Miklós Horthy (June 18, 1868, Kenderes, Yas-Nagykun-Solnoksky committee, Austria-Hungary - February 9, 1957, Estoril, Portugal) - ruler (regent) of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1920-1944, Vice Admiral.

In 1892, 24-year-old Austro-Hungarian naval officer Miklós Horthy embarks on a long journey across the South Pacific. In Australia, Horthy's group took on board the Austrian geologist Baron Heinrich von Fullon-Norbeck, who was exploring the southern islands in search of minerals. They headed for the Solomon Islands, which were then under the protectorate of Germany. But one of them - Guadalcanal - they found traces of gold and nickel. Four years later, the baron returned to Guadalcanal, where he was killed by locals who opposed his attempt to climb the sacred mountain of Tatuwe. By then, Horthy's maritime career had already taken off. He commanded a number of increasingly important ships of the imperial navy, and then became a naval assistant to the Emperor of Austria-Hungary Franz Joseph I and a constant participant in his hunting amusements.

When World War I began, Horthy commanded the battleship Habsburg. In May 1917, leading a detachment of three cruisers and other auxiliary vessels, he defeated the Allied fleet at the Battle of the Strait of Otranto. In February 1918, Horthy was promoted to Rear Admiral and appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Navy.

Six months later, the war ended. The empire collapsed. Hungary became independent. But her losses were enormous. Being part of the empire, Hungary had an area of almost 324 sq. km, when the war ended, it was reduced to less than 93 thousand square meters. km. Most of the land was given to Czechoslovakia by the allies, but the transfer of Transylvania to the Romanians was especially annoying for the Hungarians.

The kingdom of Hungary plunged into chaos. Charles I of the House of Habsburg, who became Emperor of Austria-Hungary on the death of his great-uncle Franz Joseph in 1916, also reigned as King Carol IV of Hungary. However, the Allies did not want to see the Habsburgs on the throne—the Trianon Treaty of 1920 abolished his first position and prevented him from taking a second. Charles refused to participate in Hungarian affairs, but did not abdicate. Therefore, Hungary became a kingdom without a king, and the country fell into political turmoil. In March 1919, the communists seized power, created the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and a fierce civil war began.

For Admiral Miklós Horthy, the war ended not so badly. By order of the government, he surrendered all the ships and naval bases of the Austro-Hungarian fleet and calmly retired to the family estate in Kenderesh. However, in 1920, after the fall of Soviet power in Hungary, politicians came to Horthy. He was called out of retirement to first lead the new national army to restore order and then lead the kingdom. Since the Habsburg monarch could not rule, the situation called for a "regent", or temporary ruler. Thus, as a kingdom without a king, landlocked Hungary accepted an admiral without a fleet.

Horthy "obsessed" with the national identity of Hungary and sought to restore her lost glory and lost territories. He and Adolf Hitler agreed on the intention to reshape Europe once again.

Horthy first met Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1936. In August 1938, Horthy was received with full admiral's honors at the Reich naval base in Kiel, and his wife Magdolna was honored to christen the German cruiser Prinz Eugen. The Munich “conspiracy” in September 1938 and the division of Czechoslovakia allowed Hungary to “return” part of the lands of Slovakia and the Western Carpathians into its composition.

In 1940, Hungary received part of Transylvania, Germany and Italy twisted the hands of the Romanian king and Marshal Antonescu. However, Antonescu did not resist for long, Hitler promised him help in "returning" Bessarabia and Bukovina, which had recently become Soviet.

Riding on a white horse, Horthy personally led the Hungarian 1st Army into Transylvania on September 6, 1940, two weeks before the signing of the Tripartite Pact. About 1.3 million ethnic Hungarians and about the same number of ethnic Romanians became citizens of Hungary. Now he was a national hero.

In April 1941, when the Nazi troops passed through Hungary and attacked Yugoslavia, the Hungarian 3rd Army moved along with them, adding more than 20 thousand square kilometers to Hungary. km of Yugoslav territory.

Two months later, on June 22, 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, he expected Horthy to declare war on the USSR. Horthy hesitated at first. However, on June 26, an air raid hit the Hungarian city of Kassa (now Kosice in Slovakia). The Germans presented Horthy with evidence of Moscow's guilt, and Hungary joined Operation Barbarossa. But later there was evidence that the raid on Kassa was staged by the Germans. By the end of his life, Horthy thought the same way.

Horthy and Antonescu included their troops in the German Army Group South. Hungarian forces - 40 thousand fighters. Two conditionally mechanized brigades, a border guard brigade, a horse-cavalry brigade and a small air component. For comparison, Romania sent 13 divisions to the Eastern Front.

The Hungarians participated in the battles for Kyiv and suffered huge losses - up to 30% of the personnel. Horthy quickly began to doubt the success of the Axis, but there was nowhere to retreat. The Germans frightened him with the prospects of the Communists coming to Hungary, and he still could not forget the civil war that shook the country 20 years ago. As a result, he brought the number of Hungarian troops on the Eastern Front to 200 thousand (2nd combined arms army plus the only tank division) - four times more than in 1941.

In June, the 2nd Army was attached to the 4th German Panzer Army. Nearby in battle formations were Italians and Romanians. All of them went to Stalingrad. Their defeat was catastrophic. The 2nd Hungarian Army in January 1942 was actually destroyed by Soviet troops near Voronezh.

In April 1943, Hitler met separately with Mussolini, Antonescu and Horthy at Klessheim Castle in Austria. Each claimed that the war was lost and insisted on withdrawing. Hitler, of course, was against it and blamed his allies for everything.

Hitler's Axis partners began to withdraw from the game. In July 1943, the Italians arrested and imprisoned Mussolini, and in September they declared a truce. Hitler intervened, occupied the country, freed Mussolini and continued to fight the Allies in Italy.

Soviet troops continued to advance inexorably. Both Antonescu and Horthy tried to wage war while trying to negotiate with the Anglo-American allies. Hitler learned of this and in March 1944 summoned Horthy to Klessheim, at the same time quietly ordering German troops to occupy Hungary as part of Operation Margherita. When Horthy returned to Budapest, he was met by German soldiers. Although he was allowed to remain as regent, but now he has become an absolute puppet. Romania went over to the side of the Allies, and now Hungary was at war with her too.

On October 15, when Horthy announced the signing of a truce with the USSR on the radio, SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny was already in Budapest. He carried out Operation Panzerfaust and seized control of the country. Skorzeny took Horthy into custody and sent him to Hirschberg Castle in Bavaria with orders to shoot him before he was taken by the Allies. Horthy would never see Hungary again. On February 13, 1945, after a bloody 50-day siege, Soviet troops took Budapest.

But Horthy turned around again. The order to kill him was not carried out, on May 1, 1945, soldiers of the 36th Infantry Division of the US Army took him prisoner to Hirschberg Castle. The Allies initially imprisoned Horthy in Nuremberg, but in December 1945 they transferred him to a house near Hirschberg Castle, where his wife had taken up residence after the Americans arrived. Marshal Antonescu was tried and executed in Romania in 1946. Horthy escaped any court, the contradictions between the USSR and the USA affected.

In December 1948, the Americans allowed Horthy and Magdolna to go to Switzerland, where their son knew the Portuguese ambassador. There they received visas, the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar received them cordially. Horthy lived in Portugal until his death in February 1957.