740.0011 European War 1939/1045: Telegram
The Minister in Hungary (Montgomery) to the Secretary of State
[Received 2:40 p.m.]
312. Referring to the Department’s telegram No. 251 of November 13, the Regent received me by appointment last evening when he evinced no concern regarding the possibility of German or Russian aggression upon Hungary but was emphatic in denouncing the entry into Central Europe of Russia who was deluding Germany whom she would not permit to enter Rumania. Russia herself had definite intentions of seizing Bessarabia at the earliest safe moment and otherwise of achieving her imperialistic designs which included the defeat of Germany. The only solution he envisaged was to end the war which to him was capable of justification and to drive Russia from Europe by the combined forces of a European coalition by the present belligerents and Hungary.
Attributing the Munich outrage10 to a person high in the Nazi hierarchy he saw Germany disunited because of minority and religious malcontents and with no military officer capable of imposing an army control. In any eventuality, including peace, he regarded Germany’s [Page 473] present position as worse than at the outbreak of hostilities. The Polish campaign he found to have been a fiasco for the Poles because of long and detailed German planning and of her wide use of sabotage.
Italy he asserted had promised military assistance in the event of an attack on Hungary by either Germany or Russia and, with hopes of circumventing the Rumanian-Yugoslav pact,11 negotiations were in progress with a view to obtaining a similar guarantee from Yugoslavia.
Parenthetically Eckhardt12 has just returned from Belgrade where Macek13 and Serbian leaders suggested to him the formation of an Adriatic bloc to consist of Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Italy.
Hungary had no aggressive intentions to retrieve Transylvania but she could not look with equanimity upon a Russian invasion of that region which was improbable because of Russian interest in Black Sea ports and Dardanelles.
The Regent stated that he had caused the resignation of Minister of Commerce Kunder because of his efforts in behalf of Germany and that he intended eventually to cause the removal of all National Socialist sympathizers in the Hungarian Cabinet and to ban the National Socialist Parties but was advised by the Prime Minister to proceed cautiously. He ended with a castigation of Imredy14 and a rebuke for his Jew law.
The Regent commended the international efforts and actions before and since the outbreak of war of President Roosevelt15 whom with Mussolini he considered the two most powerful men in the world.
- Attempted assassination of Hitler, his staff, and party leaders in bomb explosion at Munich, November 8, 1939.↩
- Signed at Belgrade June 7, 1921, League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. liv, p. 257; extended May 21, 1929, ibid., vol. xcviii, p. 221; and extended February 16, 1933, ibid., vol. cxxxix, p. 233.↩
- Tibor Eckhardt, leader of Hungarian Agrarian Party.↩
- Vlatko Matchek, Yugoslavian Vice President of the Council and leader of Croatian Peasant Party.↩
- Bela de Imredy, previous Hungarian Prime Minister.↩
- See pp 130 ff and 350 ff↩