I was sent a link to a comment with a clear case of pro-Nazi disinformation on the Euro News site.

Imagine the kind of person who comments that the end of genocide wouldn’t be called by the “many” a liberation. Their comment fails on the most obvious facts: Operation Margarethe, the German invasion of Hungary on 19 March 1944.

Germany militarily occupied Hungary because the Kállay government had been negotiating armistice terms with the Western Allies, and Horthy had refused Hitler’s repeated demands to hand over Hungarian Jews. Do you see the problem with the comment yet? Who exactly would falsely claim that the Nazis were not a genocidal occupation?

Hitler summoned Horthy to Klessheim on 18 March 1944, and the Wehrmacht crossed the border while Horthy was still on the train home. That’s not allied.

Wehrmacht troops took the country, Veesenmayer arrived as Reich plenipotentiary, Eichmann’s Sondereinsatzkommando followed, and over 400,000 Hungarians were suddenly shipped to Auschwitz between May and the beginning of July 1944 (over 300,000 murdered immediately on arrival). Hungarians were told the Nazis would put them in a “safe” ghetto, which turned out to be insufferably cramped and cruel, and then told they were being taken by train to agricultural labor at Kenyérmező, a work site that never existed. Hungarian gendarmes under Eichmann’s direction forced them into rail cars locked for days without food, water or sanitation, causing many to die, and the trains deposited them in a death camp to be rapidly murdered. Postcards postmarked from the fictional resort “Waldsee” then arrived back in Hungary, dictated at Auschwitz to keep the deception running.

Remigration (forced deportation) of that scale was during, and because of, the Nazi occupation.

The alliance was worthless, completely exploited and then ignored by Germany. Hungary signed the Tripartite Pact in November 1940 and bled its Second Army out on the Don in January 1943. Then German troops crossed the border to mass murder Hungarians and hold the rest hostage. Germany itself declared that the alliance didn’t exist, by force, twice!

On 15 October 1944, when Horthy announced he had achieved Hungarian armistice with the Soviets, Germany (still not an ally) ran Operation Panzerfaust. That meant Skorzeny kidnapped Horthy’s son to force the Hungarian leader to abdicate under extreme duress. Szálasi and the Arrow Cross were put under direct German installation, completely the opposite of any alliance. The occupation turned into a siege (26 December 1944 to 13 February 1945) as Budapest was commanded by Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a German SS general, under Hitler’s Festung order forbidding capitulation or withdrawal. A foreign German officer commanding a Hungarian city he refuses to surrender, driving up casualties and death of the Hungarians, is an occupation in its plainest form.

“Liberation” meant the Red Army reached the sealed Pest ghetto on 17-18 January 1945, with roughly 70,000 people still alive inside, while the Arrow Cross squads under Nazi command were shooting Hungarians into the Danube nightly. Liberation was a literal end of the genocidal and suicidal Nazi occupation of Hungary.

So I posted this reply and was informed it went into moderation:

As a formally trained historian, I find this kind of disinformation comment very interesting. Germany occupied Hungary twice in 1944. First it invaded against Horthy’s diplomacy in March, and then against his armistice in October. What kind of German “ally” invades by force and murders roughly 437,000 Hungarians between May and [early July] of 1944? Operation Panzerfaust wasn’t just genocidal, it kidnapped Horthy’s son to force abdication of self-rule. Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a German SS general, under Hitler’s Festung order then commanded the Hungarian city by refusing to surrender! That is by definition an occupation of Hungary to cause mass suffering in its plainest form. Where do you think Dan got his backwards story from and why?