It would be a fatal mistake to use these textual instances to speculate the reasons why women found far-right politics so attractive during Second World War.1 It would be easy to assume that the Arrow Cross women’s movement’s sole aim was to veer women back from the workplace to their “sacred duty” that is motherhood.2 A similar fallacy was made by researchers of Nazi women’s politics when they omitted the fact that the reason of the National Socialists’ popularity among female voters was that they reached working women: nurses and other white collar workers (Sneeringer 2002). The triangle of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (“child, kitchen, church”) remained an ideological goal never fully accomplished.
Based on contemporary Hungarian press the Arrow Cross Party’s ostensible goal was to establish the Hungarian National Reproduction Fund, introduce regular family allowances, follow German and Italian “biopolitical results” and create a national body of “20 million Hungarians,” after which “the biologically sound families with many children would be organized into the Order of Patriarchs.”3 My research on the Arrow Cross Party’s political praxis arrived to different results. These results confirm that far-right politics was a rather flexible framework into which the main actors, members and allies imported their own views, convictions and everyday practices.
The Hungarian far right gave the “woman question” utmost importance in an era when it was obvious for political parties that women voters are key to electoral victory.4 Although the Arrow Cross Party never won elections and posited itself “outside” of the Hungarian political spectrum, it still needed members and activists. According to estimates, the Arrow Cross Party had 15,000 women members. The membership lists found in the Budapest Főváros Levéltára (BFL; Budapest City Archives) show that this number varied with time. Partly because sometimes membership “only” signaled strong emotional ties, and since allies did not pay membership fee, they were not on record; and partly because fluctuation among members was fairly large.5 After the war about one third of these women got interned and imprisoned for supporting the occupying German forces and for collaboration. Their people’s tribunals’ files are giving a rare insight in their world—after serious methodological considerations.6
Another potential mistake would be to interpret the Arrow Cross movement’s gender politics as a simplified and belated mirror image of Nazi German politics. The Arrow Cross Party’s women’s program was not a duplicate of the Nazi or the Fascist program, but a well-thought-out system of ideas, which was necessarily self-contradictory as it simultaneously advocated for women’s mobilization and anti-modernist emancipation. Ulrich Beck calls the Nazi program “anti-modern” because it questioned and demonized everything that was related to modernity (Beck 1997). The cult of motherhood was the centerpiece of official Nazi gender ideology (Pickering-Iazzi 1995). Their program was focused on mothers whose task was to birth children for the nation, as Paul Danzer put it in his 1937 book Geburtenkrieg (Birth War).7 At the same time in Germany 90 percent of single women and 36 percent of married women performed waged work before the Second World War (Schwarz 2002: 126). In January 1945 there were more than 360,000 women in the Wehrmacht’s medical service, 140,000 women in the civilian military workforce, and 3000 women in the SS women’s corps8 (Schwarz 2002: 131). As wives of SS officers, settlers in the Eastern regions, nurses, midwives, teachers and doctors, women actively contributed to the execution of Hitler’s racial politics.9
The third mistake that one can make when analyzing far-right women’s politics is to over-emphasize “national specificities” or “historical context.” This approach presupposes that Fascism is “one” only it takes on various national forms (Eatwell 1996). Roger Griffin rejects the idea that fascism would mutate into various forms in order to adapt to different local circumstances, all the while keeping the myth of “national revival” intact as its constitutive ideological element.10 The far-right movements and parties were in connection, thus the national and the international elements in their programs were intertwined (Bauerkämper and Rossoliński-Liebe 2017).
It would be another mistake to think that young, inexperienced women, especially with a male Arrow Cross member relative were more prone to join the party. The analysis of the people’s tribunals’ database in the BFL showed that ten percent of those indicted with war crimes were women.11 The proportions were thus similar to the proportion of women and men in contemporary Hungarian politics. However, before 1945 women seldom took public roles, therefore their ten percent share was high. The documents of women indicted by the Budapest people’s tribunals show that twenty-one percent of them were born before 1896, more than a half of them were born between 1896 and 1914 and the remaining almost one-fifth after 1914. Therefore, most of the accused women were middle-aged, therefore educated and socialized under the Horthy regime. So, the perpetrators were not the young and reckless who could not judge the potential consequences, but those who in possession of ample social experiences deemed that their deeds could remain unpunished.
Although “perpetrator” has recently become a contested concept the heuristic value of which has been questioned (e.g. Williams and Buckley-Zistel 2018), this book still applies it for a number of reasons. Firstly, the bulk of primary sources used to map Hungarian far-right women’s activity before and during the Second World War are legal documents of the people’s tribunals. This source material makes those women visible who fit into the category of perpetrator as defined by the law of people’s tribunals—this is why the book also analyzes their gender politics: to show how certain crimes and therefore certain individuals became invisible for the legislation and its implementation. Not all far-right women discussed in the book were perpetrators in legal terms, but they became visible as “perpetrators” for this research as they got on the radar of the people’s tribunals because of different, very often political reasons. All women discussed in this book supported Hungary’s war efforts and the exclusionary ideologies behind this. These political views themselves would not have been enough to name them as ‘perpetrators’ unless in the particular framework of political justice after the Second World War in Hungary.
The use of the politically normative category of perpetrator is also justified by a recent trend in Hungarian historiography, which questions the lawfulness of the people’s tribunals’ processes. Though the criticism against post–Second World War political justice is legitimate, this revisionist trend often dismisses the crimes committed during the Horthy regime, which led to the economic, moral and political collapse of Hungary and the killing of 600,000 of its Jewish citizens (Pető forthcoming). Also, this scholarship only focuses on high-profile cases of the political elite, whose people’s tribunal trials obviously were political trials. Analyzing the life story, motivation, actions and then punishment of “ordinary” women who were supporting far-right politics gives a rare insight in the rank and file of women who were active in different forms of anti-modernist politics.
The data about convicted women show that the share of middle-class women was significantly higher—20 percent higher—than in the general population. Four-fifths of the women had been born in Hungary, while one-fifth had been born in areas ceded by Hungary under the Treaty of Trianon (1920). The proportion of women born outside of Hungary was thus significantly higher than their 7 percent share for the female general population. Coming from beyond the country’s Trianon borders may have been a significant factor influencing these women’s political radicalism (Papp-Sipos 2018). The left-wing alternatives to a radical transformation of society—the trade union, social democratic or communist movements—were closed to these women, since for them the question of border revision was of central significance. Thus, as the arena for their political activity, they chose political organizations that offered them social integration and a response to their grievances over the loss of Hungarian territories (Pető 2008). Analyzing the people’s tribunals’ documents, we found no correlation between the date of the trials and the origins of the indicted, i.e. whether the accused was from within or outside the borders of Hungary.
An analysis of the accused women by type of settlement reveals an over-representation of women from small towns. Ten percent of the women belong in this category—which is more than one would expect based on the ratio for the general population. Women from cities (nagyvárosok) were under-represented by 7 percent and those from small towns (nagyközségek) were under-represented by 5 percent.
Further analyzing the women indicted for war crimes, we discover that a surprisingly high proportion had intellectual professions. In 1941, 6 percent of female wage earners in Hungary were working as public servants or in the intellectual professions, but among the indicted women the corresponding ratio was at least one in five. This is an important piece of data, because women with good contacts—most of whom were intellectuals—tended to more easily evade justice.
The list of women convicted by the people’s tribunals does not include those female members of the Arrow Cross who published articles in national socialist newspapers from the 1930s onwards. Many of them fled to the West, but since they were not considered important, their extradition was never sought, they were left out of history, and thus became invisible. The same applies to the women’s b...