63–83. Pisa: University of Pisa Press. ———. 2009. Who Is Afraid of the “Ugly Women”? Problems of Writing Biographies of Nazi and Fascist Women in Countries of the Former Soviet Block. Journal of Women’s History 4: 147–151. ———. 2011. New Differences? Competing Canonisation of History of WWII. In Überbringen -Überformen -Überblenden. Theorietransfer im 20 Jahrhundert, ed. Dietlind Hüchtker and Alfrun Kliems, 67–75. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag. ———. 2014. Gendered Exclusions and Inclusions in Hungary’s Right-Radical Arrow Cross Party (1939–1945): A Case Study of Three Female Party Members. Hungarian Studies Review 1–2: 107–131. ———. 2018. Elmondani az elmondhatatlant. Budapest: Jaffa. ———. forthcoming. From Murders to Victims. Dilemmas of Doing Perpetrator Research in an Illiberal State. In Approaching Perpetrators of Genocide, ed. Erin Jesse and Kjell Anderson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pető, Andrea, and Klaartje Schrijvers. 2006. The Theatre of Historical Sources. Some Methodological Problems in Analyzing post-WWII Extreme Right Movements in Belgium and in Hungary. In Professions and Social Identity: New European Historical Research on Work, Gender and Society, ed. Berteke Waaldijk, 39–63. Pisa: University of Pisa Press. Pető, Andrea, and Judit Szapor. 2004. Women and the Alternative Public Sphere: Toward a Redefinition of Women’s Activism and the Separate Spheres in East Central Europe. NORA Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies 3: 172–182. Petrenko, Olena. 2015. Frauen als “Verräterinnen”. Ukrainische Nationalistinnen im Konflikt mit den kommunistischen Sicherheitsorganen und dem eigenen Geheimdienst. In “Frauen im Kommunismus”. Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung. Berlin: Metropol Verlag. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin. 1995. Mothers of Invention. Women, Italian Fascism and Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schwarz, Gudrun. 2000. Eine Frau an seiner Seite? Ehefrauen in der SS Sippengemeinschaft. Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag. ———. 2002. During Total War, We Girls Want to Be Where We Can Really Accomplish Something. What Women Do in Wartime. In Crimes of War. Guilt and Denial in the 20th Century, ed. Omer Bartov, Atina Grossman, and Mary Nolan. New York: The New Press.

18 

A. PETŐ

Sigmund, Anna Maria. 2000. Women of the Third Reich. Richmond Hill: NDE Publishing. Sneeringer, Julia. 2002. Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Szapor, Judit. 2018. Hungarian Activism in the Wake of the First World War. From Rights to Revanche. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Vonyó, József. 1996. Women in Hungary in the 1930s: The Role of Women in the Party of National Unity. In Women and Power in East Central Europe—Medieval and Modern, ed. Marianne Sághy, 201–218. Los Angeles: Schlacks. Williams, Timothy, and Susanne Buckley-Zistel, eds. 2018. Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence: Action, Motivations and Dynamics. Abingdon, NY: Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Invisible Party Members

Abstract  The first analytical chapter, based on the documents of the women’s section of the Arrow Cross Party, party press material and memoires, and documents collected by the people’s tribunals, shows who these women were, in what kinds of activities they were engaged in, what kinds of political, professional and material aspirations they had; it argues that most Hungarian far-right women belonged to the first generation of Hungarian intellectual and wage earning women and joined the ranks of the far-right because they did not find the “conservative offer”of the Horthy regime acceptable as it would have forced them into the role of care-takers, but at the same time the leftist alternative, i.e. the trade unions or the social democratic movement was also unappealing for them after the failed 1919 revolution. Keywords  People’s tribunals • Forgetting • Women’s employment • Intellectual women From the onset of the Second World War, the framework of Hungarian women’s politics went through radical changes: some charity societies engaged in beforehand frowned-upon “high politics,” and many women who experienced workplace discrimination decided to join the feminists, the Arrow Cross, the social democrats or the communists. The analysis of the Hungarian case reveals what the national socialist movement offered © The Author(s) 2020 A. Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5_2

19

20 

A. PETŐ

to its female members,1 and the scrutiny of Hungarian woman war criminals brings closer the connections between gender and politics. This chapter provides an overview of the social history of Hungarian far-right women. It aims to show how the far right’s mobilization of a versatile, multilayered recruitment base eventually led to the stereotype of the “Arrow Cross woman” in public and legal discourse.

2.1   Gender Politics of the Far Right With the extension of suffrage (1918) and the election of the first Hungarian female parliament member (1920), women slowly became political factors. The question was, which political party will represent their interests best (Paksy 2009). In an international comparison it is clear that before the Nazis came to power the right-wing Deutschnationale Volkspartei’s (DNVP) women’s politics had gradually radicalized (Scheck 2001, 2004). There was a continuity between the politics of the DNVP and the Nazi party, and the same kind of continuities were observable in Hungary, as many women members of the Arrow Cross Party arrived to politics through the mainstream conservative MANSZ (Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége/National Association of Hungarian Women). This however holds true only for those intellectuals who joined the Arrow Cross during the Second World War, as in the 1930s the far-right parties and the MANSZ, i.e. the two political movements that mobilized women, relied on different recruitment bases.2 Another comparison can be made with the gender politics of the Croatian Ustasha movement. Upon coming to power, the Ustasha, just like the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party, started to control acceptable expressions of masculinity and femininity alike. Based on his analysis of contemporary Croatian press, Rory Yeomans showed that while Ustasha men could follow only one role model, that of the fearless warrior, the Ustasha women had a relatively wide array of roles to choose from: mother, wife, worker, writer and artist (Yeomans 2005). In 1941 the Ustasha Independent State of Croatia was formed and the Ustasha commenced to put theory into praxis. Their official goal was to send women back to the family homes after twenty years of emancipation, which were perceived as a failure. When the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party formed government on October 15, 1944, they posited a similar goal, but due to their limited governing time they could not achieve it. These parties faced the same problem: how to integrate women who have increasing economic and

2  INVISIBLE PARTY MEMBERS 

21

psychological independence into the movement and into the ideal state as envisioned by the movement, when in principal the objective of the state is to confine women in their homes. A further point of comparison is the gender politics of the Republic of Salò, the German puppet state in Italy. There are some similarities between the Republic of Salò and the Arrow Cross rule: both were short lived and both excelled in violence. However, it would be a mistake to approach the activists of the Fascist women’s movement and the woman members of the Arrow Cross as equivalent. In their memoires, the women who served in the Republic of Salò’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps mention this period as “the time of freedom” because they could finally leave the politically sanctified confinement of motherhood—in uniforms and armor (Schiavo 2016: 135–145). During the period of the war’s radicalization, these small and often previously banned parties entered the government, and together with them their woman party members and supporters also experienced a measure of independence and power. Still, in Hungary the German-Hungarian military leadership did not set up a woman’s militia, unlike in Italy, where the prolonged civil war necessitated it. The primary bases of post–First World War far rights movements were men’s friendships and connections (Mosse 2001). This holds true for the Romanian Garda de Fier, the Iron Guard, which did not allow women among its ranks (Ioanid 2004). They created a separate organization for women; who as wives, lovers or mothers supported the men. While men trained or engaged in strategic planning, women cooked, washed and performed other household duties (Clark 2012). The Arrow Cross Party had been formed in the misogynistic political milieu of interwar Hungary, in which “women,” especially working, independent, single women were regarded as a threat by the male economic, political and cultural hegemony. The comradeship forged during the First World War also created a cohesive force among male members. The Arrow Cross leaders considered that women are inferior factors that hinder men in achieving higher goals—therefore shaping the rhetoric of their women’s politics was especially challenging (Theweleit 1989). After the First World War Hungarian women’s position fundamentally changed with the right to vote in 1918 and the increase in women’s employment. However, from the 1920s on women were again steadily squeezed out from public life, which was achieved in part by restricting their newly gained suffrage, and in part by attempts to restrict their access to higher education gained in 1895 (Pető and Szapor 2004). It was against

22 

A. PETŐ

this backdrop that MANSZ gradually became the umbrella women’s organization. It mobilized middle- and upper-middle-class women in a Horthy regime conforming manner, i.e. in the spirit of “sacrifice” for the nation. Although MANSZ held back the spread of left-wing and right-wing radicalism among women, the activities of its founder, Cécile Tormay effectively prepared the grounds for women’s far-right political mobilization (Pető and Szapor 2004). In her Bujdosó könyv (An Outlaw’s Diary, 1925), Tormay established the ideological base principles of women’s politics and claimed the right for women’s public political activism. Furthermore, she did all that using the language of political extremism and hate, with which she made this style acceptable in women’s politics a long time before Nazism appeared on the European stage.3 Therefore to find a critical answer to the question of what is the relationship between conservativism and far right, as far as women’s mobilization is concerned, today with the resurgence of illiberalism is more important than ever.

2.2   The Woman’s Place in the Arrow Cross Party The 1938 parliamentary debate on suffrage made it clear that Hungarian far-right groups’ parliamentary influence had increased (Pető 2001). Inspired by the fascist Italian state, Gyula Gömbös became the first Hungarian politician to pay attention to and invest in women’s political mobilization (Karsai and Molnár 1994: 309–310). He even established an all-women party, the short-lived Hungarian Women’s Party with Mrs. Kovács as its president.4 The Arrow Cross followed Gömbös’ example in extending party recruitment onto women (Salvatici 1999). The Arrow Cross Party–Hungarist Movement, founded by Ferenc Szálasi in 1939, became the melting pot of several national socialist and far-right parties. Szálasi’s personal talents and political ambitions integrated many small, divided and marginalized far-right groups into a single political unit.5 The organization of the Arrow Cross Party was strictly hierarchical (Pető 2014).  The leadership communicated with the members through directives. The party conventions always began with a prayer, which included the following section: “Let us remember the mothers, the wives and the children, who risk their greatest earthly belonging, their child, their husband, their father for the survival of our eternal nation.” According to a party directive “the female members of the party have the same rights and duties as male members.” The task of the women groups was the

2  INVISIBLE PARTY MEMBERS 

23

spread of national socialist thought and its integration among family values, but when needed they also had to “take over the tasks of their brother Arrow Cross members.” The directive also included a note on comportment: “a missing party badge, a limp lifting of the arm, a quiet or whispered Kitartás!6 suggest weakness” therefore they are to be avoided.7 The official activity of the women’s groups was to organize tea parties and Sunday brunches, to visit the sick and the families with newborns, to distribute food among the needy, write postcards to imprisoned party members and pray for the soldiers.8 Their leaders knew the texture of the local societies really well and tried to resolve issues locally, based on local sources, while in the meantime they regularly had to report to the party leadership who ceaselessly dispatched newer and newer directives. The Arrow Cross Party was based on sexually divided and hierarchical order; accordingly, its women’s organization was at the same organizational level as the youth section. Despite that the Arrow Cross leadership recognized the political value of its female members. For example, it was among their functions to promote mass membership, although the all-­ male party leadership wanted female party members to be active primarily in the social field.9 Various types of party memberships were made available to women, they could be members, supportive members or even secret supporters, and they accordingly were involved in different kinds of activities. However, the way they performed their activities was not always compatible with the party’s expectations (Photo 2.1). The life of women members of the Arrow Cross followed the formal party structure. The party organization consisted of professional and regional sections. The women’s sections belonged with the regional sections. It was expected from women sections to subscribe to the party journal A Nép (The Nation), and discuss its articles during their meetings. In their gathering room they were always expected to keep a small altar for the heroes with fresh flowers.10 The women’s section’s leaders had bi-­ weekly meetings with all 35 city and county section leaders present. Among the surviving reports there are detailed accounts of these meetings: Mrs. Thoma, the head leader of women’s sections gave instructions concerning the work of women’s sections and offered an array of advice to party officials. Before the meeting she discussed the importance of women’s sections for the Party’s social mission, then urged women leaders for more diligent work and a greater readiness for sacrifice.11

24 

A. PETŐ

Photo 2.1  Meeting of the Great Arrow Cross Council in the House of Loyalty, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, no. 1489–1954

As is apparent from Mrs. Thoma’s speech, the women’s sections’ goals were clearly defined, which led to regular confrontations between them and the party leadership. The all-male leadership wanted to corner female members into the social field, newly joining female members and freshly established women’s sections were automatically veered towards social tasks.12 The party’s women members were not satisfied with this status: they too wanted to play an active role in politics.13 However, if the Arrow Cross Party’s female members “had taken themselves seriously”—that is if they had behaved as men’s political equals—they would have been immediately dismissed from the party headquarters. In the party’s top leadership and decision-making bodies there was no place for women.14 This is well exemplified by the case of a charismatic leader of the far-right women’s movement, Mrs. Dücső. Mrs. Dücső’s political career included the membership of several far-right parties from the Ébredő Magyarok (Awakening Hungarians) through Fajvédő Párt (Race Defense Party) to the Magyar Nemzeti Szocialista Párt (Hungarian National Socialist Party), and in all these organizations she got into

2  INVISIBLE PARTY MEMBERS 

25

conflicts with the party leadership. She considered that all these parties that were so supportive of radical emancipatory moves in their rhetoric failed in action.15 Another example is Mária Hunyadi, the secretary of the Arrow Cross ideologue Ödön Málnási (1898–1970), who regularly visited ailing family members of prisoners of war till she got ousted for her “undue” political activity.16 The Arrow Cross movement existed as a counter-movement; under the Horthy regime it was denied official recognition and many of its members were imprisoned as Horthy tried to navigate between the extreme left, i.e. the communists, and the extreme right, i.e. various far-right groups and parties. In this situation, far-right women had to perform twofold: as the members of a stigmatized party and as women who often had to stand up for themselves even against their own party’s male members. Those women who made it into leading positions were exceptional in many ways. For instance in 1935 a politician of the Független Kisgazda Párt—FkgP (Smallholders’ Party), Olivér Gaál called Mrs. Dücső an “upstart missy” to which she reacted with a slap.17 Besides that Mrs. Dücső often funded the organizational costs of party events and was not afraid to walk home alone in the night, though she was attacked twice, as she admitted during her people’s tribunal trial. The greatest methodological challenge of research into the social history of far-right parties is that there is no source material on the daily routine of party members. Only the extraordinary events—such as Mrs. Dücső’s case with Olivér Gaál—left a mark in the press or in police documents, but the often-boring chores of daily life in the party have disappeared without a trace. All we know is that the party struggled with logistic issues, for example sometimes the restaurants that they hired for conventions canceled their reservation last minute.18 It is also known that the local party members actively helped those whose relatives served on the frontline as soldiers.19 The Arrow Cross movement may also be a socialization movement as it prepared its members for a series of events that were to take place sometime in the future. This moment came on October 15, 1944, when, in the aftermath of Regent Horthy’s failed attempt to pull out of the war, the Arrow Cross came to power in Hungary.

26 

A. PETŐ

2.3   Historical Predecessors and the Cult of Violence Women’s mobilization on the far right exhibited certain features that earlier Hungarian women’s organizations, such as the MANSZ, did not. The most significant difference was that the far-right accepted and integrated violence into women’s toolkit. The Arrow Cross Party lifted the myth of the fighter (squadrismo) and with that violence itself onto an ethical and aesthetical plane (Valli 2000). In this regards the Arrow Cross was closer to the Italian Fascists than to the German National Socialists. The rhetoric of the Arrow Cross also resembled Fascist rhetoric as it envisioned a “new form of political engagement,” an “anti-political politics” that would emerge together with a “new form of life” (Griffin 2007). The Arrow Cross Party also shared other far-right movements’ attraction to uniforms, and cultic respect surrounded the Arrow Cross badge and ring too. Uniforms were a common fascination of all far-right parties, and each party had special uniforms designed for women, albeit with significant differences. While the female members of the German puppet state in fascist Italy, the Republic of Salò, sported women’s trousers, female members of the Arrow Cross wore skirts with blouses and neckties. The blouse was made of green silk, and the resourceful women’s sections’ leaders signaled to the membership that if they cannot buy green silk they can also die fabric, but they should make sure to arrive to the conventions in a green blouse.20 It was common that the women also made their blouses as a form of political statement that they do not rely on cheap and exploitative labor. The uniforms of Nazi women’s organizations painstakingly avoided every stylistic feature that could have accentuated “masculine” characteristics such as broad shoulders or narrow hips. Every fashion that did not clearly distinguish between men and women was considered “alien” (Guenther 2004). Similarly to the Spanish Falangist women’s organization the Arrow Cross Party’s women section also attempted to redefine femininity (Nash 1991). The Falangist women, just like the Arrow Cross women, turned to historical examples. However, while the Falangists chose Isabella I of Castile (1451–1504), the queen who unified the country, and Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), the central figure of spiritual and monastic renewal, to prove that religion and active political participation can go hand in hand, the Arrow Cross’ pointed women towards charity work exemplified by Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–1231). While the Falangists honored Marie

2  INVISIBLE PARTY MEMBERS 

27

Curie (1867–1934) for her scientific achievements, the Arrow Cross press praised her because she was an excellent scientist and at the same time— a mother: Woman can produce something great, something intellectually absolute only if she has a rich and immaculate emotional world, that is, if she is a complete woman. Marie Curie is an excellent example as she was a caring mother and dutiful wife. Her case shows that all past efforts towards women’s emancipation were wrong, it was wrong to pitch women against men one the intellectual plane. It distorted her soul, impoverished her emotional world and harmed her intellectual abilities. It pushed her into a senseless and fruitless competition which overwhelmed her with exhaustion.21

While one of the greatest debates within the ranks of the Arrow Cross was about women’s public participation in politics, for the Spanish Falangists the increase in women’s public presence was a stated goal. They encouraged women to join them and leave the obsolete, conservative confines of the “Spanish housewife” behind, at the same time they also strictly defined the spaces where women were allowed to step out from their “biologically determined” roles: governance, religion and education, and military situations during the civil war (Ofer 2005). In effect the Falangists’ approach was a response to the leftist Spanish Republicans’ successes with women’s mobilization.22 Concerning women’s employment, the British Union of Fascists’ (BUF) stance was like the Falangists’. Their leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, promised equality in employment and the end of workplace discrimination.23 Since in the 1930s quite a few former suffragettes joined the English far-right party, they even started to claim that feminism and fascism are not antagonistic ideologies (Durham 2003: 71). The Croatian Ustasha held that medicine, literature and education are fields where women can have a different identity without losing their “feminine attributes.” Moreover, while combative queens officially represented the historical prototype of the ideal woman for the Ustasha, the first woman tram conductor of Sarajevo as well as women artists also appeared in their press as potential examples to follow. Women could choose to become fierce amazons as well, with which they would have reached the Ustasha movement’s final objective: turning into men, which would then erase all the political and rhetorical problems that arise from women’s difference (Yeomans 2005: 720–721). However, for the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party a woman who did not conform to her

28 

A. PETŐ

“biologically determined” role, i.e. was not a mother, was not a real woman. Concurrently the Arrow Cross Party–Hungarist Movement and several other smaller far-right parties propagated the cult of the “ancient Hungarian mother”24 who ostensibly had lived alongside her husband as a partner with equal rights.25 Their vision evokes Karen Offen’s definition of relational feminism, which propagates “the primacy of a companionate, non-hierarchical male-female couple as the basic unit of society” in opposition to individualist feminism, which emphasizes individual autonomy and human rights (Offen 2000: 135). However, the far-right interpretation of the myth of the Hungarian mother also suggests that the inequality of sexes was imported to Hungarian culture together with Christianity. In other words, this cult did not aim to re-evaluate women’s position, instead it represented an anti-modernist critique that posited the loss of “ancient Hungarian values” as the source of all social ills.26 Unlike the Croatian or Italian far-right press, the Hungarian national socialist press hardly if ever published articles about potential woman exemplars (Fraddosio 1996). A spectacular exemption is a light-hearted report on Ica Ruszin, who went to the Russian battlefield voluntarily and returned with an SS nursing service medal, a grenade shard in her stomach and with no lower limbs. To the soldier who cracked a joke on her “she dispensed such a robust slap with her battlefield trained young hand […] that in the future he will certainly avoid making fun of the sacrifices of Hungarian soldiers and nurses”27 The story not only illustrates that women also resorted to violence, but shows that during wartime women who exercised violence were considered example setters. Research in gender and war studies for many decades considered women in wartime exclusively as victims (Cooke and Wollacott 1993), yet, the women members of the Arrow Cross did use violence. Perhaps at the beginning of the war they only dispensed slaps but later they also engaged in murderous atrocities against Jews. These women wanted to seize and exercise power, therefore the victim position that religious, left-wing and some feminist women’s movements hold so dear were alien to the women of the Arrow Cross. Finally, the paradox of being a woman and an active political agent in a party that expects a woman to be a mother above all was solved with the call-words of “duty and mission”—just like in Nazi Germany (Manns 1997). The frame of “duty and mission” allowed for the public legitimation of women’s wage work by offering a model within which working

2  INVISIBLE PARTY MEMBERS 

29

women could have equal amounts but different kinds of rights with working men. The gender dynamics of far-right recruitment, the questions surrounding women’s individual agency, as well as the phenomenon of violence are all crucial to examine if we are to respond to the question: why did women join a marginalized radical party which obviously had an anti-­ women agenda?

2.4   Women’s Politics on the Far Right After the First World War with the extension of women’s suffrage it became clear that women’s political emancipation requires a comprehensive political response. Between the two world wars MANSZ and other Hungarian women’s organizations got between a rock and a hard place: they were under political pressure both from the far-left and the far-right ends of the political spectrum as both sides argued that the Hungarian nation’s way to join the “civilized” nations of Europe is to guarantee full and unrestricted suffrage to women.28 Despite the pressure to join a political party, women’s organizations remained active throughout the Second World War and took on an ever greater role in filling out the gaps of state welfare; in the meantime the war brought along beforehand unforeseen forms of women’s political participation, such as armed and uniformed women. The Arrow Cross Party–Hungarist movement as the only radical far-­ right party after 1940 had a very heterogenous base of female members. This heterogeneity posited a major challenge to the male party leadership when they attempted to draw the boundaries of women’s political activism. Ferenc Szálasi, during his visit to Újvidék (Novi Sad, Serbia)—the Arrow Cross Party was especially active in the freshly regained territories— thus spoke to the women’s sections’ leaders: I dearly ask you, Sisters, do not engage in politics. Leave that to men. But be present wherever loved ones’ faith needs reinforcement. And when the bitter time of challenges, hardship and suffering comes? Comfort, strengthen, encourage! Revitalize the faith and force of the husbands, fathers, and children!29

This was a clear message: women should be the advocates of far-right values in their homestead. The family therefore did not belong to the private

30 

A. PETŐ

sphere anymore, politics entered the family and the woman, and the mother had to become its agent. So, it was not the woman who left the private sphere in order to enter the public, but the public started to take control of the private sphere. The idea—which in many ways resembled the official German National Socialists’ and the Italian Fascists’ women’s politics—was soon annulled by the wartime emergence of a “matriarchy born in need.” This development had a serious effect on the labor market and soon it started to shape the political discourse too. Firstly, concerns over the potential effects that paid employment would have on women emerged, especially as the image of the woman worker undermined the image of the ideal woman homemaker favored by the far right. Secondly, as the state became increasingly impoverished by military expenditures, more and more women found support in welfare services provided by far-­ right parties, partly as aid-receiving members and partly as party employees. Thirdly, as women’s employment grew, an increasing number of women experienced gender-based workplace discrimination. The Arrow Cross Party’s women’s section organized a consciousness developing training, which was quite unusual at a time when conservative mainstream women’s organizations exclusively offered trainings that helped women become the “best” of mothers and wives. The consciousness developing training consisted of a set of lectures that aimed to increase self-awareness and the capacity of self-reflection as well as it served as an introduction into Hungarist women’s duties. The training was organized in order to counter claims by “the representatives of Judeo-liberal spirit according to whom our [party] program hinders women’s progress, degrades women and aims to lock them into the family and by the stove.”30 The Arrow Cross also published its official response in the press: Our stance is that politics was always the task of men. But the new spirit of the times, the actualization of socialism on national grounds and in a national frame is not just politics, but a matter of our nation’s survival. […] The mother instinctively sensed that she has a role in this fight, and her role is to evolve true spirituality in herself, in her family, and through these in the whole Hungarian community. […] The aim of the Arrow Cross Party’s Women’s Section is to unite those women who expect and demand from the Arrow Cross Party to guarantee them the moral, intellectual and material safety of wholesome family life.31

2  INVISIBLE PARTY MEMBERS 

31

The Arrow Cross’ family directives were in harmony with their vision about the woman’s rightful place. Szálasi had expounded his views on the topic already in his 1935 book Cél és követelések (Goal and demands); then he gave them a more detailed account in his 1938 Út és cél (Road and goal) (Sipos 1997). According to Szálasi’s plans there would have been Imperial Hungarist Homes set up where those with “unnatural” sexual instincts were to be neutered. For infertile people, regardless of gender, stepping into marriage was to be forbidden. Men leading “immoral lives” or squandering the family income were to lose their patriarchal rights (Ungváry 2003). These suggestions made the Arrow Cross even more attractive for the wider public and especially for women, because they offered a sense of clear-cut order in a very chaotic historical situation. When motherhood becomes “political,” i.e. when citizen’s rights are defined based on one’s position within the family and/or one’s reproductive abilities, then the borderline between the public and the private disappears. The same happens when someone uses their private privileges to publicly advocate their interests. Since women are more vulnerable in the public, often this is the only means they can resort to. Analyzing the reports filed to the German police during the National Socialist era, Vandana Joshi found that the denunciators were almost exclusively women who depicted themselves as loyal members of the system and inculpable wives and mothers. These “model citizens” attempted to get rid of their husbands by reporting them for behaving unlike true Nazis, i.e. they were violent, or they were heavy drinkers (Joshi 2002). Another example was set by the tens of thousands of women who joined the Ku-Klux-Klan and achieved that the idealized image of the white, Protestant, supremacist man was of a man who does not beat his wife and does not drink (Blee 1991). The same was true for the Arrow Cross Party’s popularity among woman: the far-right party held the promise that it can regulate masculinity the way it regulated femininity. Archival Sources  Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára/ Historical Archive of State Security Services, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, Budapest Főváros Levéltára/Budapest City Archives, Politikatörténeti Intézet Levéltára/Archive of the Institute of Political History, Vajdasági Múzeum/Museum of Vojvodina (Serbia). Photo: Meeting in the House of Faith. Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department / Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár 1489–1954.

32 

A. PETŐ

Notes 1. On methodological questions of research on female subjectivities, see Passerini, Luisa. 2003. A nők és a feministák története. Budapest, Balassi., especially 202–214. 2. Similarly, the Italian fascist women’s movement should be separated from traditional Italian religious women’s movements. See M. Rossi Caponeri, Lucia Motti (szerk.): Accademiste a Orvieto. Donne ed educazione fisica nell’Italia fascista 1932–1943. Perugia, Quattroemme, 1996. 3. See more: Bánki, Éva. 2008. Lobogó sötétség. Múltunk, 2: 91–104., Kádár, Judit. 2003. Az antiszemitizmus jutalma. Tormay Cécile és a Horthy-­korszak. Kritika, 3: 9–12., Kollarits, Krisztina. 2010. Egy bujdosó írónő—Tormay Cécile. Vasszilvágy: Magyar Nyugat Kiadó., Rákai, Orsolya. 2007. A nők és a nemzet kulturális-kultikus megalkotása. Alföld, 6: 52–56. 4. See more: Vonyó József: Gömbös Gyula és a jobboldali radikalizmus. Tanulmányok. 2001. Pannónia Könyvek., Vonyó József. 2009. Gömbös Gyula jobboldali radikalizmusa. In A magyar jobboldali hagyomány 1900–1948, ed. Romsics Ignác, 243–275. Budapest: Osiris., Gergely Jenő. 2001. Gömbös Gyula. Politikai pályakép. Budapest: Vince., Gergely Jenő (ed.). 2004. Gömbös Gyula hatalomra kerülése és kormányzása 1932–1936. Antal István sajtófőnök emlékiratai. Budapest: Palatinus. 5. See more on this: Nagy-Talavera, N. M. 1970. The Green Shirts and the Others. The History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press; Vonyó, József. 2004. Össze nem növő gyökerek. Jobboldali radikalizmus Magyarországon a Hungarizmus előtt. Rubicon, 11: 44–52; Szöllősi-Janze, Margit. 1989. Die Pfeilkreuzler-bewegung in Ungarn. Historischer Kontext, Entwicklung und Herrschaft. München, Oldenburg. (Studien zur Zeitgeschichte.) 6. “Kitartás!” lit. “Perseverence!” the greeting of the Arrow Cross Party. 7. Vajdasági Múzeum/The Museum of Vojvodina (Serbia) = VM Archive, Hungarian Box no. 26., Arrow Cross Party 1941–1942, 72. I am grateful to Karolina Lendák-Kabók for her help and to László Bernát Veszprémy for pointing out this source. 8. VM 27. box no. 34. 9. Directive, 18 September, 1941. VM 26. box no. 6. 10. Directive received by Mrs. Rehák county section leader, Zenta, January 15, 1943. VM. 27. box no. 7. 11. A Nép, August 26, 1942, 6. 12. Politikatörténeti Intézet Levéltára = PIL 685 1./2. (circular letter no. 8., September 10, 1940) 13. A Nép, February 25, 1943, 4.

2  INVISIBLE PARTY MEMBERS 

33

14. Same as with other far-right parties, see de Grazia, Victoria. 1992. How Fascism Ruled Women. Italy 1922–1945. Berkeley, California University Press. 15. On the controversies inherent in the far-right’s program see Sandulescu, Valentin. 2005. On the Ideological Characteristics of the Romanian Legionary Movement. A Synthetic Account. In Studia Universitatis Petru Maior (Historia), 5: 145–154. 16. ÁBTL V 102649. 5. 17. On Mrs. Dücső’s adventures in Zala County during the 1935 elections see Vonyó, József. 2001. Gömbös Gyula és a jobboldali radikalizmus. Pécs: Pannónia könyvek. (Dücső Jánosné, BFL 893/1949. 10.) 18. VM. 26. Box 16. 19. Directive by Gyula Rehák, the county leader of Bács-Bodrog County, June 8, 1942. VM 26. box 39. 20. VM 27. box no.37. 21. A Nép, January 2, 1943. 4. 22. See: Fraser, Ronald. 1979. Blood of Spain. The Experience of Civil War 1936–1939. London: Penguin; and Morcillo, Aurora G.. 2000. The Catholic Womanhood. Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain. Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press. 23. Durham, Martin. 2003. The Home and the Homeland. Gender and the British Extreme Right. Contemporary British History, 17: 69., Benewick, Robert. 1969. The Fascist Movement in Britain. London: Allen Lane; Skidelsky, Robert. 1975. Oswald Mosley. London: Papermal. On the Italian Fascist Party see: Willson, Perry R. 1993. The Clockwork Factory. Women and Work in Fascist Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press; and Willson, Perry R.. 1997. Cooking the Patriotic Omelette. Women and the Italian Fascist Ruralisation Campaign. European History Quarterly, 27: 531–547. 24. A Nép, September 14, 1944. (Mária Katona: A nő a fegyveres nemzetben/ The woman in the armed nation) 25. A Nép, April 8, 1943. (A turáni nő/The Turanian woman). 26. On its afterlife today, see Pető, Andrea. 2003. Napasszonyok és Holdkisasszonyok. A mai magyar konzervatív női politizálás alaktana. Budapest: Balassi. 27. A Nép, March 28, 1944. (Lili Fabinyi: Nagy Idők, apró esetek/Great times, small events) 28. Magyarság, March 2, 1938. (An article by Ida Bobula). 29. A Nép, June 18, 1942. 30. Thoma Józsefné: A hungarista nő hármas feladatköre. Manuscript. PIL, 685. f. 1/4. 12. 31. A Nép, December 2, 1943. (Nő a mozgalomban/Woman in the movement. An article by the Budapest county head section leader.)

34 

A. PETŐ

Bibliography Blee, Kathleen M. 1991. Women of the Klan. Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: Berkeley University Press. Clark, Roland. 2012. European Fascists and Local Activists: Romania’s Legion of the Archangel Michael (1922–1938). Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburg. Cooke, Miriam, and Angela Wollacott. 1993. Gendering War Talk. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Durham, Martin. 2003. The Home and the Homeland: Gender and the British Extreme Right. CBH 17: 67–81. Fraddosio, Maria. 1996. The Fallen Hero: The Myth of Mussolini and the Fascist Women in the Italian Social Republic 1943–45. Journal of Contemporary History 31: 99–124. Griffin, Roger. 2007. Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Guenther, Irene. 2004. Nazi Chic: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Dress, Body, Culture). Oxford, New York: Berg. Ioanid, Radu. 2004. The Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5: 419–453. Joshi, Vandana. 2002. The ‘Private’ became ‘Public’: Wives as Denouncers in the Third Reich. Journal of Contemporary History 3: 419–435. Karsai, László, and Judit Molnár. 1994. Az Endre–Baky–Jaross-per. Budapest: Cserépfalvi. Manns, Haide. 1997. Frauen für den Nationalsozialismus. Nationalsozialistische Studentin und Akademikerin in der Weimar Republik und im Drittem Reich. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Mosse, George L. 2001. Férfiasságnak tüköre. A modern férfieszmény kialakulása. Budapest: Balassi. Nash, Mary. 1991. Pronatalism and Motherhood in Franco’s Spain. In Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s–1950s, ed. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, 160–177. London: Routledge. Ofer, Inbal. 2005. Historical Models—Contemporary Identities: The Sección Femenina of the Spanish Falange and Its Redefinition of the Term ‘Femininity’. Journal of Contemporary History 40 (4): 663–674. Offen, Karen M. 2000. European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Paksy, Zoltán. 2009. A nemzetiszocialista mozgalmak megszerveződése, párt regionális struktúrája Magyarországon az 1930-as években. Múltunk 3: 202–237. Pető, Andrea. 2001. Kontinuität und Wandel in der ungarischen Frauenbewegung der Zwischenkriegperiode. In Feminismus und Demokratie. Europäische

2  INVISIBLE PARTY MEMBERS 

35

Frauenbewegung der 1920er Jahre, ed. Ute Gerhard, 138–159. Königstein: Taunus. ———. 2014. Gendered Exclusions and Inclusions in Hungary’s Right-Radical Arrow Cross Party (1939–1945): A Case Study of Three Female Party Members. Hungarian Studies Review 1–2: 107–131. Pető, Andrea, and Judit Szapor. 2004. Women and the Alternative Public Sphere: toward a Redefinition of Women‘s Activism and the Separate Spheres in East Central Europe. NORA Nordic Journal of Women‘s Studies 3: 172–182. Salvatici, Silvia. 1999. Contadine dell’Italia fascista. Presenze, ruoli, immagini. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier. Scheck, Raffael. 2001. Women on the Weimar Right. The Role of Female Politicians in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP). Journal of Contemporary History 4: 547–560. ———. 2004. Mothers of the Nation. Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany. Oxford, New York: Berg. Schiavo, Gianluca. 2016. The Italian Civil War in the Memoirs of Female Fascist Soldiers. In Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories. Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence, eds. Ayşe Gül Altınay, Andrea Pető. 135-145. London, New York: Routledge. Sipos, Péter. 1997. Egy politikai eszmerendszer kialakulása. In Szálasi Ferenc börtönnaplója 1938–1940, ed. Csiffáry Tamás. Budapest: Budapest Főváros Levéltára. Theweleit, Klaus. 1989. Male Fantasies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ungváry, Krisztián. 2003. Kik azok a nyilasok? Beszélő 7: 65. Valli, Roberta Suzzi. 2000. The Myth of Squandrismo in the Fascist regime. Journal of Contemporary History 2: 131–150. Yeomans, Rory. 2005. Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae. The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945. The Slavonic and East European Review 83: 685–732.

CHAPTER 3

Invisible Political Actors

Abstract  The second analytical chapter, through the life stories of “notable” and “notorious” female Arrow Cross Party members shows that the invisibilization and forgetting of woman perpetrators was already happening in the 1930s and 1940s because female members of the Arrow Cross Party never received prominence or acknowledgement from their party’s male leaders and because after the Second World War the people’s tribunals sought to re-establish the traditional gender hierarchy and therefore posited the deeds of woman perpetrators as exceptions to the rule. Keywords  People’s tribunals • Female doctors • Intellectual women • Invisibilization Through the life stories of “notable” and “notorious” female Arrow Cross Party members, this chapter shows that their invisibilization and forgetting was already happening in the 1940s. A good point of departure is the question: who was “significant” for the new political elite immediately after liberation? Analyzing the different lists requesting extradition from the allied forces gives an insight into the logic of how war crimes were defined. Further sources of this chapter are contemporary press coverage, archival material of the Arrow Cross Party and, most importantly, the testimonies of women at the people’s tribunals. These testimonies are not neutral as they were performances negotiated between expectations, © The Author(s) 2020 A. Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5_3

37

38 

A. PETŐ

experiences and imaginations; still, they give an insight into the diversity of women who were mobilized for and by the Arrow Cross Party. The first list of requesting extradition from the allied forces was put together in Debrecen by the provisionary government. For the sake of this list, “war criminal” was defined as a person who pushed the country into war, aided the Arrow Cross movement, participated in Szálasi’s treason, intellectually contributed to the Nazis’ and the Arrow Cross’ goals or committed crimes in the occupied territories. Initially there was not a single woman among those accused of these crimes.1 The second list was put together on March 29, 1945, as part of the extradition process with the United States. This included several women who were considered guilty in intellectually contributing to the goals and aims of the Nazis and the Arrow Cross: Mrs. Dücső, Sári Fedák, Ella Megyesi, Lili Muráti, Erzsébet Rátz and Zita Szelecky.2 However, this list, which included the leader of the women’s section of the Arrow Cross Party (Mrs. Dücső), actresses (Fedák, Muráti, Szelecky) and journalists (Megyesi, Rátz), could be misleading. There is a great likelihood that these women made it on the list because they were the only ones who broke the “glass ceiling” and gained a measure of visibility. It is certain that the list does not nearly cover the whole range of woman members and sympathizers of the Arrow Cross Party. The following extradition list consisted of 312 people and included Mrs. Bagossy, the wife of Zoltán Bagossy (1905–1962), who prepared the ground for the Arrow Cross takeover and the party’s later delegate at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Mrs. Hain, the wife of Péter Hain (1895–1946), a police inspector who became the head of the Hungarian Gestapo; Mrs. Andreánszky, the wife of Jenő Andreánszky (1898–1981), the minister of foreign affairs in the Arrow Cross administration; Mrs. Thoma, a section leader within the party; Mária Hunyadi, the secretary of Ödön Málnási, the main ideologist of the Arrow Cross; and Lili Fabinyi, a photographer, but the two actresses, Muráti and Szeleczky were not on the list anymore, same goes for Mrs. Dücső, who by this time was in a Hungarian prison.3 This list still only contains the “wives” and the robbers, looters and murderers because most women members of the Arrow Cross appeared to be relatively insignificant in political terms, therefore the Hungarian authorities did not press for their extradition. Consequently, in the absence of court trials, those women who rose to prominence within the Arrow Cross Party do not feature in historical memory either (Matthée and Pető 2008).

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

39

During the Horthy era women seldom had public visibility in politics (Pető-Szapor 2004). This especially holds true for the right-wing and far-­ right political scene—more women had a measure of visibility among the social democrats and the Communists.4 From the Christian middle class, Lilla Melczer was an elected MP representing the Nemzeti Egység Pártja/ Unity Party in 1931, 1935 and also in 1939. Mrs. Orosdy, née baroness Margit Herzog, became an MP representing the Keresztény Gazdasági és Szocialista Párt/Christian Economic and Social Party in 1931, then in 1935 Mrs. Toperczer was elected from the Keresztény Szociális Párt/ Christian Social Party.5 In harmony with the Horthy era’s political elite’s norms these women actively participated in charity work and in the pursuits of various women’s organizations. The women’s recruitment base of far-right movements was entirely different, e.g. in the leadership of the Ébredő Magyarok Egyesülete/Awakening Hungarians, a far-right movement established in 1919 included a woman, Karola Bitskey, postal service controller. By the end of the 1930s most members of this organization ended up in the Arrow Cross Party. Through the analysis of prominent far-right women’s life stories (Gizella Lutz, Mrs. Dücső, Erzsébet Madarász MD, Mrs. Thoma), this chapter reflects on the formation of far-right women’s public remembrance in order to understand what led to the invisibilization of far-right women other than the blood thirsty. Besides those who broke the “glass ceiling,” it is crucial to get closer to everyday woman members of the Arrow Cross and for that purpose I chose to examine the life of an exceptionally diligent party activist, Mária Kozma.6

3.1   The Wives It would be easy to approach the woman members of the Arrow Cross as “wives” and thus to follow the tradition of writing about “evil women.”7 Such an approach would however reinforce the thesis that the woman members of the party were all victims of male manipulation.8 As I shown, German and Italian research on far-right women commenced with the life story analyses of the wives of notable and notorious politicians. In Hungary the best-known and most visible in the public discourse was the group of women who used their private privileges to publicly advocate their interests—the female family members of Arrow Cross leaders. Most of these women were from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds, and they had no professional aspirations. Family relations influenced their

40 

A. PETŐ

decisions and explained their actions. Within the Arrow Cross they ran an important informal network, which played a significant role in the distribution of jobs and provisions; however, their public identity strictly remained that of “wife” or “supporter” to the husband or relative. In his private life, Ferenc Szálasi very much followed Hitler’s model (Pető 2007). After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, he moved from Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia) to Budapest in 1919. The man, for whom military life was a vocation and mission, formed a relationship with the public servant Gizella Lutz in 1927. From 1936 onwards he spent much time at her apartment, but he only married her after the couple’s flight to Austria in 1945. Until 1944 Szálasi lived with his beloved mother, Erzsébet Szakmár. He adored his mother and designated her name day, the day of Erzsébet (Elizabeth) as Mother’s Day within the Arrow Cross Party. On Erzsébet day it was expected to send telegrams to the Leader’s mother because as the journal A Nép argued on November 25, 1943: “when we remember all Mothers on the name day of our Leaders’ mother, we do so to make the idea and reality of true motherhood more tangible and relatable.”9 Lutz was not a mother, moreover she was an employed woman so there was no place for her in the official Arrow Cross Pantheon. Szálasi and Lutz were married in Mattsee on April 29, 1945, and taken into American captivity on May 5, 1945. Lutz paid a high price for the relationship. The wives of other Arrow Cross leaders captured by the Americans and returned to the Hungarian authorities—such as the wife of Zoltán Bagossy or the wife of Péter Hain—were “merely” sent to internment camps. Gábor Péter (1906–1993), the Communist Party’s first secret service chief—who was notoriously sensitive to publicity and who played a key role in securing the return to Hungary of people suspect of war crimes— arranged for the interrogation of Gizella Lutz to be documented. Lutz, a slim middle-aged woman who wore her hair in the manner of the famous film star Katalin Karády, was unable to reveal much information about the Arrow Cross movement to her secret police interrogators, for Szálasi had intentionally kept her away from politics proper. While Lutz had regularly invited the wives of other Arrow Cross leaders to her home for tea, the women were unlikely to have made ground-­ breaking policy decisions. When asked by the people’s tribunal about these tea parties, the wife of Ferenc Kassai (1903–1946)—the minister without portfolio responsible for national defense and propaganda in Szálasi’s government—stated: “We women gathered at the invitation of

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

41

Gizella Lutz. We discussed a variety of problems, also addressing political topics. We spoke about the coming victory of the Arrow Cross Party.”10 This group of women—the wives and lovers’ group—recruited many female members for the party. One of them was Mária Januj, who became the wife and accomplice of Dénes Bokor, the head of the House of Loyalty, the Headquarter of the Arrow Cross Party, today the House of Terror—an elite Arrow Cross body comprising party members who had been imprisoned or interned for their views—because she was living in the same house as László Baky’s11 mother-in-law and, as a single seamstress, hoped to gain social status and a husband by joining the party.12 We know from documentary material produced in the course of the people’s tribunal trials that this social network was used to distribute well-paid and secure jobs to people working in the party apparatus. Amid the wartime uncertainty, finding a “good partner” was important; even the aging Jenő Andreánszky, who later became minister of foreign affairs in the Arrow Cross administration, managed to attract a much younger woman as his partner.13 The members of this elite circle had a life that was incommensurable with the lives of other women members of the Arrow Cross. For example this is how a regional women’s section’s leader described her activities: “I visited the members, collected the membership fees, distributed tickets to cultural programs. This is all I did … I don’t know more than the others because we women were not included.”14 The people’s tribunal trial of Ferenc Szálasi was between February 5 and March 1, 1946. Among the audiences there were former women sympathizers of the Arrow Cross who took a great risk to be personally present at their idol’s hearing. On the third day of his trial, Ferenc Szálasi told the court about the roles he assigned to women in his movement. When the prosecutor in his trial, László Frank, asked—in a manner replete with misogyny—whether women active in politics and particularly in the Arrow Cross were necessarily of loose morals, Szálasi replied that the women had been knitting stockings and woolens, and when a “situation” had arisen, like a sudden snowfall, they helped clear the snow. He even showed to the camera the handkerchief made for him by female members of the Arrow Cross Party. Through this statement, Szálasi once more invisibilized the female Arrow Cross activists, among them all those women who suffered because of their commitment to the movement, like Mária Hunyadi, who had been interned in 1939 for supporting the Arrow Cross (Photo 3.1).15 The woman ideologues and fanatic female warriors of the Arrow Cross Party of course envisaged a rather different role for women, which resulted

42 

A. PETŐ

Photo 3.1  Handkerchief made by the women’s section of the Arrow Cross Party for Ferenc Szálasi. MTVA Archívum/Photoarchive of the National Broadcasting Foundation, FMAFI 1945–34036

in a conflict between the party’s male and female members. Many of these women were members of the House of Loyalty as they had been interned in the pre-war era on account of their Arrow Cross convictions. Still, these women did not take part in the exercise of power after the Arrow Cross’s takeover. They were left out partly because the Arrow Cross party leadership did not consider women to be the intellectual equals of men; and partly because of the approach of the Red Army and the chaos it generated. At the people’s tribunal, the fact that leading Arrow Cross women were not included in the leadership of the Hungarian Quisling government was portrayed, in almost all cases, as if it had been their own decision. This is hardly surprising given that such a stance was likely to result in a much lighter sentence. Szálasi and seven of his accomplices were sentenced to death and executed on March 12, 1946. After her return to Hungary, Lutz received sentences from the people’s tribunal on two occasions: November 22, 1945, and June 19, 1946. The People’s Prosecutor interpreted various

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

43

items found in her apartment, such as a photograph of her husband, as Arrow Cross symbols, and so she was found guilty of disseminating Arrow Cross propaganda. She was then held at an internment camp in South Buda, after which she spent many years in prison, sharing a cell with Júlia Rajk for a while.16 She was freed at the time of the 1956 revolution, thereafter living a quiet life in her apartment on Mester Street, Budapest, until her death in 1992. In Tamás Almási’s documentary, Ítéletlenül (Without Verdict 1991), about the inmates of the Kistarcsa women’s internment camp, Gizella Lutz is also featured. In the documentary, the elderly Lutz holds and caresses a photograph of Szálasi’s meeting with Hitler, and with tears in her eyes tells the camera what a great person her husband was whose memory was terribly discredited and abused by history. Neither Eva Braun, the lover of Hitler, nor Clara Petacci, the lover of Mussolini, had the gratifying opportunity to publicly mourn the murderous regime that the love of her life was responsible for, although of the three “evil women” possibly Gizella Lutz took part in the regime the most actively. Though research has found that Eva Braun not only rejoiced in stolen European treasures that she received as presents, but also aptly advocated for her own interests (Görtemaker 2010), still, she was not as much integrated into the Leader’s public life as Gizella Lutz, who used her “relative power” more efficiently.

3.2   Woman as Leaders At the people’s tribunal trial of the Arrow Cross women leaders, the key witness was Szálasi himself. The party leader praised the women’s effectiveness and know-how, which had two outcomes: one the one hand he secured their places in history—though originally he was not in favor of women’s participation in the movement—on the other hand because of his statement these women received stricter sentences. Szálasi’s comments during his hearing also suggested that the Arrow Cross women’s organization was not void of personal rivalry. The key actors of these power struggles were Lili Fabinyi, Mrs. Dücső, Mrs. Meggyes and Mrs. Thoma. The photographer Fabinyi escaped from the country, Mrs. Meggyes’s trial was held in her absence, and Mrs. Thoma and Mrs. Dücső were sentenced. Mrs. Meggyes, originally the leader of the Budapest County women’s head section, became, besides Emil Kovarcz (1899–1946) the party

44 

A. PETŐ

organizer, the commander of “women’s total recruitment”17 by a direct order from Szálasi. Mrs. Meggyes was promoted into this position because earlier due to her “dutiful and exceptional organizational skills” she had recruited 8000 new party members. According to her file she was unconditionally loyal towards the party leader—and “remarkably attractive.” As part of her people’s tribunal documents I found the transcripts of her radio speeches. In the one titled “The woman is the pillar of the nation” she argued against women’s waged work: [W]here there was no child, and in fresh marriages, where there is no child because the woman is employed, that is where the “western spirit” made its destructive effect, inspired by the eternal Jew, the devilish materialism. […] [The] woman’s place is in the family. Her mission is motherhood. The upbringing of the child. The shaping of the nation’s future. She can leave the family only when the wartime situation of the nation requires it.18

During his December 14, 1945, hearing, Szálasi stated that in 1942 during a conflict within the party Mrs. Thoma left Mrs. Dücső alone, because the latter supported the freshly expelled Kálmán Hubay. Under the effect of the events, Mrs. Dücső stepped off the position of the national leader of the Arrow Cross’ women’s organization.19 Mrs. Dücső, who joined the party to fight for a fairer society, was fed up by the inner hierarchy of the Arrow Cross Party and of Szálasi’s demanding personality.20 After Mrs. Dücső’s resignation Mrs. Thoma became the Budapest head section leader, and Mrs. Meggyes got the position of the Budapest County head section leader. Szálasi went on saying that since he “found no other suitable person” he made Mrs. Thoma also the all-round leader of the women’s sections of the rural areas. This decision might have been influenced by Gizella Lutz’s friendship with Mrs. Thoma’s husband too. When Mrs. Meggyes got a new assignment as the commander of recruitment, Mrs. Thoma became the leader of the Budapest County women’s sections too. Szálasi readily summarized her main tasks: her duty was to control the “neighborhood service” (szomszédság-szolgálat), i.e. the social service the Arrow Cross Party offered primarily to those party members who “suffered prejudice”, i.e. got imprisoned. Secondly, Mrs. Thoma’s task was to raise women’s self-consciousness so women could more effectively support men fighting within the party and on the battlefield. Thirdly, she was to organize the mission frame that would incorporate all mothers. Szálasi

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

45

concluded: “Mrs. Thoma completed all her assignments to my greatest contentment therefore her operations were successful.”21 To her September 26, 1946, trial, Mrs. Thoma arrived on a stretcher as she, according to her medical documents, suffered from “post diphtheria paralysis.”22 Mrs. Thoma had a well-thought-out defense: [What I did] had nothing to do with women’s politics, and I could have done it in the framework of any current democratic party, not only in the Arrow Cross. That I was active within the Arrow Cross Party […] was a major oversight on my part. […] It is true that I lead training for women leaders, but that training was entirely apolitical too.23

It is understandable that Mrs. Thoma used every means of defense. She could not deny that she published articles in A Nép [The Nation, the Arrow Cross Party’s official journal], but she denied the authorship of the anonymous short texts she wrote within the women’s organization.24 Furthermore, Mrs. Thoma claimed that she never wore the Arrow Cross uniform except for the green blouse, but in March 1945 she wore the party badge, ring and bracelet too.25 On first degree the people’s tribunal sentenced her to five years of imprisonment and confiscation of all assets, a sentence that was later altered to imprisonment only in order to save her family. On July 28, 1945, the people’s tribunal sentenced the other best-­ known female member of the Arrow Cross, Mrs. Dücső, to ten years imprisonment. Mrs. Dücső suffered from cervical cancer and died as a prisoner on November 27, 1948.26

3.3   Women Who “Wanted to Heal the Body of the Nation”27 The first generation of Hungarian women intellectuals who had graduated from university at great individual cost had been confronted with discrimination in the workplace. A survey conducted by the Diplomás Nők Országos Egyesülete/National Association of Women University Graduates found that 60 percent of respondents reported that they had suffered discrimination in the workplace (Papp 2004). Educated women therefore experienced a double bind: because of their gender and despite their education that had little value in the Horthy era’s conservative male-­dominated labor market. Along with single women who, in search of livelihood, had migrated to Hungary from areas ceded under the Treaty of Trianon

46 

A. PETŐ

(1920), they were profoundly hostile to the patronage and nepotism of the conservative parties and to the acquiescence of party officials’ wives and lovers to the “patriarchal bargain,” to use Deniz Kandyoti’s term (1988). These women believed in an anti-modernist emancipation, which excluded, in a moral sense, the option of a woman depending financially on her male partner. The alternatives offered by the left were not attractive for them either; partly because they were for border revisionism and partly because many of them were influenced by the government’s anti-Semitic rhetoric. The interwar period also saw the first generation of practicing women physicians, but despite the officially granted educational rights prior to the First World War, they also had to face prejudice and discrimination on a daily basis.28 Faced with such problems, some of the women turned to new disciplines, such as psychoanalysis, or became involved in the radical social movements. Others, however, chose a different path. The example of Erzsébet Madarász MD shows that women’s employment and a traditional definition of femininity that are incompatible in a rhetorical sense can become compatible at the cost of a compromise with racism. Reinhart Koselleck has shown how “linguistic communities are organized around specific concepts … and they also have a temporal aspect.” (1985) This framework may be useful in understanding the gradual radicalization of female doctors. After the Treaty of Trianon, which created Hungary as a nation state, the Horthy regime did not establish “a new canon of knowledge” (Joyce 1987: 19) but rather invoked the metaphor of disease to explain events. According to its rhetoric, while the limbs of the national body had been severed, the trunk had remained29; therefore people in Hungary started to commonly regard their country as a truncated national body. Women physicians were those who could be at the forefront of healing the national body in those exceptional or peculiar times. The “peculiarity” was the temporal aspect, as women physicians strove to resolve the conflict between a woman’s traditional role and employment as a physician.30 These women were fairly successful in their efforts: by 1942 there were as many as 679 women physicians in Budapest, out of a total of 1207 physicians; and only 54 percent of these women were married, while this was true for 61.7 percent of male physicians (Papp 2004: 132). Studying to become a medical doctor was a “noble activity” already during the Horthy era and as such a proper choice for daughters of the impoverished middle class, a choice that increased their possibility of good

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

47

marriage. However, the professional and social expectations clashed here. During the conservative Horthy regime the female doctors were expected to be employed only until they got married, and then they were expected to withdraw and to live and work only for their families. To solve this conflict Eszter Kokas MD resorted to fascist rhetoric. When Kokas MD, founding president of MOOE (Magyar Orvosnők Országos Egyesülete/Hungarian Association of Female Medical Doctors), made a study trip to fascist Italy, she learned that: Women’s work is utterly indispensable to the life of the state, because there are territories, which can be properly serviced by women, so they should be directed towards that direction. Their opinion is that women’s nature makes them utmost appropriate for social work and educating the youth. (Kokas 1942)

The essentialist argument about the superiority of women to men on the field of healing carved out rhetorical space for female doctors in a public that traditionally opposed women’s paid employment: That beautiful vocation, which was chosen by the women for serving humankind, should be fulfilled by every Hungarian medical doctor with female spirit, with honor and proud self-confidence. (Kokas 1941)

Female medical doctors formed two professional organizations that used different rhetorical frames for the legitimization of entering female doctors into public space via paid employment. The MOOE was formed in 1927. Although the founder, Kokas MD, gained inspiration from fascist organizations, they did not exclude Jewish medical doctors from membership, and they did not use the argument of national necessity. Instead they were defining their role as professionals who are equal because they are professionals, which is why in the context of increasing nationalism MOOE failed to gain wider support. The other organization, the women’s section of the MONE was formed in 1929. Its leader, Erzsébet Madarász MD, i.e. Mrs. Gönczi, was a seasoned politician, who had been chair of the women’s section of previous far-right formations such as the United Women’s Camp, and a member of the Hungarian National Socialist Party. MONE was a radical extreme right professional organization that excluded Jewish members.

48 

A. PETŐ

The mission invented for female medical doctors—and later largely appropriated by them—was healing the wounds of the nation while the anti-feminist-dominant discourse kept on pushing women back to the family. As Madarász MD wrote: God created the woman as mother, her first and saint aim is to fulfill this duty … there should be a new world coming, and shaping this new world there is a big role waiting for women, especially as a mother, who in the present day liberal world was snatched from her home, and through to the fight for bred, the woman should be given back to the family. (Madarász 1935)

Or as the manifesto of MONE’s (Magyar Orvosok Nemzeti Egyesülete / National Association of Hungarian Doctors) female members underlined: You also know, and you have experienced how big weapon convergence is, and we, bred winning women we need that weapon badly! Help us not to let that weapon fall from our hands but hold it firmer than ever before! (MONE 1938)

With the onset of the Second World War, an increasing number of women physicians were given a professional chance but only because of the “exceptional circumstances.”31 Female doctors used the opportunity to enter medical fields previously closed for them: The female doctors of the MONE are consciously women and feminine in their capacity as doctors …. Day by day more male colleagues are dressed in military uniform. It is an imperative grown out of necessity that female doctors should cover more fields of medicine. (MONE 1942)

Erzsébet Madarász MD, i.e. Mrs. Gönczi (who unlike most female doctors took on her husband’s name), the head of the women’s section of MONE, was accused by Mrs. Dücső during the latter’s trial. Mrs. Dücső claimed that “Mrs. Gönczi served all the far-right parties throughout the period”32 (not unlike Mrs. Dücső). Madarász MD had been a member of the Ébredő Magyarok (Awakening Hungarians), of the Fajvédők (Race Defense Party) and finally of the Arrow Cross Party, and she was well known as a charismatic spokeswoman of her times (Szöllösi-Janze 1989). As Mrs. Dücső stated: [She was an] excellent and experienced voice of the people, who with her actor’s voice and passionate performances seized the attention of her listen-

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

49

ers and threw them into ecstasy, whereby some of the women were inclined to weep as she spoke.33

The prosecution did not spend much time on compiling Madarász MD’s indictment; they considered that an unusually detailed statement from a fellow woman party member, i.e. Mrs. Dücső would suffice.34 On June 27, 1945, Madarász MD received a short, only six-month prison term because “she had been persuaded to join the party by an influential male relative,”35 and because in front of the people’s tribunal Madarász MD defended herself in a normative “feminine” manner: “[b]ecause I am by profession a medical doctor, I am more sensitive to social issues […] I was convinced that I could implement my social ideas only through political channels.”36 Concerning her later life, we should note that she received a certificate of good moral conduct on July 20, 1971, after which Madarász MD became the supervising chief physician at the Central Child Dentistry Clinic in Budapest and qualified for a pension at the age of seventy-three.

3.4   The Party Activists Another group of women members of the Arrow Cross Party consisted of single women of lower-middle-class origin. Among them there were women who were imprisoned during the Horthy era as a punishment for their Arrow Cross convictions.37 After their release they re-joined the party’s ranks but their communication with the Arrow Cross Party leadership was constantly full of grievances. Their testimonies reveal that they accused modernity and the change in women’s social role and what they perceived as the accompanying moral decline for not being able to get married, which for them, in harmony with the Horthy era, was the measuring rod of a woman’s respectability. As their main ideologist, Mrs. Thoma argued: Woman has a beautiful God given mission, which makes her life complete, and through which she fulfills her community duties. The Jewish spirit that aimed to weaken and destroy the national spirit was aware of that, so it aimed to do away with the family through the woman. It used every possible tool: literary works, theater, movies, and the radio for this aim. […] It erased the concept of family life and advocated for companionate marriage. […] The results were miserable: respectable mothers spent their nights on bar stools masked as red nailed demons; working girls intoxicated by the

50 

A. PETŐ

rampaging body cult spent their whole income to become cheap copies of fashionable movie stars.38

Among the Arrow Cross members we can also find middle-class women who took their administrative work at the Arrow Cross Party as a regular waged job. These women also had previous experiences with gender discrimination, so they sought out the safer environment of the party, joined its ranks and performed the necessary activities. The protection of working women was an important element of the Arrow Cross Party agenda. Necessarily this meant that they were ready to protect the “Hungarian” working woman from her “alien” employers (Photo 3.2). Many women joined the party because they considered their mission to participate in politics. As Mrs. Thoma argued: “We want to build a world that is morally, intellectually and materially better.”39 The promise of a

Photo 3.2  Ferenc Szálasi at the women’s section of the Arrow Cross Party in Kosice. Štátny archív v Košiciach/The Kosice State Archives. Zbierka fotografií, 1873–2000, no. 0565

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

51

more just society attracted many women to the party as the story of an Arrow Cross woman who was convicted after 1945 exemplifies: I got acquainted with the Arrow Cross movement in 1941. Around that time I had regular conversations with Árpád Berán, who was already an Arrow Cross member. We commonly discussed social problems and through these conversations I came to think that the Arrow Cross Party is the only party that wants to and able to help Hungarian working class. This is when I decided to become an active member of the Arrow Cross movement.40

Mária Kozma, who started as the leader of social affairs at the Nemzeti Egység Pártja/National Unity Party, was another committed party activist. When questioned on April 5, 1945, Kozma stated that she had been taken to court for verbal abuse and that she had been sentenced to three months’ detention for disruption of peace. She had served her sentence in the city of Győr. Other than that, she had been punished (fined) on just one other occasion for slander and libel. She had been released from Győr prison in April 1941, whereupon she returned to Budapest where she found work as a cashier at the Metropol Hotel. After her return to Budapest, she often went to the Arrow Cross offices and visited Arrow Cross families and attended lectures. Her main area of interest had been social work, and the party leadership supported this “feminine” interest. Her activities in the Party had been in this field. In 1943, she took part in a retraining course, as this was a requirement for becoming a party official. She stated that she would have gladly played a leading role in the Party, as the Arrow Cross ideas appealed to her and she wanted to serve the Party. In 1941, she had been granted membership in the House of Loyalty, but the Horthy regime subsequently banned this body, although its operations were reauthorized in January 1944. At this time, Kozma had become leader of the District IV branch. In the summer of 1944, she submitted a request for a Jewish shop, but instead of being awarded a bookshop, she was chosen as director of the Arrow Cross Book and Newspaper Publishing Company (Nyilas Könyv és Lapkiadó Részvénytársaság). In the course of her activity in the party, she spoke to Szálasi on several occasions and she also wrote him a letter stating, according to the minutes of the interrogation: “I, the most diligent visitor to the [Budapest] District IV party offices.” She also met with Ödön Málnási, chief ideologue of the Arrow Cross Party, who, after her release from prison, asked her whether she wished to submit a compensation claim. On several occasions she contributed to the newspaper

52 

A. PETŐ

Összetartás (Solidarity). In her articles she praised the Arrow Cross ideas and spread party propaganda. She concluded her court statement as follows: “I acted as a convinced Arrow Cross supporter, I made the Arrow Cross ideas my own, and I still support them and where possible, disseminate them.”41 She was of course convicted. Kozma’s resume, attached to the trial papers for October 13, 1952, reveals another typical turn of events at the time: at the end of the war she had occupied an apartment so as to “guard” it; however, she subsequently refused to return it to the rightful tenants once they reappeared. The latter reported her to the authorities, and she was imprisoned. After her release, she became a member of the Trade Union for Concierges and of the Hungarian-Soviet Society and offered her services to the ÁVH (Államvédelmi Hatóság/State Protection Authority), who gladly employed her as an informer. After 1945 the Communist Party conveniently took over those concierges or housekeepers who used to report for the Arrow Cross, in other words the Arrow Cross’s former informants later became informants of the Communist Party.

3.5   Woman Criminals The dividing line between party activists who were fighting against the system with tools that were external to the system and those who tried to use extra-judiciary tools to make advances within the system was very thin. After October 15, 1944, when extra-judiciary tools became widely available, there were many who could not resist the temptation. The group of woman criminals consists of women from lower middle class and poor backgrounds who became “redistributors” of “Jewish wealth,” i.e. they participated in the systematic plundering of Hungarian Jewry. Their activities served a particular goal: they wanted to acquire goods and/or they wanted to take revenge. The looters, robbers, plunderers used the Shoah in order to change the distribution of social wealth to their own benefit. These women criminals made up the largest proportion of the people’s tribunals suspects. Whenever laic Hungarians but even the literature mentions “Arrow Cross women,” it is about them. For example, Piroska Dely is notorious as an “Arrow Cross woman” though officially she most probably never was a member of the party. Some of these women were mentally ill, others had undeniable psychological issues. One of them stated that “Eszter László had kissed Szálasi’s image and said that she would die for this man.”42 Another woman kept a small candle-lit Szálasi-altar in her home even after the war. According to

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

53

a report in the prison, Sarolta Petrák “used to quietly hallucinate in the night” as she was in deep spiritual connection with Hitler years after his death.43 The already mentioned Mária Kozma kept on reporting on fellow party members claiming that they participate in sex orgies under the guise of party meetings. She also refused to use any other ink but green for her signature.44 Then there were those women who drew the attention of the communist police onto themselves by regularly showing up on Szálasi’s trial as well as in the prison where he was held in order to receive from the aura of the Nation’s Leader.45 The people’s tribunals sentenced them with remarkable swiftness. Lastly, a testimony made by an actual “Arrow Cross woman”: I entered the Arrow Cross Party in April 1941. I was a party member till the very end, and since I received party education, I became a district leader in 1942. I remained in this position until October 15, 1944. My tasks were the following: surveillance of the district, agitation, propaganda work, recruitment of new members, but also scouting, that is to list the political preferences of the district’s inhabitants with Jews and Communists marked separately […] At the beginning I also did administrational work at the Teréz körút [inner city Budapest], but the party officers had too much on their plate and so they asked me to help with the interrogations. Then I went upstairs and worked in the interrogation room until Christmas. This is why I received my Árpád-striped armband. I had no weapon. […] I was always present at the interrogations because it was my duty to interrogate and body check women. Depending on the outcome of the interrogation the Jews were either sent to the Danube [to be immediately killed] or to the brick factory [to be deported to Auschwitz]. I admit that I hit Jewish women with truncheon and blackjack, and that based on my interrogation Jewish people were executed. I personally participated in one execution only, where the following happened: around December 20 three Communist Jews were brought in. The party officers interrogated them, I arrived at the end of the interrogation. After that they had admitted to be working for the communist movement the leader of the party officers, György Pálinkás stated the verdict. Then we took them one by one to the bathroom and shot them dead. I was not present at the execution of the first one. He was a 19–20 years old, 180 cm tall Jewish lad with smooth, black hair. I shot the second with a pistol with a mother of pearl grip that a party official called Laci put in my hand loaded. I put the pistol to the Jew’s temple and pulled the trigger. The gun fired and the Jew collapsed then shorty struggled and died. He was a 40–45 years old, rather stout, 155–160 cm tall individual with blond Hitler style hair. He wore a gray sport’s jacket with knee trousers. Also, I executed

54 

A. PETŐ

the third Jew in a similar manner. He was about 175 cm tall, with black wavy hair split in the middle, rather skinny, 28–30 years old with a wipla tooth on the side. He wore dark clothes.46

This is the story of an actual “Arrow Cross woman” who was both a party member and a rampaging criminal.

3.6   Female Militarized Masculinity Lastly, there were rebellious, revolutionary women among the members of the Arrow Cross Party, most of them came from a middle class or upper middle-class background. The most frequently quoted book on becoming a female perpetrator is by Melita Maschmann from 1963. In this book she confesses to a former Jewish classmate how she, the wealthy German middle-­class girl turned into an enthusiastic activist of the Nazi women’s organization to rebel against the values of her parents. She admired the organization’s uniform and worked 14  hours daily for the “cause” (Maschmann 1963). Similarly, in the Ustasha movement there were several middle-class girls who perceived militarism and violence as their way of rebelling against their mother’s values and becoming independent (Yeomans 2005). Their Hungarian counterparts were, based on the people’s tribunals’ files, also educated young women who wore men’s clothes and were passionate horse riders.47 Among them was the middle class woman who, as the only daughter of an army officer father, enjoyed great liberties, still, she found even more space for her agency in the Arrow Cross movement, because there she could stand out as the woman who rode down the streets wearing an Arrow Cross uniform.48 The anti-modernist politics of the Arrow Cross opened beforehand unexplored venues for female self-realization. The identity of these cross-­ dresser and uniform-admirer women was based on rebellion. For example, the daughter who revolts against her father is a stock figure among the Arrow Cross women. Sarolta Petrák, whose sadism terrified even the most experienced participants of her trial, stated in front of the people’s tribunal: My excuse is my limitless admiration of Germans, that was so powerful that even my father’s behavior could not change or challenge it, though he, because of his anti-German sentiments asked for early retirement, and was entirely against the war and the Arrow Cross movement.49

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

55

The phenomenon of women who sported men’s clothing and acted ferociously, such as Mrs. Zámbori, who walked the streets wearing men’s trousers, tight brown tee-shirts and an Arrow Cross armband50 posit the question: what kind of agency was provided for women through the refusal of dress codes?51 By any means these women were much less prominently—if at all—present in the post-1945 discourses than the wives and lovers of party members or the criminals, because the latter much more seamlessly fitted into the new public discourse, which aimed to reinstate the pre-war patriarchal order.52

3.7   The “Relative Power” The paradox of far-right movements is the following: how to “construct” politically active women without challenging the patriarchal social order.53 To explain the high numbers of women in a movement such as the Arrow Cross, we should utilize the concept of relative power. Only men were visible in the Arrow Cross, but women can have power in situations in which they have no official power—exactly their declared powerlessness can be their source of power. In the Croix de feu, the organization of French First World War veterans founded to restore masculine values challenged by the war, women utilized their professional networks as well as their ties to the Catholic Church to construct their own political agenda (Passmore 1999). As mentioned before during the second wave of the Ku-Klux-Klan tens of thousands of women joined and achieved that the idealized image of the white, Protestant, supremacist man was of a man who does not beat his wife and does not drink (Blee 1991). If the dominant group is strong, the relatively weaker component still gets her share. Even if “masculinity” is connected to the “political” and “femininity” to the “social” women can take advantage of these seemingly unquestionable discursive dichotomies and use their relatively subordinate position as a springboard to becoming political agents (Passmore 1999). In the course of the people’s tribunals—which were sought with great vehemence by the Hungarian Communist Party, as part of the governing coalition—it was crucial to proclaim the responsibility of the previous political regime.54 With this they followed the example of the Soviet judicial system as a model (Prusin 2003). In Hungary the “Arrow Cross” label was used freely in public discourse and during the trials. Arrow Cross membership cards were only rarely found during house searches, and so, at the people’s tribunals, it was usually enough for a witness to state that

56 

A. PETŐ

he had seen the accused wearing an Arrow Cross armband. Further, in the chaos of the final months of the war, almost anyone had been able to obtain an Arrow Cross armband. Indeed, as the Red Army approached, there had been no need for—or even possibility of—official party membership or admission procedures. Therefore from 1945 on “Arrow Cross membership” was a political label rather than a real category, which on the one hand expanded the people’s tribunals’ space of political action, but on the other hand it reduced the category of perpetrators by excluding those who had no ties to the party. This is how perpetrators became invisible. In Hungary, resistance was insignificant, and collaboration with Nazi Germany was nationwide (Deák 2000). After 1945 all political powers were invested in criminalizing the Arrow Cross Party: it got depicted as the party of people from the margins, and it alone got blamed for all Second World War losses as if only they had collaborated with the Germans. The communists and the former political elite also supported each other in blaming everything on the Germans in order to hide the responsibility of Hungarian state administration and institutions.55 Therefore, the more Arrow Cross “members” got indicted, the better. Therefore, history made some groups invisible, and the aim of this book is to show the reasons behind this invisibility as well as to dissolve it. Archival Sources  Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára/ Historical Archive of State Security Services, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, Budapest Főváros Levéltára/Budapest City Archives.  Photos:  Handkerchief made by the women’s section of the Arrow Cross Party for Ferenc Szálasi. Photoarchive of the National Broadcasting Foundation / MTVA Archívum, FMAFI 1945-34036., Ferenc Szálasi at the women’s section of the Arrow Cross Party in Kosice. Štátny archív v Košiciach, Zbierka fotografií, 1873-2000, Number 0565.

Notes 1. MOL XIX-1-a. 18. d. XVIII. A., February 16, 1945. 2. MOL XIX-E-1-l Tat 4803/1945, February 25, 1945. 3. MOL XIX-1-a 18. d. XVIII. a., August 1, 1946 and Mrs. Dücső (BFL 893/1949. 10.) 4. More on this see Pető, Andrea. 2003. A Missing Piece? How Women in the Communist Nomeclature are not Remembering. East European Politics

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

57

and Society, 16: 948–958. and Pető, Andrea. 1998. Nőhistóriák. A politizáló magyar nők története (1945–1951). Budapest: Seneca. 5. More on this see Papp, Claudia. 2004. „Die Kraft der weiblichen Seele”. Feminismus in Ungarn, 1918–1941. Berlin: Lit Verlag. 6. The same method was used in Gottlieb, Julie V. 2004. Women and British Fascism Revisited. Gender, the Far-Right, and Resistance. Journal of Women’s History 16: 108–123. Gottlieb shows how the experiences gained during the First World War mobilized women for the English Fascist movement, and that women also joined the movement as a form of revolt and out of self-interest. 7. More on this see Pető Andrea. 2007. A „rossz asszonyok”. Eva Braun, Carla Petacci, Lutz Gizella. Rubicon, 8: 24–32. 8. For critical reception of the ‘wives’ see Gehmacher, Johanna. 2008. “I never loved Eva Braun”. Geschlechtspolitische Funktionen einer nachträglichen Ikone des Nationalsozialismus. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschafter, 19: 145–171. 9. The cult of the mother-son Oedipal relation was also present in the Ustasha movement, see Yeomans, Rory. 2005. Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae. 10. ÁBTL V 92849, 24. 11. A prominent member of the Hungarian far right, László Baky, became state secretary in the Ministry of the Interior after the Nazi occupation of Hungary in March 1944. He was one of the people directly responsible for the deportation of Hungarian Jews. He was tried and executed in 1946. 12. ÁBTL, V 88634, 5. 13. ÁBTL, V 85316. 14. ÁBTL V 88364. 10. 15. ÁBTL, V 102649. 16. Júlia Rajk (1914–1981), wife of the executed László Rajk (1909–1949), fiercely fought for the reburrial of her husband in 1956. László Rajk was a member of the Imre Nagy group, and supporter of opposition to the Kadar regime. See Andrea Pető, Geschlecht, Politik und Stalinismus in Ungarn. Eine Biographie von Júlia Rajk (Gender, Politics and Stalinism: A Biography of Júlia Rajk). Studien zur Geschichte Ungarns, Bd. 12. (Herne, Gabriele Schäfer Verlag, 2007). 17. The file of Meggyes Kálmánné, BFL 4819/194812, Szálasi’s November 16, 1945 hearing. 18. The file of Meggyes Kálmánné, BFL 4819/1948 48–49., January 11, 1943. 19. Thoma Józsefné Dr., BFL 11/1946 (324/1948, V 47834) 4. 20. Dücső Jánosné, BFL 893/1949 8. According to her March 30, 1945 testimony within the party Szálasi was called the “Dalai Lama” and “dummy” because he did not speak well and whenever he spoke out “it was all rubbish”. 21. Józsefné Dr., 11/1946 (324/1948, V 47834) 4.

58 

A. PETŐ

22. Thoma Józsefné Dr., 11/1946 (324/1948, V 47834) 5. 23. Thoma Józsefné Dr., 11/1946 (324/1948, V 47834) 8. 24. Thoma Józsefné Dr., 11/1946 (324/1948, V 47834) 33. This was most probably written following the advice of her lawyer. 25. Thoma Józsefné Dr., 11/1946 (324/1948, V 47834) 10. 26. ÁBTL, V 91169. 27. See more: Andrea Pető. 2008. “The Rhetoric of  Weaving and  Healing: Women’s Work in Interwar Hungary, a Failed Anti-Democratic Utopia”. In  Rhetorics of  Work, ed. Yannis Yannitsiotis, Dimitra Lampropoulou and Carla Salvaterra, 63–83. Pisa: University of Pisa Press. The quote is from the testimony of Erzsébet Madarász MD (Ms. Gönczi) at her people’s tribunal hearing. 28. Szarka, Eszter. 2005. Az Orvosnő (1938–1941). Manuscript. and Szarka, Eszter. 2005. Női szerepek és szakmai reprezentáció. Orvosnői identitások a két világháború közötti Magyarországon. Kút, 2: 115–138. 29. See more: Cselőtei, Nóra. 2000. Transformation in Body Politics in Interwar Hungary. MA thesis, Central European University. 30. More on this strategy of appropriation in Pető, Andrea. 2003. Napasszonyok és Holdkisasszonyok: A mai magyar konzervatív női politizálás alaktana. Budapest: Balassi. 31. There was a point in 1943 when they entertained the thought of employing Hungarian-Jewish medical doctors in Transylvania where the medical situation was dramatic especially after the mass emigration of Romanian doctors, but this proposal was rejected at the end. 32. BFL 416/45. p. 36. 33. BFL, 416/45, 34. 34. BFL 416/45. 35. BFL 416/45. p. 23. 36. Madarász MD Dr. Gönczi Aladárné testimony on June 17, 1945. BFL 416–45 p. 11. 37. ÁBTL V 102649. The case of Mária Hunyadi. On the prison as the space that shapes political subjectivity see Voglis, Polymeris. 2002. Becoming a Subject. Political Prisoners in the Greek Civil War. New  York, Oxford: Berghahn. 38. Thoma Józsefné: A hungarista nő hármas feladatköre. Manuscript. PIL, 685. f. 1/4. 12. 39. Thoma Józsefné: A hungarista nő hármas feladatköre. Manuscript. PIL, 685. f. 1/4. 12. 40. ÁBTL V 104 302. 6. 41. ÁBTL V 87614, 79–80. 42. ÁBTL V 102304. 36, László Gyuláné, member from 1941, from 1943 9th district section leader. 43. BFL 3102/1948., 17,252/1949. és 455/1957. 71. 44. ÁBTL V87614., pornographic description 10–16.

3  INVISIBLE POLITICAL ACTORS 

59

45. About this trial see Karsai Elek and Karsai László. 1998. A Szálasi-per. Budapest: Reform; and Karsai László. 2008. Reflektor a sötétbe. Szálasi Ferenc naplója 1943. szeptember 15.—1944. július 18. I–II. Beszélő, 3: 54–76. and 4: 60–79. 46. ÁBTL V88644 24–25. Testimony of Margit Mészáros. 47. Open Society Archives, Budapest, HU OSA 357, www.osa.ceu.hu. 48. Gabriella Békefi recalls the story of her former classmate. 1956 Institue. Thanks to Eszter Zsófia Tóth for the reference. 49. BFL 3102/1948., 17,252/1949., 455/1957. 71. 50. ÁBTL V 47832. 16. 51. BFL 21847/1949. 12. Such is the case of Andor Kozma and his companions who tortured Hungarian people considered army deserters in the presence of a woman, Kamilla Dévai, who “participated despite being a woman.” However, Dévai, because she was involved in the resistance, got a lighter sentence, and as a “remarkably beautiful woman” she was not sentenced to forced labor as the court considered that she “would not be able to endure such hardship.” Dévai was sentenced to three years of imprisonment. 52. On the dismantling of the “matriarchy born in need” see: Pető, Andrea. 2000. Hungarian Women in Politics 1945–1951. New  York: Columbia University Press. 53. About consumption as a form of agency de Grazia, Victoria. 2000. Nationalising Women. The Competition between Fascist and Commercial Cultural Models in Mussolini’s Italy. In The Sex of Things. Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, eds. Ellen Furlough, Victoria de Grazia, 337–358. Berkeley: University of California Press. 54. More on this see Pető, Andrea and Patricia Chiantera-Stutte. 2005. Populist Use of Memory and Constitutionalism. Two Comments. German Law Journal, 2: 165–175. (Special Issue on Confronting Memories: European “Bitter Experiences” and the Constitutionalisation Process.) 55. Similarly to the “Austria as the first victim” myth, see Botz, Gerhardt. 1987. Österreich und die NS Vergangenheit: Verdrängung, Pflichterfüllung, Geschichtsklitterung. In Ist der Nazionalsozialismus Geschichte?, ed. Dan Diner, 141–152. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag.

Bibliography Beszámoló a MONE Orvosnők évzáró üléséről [Report on the Annual Meting of Women’s Section of MONE]. 1942. MONE, pp. 85–86, August 1. Blee, Kathleen M. 1991. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deák, István. 2000. A Fatal Compromise? The Debate over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary. In The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath, ed. István Deák, Jan T.  Gross, and Tony Judt, 39–74. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

60 

A. PETŐ

Görtemaker, Heike B. 2010. Eva Braun. Leben mit Hitler. Berlin: Beck. Joyce, Patrick. 1987. The Historical Meanings of Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kandyoti, Deniz. 1988. Bargaining with Patriarchy. Gender and Society 2: 274–290. Kevin Passmore. 1999. “Planting the Tricolor in the Citadels of Communism”: Women’s Social Action in the Croix de feu and Parti social français. The Journal of Modern History 71 (4): 814–851. Kokas MD, Eszter. 1941. Az orvosnő [The Female Doctor]. Az orvosnő, January–December. ———. 1942. A nők szerepe Olaszország államépítő munkájában [Role of Women in Building Up the Italian State]. MONE, August 1. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Madarász MD, Erzsébet. 1935. Az orvosnő feladatai [Tasks of Female Doctors]. Magyar Női Szemle, January–February. Matthée, Zonneke, Pető, Andrea. 2008. A ‘kameraadskes’ és a „testvérnők”. Nők a holland és a magyar nemzeti szocialista mozgalomban: motiváció és akarat. (‘Kameraadskes’ and „fellow sisters”. Women in the Dutch and Hungarian National Socialisr Movement: Motivation and Agency) In Határtalan nők. Eds. Bakó, Boglárka and Tóth, Eszter Zsófia, 285–303. Budapest: Nyitott Könyvműhely. Maschmann, Melita. 1963. Account Rendered: A Dossier on my Former Self. Kindle edition 2018. MONE orvosnői csoportjának felhívása a keresztény orvosnőkhöz [The Manifesto of Women’s Section of MONE to Christian Female Doctors]. 1938. MONE, August–September. Papp, Barbara. 2004. A diplomás nők Magyarországon: A Magyar Női Szemle (1935–1941). PhD thesis, Eötvös Loránd University. Pető, Andrea. 2007. A “rossz asszonyok”: Eva Braun, Carla Petacci, Lutz Gizella. Rubicon 8: 24–32. Pető, Andrea, and Judit Szapor. 2004. Women and the Alternative Public Sphere: Toward a Redefinition of Women‘s Activism and the Separate Spheres in East Central Europe. NORA Nordic Journal of Women‘s Studies 3: 172–182. Prusin, Alexander Viktor. 2003. Fascist Criminals to the Gallows. The Holocaust and the Soviet War Crimes Trials December 1945–February 1946. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1: 1–30. Szöllösi-Janze, Margit. 1989. Die Pfeilkreuzler-Bewegung in Ungarn: Historischer Kontext, Entwicklung und Herrschaft. Münich: Oldenburg. Yeomans, Rory. 2005. Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae. The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945. The Slavonic and East European Review 83 (4): 685–732.

CHAPTER 4

Invisible Defendants

Abstract  The chapter shows how female perpetrators were invisibilized in the lustration process following the Second World War. The chapter argues that because of the gender politics of the courts, female perpetrator’s sentences were more lenient or more strict than those of male perpetrators who committed similar crimes. The chapter also examines the lawyers of the people’s tribunals, as they were instrumental in the processes on multiple levels. The chapter further argues that although the gender politics of the courts contributed to the “overpainting” of these women, their convictions remained unchanged, even though later some of them quite seamlessly integrated in the communist system in Hungary. Keywords  Legal professionals • Transitional justice • Gender politics of justice system “The Arrow Cross did not bother with women. Women were not partners for them. During the interrogations, I did not meet a single Arrow Cross woman. And you are saying this only now [that 10 per cent of Arrow Cross party members were women]? Why didn’t you tell me this thirty-five years ago, when I could have swooped down on them?”

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5_4

61

62 

A. PETŐ

These were the answers of a former officer of the ÁVH, the Hungarian secret police, during a 2007 interview in Budapest in which I asked him about the so-called “Arrow Cross women.” This officer had worked from 1949 until 1973 on investigating domestic reactionary forces, i.e. war criminals and Arrow Cross members. The quote well illustrates the measure of woman perpetrators’ invisibility during the political justice process after the Second World War. The war upset the hierarchy of social genders. Although the institutions of people’s tribunals were controlled by the Communist Party via the Ministry of Home Affairs and Justice, and the Communist Party in principal adopted gender equality, one of the people’s tribunals’ main aims was to restore the hierarchy of genders and reinstate the traditional order of values.1 In this respect there was no difference between countries occupied by the Red Army and those that were not: post-war European corrective justice univocally veered women back to traditional women’s spaces (Meyer 2004). The fabric of Hungarian society had been torn apart by the Second World War; there was no functioning social solidarity. There was no domestic armed resistance or partisan movement in Hungary during the war; and individual cases, i.e. the rescuers that have received wide publicity in recent years, could not obscure the fact that in 1944–1945 the Hungarian administrative state system and bureaucracy first morally fell then entirely collapsed. There was, indeed, no institution or organization that was ethically beyond reproach due to collaboration with Germany and which could therefore have operated as a cohesive force in the aftermath of the war. That was the institutional vacuum, which was expected to be filled with the newly established people’s tribunals. In the case of Hungary there was no public, spontaneous participation in the post– Second World War legal processes. Lynching, which was so poetically shown in Bernardo Bertolucci’s renowned movie Novecento (1976) or on the photos that Robert Capa made in France about the public shavings of collaborating women, was absent in Hungary as Hungary before its German occupation on March 19, 1944, was a loyal ally of the Nazi state. The people’s tribunals as legal institutions were expected to begin to “normalize” and construct social cohesion by determining the meanings of social interactions during the Second World War (Barna and Pető 2015). They comprised of the delegates of the five democratic parties, which were operational before and during the war, the Hungarian Communist Party being one of them. The court was a highly structured

4  INVISIBLE DEFENDANTS 

63

space for communicating about crimes and between the criminals, victims and witnesses. Language, or more precisely the legal language of the court, was the tool of mediation and expression of emotions. The people’s tribunal was also a space in which different political conflicts appeared: various parties struggled to define the meaning of the Holocaust and its consequences based on gender, but also based on class, as the victorious Communist Party used these trials to label the previous ruling elite as responsible for class bias. The manifestations of these conflicts in the courtroom determined interpretations of post–Second World War social life and continue to influence our understanding of the events even today (Pető 2008). As far as the structure of these courts are concerned the Hungarian people’s tribunals had a unique characteristic even in comparison to transitional justice of other countries under Soviet occupation. The decree on people’s tribunals, later the bill about setting up exceptional courts was drafted in Debrecen, at the headquarter of the Provisional Government, by lawyers who lived for decades in exile in the Soviet Union and who wanted to transfer the Soviet type of exceptional court system to Hungary. They did succeed with introducing new institutions of criminal justice to the totally discredited Hungarian legal system, but the institution of people’s tribunals, which existed between 1945 and 1949 and later was renewed after 1956, to oppress the 1956 revolution, has been a target of much legalistic and political criticism. Until the adoption of Act VIII of 1946 on “the protection of the democratic state and the criminal law of the republic” the aim of the people’s tribunals had been “to punish as soon as possible all those who had caused or participated in the historical disaster suffered by the Hungarian people” (preamble to PMDPJ). Act VIII of 1946, however, provided for the creation of special councils at the people’s tribunals, and these special councils “became increasingly a device for the Hungarian Communist Party to engage and suppress their political opponents” (Papp 2011: 38–39). After the war and at the very outset of the transition, the people’s tribunals failed to make a distinction between pre-war, wartime and post-war values. The function of the courts investigating war crimes in Europe and later in Japan was to define, in legal terms, what are war crimes, and to punish the offenders. In Hungary the courts were only half successful in this endeavor. Current assessments of the work of the people’s tribunals in Hungary are characterized by a duality: both legal and political arguments are used to explain the tribunals’ shortcomings.2 The legal arguments

64 

A. PETŐ

focus on the failure of these courts to operate “legally” as they were in fact political tribunals that, acting under international pressure, introduced retrospective justice. This meant that the people’s tribunals were operating outside Hungarian legal tradition. Meanwhile, the political arguments refer to the fact that the country was under Soviet occupation; they condemn the courts as promoters of the communist take-over for their excessive rigor, while also criticizing them for the lenient manner in which they handled minor Arrow Cross figures and war criminals that had not played a major “historical role.”

4.1   Gender Politics of Corrective Justice My quantitative research covered the documentation of 6260 cases heard by the people’s tribunals in Budapest, which is roughly ten per cent of the total number (Barna-Pető 2007). I relied on documents that have been preserved in the Budapest City Archives (BFL) and at the State Security Archives (ÁBTL), though both databases have logical deficiencies rendering them inaccurate. Even so, together they reveal who were prioritized by the national security organs as well as the “selected” women’s mode of participation in the Arrow Cross movement; why they were convicted, and what their sentences were. This research represented the first systematic inquiry into the operation of the people’s tribunals and its results contributed to a process of reassessment of the views of experts and the broader public on transitional justice and gendered aspects of extreme right political radicalism (Barna and Pető 2015). When analyzing the court trials, the traditional women’s history approach, i.e. counting how many women were there, leads to no results. The individuals delegated by the political parties to the people’s tribunals included just a small number of women who had been trained by the Communist Party while it was still an illegal organization (Pető 2003). Thus the criminals, witnesses and in many cases the victims too were women, but almost all judges and lawyers were men. During the people’s tribunals hearings of woman perpetrators the lawyers had a crucial position as they shaped the narratives their defendants presented. Based on the BFL and ÁBTL documents, the group of lawyers who worked at the people’s tribunal cases were a part of a technocratic network consisting of mostly middle-age or older legal professionals, who were not visible in public life, but cultivating professional networks. If we look behind the professional cover a surprising fact becomes apparent:

4  INVISIBLE DEFENDANTS 

65

only five percentages of these lawyers had any previous practice in criminal law. They started to work in the field of criminal law only after the Second World War when the previous generation of lawyers who were active in the field of criminal law got discredited because of their strong ties with the Horthy regime and the anti-Semitic MÜNE (Magyar Ügyvédek Nemzeti Egyesülete/National Association of Hungarian Lawyers). As the lustration process started, the fight for new clients also began. This was a new, expanding but risky market for the legal profession. In the people’s court cases a minimum fee was guaranteed for the lawyer by law, which meant a small but secure income. The Szabad Nép, the daily of the Hungarian Communist Party, did not leave uncommented the flourishing business of defending the war criminals. In April 1946, the newspaper declared under the heading “Greedy lawyers in the labyrinth of law” that there were three categories of lawyers: those who for the high fee win all possible cases independently of the crime, those who are hunting to get new clients3 and those who are misusing their legal practice to fight against democracy, meaning they were successfully saving war criminals from the legal procedures. I compared the list published in the journal with the list of lawyers I compiled from the lawyers of female war criminals. It is not an accident that from those “infamous” lawyers mentioned by Szabad Nép one was also on my list as a notorious protector of war criminals and two who were labeled by the communist journal as “the enemies of the democracy.” These attacks signal the importance of lawyers in post–Second World War society. Certainly they played a central role in negotiating what counted as a crime. Legal professionals are mediating between state and individuals; they serve as a transmission belt of norms and values as well as of disciplining power. This was especially true after 1945 when the discourse of normalization was a legal discourse since the people’s tribunals were expected to mark the end of an era and to start a “new” one. The reinstatement of gender hierarchy was crucial to this process and as it can be gathered from the trial data lawyers used the gender bias of the courts to their defendants’ advantage. Whereas in the case of men, indictments were fitted to individuals and paid lawyers offered the possibility of an escape from the rigors of the justice system, in the case of female perpetrators, the “femaleness” of the accused parties, as a defense category, held out the prospect of a more lenient sentence. At the trials, a much-repeated and rather successful argument was that the accused had been acting under the influence or pressure of others. In the case of accused women, this

66 

A. PETŐ

argument worked particularly well—especially when they had to answer for their crimes to male judges. As Kristen Campbell argued that “[t]he legal memory of the complainant is a gendered memory because of the structure of the trial process, the evidential model of memory, and her sexed subjectivity” (Campbell 2002: 174–175). In general more women than men testified in the people’s tribunals trials.4 Following the typology of Campbell, four types of memories are present in the court: the testimonial memories of the witnesses; the prosecutor’s model of memory in the paradigm of truth and error; the defense concept of mentality; and the judge’s memories evaluating the court material as evidence (2002: 165). Each of them understands memory in a different way, and this, in turn, influences how the emotions in the courtroom are shaped. Applying Campbell’s analysis to the people’s court trials, we can argue that the built-in discrepancies in meaning construction caused the most dissatisfaction with the activity of the court among the various parties involved. Essentially all parties returned home with a belief that they were “right.” In the case of the people’s tribunals the legitimacy of the procedure was also questionable. Prosecutors are expected to check the relationship between an event and the recollection of the event. I found no cases in which the perpetrators or the witnesses changed their testimonies after being cross-examined by the prosecutor, which suggests that the prosecutors were “professionally”—and politically—convinced that the accused was guilty. Especially during the initial trials in 1945 the tribunal did not assess the accuracy of the facts presented by the witnesses nor the legal framework in which these acts were judged. Therefore the defendants and their lawyers tended to apply “a cognitivist, empirical epistemology” (Jackson and Doran 1996 quoted in Campbell 2002: 168), and this enabled them to successfully challenge the verdicts, particularly in the low-­ profile cases. While the performance of “femininity” led to a more lenient sentence, the court was especially tough with women who performed their crimes in uniforms. Women perpetrators in uniforms and women’s active participation in a populist party were both new phenomena in Hungary. At the court trials these women perpetrators were presented as “emotional” persons who defied expectations and did not behave in a “feminine” way (Osiel 1997). As a witness said during the trial of a woman who was convicted because of her alleged membership in the Arrow Cross Party: “My husband noted how ugly it is for a woman to be politically active—a

4  INVISIBLE DEFENDANTS 

67

member of a party who wears its symbol.”5 This quote referred to the metaphorical ugliness of politically engaged women (Pető 2009), that is perpetrators had become “men” and thus were not “pretty.” Those women, who admitted to a political role, knew that they were confronting official expectations, and that this would have its consequence: a more serious conviction. One of the most prominent trials was the case of Piroska Dely, which ended with her execution on March 23, 1946 (Pető 2020). An armed group committed a massacre during the night of October 15, 1944, in an apartment building looted by the Arrow Cross and SS troops; 18 tenants were murdered in their own apartments. The group was allegedly led by a woman, Piroska Dely, who after a high-profile people’s court case was sentenced to death in the late spring of 1945. Very few women were sentenced to death as war criminals in Hungary, and Dely’s case was among the first ones. That is why Piroska Dely tried to deploy some “feminine” tactics during the hearings, as a court investigator put it, “her hearing was particularly difficult as she kept on fainting and getting heart attacks.”6 Piroska Dely’s sentence well illustrates the gendered perspective of the people’s tribunal: [S]he was in an intimate relationship with a soldier of the occupying alien forces, lived separated from her husband, despite being a nurse and a mother she performed the most brutal deeds. […] [H]er character, her world view and her thus far life presents a person who cannot be expected to become a useful member of the democratic people’s society.7

Another good example for the gendered dynamics of the people’s tribunals is the case of Erzsébet Rátz, one of the very few Hungarian far-right political journalists before the Second World War.

4.2   Doubled Invisibility: The Case of Erzsébet Rátz The narrative framing of Erzsébet Rátz changed dramatically during her lifetime, first in the aftermath of the war and later after the fall of communism. As a student of archeology in Italy during the Second World War, Rátz penned the most enthusiastic letters home praising Italian fascist achievements. Her father, Jenő Rátz, the deputy prime minister of the Quisling Sztójay government, subsequently published these in the national

68 

A. PETŐ

socialist newspapers Egyedül vagyunk (We are alone) and Magyarság (Hungarians). After the liberation of Hungary by the Red Army, Erzsébet Rátz was condemned as a “fascist journalist” and sentenced to eight years imprisonment, confiscation of all her assets and ten years deprivation of civilian rights—an exceptionally harsh sentence in 1946. According to the indictment: Upon finishing her studies the accused person was driven by her female vanity to enter the journalist profession. If she wanted to be useful she could have worked in her home or participate in social work or find any other useful activity. However she wanted to become an intellectual woman […] [moreover] she chose political journalism, a field very unusual for women.8

This indictment, though put together in the supposedly democratic second Hungarian Republic, exhibits no empathy with women’s emancipation. By the indictment the reason that took Erzsébet Rátz towards “a field very unusual for women,” i.e. political journalism, is that she got acquainted with far-right views in the surrounding of her father and these far-right people “perceived her as the right subject to further their propaganda.” Therefore according to the indictment the woman who is active in the public sphere acts as a puppet controlled by men who fill her head with their ideas. Nevertheless, Erzsébet Rátz’s story could be an exemplary one: there was a far-right journalist woman who spread hate and shaped the language of hate but the communist people’s tribunal taught her a lesson. This is what happened at a superficial glance. We should also take into consideration, however, that her sentence was way more grave than what her male counterparts received for similar deeds. Besides her political activity, Rátz was also punished for engaging in such an “unwomanly” activity as political journalism; since Rátz, as a woman, was unfit “for the huge responsibility which is a part of political journalism.”9 Still, the gender bias of the people’s tribunal later worked to her advantage when she successfully petitioned for her rehabilitation in 1994. In her request for revision Rátz argued that as a woman journalist she could only repeat and re-edit what others had already said, none of what she wrote was her own opinion, because as a woman she could not possibly have an “opinion of her own.” She therefore concluded that her trial in 1946 was a show trial.10

4  INVISIBLE DEFENDANTS 

69

On January 16, 1995, the Supreme Court of Hungary acquitted Erzsébet Rátz of the allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The case was already analyzed from the point of view of “creative quoting,” i.e. the way Rátz’s lawyer when preparing the request for revision in 1994 only quoted those sentences from Erzsébet Rátz’s extensive journalistic oeuvre that fit the narrative about the “puppet” (Kende 2007). Here I would like to draw attention to another part of Erzsébet Rátz’s request for revision: “[W]ar criminal is a person who performed significant intellectual work in service of war propaganda. [Writing] simple descriptions of events or organizing some written material cannot be considered high level [intellectual work].”11 The argument is that since Rátz was a woman she could only “organize” what others wrote which is of course not proper intellectual labor therefore it is not punishable. The request goes on as follows: “These writings were conceived when Hungary was in war with the Soviet Union as well as with Britain and the United States. It is only natural, and cannot be legally penalized in light of later changes, if a citizen wishes for the victory of her own country.” Of course whatever “her own country” meant during the Second World War was not examined by the judges of post-1989 Hungary. The Communist Party controlled people’s tribunal thus defined those norms and values that a woman should follow in public; it declared that she can be only active in the social field. Their expectations are clearly not very different from the expectations of the Horthy era or the Arrow Cross Party—and Erzsébet Rátz defied these expectations. In 1946 her main sin was that she wanted to have a profession, and for that political journalism that is according to the indictment “a field very unusual for women.” As opposed to that, the 1994–1995 revision process’ argument was that Erzsébet Rátz as a woman was incapable of autonomous intellectual achievements therefore she could not have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. The people’s tribunal as well as the rehabilitation process after 1989 served as corrective forces to restore gender hierarchy. After the Second World War she was punished as a politically active woman, as a Nazi, and as a “class enemy,” and after the collapse of communism, she was celebrated as a “passive” woman who was a victim of communism (Pető 2007). What did not change was that the committed journalist woman became invisible both times. The gender-based analysis of the court documents contributes to a better understanding of the complex legacy of the people’s tribunals and the

70 

A. PETŐ

effect of this legacy on contemporary Hungarian society. It may also help us to understand why a former officer and interrogator of the State Protection Authority cannot recall a single “Arrow Cross woman.” Archival Sources  Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára/ Historical Archive of State Security Services, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, Budapest Főváros Levéltára/Budapest City Archives, Vajdasági Múzeum/Museum of Vojvodina (Serbia).

Notes 1. An interesting phenomenon of the era—that greatly contributed to the reinstatement of gender hierarchy—was the Egy nyilas nő naplója, the fictive diary of an Arrow Cross woman published by Sándor Szerdai. The text depicts the life of Arrow Cross government members living in exile in Germany through an Arrow Cross member woman’s “honest, pure, naïve” eyes. Haladás: May 15, May 22, May 29, June 5, June 12, 1947. Thanks for Clara Royer for the reference. 2. For the operation of the People’s Tribunals, see Lukács, Tibor. 1979. A magyar népbírósági jog és a népbíróságok. 1945–1950 [Hungarian people’s tribunal law and the people’s tribunals, 1945–1950] Budapest: Zrinyi, KJK; Karsai, László. 2000. The People’s Court and Revolutionary Justice in Hungary, 1945–1946 In The Politics of Retribution in Europe. World War II and its Aftermath, eds. István Deak, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt, 33–52. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Pető, Andrea. 2007. Problems of Transitional Justice in Hungary: An Analysis of the People’s Tribunals in Post-War Hungary and the Treatment of Female Perpetrators. Zeitgeschichte 34: 335–349. 3. Szabad Nép April 21, 1946. 4. More on this: Pető, Andrea. 2020 (forthcoming). Historicizing Hate. Testimonies and Photos about the Holocaust Trauma during the Hungarian post-WWII Trials. In Evidence and Testimony, ed. Naci Adler, Selma Leydesdorff. Transactions Publisher. 5. ÁBTL V-55 964: 10. 6. BFL 17654/1949. 15. February 13, 1945. 7. MOL XIX-E-1-l-tonk-2000-1946. 6–7. 8. BFL 23121/49. 55. According to the census data in 1900 there were nine, in 1920 there were 27, in 1930 there were 57 women journalists in

4  INVISIBLE DEFENDANTS 

71

Hungary. In 1942 there were 71 women working at the press section. Thanks to Balázs Sipos for the data. 9. Indictment submitted to the people’s tribunal in Budapest in the case of Erzsébet Rátz, June 15, 1946. Document 23,121/49: 55, people’s tribunals’ documents, collection XXV. 1. a. 10. Rátz requests the revision of her previous sentence, June 24, 1994. Document 23,121/49: 7, Collection XXV. 1. a., BFL. 11. BFL 23121/49. 7.

Bibliography Barna, Ildikó, and Andrea Pető. 2007. A “csúnya asszonyok”. Kik voltak a női háborús bűnösök Magyarországon?. Élet és irodalom, October 26. ———. 2015. Political Justice in Budapest after World War II. Budapest, New York: CEU Press. Campbell, Kristen. 2002. Legal Memories: Sexual Assault, Memory, and International Humanitarian Law. Signs 28: 1. Jackson, John, and Sean Doran. 1996. „Evidence.” In A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, ed. Dennis Patterson, 172–83. Oxford: Blackwell. Kende, Péter. 2007. Védtelen igazság. Röpirat a bíróságról és ítéletekről. Budapest: Hibiszkusz. Meyer, Kathrin. 2004. Entnazifizierung von Frauen: Die Intiernungslager der US Zone, 1945–1952. Berlin: Metropol. Osiel, Mark. 1997. Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and The Law. New Brunswick, London: Transaction. Papp, Attila. 2011. Néptörvényszék, népbíróság és népbírósági jog Magyarországon. Etudomány 9 (4): 1–141. Pető, Andrea. 2003. A Missing Piece? How Women in the Communist Nomenclature are not Remembering. East European Politics and Society 3: 948–958. ———. 2007. Problems of Transitional Justice in Hungary: An Analysis of the People’s Tribunals in Post-War Hungary and the Treatment of Female Perpetrators. Zeitgeschichte 34: 335–349. ———. 2008. Gendered Memory of Military Violence in Eastern Europe in the 20th century. In The Gender of Memory: Cultures of Remembrance in Nineteenthand Twentieth- Century Europe, ed. Sylvia Palatschek and Sylvia Schraut, 237–253. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag. ———. 2009. Who is Afraid of the “Ugly Women”? Problems of Writing Biographies of Nazi and Fascist Women in Countries of the Former Soviet Block. Journal of Women’s History 4: 147–151. ———. 2020. The Forgotten Massacre in Budapest in 1944. Berlin: DeGruyters (forthcoming).

CHAPTER 5

Invisibility on Photographs

Abstract  The fifth chapter discusses why no visual representation of women perpetrators exists. Though Hungarian state archives hold a plethora of films, newsreels, and press photos made during and after the Second World War, there are hardly any visual traces of far-right women. The existing pictures are of bureaucrats, wives of politicians, and sometimes of uniformed women who were obviously photographed for propaganda purposes. During the people’s court processes seven Hungarian women were sentenced to death for war crimes, still, in the archives there is only one picture of an anonymous woman’s execution. The chapter analyzes the symbolic goals of the efforts, which aimed at the erasure of the visual traces of female perpetrators, and their more than symbolic consequences. Keywords  Photography • Visual representation • Erasure of traces

Republished with permission. Original publication: Pető, Andrea. 2016. Forgotten Perpetrators: Photographs of Female Perpetrators after WWII. In Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories. Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence, eds. Ayşe Gül Altınay and Andrea Pető, 203–219. London: Routledge. © The Author(s) 2020 A. Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5_5

73

74 

A. PETŐ

In January 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received a donation of a photograph album with the inscription “Auschwitz 21.6.1944” consisting of Karl Höcker’s photographs of his service years in Auschwitz. In Höcker’s Auschwitz album there are no photographs of prisoners, unlike in the parallel Auschwitz Album donated by Lili Jacob in 1983 to Yad Vashem, which aimed to demonstrate the process of how inmates were handled there. The photographs of the Höcker Album showed the female guards of Auschwitz enjoying themselves while on leave from duty. This series of photographs stimulated a new debate around how under-theorized the research on female perpetrators is (Busch et al. 2016; Bruttmann et al. 2019). The surprise and uneasiness around the Höcker album was caused by the fact that the presence of women among the camp guards is one of the rarely discussed elements in historiography, and if discussed, then the women were framed as beasts, not as normal, diligent, reliable workers who love to have fun when off duty. This discussion spots a void in literature on political violence, namely, on female perpetrators.1 Recent research is trying to map the participation of women in every level of the Nazi state, not only concentration camp guards and wives (Harvey 2005). The representational deficit, namely, that no woman is a part of the visual canon of the Nazi Germany but the “beasts” and the wives (“Women of the Nazis”), has political consequences. This chapter analyzes this representational deficit in an even more complex setting: post–Second World War Hungary, which is yet to face the complicity and active participation of the Hungarian state in the killing of its citizens. This deficit is even timelier to investigate as Hungarian public life was shaken during the 2010 parliamentary election when 17 percent of the popular vote was won by a far-right party that shows continuity—in terms of symbology and rhetoric—with the Arrow Cross Party, a party in part responsible for Hungary’s defeat in the Second World War and for the death of half a million of the country’s Jewish citizens. The period that began with the political changes of 1989 and culminated in the victory of the right wing in the 2010 election has seen a gradual questioning of earlier anti-fascist historical interpretations and the incipient rehabilitation of the pre–Second World War era. The collapse of communism reopened the public debate on antifascism; therefore history in Eastern Europe, a region occupied by the Red Army in 1945, has become an unfinished history. This chapter analyzes how this past—divided and unfinished in terms of the role of the perpetrators—is shaped by and in return shapes the visual representation.

5  INVISIBILITY ON PHOTOGRAPHS 

75

5.1   Absent Women: The Reasons for the Representational Deficit Although photography and film were already well established in Hungary by the outbreak of the Second World War, very few photographs of extremist right-wing women engaged in political activity during the war are to be found in the accessible public collections. Why are such pictures missing from the public collections and from newspaper reports on the political justice process after the Second World War? Why was there a failure to document female war criminals in a country in which, only a few years earlier 10 to 30 percent of Hungarian women had given their support to the Arrow Cross Party?2 Why are women, who constituted 10 percent of war criminals sentenced in the aftermath of the war, absent from the photographs? Why were the executed women erased from historical memory, even though Hungary—among all the countries formerly allied with Germany—carried out the highest number of female executions following the people’s tribunal trials?3 Even where photos of the women do exist, they tend to be hidden away in uncatalogued archive boxes or inaccessible private collections. How did these photographs become forgotten pictures (Pető 2009a)? What is the relationship between the failure to remember and Hungary’s divided memory of the Second World War, and how is this relationship shaped by gender (Pető and Schrijvers 2009)? How has this situation been altered by the Internet and the publication of these formerly “forgotten” pictures by today’s far-right websites? There are several reasons for the representational deficit in collective memory as far as female perpetrators are concerned (Pető 2007). One reason—as has been shown in various works on the political role of far-right women—is the general invisibility of women in the right-wing extremist movements: a manifestation of this was that women’s activities in political life were rarely photographed. Women were typically marginalized in politics, and in this respect the extremist right-wing political parties were no exception. Examining the photos that have been found, we see only secretaries or shorthand recorders.4 They are interestingly entirely missing from people’s tribunal documentation though they were the equivalents of German “desk perpetrators.” Yet there were, in the Arrow Cross Party, several charismatic female leaders, of whom there are no surviving photographs. Many women worked in the extremist right wing parties both in

76 

A. PETŐ

peacetime and during the war; as in other party apparatuses they tended to be employed in administrative positions.5 The formality of party life is manifest in the group photo taken at the time of a visit to Kassa (today Kosice, Slovakia) by Ferenc Szálasi, the Arrow Cross leader. The photograph of members of the Arrow Cross women’s organization celebrating St. Francis Day follows the classic iconography of young women celebrating an elderly, respectable mother figure.6 The Arrow Cross Party seized power in Hungary on October 15, 1944, following Horthy’s unsuccessful attempt to exit the war. At the time the Red Army had already reached the country’s eastern borders. Arrow Cross rule was brutal and short-lived, lasting barely six months. If we look at a photo taken during an Arrow Cross congress at the House of Loyalty, i.e. the party’s headquarters, we find—among the many men—Mrs. Thoma and Mrs. Dücső, two rival Arrow Cross female leaders, who are seated far apart.7 This is the only surviving photograph of the two women (Photo 5.1). The uniformed women serve as illustrations in the life of the extremist right-wing party, and the attractiveness and photogenic appearance also plays a role in selecting female activists for public meetings.8 Of course, wives are also present in the photographs; they embody the middle-class ideal and are portrayed as loyal supporters of their husbands, who hold important positions in the party. An example is the wife of Kálmán Hubay, who was leader of the Arrow Cross Party during Szálasi’s prison years and who became Minister of Culture under Arrow Cross rule.9 The second reason for why few photos have survived is that the 1940s was the era of iconoclasm. Although I examined many hundreds of files created by the people’s tribunals, I found not a single photograph: photographs were not used as evidence. A crucial scene in Costa-Gavras’s film Music Box is when the music box starts to produce self-documentary images of the atrocities perpetrated by the Arrow Cross in Budapest. I found no such pictures in the people’s tribunal files or in museum collections. This raises questions about the relationship between the tribunal and photographs as evidence. The surviving photographs do not document the criminal acts as such, but instead they document the justice process. This supports the hypothesis that the people’s tribunals played a key role in establishing the public remembrance of the war (Pető 2012). Even where a person did take a picture of an atrocity, he or she would normally destroy it—out of fear of being held responsible. Thus, the most

5  INVISIBILITY ON PHOTOGRAPHS 

77

Photo 5.1  Meeting in the House of Loyalty. Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, no. 1511–1954

important attribute of a photograph, its evidential power stemming from synchronicity, was lost. The Hungarian Museum of Photography in Kecskemét has collected private photographs from this period. It was at the Museum that I discovered a private photo of a woman in military clothing posing in her garden, which shows that women too were attracted to and affected by the power (and security) of a uniform. The picture was not taken for a wider public, and it is only now that it has entered the public domain.10 But as in the case of the other pictures, we do not know who took them. The third reason for the scarcity of photos is the dominant anti-fascist discourse of the post-1945 period, which left no space for them, thus making it impossible to share memories or to illustrate them. It is no accident that the photos analyzed here have come from private collections and are now being used to document “history” as interpreted by the far-right website Suttogó [Whisperer]. The website’s name reflects its founders’

78 

A. PETŐ

perception that “true” knowledge can only be whispered—as the dominant anti-fascist discourse silences “true patriots.” The photos that we have analyzed establish a special social time, for these pictures were not part of the public discourse and were “overseen” during the post–Second World War period. The significance of the content of the photographs changes continuously, for it was only after 1989 and the advent of the Internet that Suttogó, the far-right website, made what had been family photos accessible to the public. By now this website due to the anti-hate speech legislation is only available in the dark web.

5.2   Women in Photographs: The Justice System in Operation The other half of the excavated photographic sources relate to the participation of women in the people’s tribunals. The portrait of Gizella Lutz, the wife of Szálasi, was made at Andrássy Street no. 60, at the Headquarter of the Department of State Protection. The powerful head of this department, Gábor Péter, made great efforts to ensure that the interrogation of war criminals was documented. Thus, sources pertaining to this process are abundant.11 It was here, at the Department of State Protection or secret police headquarters, that during his interrogation Szálasi showed to the camera an Arrow Cross handkerchief that had been embroidered by members of the Arrow Cross women’s movement. The handkerchief illustrates the contradictory relationship of the Arrow Cross women’s movement to female work; as I demonstrated previously, embroidery was of no interest to most of the Arrow Cross’s female members.12 Many photos of the people’s tribunal trials have survived, and a significant number of these were taken by private individuals. Based on the documentation photos made during the trials, many women attended the trials.13 Many men were still being held as prisoners-of-war, while others were working. The documentation of crimes by means of official photographs helped the people’s courts to reach their goal of “searing” into citizens’ consciousness what is good. For this reason, the Hungarian daily newspapers and newsreels carried an abundance of pictures of war criminals under prosecution, all of whom were male. A photograph of the exhumation of a site in Maros Street is the only one to show a woman: apparently, she had taken an active part in the murder of patients at the Jewish hospital (Photo 5.2).

5  INVISIBILITY ON PHOTOGRAPHS 

79

Photo 5.2  Perpetrators of the Maros Street massacre (Budapest). Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, no. 2916

As far as our research is concerned, the most interesting collection is held by the Police History Museum in Budapest. Not only do we receive a glimpse of the hot and stuffy atmosphere of the people’s tribunal trials, but also we get closer to the women perpetrators, for they receive “faces.”14 The collection consists of photographs commissioned by the police to document the process of the trials. Here we return to the traditional documentary function of the photograph to document what has happened. The women brought before the people’s tribunal, whose trials were held in the university auditorium or who awaited their fate while sat on the narrow benches of the accused, were “unrecognized social actors” until the discovery of the photos. We do not know who took the photos: the crime reporter, a family member of one of the victims or someone else. Evidently, however, the photographs found their way into the collection of the Police History Museum, and in this way these private photos became community photos, serving as illustrations of the discourse on female war criminals.

80 

A. PETŐ

The most important picture as far as this chapter is concerned was found in the photographic archives of the Hungarian National Museum among photographs relating to the people’s court; it is entitled Manci.15 If we manage to overcome our surprise that in recent decades not one researcher bothered to change this sexist title—for to my knowledge none of the executed female war criminals was called Margit (and Manci is a nickname for Margit)—we can then analyze the picture as a metonymy. The picture does not mean what it was in the past, but what it remains even today—a part of our everyday lives. In this way we close the gap between then and now. If we interpret the picture in this manner, the photograph receives a presence rather than a meaning. Its presence in the collection in a non-catalogued and marginalized way is the historical fact not the meaning which is difficult to attribute as basic information is missing. Although seven women were executed as war criminals in Hungary, we have only a single photograph of a female execution. The photo seems to show one of the seven women. We may think we know which one, but it is not the name but the absence of a name that must be the subject of research (Photo 5.3). It is disturbing to look at this picture (Pető 2009a). Thus, it is important to bear in mind Janet Liebman’s methodological consideration, which she referred to as “double vision” (2004). Liebman argues that when viewing photos of an execution, the researcher is both a witness of the event and a historian collecting qualitative material. The other methodological challenge is that if we know that history is written by the victors, then we may also suppose that the victors are those who were also using photography as a tool of dominating narratives about the events. At the same time, this picture had been hidden in the “miscellaneous” box of the National Museum until I found it and decided to publish it. We must ask ourselves what will be the impact of publishing this picture: Will it help to make truth part of consciousness by showing how those women that reported on Jews or stole Jewish property were subsequently punished as this has been the major crime which brought women to justice? Concerning the analysis of visual sources, Perlmutter established the criteria on which basis such sources are established, accepted and interpreted (Perlmutter 1994). The function of a photograph is to present an event, and in doing so it shapes popular memory (Sontag 1993). A great many official and private photographs were taken of war criminals, but only one of them— an undated photo—shows the execution of a woman. Looking at old photographs is a part of the “processing” (Verarbeitung) of the past, and so

5  INVISIBILITY ON PHOTOGRAPHS 

81

Photo 5.3  The execution of Manci. (Yad Vashem Photo Archive, no. 144BO8)

82 

A. PETŐ

the fact that the photo of “Manci” has remained invisible until now is important. According to Barthes, a photograph has no meaning of itself, and it is only in dialogue with other sources that a meaning emerges (Barthes 2002). For this reason, we need to determine why the female perpetrators were forgotten. Were they forgotten because of the lack of a dialogue or because of the lack of a framework for such a dialogue? We may also analyze the picture from an iconographic standpoint. The photographer was facing the woman; as she awaited her execution on the gallows, an executed corpse covered in a sheet lay alongside her. We see no other onlooker, which is unusual, as executions were generally attended by large numbers of people. The aim or task of the photograph’s maker was apparently to document the carrying-out of the sentence. Foucault linked the notions of gaze and power, for disciplinary power also operates using visual means. A public execution is a means of this. At the same time, “visual truth” does not always accord with the truth of the justice system, for in the picture we see a fragile woman in clean but modest clothing: she seems almost to be preparing for martyrdom. The various cultures of memory clash when it comes to interpreting the picture. Visual memory of the execution of war criminals in Hungary has portrayed them as martyrs, and the execution of “Manci” is no exception (Pető 2009b). This was not so in the case of the photographs depicting the men executed at Nuremberg. The iconography used in Hungary, however, undermines the anti-fascist discourse in which the executions took place. As early as 1764, Cesare Beccaria argued that execution is the state’s weapon against uncooperative individuals. But if pictures of an executed person evoke feelings of sympathy and sorrow in viewers, then the execution has not fulfilled the disciplinary function anticipated by the state. On seeing the photo, many people will wonder why the woman’s cardigan was the main concern of the man supervising the execution, given that the woman would be dead within minutes. It is this humane gesture that renders “Manci” first and foremost a victim, whereby the crimes she committed were left to fade into oblivion. Not only is the female war criminal forgotten, but also the crime she has committed; in this way the true victims become invisible in history. For researchers of this period, sites and modes of silencing are becoming historical facts themselves, which should be analyzed while explaining the ways gendered memory of the Second World War has been constructed. It was the “new cultural history” school that in its methodology turned away from the idea of visual sources of history as the documentation of

5  INVISIBILITY ON PHOTOGRAPHS 

83

reality and which focused instead on representation (Burke 2001; Zemon Davis 2000). Photographs may be analyzed not only as descriptive means for the documentation of historical truth but also as a visual discourse that tells the story of the visual representation of right-wing extremist women. The photographs are determined by absence: there are no pictures, or if there are some, we do not know who took them and what they depict. Based on Carol Zemel’s theoretical approach, the photos are emblems of the past (Zemel 2003). Unknown, forgotten and absent photos belong just as much to the documentary function of photographs as to the emblematic function. Why did the producers of the photographs choose this kind of representational form, if their goal was to preserve the subject of the photograph for collective memory? The question of what and who are chosen to be photographed receives a political relevance as this is a process of building up an archive of the past for future generation to read and interpret. The photograph is mediating the past to us; therefore, the framing of the photo and the accessibility of the photo are crucial issues. The photographs published here were intended to be forgotten; no one thought that—by means of this chapter too—they would become iconic pictures.

5.3   Photographs of the Perpetrators Historians have at their disposal not only written sources, but also—from the mid-twentieth century onwards—visual sources, the analysis of which requires a special methodology. According to Manovich, the distinct borders between production and consumption have been blurred by the new media (Manovich 2001). This means that those who took the photograph of Szálasi’s visit to Kassa (Kosice) and preserved it for decades under difficult circumstances in a private collection in communist Czechoslovakia or those who published—15  years after the collapse of communism—a group photograph of smiling Arrow Cross party workers, not only produced a picture but also contributed to the creation of a new knowledge and a new memory. Therefore, the increasing number of far-right websites is so crucial to the memory “boom” after 1989, for they opened, to a wider audience, locations of memory that had previously been closed or private. Their aim was to emancipate their own history, to make it possible to tell and represent their history—which had not been an option before. A photograph also signifies a memory space in which counter-­memories can be formed, for photographs represent a repeated act of socialization:

84 

A. PETŐ

we are likely to look at a photograph more than once. As time passes, the memories associated with a photograph will change, but the location and occasion of remembrance will be the viewing of the picture. This is possible in various visual narrative modes, whereby opportunities arise for injustices to be exposed from the perspective of the subjective historical actor. Photographs have no meaning in themselves, but they acquire meaning within the narrative of the interpretative framework (Pető 2009c). In 1945 and after 1989, similar changes occurred in the narrative frame; a space was created for the reinterpretation of the lives and deeds of those accused by the people’s tribunals. The spaces communicate with each other, for when previously “unknown”—i.e. unpublished—photographs of Arrow Cross members or supporters were published, they immediately found their way to the far-right “Hungarista” website. This is why I stress the need for a reverse process, whereby photos of the far-right movement that have been lurking in private collections and whose owners have uploaded them to the Suttogó website should find their place in the mainstream of historical criticism, thereby establishing a much-needed dialogue on our evaluation of the past. When analyzing photographs, we should take four criteria into consideration: the material of the photo, its selection, provisionality and authenticity (Pető and Schrijvers 2006). Concerning the material of the photographs: the pictures showing the “Arrow Cross women” are preserved as prints in the museums. In the collection of the Hungarian News Agency (MTI), the negatives—the originals—are also present, as the photographs are stills captured from newsreels or the roll of film came directly from the photographer. Aware of historical trends, Life magazine hired a photographer to produce pictures of emerging right-wing extremist politicians in the interwar period and then, for a substantial sum, had the negatives enlarged. The first group of photographs published here were stored in an unsystematic miscellaneous box for decades, and they had never been cataloged. Photographs documenting the people’s tribunals are somewhat more ordered and were correctly labeled “miscellaneous photographs of the people’s tribunals.” I have already referred to the selection aspects (what factors determine whether a picture will be forgotten or become iconic). But a further aspect must also be noted, namely the issue of their mass availability. The photographs became widely available when they were published by such press outlets as Life magazine, whose archive is now managed by Getty Images. When the photographs belonging to Getty Images became researchable

5  INVISIBILITY ON PHOTOGRAPHS 

85

online, the material relating to the Hungarista movement immediately appeared on the Suttogó [Whisperer] website, thereby creating a cycle in which the representations “return” to the representational milieu. A special feature of this cycle is that the period between its two extremes is the era of both the Second World War and the Cold War, as well as the transition following the collapse of communism. Yet the pictures are uploaded to the site without any critical reflection; it is as if 70  years had never even passed. The provisionality of a photograph has two dimensions: the survival of the photo and its internal provisionality. Photographs transform reality into something memorable. As soon as the exposure button on a camera is pressed, the present becomes the past, a “frozen memory” and a privileged representation. Thereafter the object of the photographs is lost; it is only present in the form of a memory. This past is an unfinished past, which creates parallel pasts in viewers. A regular visitor to the Suttogó website and a historian will look differently at a picture. For both the process of canonization is underway, even if the interpretation occurs along opposing value axes. The question concerns the monopoly of interpretation: who has the right to say what we (should) see in the photo. Thus, returning to the main question, that of the divided memory of the war, we can state that the interpretation of photographs has also contributed to the development of a divided memory. An important part of Second World War history—female perpetrators—became invisible in collective memory, owing to the absence of visual representation. However, the special features of the photographic genre mean that it also offers an opportunity to go beyond this division. Archival Sources MTI Fotótára/Photoarchive of the Hungarian News Agency, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtára/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, Rendőrmúzeum/ Museum of the Police, Magyar Fotográfiai Múzeum/Museum of Hungarian Photography.  Photos:  Meeting in the House of Faith. Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department / Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár, 1511–1954., Perpetrators of the Maros utca massacre (Budapest). Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department / Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár 2916., The execution of Manci. Yad Vashem Photo Archive 144BO8. 

86 

A. PETŐ

Notes 1. Anette Kretzer. 2009. NS-Täterschaft und Geschlecht. Der erste britische Ravensbrück-Prozess 1946/47  in Hamburg. Berlin: Metropol Verlag. Claudia Taake. 1998. Angeklagt. SS-Frauen vor Gericht. Oldenburg: Universität Oldenburg. Gudrun Schwarz. 1992. Verdrängte Täterinnen. Frauen im Apparat der SS (1939–1945). In: Nach Osten. Verdeckte Spuren nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen, ed. Theresa Wobbe, 197–227. Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik. 2. The wide range is due to two factors: regional differences (in some areas the membership is 30%, in some it is closer to 10%) and uncertainty in numbers as membership files have not been made available to me. Pető, Andrea. 2009. Arrow Cross Women and Female Informants. Baltic Worlds, 2/3–4: 48–52. 3. The number of executed women in Hungary is seven. 4. Kovács Klára, secretary of Szálasi keeps the minutes, Getty Collection, 508,770,000. and Meeting of the Great Arrow Cross Council in the House of Loyalty, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, no. 1489–1954. Interestingly the latter photo was published on the Suttogó [Whisperer] website without the secretaries. 5. Varga József and Kis Károlyné, www.suttogo.hu. Meeting, www.suttogo.hu. 6. The party celebrates the name day of Ferenc in the 9th district of Budapest in 1940, www.suttogo.hu. 7. Meeting in the House of Loyalty, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, no. 1511–1954. 8. Salló János at the opening of the exhibition of the National Front in 1939, Getty Collection, 50,440,527. 9. Hubay Kálmán and his wife, Getty Collection. 10. Woman in Uniform, Magyar Fotográfiai Múzeum/Museum of Hungarian Photography, no. 0144063. 11. Portrait of the wife of Szalasi, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department. 12. Szálasi in Andrássy út 60 during his interrogation shows a handkerchief made for him by the women of the party, MTI Fotótára/Archives of the Hungarian News Agency, FMAFI 1945–34036. 13. See, for example, Women participating as audience at the people’s tribunal, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtára/Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, no. 64–730. 14. The trial of Balogh, Rendőr Múzeum/Museum of the Police, 385. 15. Execution of Manci, Yad Vashem Photo Archive 144BO8.

5  INVISIBILITY ON PHOTOGRAPHS 

87

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 2002. Rhetoric of Image. In The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 135–138. New York: Routledge. Beccaria, Cesare. 1764/2007. Dei delitti e delle pene. Milan: Garzanti Libri. Bruttmann, Tal, Stefan Hördler, and Christoph Kreutzmüller, eds. 2019. Die fotografische Inszenierung des Verbrechens. Ein Album aus Auschwitz. Darmstadt: wbg Academic. Burke, Peter. 2001. Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. London: Reaktion Books. Busch, Christophe, Stefan Hördler, and Robert Jan van Pelt, eds. 2016. Das Höcker-Album. Auschwitz durch die Linse der SS. Darmstadt: wbg Academic. Harvey, Elizabeth. 2005. Management and Manipulation: Nazi Settlement Planners and Ethnic German Settlers in Occupied Poland. In Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies, ed. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, 95–112. New York: Routledge. Kretzer, Anette. 2009. NS-Täterschaft und Geschlecht. Der erste britische Ravensbrück-Prozess 1946/47 in Hamburg. Berlin: Metropol Verlag. Liebman, Janet. 2004. Women, Genocide and Memory: The Ethics of Feminist Ethnography in Holocaust Research. Gender and Society 18: 223–238. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Perlmutter, David. 1994. Visual Historical Method Problems, Prospects, Applications. Historical method 4: 167–184. Pető, Andrea. 2007. Problems of Transitional Justice in Hungary. An Analysis of the People’s Tribunals in Post-War Hungary and the Treatment of Female Perpetrators. Zeitgeschichte 34: 335–349. ———. 2009a. Death and the Picture. Representation of War Criminals and Construction of Divided Memory About WWII in Hungary. In Faces of Death. Visualising History, ed. Andrea Pető and Klaaertje Schrijvers, 39–57. Pisa: Edizioni Plus, Pisa University Press. ———. 2009b. Who Is Afraid of the “Ugly Women”? Problems of Writing Biographies of Nazi and Fascist Women in Countries of the Former Soviet Block. Journal of Women’s History 4: 147–151. ———. 2009c. Arrow Cross Women and Female Informants. Baltic Worlds 2 (3–4): 48–52. ———. 2012. Women and Victims and Perpetrators in World War II: The Case of Hungary. In Women and Men at War. A Gender Perspective on World War II and its Aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Maren Rogen, Ruth Leiserowitz, 81–97. Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag.

88 

A. PETŐ

Pető, Andrea and Klaartje Schrijvers. 2006. The Theatre of Historical Sources. Some Methodological Problems in Analyzing post-WWII Extreme Right Movements in Belgium and in Hungary. In Professions and Social Identity: New European Historical Research on Work, Gender and Society, ed. Berteke Waaldijk, 39–63. Pisa: University of Pisa Press. ———. 2009. Introduction. In Faces of Death. Visualising History, ed. Pető Andrea and Klaartje Schrijvers, XI–XIX. Pisa: Edizioni Plus. Schwarz, Gudrun. 1992. Verdrängte Täterinnen. Frauen im Apparat der SS (1939–1945). In Nach Osten. Verdeckte Spuren nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen, ed. Theresa Wobbe, 197–227. Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik. Sontag, Susan. 1993. Regarding the Pain of the Other. New York: Picador. Taake, Claudia. 1998. Angeklagt. SS-Frauen vor Gericht. Oldenburg: Universität Oldenburg. Zemel, Carol. 2003. Emblems of Atrocity. Holocaust Liberation Photographs. In Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz, 201–219. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zemon Davis, Natalie. 2000. Slaves on Screen. Film and Historical Vision. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusions

Abstract  The conclusion examines the consequences of female perpetrators’ invisibilization and argues that the legacy of these women remained alive; furthermore, it argues that their legacy has actively contributed to the recent insurgence of far-right politics in Hungary. The conclusion also summarizes what we can learn from history at the same time warns of the uncritical use of historical analogies, as they might prevent us from recognizing the new features of illiberal governance in present-day Hungary. Keywords  Illiberal governance • Historical analogy

In November 2003, I received an email from Diana, a 26-year-old Hungarian PhD student of archaeology and Egyptology. She is also interested in gender studies, she wrote, especially in the cult of female goddesses. Diana sent me an article that she published in the mainstream Hungarian journal of religious studies, the Egyháztörténeti Szemle/Church History Review. For her article on the cult of female goddesses she used English, French, German and Italian literature besides quoting sources in Latin and Ancient Greek. In her email Diana asked me to suggest literature on the reinterpretation of women’s role in religion. Clearly, she was familiar with my work on religion, gender, extreme right and women’s political mobilization (Pető 2003). But here I would like to make a © The Author(s) 2020 A. Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5_6

89

90 

A. PETŐ

digression and continue the story with a police report issued on June 23, 2004. According to the police report someone placed Arrow Cross posters on the main boulevard of Budapest announcing the meeting of the “Group of Hungarian Future,” As is well known, the Arrow Cross was the Hungarian Nazi Party before and during the Second World War. I found out that this “Group” which is so concerned about the “Hungarian Future” consists of 27 members and its founder is no one else but—Diana. Several questions emerge. How could it be that a virulent and intellectually well-founded, moreover, a woman-lead Nazi movement has been developing in Hungary sixty years after the post–Second World War lustration processes? What about the forty years of communist rule that hardly allowed space for alternative political thought and was especially tough on Hungarism? Vivian Grosswald Curran quotes Ernst Cassirer arguing, and I am simplifying her argument here, that the only constitutional law that effectively functions is one that represents a “constitution written in the citizens’ mind” (Curran 2004).1 So what kind of constitution was in the mind of Diana after 16 years spent in the Hungarian state educational system? She could not be considered a loser of transition since she had studied in the most elitist department of Budapest’s greatest university. Furthermore, Diana came from a leftist middle-class family, so none of the commonly used interpretative frames for women’s participation in populist movements offered an explanation in her case. Also, where were all the youngsters comprising Diana’s group coming from? They were all too familiar with the far right’s vocabulary and way of thinking after fifty years of a hiatus constructed by the communist era with its clear legal and political instructions on how to handle the national socialist past. The link between pre-1945 and post-1989 Hungarian far-right public discourses, represented or rather embodied in the figure of Diana, merits our attention because it points at the controversial aspects of post-1945 people’s tribunals trials against the Arrow Cross Party members. The lustration process from 1945 onwards served as a cleansing ritual and as such it required essentialist-homogenized understandings of the past. Furthermore, the process of corrective justice was overshadowed by the fact that it happened during the Soviet occupation of Hungary and it served as a starting point for the Sovietization of Hungarian juridical system.

6 CONCLUSIONS 

91

The afterlife of Hungarian far-right ideology suggests that corrective justice based on individual responsibility and punishment does not promote the construction of a different “constitution written in the citizens mind.” Each and every court case is problematic because of the mediated character of justice, but individualized arguments did not fit into the constructed character of grand historical narratives.2 The politics of the people’s tribunals was, briefly, that the former active members of the Arrow Cross Party, no matter whether they committed criminal acts or not, had to be punished in order to break their political consciousness. As Winter and Sivan pointed out, “collective memory is not what everybody thinks” (Winter and Sivan 1999). Collective memory can be produced, cultivated and (re)constructed on the level of families or smaller communities. There were families in Eastern Europe that formed a “nationalist subculture” during communist times within which “religious practice and tradition whereby dominant regime attitudes were fused with religious symbols and beliefs are passed from one generation to another” (Johnston 1994: 271). In an authoritarian regime that destroyed all previous networks of socialization, the family as a kinship and normative unit served as the most important site of identity formation. The establishment of facts, the creation and recycling of consensually accepted parts of historical memory could happen in the family circle. This family-based “nationalist subculture” might be where Diana and her fellow group members found their vocabulary for far-right political mobilization. The recent resurge of illiberalism and the prominent presence of women in illiberal governance however stems from a different source. The 2008 triple crises—financial, security and migration—made the already existing cracks of the neoliberal world order visible. On the individual level, both left and right voters were suffering from the same structural factors. The leftists because of previously promoted neoliberal policies in Eastern Europe were not in a position to criticize neoliberalism. Unlike in the 1930, in the early 2000s the leftist critic of capitalist production was not an option, and this necessarily pushed women towards right-wing political radicalism. After the triple crises of 2008, “neoliberal neopatriarchy” (Campbell 2013) had dire consequences for equality politics globally. While it might have ostensibly supported a narrow and market-oriented version of gender equality, it has simultaneously dismantled the welfare state, undermined social solidarity, and rejected structural reforms needed to reach genuine equality. The result is a system which accepts some token women in

92 

A. PETŐ

positions of power but leaves masses of women behind. Consequently, progress in reaching gender equality has stagnated in the last two decades, adding to a general feeling of frustration and disappointment with equality politics in general. This has led many women to doubt the sincerity of the equality paradigm itself (especially within the paradigms of neoliberal policy) and to seek alternative forms of empowerment in anti-modernist and nationalist projects such as familialism or far-right extremism. Similarly, Nazi and fascist parties were able to attract considerable support by women voters in the interwar years as they offered support, security and economic possibility in a society with growing inequalities. Today in Hungary the institutional network of far-right women and the identity, principles and future political vision of the far-right women’s movement is still “under construction.” Women can create a space for promoting their own agenda if they do not question male hegemony. This agenda may incorporate a variety of demands such as the formation of a strong, protective, responsible state that offers welfare provisions—which are originally leftist planks. The far right also mobilizes women along cultural and symbolic lines related to identity issues. The anachronistic revival of pre-1945 women’s mobilization patterns contributes to a perception that there is a continuity and similarity of the present with pre-1945 ideas, movements and patterns (Pető 2017). However, the formation of the illiberal polypore state with major support of female electorate changed the rule of the game. The basis of the “catch all” mobilization of wide social strata of women is very different from the mobilization of the Arrow Cross Party in the 1930s. But fighting for the hearts and minds remain equally channeling for progressive forces (Pető forthcoming).

Notes 1. For more on constitutionalism and memory, see ‘Confronting Memories: European “Bitter Experiences” and the Constitutionalisation Process’ in Special Edition of the German Law Journal 2005. 2: 165–175. and Driessen, Thea. 2002. Greek Political Refugees in Hungary. History of the Greek Community “Nikos Beloyannis” (in Greek). Graduate paper. University of Amsterdam. Thanks to Ricky Van Boeschoten for these references. 2. See Sajó, András. Affordable Shame. Paper presented at “Dark Legacies of Europe”, EUI, Florence, June 19, 2004.

6 CONCLUSIONS 

93

Bibliography Campbell, Beatrix. 2013. End of Equality. Kolkata, London: Seagull Books. Curran, Vivian Grosswald. 2004. Racism’s Past and Law’s Future. Vermont Law Review 26: 683–712. Johnston, Hank. 1994. New Social Movements and Old Regional Nationalisms. In New Social Movements. From Ideology to Identity, ed. Enrique Larana et al., 267–286. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pető, Andrea. 2003. Napasszonyok és Holdkisasszonyok. A mai magyar konzervatív női politizálás alaktana [Women of Sun and Girls of Moon. Morphology of Contemporary Hungarian Women Doing Politics]. Budapest: Balassi. ———. 2017. Revisionist Histories, ‘Future Memories’: Far Right Memorialization Practices in Hungary. Perspectives on European Politics and Society 1: 41–51. ———. forthcoming, 2020. The Rise of the Far-Right Women’s Movements in the 1930s and 2010s. In Back to the ‘30s? Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy, eds. Jeremy Rayner, Susan Falls, and Taylor C. Nelms. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Winter, Jay, and Emmanuel Sivan. 1999. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Index1

A Andreánszky, Jenő, 38, 41 Arrow Cross Arrow Cross movement, 2, 25, 38, 40, 51, 54, 64 Arrow Cross Party, 2, 6, 20–31, 32n6, 37–42, 44, 45, 48–51, 53, 54, 56, 66, 69, 74–76, 83, 90–92 Arrow Cross women, 2, 7, 26, 42–44, 52, 54, 62, 76, 78, 84 Auschwitz, 53, 74 C Communist Party, 40, 52, 55, 62–65, 69 D Dely, Piroska, 52, 67 Dücső Jánosné, Mrs Dücső, 24, 25, 33n17, 38, 39, 43–45, 48, 49, 76

G Gavras, Konstantin, 76 Glass ceiling, 10, 38, 39 Gömbös, Gyula, 22 H Hain, Péter, 38, 40 Hitler, Adolf, 3, 10, 40, 43, 53 Horthy, Miklós, 3, 4, 9, 12, 22, 25, 39, 45–47, 49, 51, 65, 69, 76 Horthy era/government/ regime, 3, 4, 12, 22, 25, 39, 45–47, 49, 51, 65, 69 House of Loyalty (Hűség Háza), 24, 41, 42, 51, 76, 77 Hubay, Kálmán, 44, 76 Hunyadi, Mária, 25, 38, 41, 58n38

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5

95

96 

INDEX

K Kassai, Ferenc, 40 Kokas, Eszter MD, 47 Kozma, Mária, 39, 51–53 L Lutz, Gizella, 39–44, 78 M Madarász, Erzsébet MD, 39, 46–49 Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége/ National Association of Hungarian Women (MANSZ), 20, 22, 26, 29 Magyar Orvosnők Országos Egyesülete/ Association of Hungarian Female Medical Doctors (MOOE), 47 Magyar Orvosok Nemzeti Egyesülete/ National Association of Hungarian Doctors (MONE), 5, 47, 48 Magyar Ügyvédek Nemzeti Egyesülete/ National Association of Hungarian Lawyers (MUNE), 65 Málnási, Ödön, 25, 38, 51 Meggyes Kálmánné, Mrs Meggyes, 43, 44 P People’s tribunal, 2–5, 7, 9, 14n5, 25, 37, 40–45, 49, 52–56, 62–69, 71n9, 75, 76, 78, 79, 84, 90, 91

Péter, Gábor, 40, 78 Petrák, Sarolta, 53, 54 R Rajk, Júlia, 43, 57n17 Rátz, Erzsébet, 38, 67–70, 71n9, 71n10 Rátz, Jenő, 67 Red Army, 7, 42, 56, 62, 68, 74, 76 S State Protection Authority (ÁVH), 52, 62, 70 Suffrage, 20–22, 29 Szálasi, Ferenc, 11, 22, 29, 31, 38, 40–44, 50–53, 57n21, 76, 78, 83 T Thoma Józsefné, Mrs Thoma, 23, 24, 38, 39, 43–45, 49, 50, 76 Tormay, Cécile, 22 Trianon Trianon borders, 4 Trianon Treaty, 4, 45, 46 W Women’s employment, 7, 21, 27, 30, 46, 47 Women’s movement, 2, 10–13, 21, 24, 28, 32n2, 41, 43, 55, 64, 78, 92 Women’s organization, 6, 11–13, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 39, 43–45, 47, 54, 76