![]() Horthy now permitted the deportation of a large number of Jews (the generally accepted figure is 100,000), but would not go further. He pressured Horthy to make greater contributions to the war effort, and again commanded him to assist in the killing of more of Hungary's Jews. An enraged Hitler summoned Horthy to a conference in Klessheim (today in Austria). He even promised to surrender unconditionally to them once they reached Hungarian territory. Fearing that the Soviets would overrun the country, Kállay, with Horthy's approval, put out numerous feelers to the Allies. By 1944, the Axis was losing the war, and the Red Army was at Hungary's borders. Roughly 18,000-20,000 of these deportees were slaughtered by Friedrich Jeckeln and his SS troops only 2,000-3,000 survived. The first massacre of Jewish people from Hungarian territory took place in August 1941, when government officials ordered the deportation of Jews without Hungarian citizenship (principally refugees from other Nazi-occupied countries) to Ukraine. Horthy's personal views on Jews and their role in Hungarian society are the subject of some debate. The first Hungarian anti-Jewish Law, in 1938, limited the number of Jews in the professions, the government and commerce to twenty percent, and the second reduced it to five percent the following year 250,000 Hungarian Jews lost their jobs as a result. In August 1940, Hitler intervened on Hungary's behalf once again, taking Northern Transylvania away from Romania, and awarding it to Hungary. Hungary was now committed to the Axis agenda: on 24 February 1939, it joined the Anti-Comintern pact, and on 11 April withdrew from the League of Nations. Horthy's relationship with Hitler was, by his own account, a tense one - largely due, he said, to his unwillingness to bend his nation's policies to the German dictator's desires. Horthy was, in the eyes of observers, obsessed with the Communist threat. For Horthy, Hitler served as a bulwark against Soviet encroachment or invasion. Hungarian Regent of the Kingdom between World Wars I and II and throughout most of World War II. In 1939, the newly elected Pope Pius XII appointed several prominent Jewish scholars to posts at the Vatican after they had been dismissed from Italian universities under Fascist leader Benito Mussolini's racial laws. His strongest public condemnation of genocide was considered inadequate by the Allied Powers, while the Nazis viewed him as an Allied sympathizer who had dishonoured his policy of Vatican neutrality. But his insistence on Vatican neutrality and avoidance of naming the Nazis as the evildoers of the conflict became the foundation for contemporary and later criticisms from some quarters. He permitted local churches to assess and formulate responses to the Nazis, and instructed them to provide discreet aid to Jews. ![]() ![]() He followed a strict public policy of Vatican neutrality for the duration of the conflict, but preached against selfish nationalism and, through the use of diplomacy, sermons and radio broadcasts and the creation of the Vatican Information Service, Pius worked to ameliorate the suffering of the victims of the war. Pius XII lobbied world leaders to prevent the outbreak of World War II and then expressed his dismay that war had come in his October 1939 Summi Pontificatus encyclical. Reigned from March 1939 to his death in 1958. ![]()
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