HORTHY’S DILEMMA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25503, 5 April 1944, Page 5

HORTHY’S DILEMMA

CAREFUL ALIBI COLLAPSES HUNGARY’S WAR GUILT (Rec. 11 p.m.) LONDON, Apl. 3. Declaring that the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, this morning saw the collapse of his carefully built-up alibi for Hungary's war guilt when Allied bombers swept over his palace on the Danube and loosed the first bombs on Budapest, the Daily Express’s foreign editor says: “Shrewd observers in London, Berne, and Istanbul are no longer disposed to accept at face value the first reports of the German Army’s forcible occupation, nor do they credit Admiral Horthy with trying to stave off the invastion. “Admiral Horthy was in Budapest when the Germans crossed the frontier. He was not, as Hungarian propagandists asserted, ‘ a helpless prisoner at Hitler’s headquarters.’ Admiral Horthy called his Ministers together on March 18. the day before German

paratroopers dropped on the capital. He was reshuffling his Cabinet and rounding up the opposition on March 19, instead of calling Hungarians to arms to stop the Germans. Hungary’s new Cabinet is no more a puppet Cabinet than any Horthy Cabinet in the past 10 years. Most of the new Ministers earlier served under Horthy in one capacity, or another. Five of them were in the last Government, so there is little doubt of their personal loyalty to Horthy. “ Horthy himself signed the decrees under which the old Government resigned and the new one was appointed. Horthy's purpose in posing as a victim of Hitler’s methods is to reinsure himself with the Allies against the probability of Germany’s defeat.”