Hungary, the Unwilling Satellite

Potpourri

MR. MONTGOMERY’S reasonable thesis that Hungary wasn’t an enthusiastic satellite — which of them were? — is advanced with some weird footnotes to recent history. For example: Beneš was the villain of Central Europe and its most underrated statesmen King Carol and the Haps burgs; the Heimwehr’s massacre of Austrian workers in February, 1934, was leftist propaganda (and presumably a hallucination on the part of John Gunther and other eyewitness reporters); Nazism was a workers’ movement opposed by the German industrialists. (Has Mr. Montgomery been reading the papers?) A sample of the author’s logic: Hungary, the unwilling satellite, did not want Germany’s defeat, but “to adopt this attitude is by no means as foolish as may appear to some Americans. ...”

The really alarming thing about this book is the fact that Mr. Montgomery, a former dairy magnate, was “U. S. Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Hungary" for eight critical years, 1933-1941.