HUNGARY: Embarrassing Discovery

Last month Hungary’s Premier Bela Imrédy, speaking at his home town of Baja, declared he had not one drop of Jewish blood in his veins, showed baptismal certificates of his grandparents to prove it. This was his answer to a widespread whispering campaign that the Premier, author of severe anti-Semitic bills introduced recently in the Hungarian Parliament, was himself part Jewish.

Last week, with Hungary under martial law and the Premier’s racial bills facing probable defeat, Dr. Imredy was forced to admit that he had made an embarrassing and belated discovery. A deeper search into genealogical records had uncovered the unfortunate fact that his maternal great-grandfather had been born a Jew and that he himself was thus one-eighth Jewish. After some necessary promptings by old Nicholas Horthy, Regent of Hungary, Dr. Imredy resigned in a mood of self-immolation. Said he: “I held, and still hold, that legislation for the regulation of Jewish participation in the economic and cultural affairs of the country is a good thing for our fatherland. However, it is inconsistent that under such circumstances I should be identified with such legislation.”

Absurd as it was for a statesman of Semitic descent to promote antiSemitism, the discovery of Jewish blood provided the excuse rather than the reason for the Imredy resignation. The Premier was already on his way out. Leading politicians, the powerful Catholic Church, even some Cabinet colleagues were glad to be rid of him.

Oddly enough, about the only people who were sorry to see part-Jewish Premier Imredy go were the Jew-hating German Nazis. Premier Imredy, while obliged to jail Hungarian Nazi Leader Major Ferenc Szalasi for seditious activities, nevertheless had proved amenable to Nazi ideas. The Premier last month announced plans to bring Hungary into the German-Italian-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact. His racial laws were in some respects even sterner than the Nazis’ own Nürnberg decrees. And the Premier had planned to suspend Parliament and set up a totalitarian, one-party State with himself as probable Führer, adding one more state to the Fascintern.

Summoned by Regent Horthy to succeed Dr. Imredy was 60-year-old Count Paul Teleki, Hungary’s Boy Scout leader, a Catholic Transylvanian nobleman, an expert geographer and member of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. Notable it was that

Count Teleki retained the former Premier’s Cabinet intact, that he announced that the Imredy racial laws and land reform schemes would not be scrapped. But the Jewish legislation was expected to be modified in application if not on the statute books and land reform would probably be slowed up. Weak Hungary could not afford to slap the Nazis directly in the face by abandoning the bills. The new Government was expected outwardly to comply with Nazi wishes, but at the same time quietly to sabotage the laws’ effectiveness.