The Women of the Arrow Cross Party:

Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the

Second World War 1st ed. Edition
Andrea Pet■
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The Women of the
Arrow Cross Party
Invisible Hungarian
Perpetrators in the
Second World War

Andrea Pető
 The Women of the Arrow Cross Party

“For several decades, gender studies have sought to lift the invisibility of women,
forgotten or ignored by the dominant discourses despite being major actors in his-
tory. Rare are the studies that show how this invisibility has, on the contrary, been
able to hide the contribution of some women to systems of domination, in this
case Hungarian fascism. Andrea Pető’s study is particularly stimulating in remov-
ing unexpected taboos.”
—Henry Rousso, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (Paris)

“Isn’t it amazing that even two decades into the 21st century we still need proof
for the importance of gender history in order to explain past and present phenom-
ena and their entanglement? The present book by the internationally renowned
scholar Andrea Pető is one of these proofs and a brilliant one: by reconstructing
the hidden story of female contribution to Hungarian fascism, she is able not only
to dissect the specific functions of gendered memory politics, but also to shed an
illuminating light on contemporary developments.”
—Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Director of the Center
for Research on Antisemitism (Berlin)

“Feminists often point out the invisibility of women in historical accounts. But
rarely do they do what Andrea Pető does: bringing a gender lens to the Hungarian
far right, she brilliantly exposes the long-term effects of the erasure of the Arrow
Cross women’s complicity from history, judgement, responsibility and memory.
Meticulously researched and sharply analyzed, this book is essential reading for
anyone interested in the current rise of the far right.”
—Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University (New York)
 Andrea Pető

The Women of the

Arrow Cross Party
Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators
in the Second World War
Andrea Pető
Central European University
Budapest, Hungary

ISBN 978-3-030-51224-8    ISBN 978-3-030-51225-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5

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 Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Barna Ildikó, Bárd Károly, Gyáni Gábor, Kovács András,

Örkény Antal and Sipos Balázs; as well as Klaartje Schrijvers, Selma
Leydesdorff, Elenore Lappin, Ayșe Gül Altınay, Patricia Chiantera-Stutte,
and Zonneke Matthée.
I am especially grateful for the different archives and their archivists sup-
porting my work in Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára
(Historical Archive of State Security Services), Budapest Főváros Levéltára
(Budapest City Archives), Magyar Fotográfiai Múzeum (Hungarian
Museum of Photography), Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtára
(Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department), Nyílt
Társadalom Alapítvány Archívuma (Open Society Archives), Budapesti
Ügyvédi Kamara Irattára (Archive of the Budapest Bar Association),
Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (National Archives of Hungary), Politikatudományi
Intézet Levéltára (Archive of the Institute of Political History), Országos
Széchényi Könyvtár (National Széchényi Library), Rendőr Múzeum
Fotóarchívuma (Photoarchive of the Police Museum), MTVA Nemzeti
Fotótára (Photoarchive of the National Broadcasting Foundation), and the
CEU Library.
The writing of this book was possible because of a research leave from
the Central European University between 2017–2019, and the distin-
guished fellowship of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte Zentrum für
Holocaust-Studien (München) in 2019.
Thanks to Petra Bakos for her work supporting this publication.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Invisible Party Members19

3 Invisible Political Actors37

4 Invisible Defendants61

5 Invisibility on Photographs73

6 Conclusions89

Index95

vii
 Abbreviations

ÁBTL Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára/Historical Archives

of the Hungarian State Security Services
ÁVH Államvédelmi Hatóság/Hungarian State Protection Authority
BFL Budapest Főváros Levéltára/Budapest City Archives
MANSZ Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége/National Association of
Hungarian Women
MONE Magyar Orvosok Nemzeti Egyesülete/National Association of
Hungarian Doctors
MOOE Magyar Orvosnők Országos Egyesülete/Association of Hungarian
Female Medical Doctors
MTI Magyar Távirati Iroda/Hungarian News Agency
MÜNE Magyar Ügyvédek Nemzeti Egyesülete/National Association of
Hungarian Lawyers

ix
 List of Photos

Photo 2.1 Meeting of the Great Arrow Cross Council in the House of
Loyalty, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/
Hungarian National Museum’s Historical Photo Department,
no. 1489–1954 24
Photo 3.1 Handkerchief made by the women’s section of the Arrow
Cross Party for Ferenc Szálasi. MTVA Archívum/
Photoarchive of the National Broadcasting Foundation,
FMAFI 1945–34036 42
Photo 3.2 Ferenc Szálasi at the women’s section of the Arrow Cross
Party in Kosice. Štátny archív v Košiciach/The Kosice State
Archives. Zbierka fotografií, 1873–2000, no. 0565 50
Photo 5.1 Meeting in the House of Loyalty. Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum
Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian National Museum’s
Historical Photo Department, no. 1511–1954 77
Photo 5.2 Perpetrators of the Maros Street massacre (Budapest).
Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Fényképtár/Hungarian
National Museum’s Historical Photo Department, no. 2916 79
Photo 5.3 The execution of Manci. (Yad Vashem Photo Archive, no.
144BO8)81

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract The book’s introduction offers a general historical introduction

into Hungary’s situation after the First World War as far as women’s radi-
cal political mobilization was concerned. Another introductory section
analyzes the forms, causes and consequences of women perpetrators’
invisibility.

Keywords Hungary • First World War • Political mobilization •

Women • Gender

“The Arrow Cross Party therefore differs from other parties as it has a
spirit.”
Woman in the movement. A Nép, December 17, 1942. 4.
“We will veer Hungarian women back to the sacred duty of
motherhood. The Hungarian nation emanates from the Hungarian
mother. The mother is the first teacher of the nation, and she sows the
seeds of Hungarian thought and spirit when together with a prayer she
lets the Hungarist thought, the Arrow Cross idea pour into the child’s
soul. Don’t let women wither at workplaces, don’t let them become
victims of those who believe that money can buy everything, including
morality.”
Politikatörténeti Intézet Levéltára = PIL 685. 1/4. April 25,
1940. 60.

© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5_1
2 A. PETŐ

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 research-
ers 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 chil-
dren 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, con-
victions and everyday practices.
The Hungarian far right gave the “woman question” utmost impor-
tance 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 mem-
bership 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
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

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, mid-
wives, 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 con-
text.” 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 sel-
dom 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
4 A. PETŐ

potential consequences, but those who in possession of ample social expe-

riences 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 peo-
ple’s tribunals. This source material makes those women visible who fit
into the category of perpetrator as defined by the law of people’s tribu-
nals—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 “per-
petrators” for this research as they got on the radar of the people’s tribu-
nals because of different, very often political reasons. All women discussed
in this book supported Hungary’s war efforts and the exclusionary ideolo-
gies 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 justi-
fied 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 revision-
ist 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 sig-
nificantly higher than their 7 percent share for the female general popula-
tion. Coming from beyond the country’s Trianon borders may have been a
significant factor influencing these women’s political radicalism (Papp-Sipos
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

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 (nagyköz-
ségek) 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 per-
cent of female wage earners in Hungary were working as public servants
or in the intellectual professions, but among the indicted women the cor-
responding 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 extradi-
tion was never sought, they were left out of history, and thus became invis-
ible. The same applies to the women’s branch of MONE (Magyar Orvosok
Nemzeti Egyesülete/National Association of Hungarian Doctors), which
played a key role in the intellectual embedding of the far-right movement.
The right-wing radicalization of female physicians from demanding equal-
ity before the law to supporting state eugenics is briefly discussed in Sect.
3.3, but the topic would require a separate study.
A surprisingly high proportion, 46 percent, of the indicted women
were classified as housewives, widows or wives. Another relatively striking
feature was that in 1945 eight percent of the indicted women were con-
cierges or assistance concierges—whereas in the general sample their share
was just five percent. These latter were the common criminals that emerged
from the lower middle class and working class and whose specific aim was
6 A. PETŐ

to get their hands on Jewish property. The post-war authorities were well
acquainted with the concierges; those that did not flee were the first to be
reported by residents. In 1950, agricultural laborers were also strongly
over-represented: 14 percent of indicted were from this group while
among the general population their share was six percent. Thus, contrary
to popular belief, not only members of the Volksbund were put on trial but
also large numbers of Hungarian peasants.
Women’s participation in conservative-nationalist and especially in far-­
right movements brings up several theoretical questions (Blee 1991,
Passmore 1999). So far approaches to this area of research failed to
acknowledge the agency of these women, i.e. they questioned whether
women autonomously decided to participate in right-wing political move-
ments. This argument lessens the critical potential these women’s organi-
zations exhibited against patriarchy, which I wish to emphasize in this
volume, without forgetting their ideological-political involvement with
racism and the Holocaust. Other analytical questions to be examined are
whether women members of far-right parties necessarily emerged from
among the losers of social-economic processes, and whether they were
mentally unstable as the post–Second World War explanations held.
As opposed to the aforementioned explanatory frameworks which saw
far-right women as victims, losers or lunatics, I propose an alternative the-
oretical framework which takes the agency of these women in consider-
ation when trying to explain what kinds of women joined far-right
movements and why. I use the concept of agency according to Saba
Mahmood, for whom agency is “a capacity for action that historically spe-
cific relations of subordination enable and create” (Mahmood 2006: 34).
Far-right women really questioned social norms but primarily by reshap-
ing the relationship of women and violence through their participation in
violent actions.
Following Griffin, this book looks at Hungarian far-right movements,
primarily the Arrow Cross Party, as “revolutionary nationalist” forma-
tions, and analyzes them in comparison with other European far-right
movements (Griffin 1991). Furthermore, it looks at these movements
from within, focusing on their inner structure and the way they self-­
narrated. If these movements had “only” reached women as mothers, then
the Arrow Cross Party, the first Hungarian anti-modernist populist party,
could not have mobilized women in such high numbers.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

1.1   Reasons of Invisibility

Through the concept of invisibility this book analyzes how “Arrow Cross
women” are remembered in Hungary. Remembrance is not a descriptive
category, but a concept actively constructed by those who remember in
relation to the context and the space of remembering. Via remembering
we select, cover up, silence, invisibilize, change, exaggerate, minimize,
praise and demonize. In this volume I analyze the processes through
which remembrance and those who remember filtered and invisibilized
certain events and actors in comparison with all accessible relevant
documents.
Invisibility is caused by a variety of factors. In relation to memory poli-
tics it should be noted that the victory of the liberating Red Army came
with atrocities against civilians, especially against women (Pető 2018). Then
the Cold War’s anti-communist discourse made it possible to depict Nazi
collaborator far-right forces as victims of Soviet violence, and after 1989,
during the rehabilitation process these perpetrators were once again
framed as the victims of communism. Currently the German and the
Soviet occupation are both widely discussed in Hungary but there is no
mention of the role Hungarian collaborators played.
The Cold War defined the remembrance of the far right’s culpability
and responsibility, as well as the way we approach present-day followers of
these movements. After the Second World War, Soviet and Western occu-
pation zones were similar in one aspect: when the people’s tribunals exam-
ined women’s role in the warmongering regime, they either minimized it
or posited it as out of the ordinary. In every case they perceived the acts of
women war criminals as entirely opposing the traditional role of women,
and as a result, most far-right women became marginalized and forgotten.
After the war women were cornered back into the traditional “woman’s
place” with the aim to annul the “matriarchy born in need,” i.e. women’s
increased public presence and employment during wartime. This held true
for military nurses, factory workers, pacifist feminists and far-right women
alike. Only the robbers, looters and murderers, as well as the celebrities
and female relatives of party members gained visibility, because they fitted
into a public discourse that sought to restore the male-dominated social
order upset by the war.12 This invisibilization worked effectively in the case
of the girl scouts movement too, despite the fact that wartime work and
activities within the movement represented a formative experience for tens
of thousands of young girls (Árvai 2003).
8 A. PETŐ

The first period of fascism research (1960s) renounced the idea that
fascism had been a form of pathological nihilistic irrationalism that had a
singular aim: totalitarian oppression. The second period of research (from
the early 1990s, after the fall of communist regimes) shifted the focus
from economic and psychological factors to political ones. This research
relied on national myths and imagined communities as interpretative
frameworks for explaining the popularity of the far right. Currently the
third period of research aims at tracing the inner logic of fascism to account
for its resurging appeal using the explanatory principle of culture. This
principle posits that fascism is a unique cultural expression of the idea of
“true community,” and as such it is the symbolic representation of anti-­
modern society. Research on women’s relationship with fascism also
started in the third period. Previously such research was not possible partly
because of certain generic problems in women’s historiography, such as
that it ignored “evil women,” and partly because of earlier fascism
research’s political choice to focus on political history exclusively.
The quickly developing field of perpetrator research (Täterforschung)
also finds it difficult to integrate women perpetrators as a legitimate topic
of research. Holocaust-related perpetrator research started in the second
half of the 1990s, and for a long time solely focused on men. Following
the logics of the Nazi state’s activities,13 research represented perpetrators
either as psychopaths or as banal bureaucrats.14 Primarily as a result of the
debate surrounding Goldhagen’s book (1996), which had argued for
nuanced scientific inquiry devoid of stereotypes, research has finally turned
towards the issue of ideological commitment, and, therefore, towards the
intellectual elites that provided the ideological background of the
Holocaust (Pendas 2006: 294). Perpetrator research gained further rele-
vance when the children of famous and well-known Nazis had published
their books one after another.15 But the real step in the right direction was
when research began on how someone from the “everyday” level of com-
mon people becomes a perpetrator, and how the memory of perpetrators
evolves on the individual level.
Throughout its journey, perpetrator research had to dismantle several
taboos including easy dichotomy of victim and perpetrator. The current
position of this research emphasizes that simplifying typologies should be
left behind, instead focusing on various subgroups whose common fea-
tures may provide the grounds for a taxonomy, which will then facilitate a
multi-faceted understanding. However, the typology of women perpetra-
tors not only identifies the various types but also outlines the social spaces
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

where women could play a role (Pető 2014). Most research projects exam-
ine the social and psychological (though the latter is progressively consid-
ered analytically inappropriate) condition of perpetrators, and set up
typologies of perpetrators, without taking gender into consideration.
None of these typologies mention women perpetrators. Conjured typolo-
gies thus far that I will shortly introduce were based on intentions and
behavioral explanations, thus they can potentially offer easy explanations,
which could prepare the grounds for forgiveness and the avoidance of
punishment. Other explanations simply name self-interest as the cause,
which could be manifested in carrier aspirations, ambitions or the hope of
material wealth. But these feelings should always be interpreted within
their specific social context.
Perpetrator research in Hungary as well in other former communist
countries faces multiple obstacles. Firstly, the historical category of perpe-
trator is an ambivalent one because it is still debated whether the Horthy
and the Arrow Cross regimes represent a historical continuity.16 Secondly,
the extensive scholarship on Germany contributes to making research on
collaborating states and parties invisible. Thirdly, though many far-right
politicians’ diaries and memoires got published, research on the far right is
still dominated by the political history angle.17 Also, women were so far
omitted from research, as it was aimed at the main actors, who were exclu-
sively men. Lastly, after 1990 the new political system was based on anti-­
communism, including major and very legitimate criticism of the people’s
tribunals. However, the fact that the legal framework was flawed should
not bring into question that the war crimes were committed.
In the 1960s, during the first period of fascism research, women’s sto-
ries were not examined and hence the history of “evil women” sunk into
oblivion, only to be later discovered by German historiography, which
then made a mark on other countries’ research too (Pető 2009). At first,
this research was oriented towards notable women and the wives of famous
men, i.e. concentration camp guards, actors, journalists, and the wives of
various politicians, at the same time it made invisible those masses of
women who were active party members and were not “just” wives of
important men (Sigmund 2000). As the expression “evil women” used in
the research shows, all of these women were relegated to a special and
extreme category, which therefore did not necessarily deserve proper sci-
entific attention (Schwarz 2000).
10 A. PETŐ

In the 1970s the Frankfurt School explained the popularity and mobi-
lizing force of Nazism among women with Hitler’s charismatic sexual
attractiveness, by which they relegated women into the category of irratio-
nal political agents (Evans 1976). The first attempts at a gendered exami-
nation of the far-right women as real political agents were in the 1980s.
This research used the framework of political history to analyze women’s
participation in the German national socialist movement, in order to find
out what kinds of social groups were mobilized by this movement as an
effect of the First World War and the ensuing economic crisis. There was a
prolonged debate between Gisella Bock and Claudia Koonz, which, after
the famous Historikerstreit on the responsibility of Germans in Nazism,
was called the Historikerinstreit.” This debate was about the definition of
collaboration, and its aim was the invalidation of the assumption that
German women were all victims of Nazi “sexism.” This assumption sweeps
under the carpet the fact that German women profited from racist German
politics partly through the social institutions of the eugenics program, and
because of the new forms of employment available for them. During the
debate, Bock criticized Koonz for enforcing a “collective guilt” onto
German women and homogenizing them as a group (Grossmann 1991).
During the Cold War, research in the countries of the Soviet bloc was
determined by the inaccessibility of state archives and the presence of ide-
ological taboos. Although the local far-right movements—albeit selec-
tively—were considered culpable for wartime collaboration in post-1945
anti-fascist historiography, women’s participation in the process was left
unexamined. The reason why research on extreme right-wing politics
remained gender blind for a long time was that the “glass ceiling” of polit-
ical organizations made women invisible (Pető-Szapor 2004). Furthermore,
during communism, accessing the files of extreme right-wing political
movements was a state dispensed privilege, and the privileged researchers
did not consider the women found in the files as “worthy” subjects. Now,
three decades after the collapse of communism, a complete and reliable
inventory of these files is still not available (Pető and Schrijvers 2006).
After 1989 there were still only a few women historians active in the
newly reconceived historical research of the former Soviet bloc, and they
were primarily interested in the history of communist, leftist and liberal
movements. These inquiries followed the logic of early feminist historical
research and aimed at examining whether there were women’s movements
that could be examples as well as sources of legitimacy for current cam-
paigns for women’s equality. The ever-growing presence and influence of
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

contemporary “non-progressive” women’s movements turned research

on women’s connections with the far-right into a political necessity
(Pető 2004).
Soon after the 1989 collapse of the earlier hegemonic historical remem-
brance culture various, social groups started to support their political
claims with “just memories,” which were questioning the leftist version of
history writing (Pető 2011). This newly emerging Eastern European
counter-canonic history writing was again lenient towards far-right women
as they were primarily seen as victims of the communist legal system, and
only secondarily as war criminals. At the same time the aspects that made
them anti-leftists did not fit into the agenda of feminist historians either.
This is why in Eastern Europe research on this topic is still in its early
stages (Vonyó 1996). One generic reason is the ideological taboo, another
is the state of gender historiography in the region.
After the illiberal memory political turn of the 2000s, the rehabilitation
of certain Nazi collaborator politicians, such as the Ukrainian Stefan
Bandera, became possible on grounds of anti-communism. Therefore,
presently the picture is quite disparate: while in the Baltic States and
Ukraine anti-communist forces that collaborated with the Germans
became political reference points (Petrenko 2015), in East Central Europe
far-right politicians such as Szálasi or the Slovakian Tiso are still consid-
ered unacceptable. Since the memory political turn was framed by “neo-
liberal neopatriarchy,” women of the past are once again visibilized as
victims or as suffering mothers that symbolize the nation.
The difficulties of research on the relationship between women and the
far-right movements are caused just as much by the blind spots of main-
stream historical research as much by the shortcomings of gender studies.
The most important issue to examine is whether women’s presence in
politics truly and inevitably represents “progress.” For a long time, the
dominant position was that women members of organizations that are not
pro women’s rights are undoubtedly victims of male manipulation. This
sheds light on why false consciousness played such an important role in
the explanatory framework of research on conservative-nationalist and far-­
right women’s organizations. On the other hand, traditional feminist his-
torians held that right-wing women’s movements were necessarily
anti-feminist because their members supported men, or more accurately,
they supported the perpetuation of patriarchy by entering the “patriarchal
pact” (Cooke and Wollacott 1993).
12 A. PETŐ

The second difficulty is caused by a gaping lack of amply complex ana-

lytical concepts. The concepts developed and applied by feminist scholars
on leftist and liberal movements are not always applicable for researching
the far-right mobilization of women. For instance, these movements were
attractive for women because they could join them directly, i.e. they did
not have to establish a separate “women’s organization,” and therefore
they could avoid being judged by gender when acting as members of these
organizations. At the same time, the far-right discourse about saving the
“nation” had a powerful impact on women’s mobilization as well, so
much so that women regularly created separate sections within far-right
parties. Within this organizational space, women activists often challenged
the official program of far-right parties, causing serious internal tensions.
The party leadership wanted women to focus on social politics alone,
while the women themselves wanted to engage in real politics by develop-
ing an alternative vision of leftist and liberal women’s emancipation.
Invisibility was also furthered by certain preconceptions, for instance
that civil society organizations generally contribute to the strengthening
of democracy. This was not necessarily true for Hungarian civil society
organizations between the two world wars (Pető 2001). In the Horthy era
plenty such organizations existed with the aim to increase the social capital
of participating individuals. The analysis of woman perpetrators’ resumes
revealed what a great part these civil society organizations played in far-­
right recruitment. These organizations were founded on existing social
capital and network, i.e. they did not represent new opportunities of social
mobility for their membership. As the Horthy regime weakened, these
otherwise not too influential civil organizations got radicalized and even-
tually turned into venues of far-right recruitment. Thus far literature did
not pay ample attention to this.
The fourth difficulty is the limited scope of research in political history.
On the one hand, researchers mainly examined the membership of parties
and other political organizations and hence missed women’s movements
that were frequently established outside of the traditional political institu-
tional system (Pető 2003). On the other hand, political institutions and
their historical sources frequently invisibilized women active in their ranks.
Without a gendered lens in research it is easy to skip areas that do not
conform to what is commonly perceived as “important” in politics, such
as social work, the regulation of family duties or household activities, etc.;
in other words, areas in which women were politically involved. Tea par-
ties, for example, whether organized by conservative or liberal feminists or
the wives of far-right party leaders, were important platforms for women’s
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

organizations, but they never made it in the limelight of historical research

as they left behind very few sources due to their informal nature
(Szapor 2018).
With this volume I would like to dissolve the invisibility of these
women—an invisibility caused by political, theoretical and methodological
reasons. Therefore, this book did not take a famous politician as its main
protagonist but, to use Christopher Browning’s expression, the “ordinary”
perpetrator (Browning 1992). The fact that these perpetrators are women
calls for gendered analysis on two levels. Through a social history approach,
we can examine “where the women were” among the perpetrators, and
with a gender analysis we may shed light on the gender(ed) dynamics within
the far-right movements and in post–Second World War transitional justice.
By reconstructing the life and court trial of “ordinary women” perpetra-
tors, this book reveals those factors that attracted women to far-right move-
ments. The recent reemergence of extreme right-wing radicalism in Europe
with masses of “ordinary women” engaged in violent forms of protests
underlines that further critical study of the life stories of far-right women is
not only an academic but also a political imperative. The book includes
previously published material: Pető, Andrea. 2012. “I switched sides”.
Lawyers Creating the Memory of Shoah in Budapest.” In Confronting the
Past. European Experiences. Ed. Davor Paukovic, Vjeran Pavlakovic, Viseslav
Raos, 223–235. Zagreb: Political Science Research Centre; Pető, Andrea.
2012. “Women and Victims and Perpetrators in World War II: The Case of
Hungary.” In Women and Men at War. A Gender Perspective on World War
II and its Aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Maren Rogen,
Ruth Leiserowitz, 81–97. Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag; Pető, Andrea. 2009.
Who Is Afraid of the ‘Ugly Women?’: Problems of Writing Biographies of
Nazi and Fascist Women in Countries of the Former Soviet Block?
Copyright © 2009. The Journal of Women’s History. This article was first
published in The Journal of Women’s History 21:4 (2009): 147–151.
Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Notes
1. For a comparison with the Netherlands see Matthée, Zonneke and Pető
Andrea. 2008. A ‘kameraadskes’ és a „testvérnők”. Nők a holland és a mag-
yar nemzeti szocialista mozgalomban: motiváció és akarat. In Határtalan
nők, eds. Bakó Boglárka, Tóth Eszter Zsófia, 285–303. Budapest: Nyitott
Könyvműhely. About motherhood see: Koonz, Claudia. 1994. Motherhood
and Politics on the Far Right. In Politics and Motherhood, eds. A. Jetter
et al., 229–246. Hanover: University Press of New England.
14 A. PETŐ

2. Contemporary historians make the same mistake. See, for instance:

“[Szálasi] clearly defined women’s place within the family.” says Rudolf
Paksa. See Rudolf Paksa. 2009. Szélsőjobboldali mozgalmak az 1930-as
években. In A magyar jobboldali hagyomány 1900–1948, ed. Ignác Romsics,
275–304. Budapest: Osiris.
3. Interview with Dr. Antal Lajos in A Nép, February 17, 1939. On eugenics
and Turanism see Rudolf Paksa. 2009. Szélsőjobboldali mozgalmak az
1930-as években. In A magyar jobboldali hagyomány 1900–1948, ed. Ignác
Romsics, 275–304. Budapest: Osiris, especially 276–281.
4. See Ginderachter, Maarten van. 2005. Gender, the Extreme Right and
Flemisch Nationalist Women’s Organisations in Interwar Belgium. Nations
and Nationalism, 11: 265–284; Nash, Mary. 1994. Pronatalism and
Motherhood in Franco’s Spain. In Maternity and Gender Policies. Women
and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s–1950s, eds. Gisella Bock,
Pat Thane, 160–177. London: Routledge; Banac, Ivo and Katherine
Verdery (eds.). 1995. National Character and National Ideology in
Interwar Eastern Europe. New Haven: Yale Center for International and
Area Studies.
5. Some people’s tribunals’ files suggest that the interrogators had access to
membership fee payment lists. For example, ÁBTL V 81760, the case of
Mrs. Farkas. The list itself is at BFL X. 5.
6. The quantitative research took place at the Central European University in
Budapest. Preliminary results were published in Barna, Ildikó and Pető
Andrea. 2012. A politikai igazságszolgáltatás a II. világháború utáni
Budapesten. Budapest: Gondolat.
7. About the German cult of motherhood see: Weyrather, Irmgard. 1993.
Muttertag und Mutterkreuz. Der Kult um die „Deutschen Mutter” im
Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag; Heineman, Elizabeth D..
2001. Whose mothers? Generational Difference, War, and the Nazi Cult of
Motherhood. Journal of Women’s History, 12: 140–163.
8. On women in the SS see Schwarz, Gudrun. 1997. Frauen in der
SS. Sippenverband und Frauenkorps. In Zwischen Karriere und Verfolgung.
Handlungsräume von Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, eds.
Kirsten Heinsohn, Barbara Vogel, Ulrike Weckel, 223–244. Frankfurt—
New York: Campus. and Gersdorf, Ursula von. 1969. Frauen in
Kriegsdienst 1914–1945. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1969;
Maubach, Franka. 2005. Als Helferin in der Wehrmacht. Eine paradigma-
tische Figur des Krigesendes. Osteuropa, 4–6: 275–281.
9. Stibbe, Matthew. 2003. Women in the Third Reich. London: Arnold., espe-
cially “Women as Agents of Racial Policy”, pp. 75–80., Manns, Haide.
1997. Frauen für den Nationalsozialismus. Nationalsozialistischen
Studentinnen und Akedemikerinnen in der Weimar Republik und im
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Dritten Reich. Opladen: Leske + Budrich Verlag; Lower, Wendy. 2018.

German Women and the Holocaust in the Nazi East in Women and
Genocide. In Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, eds. Elissa Bemporad, Joyce
W. Warren, 111–136. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
10. See the debate: Fascism in East Central and Southeastern Europe:
Mainstream Fascism or „Mutant” Phenomenon? East Central Europe, 37.
(2010.) 331–371. Especially Roger Griffin: 338–339.
11. See Barna, Ildikó, and Andrea Pető. 2007. A “csúnya asszonyok”. Kik
voltak a női háborús bűnösök Magyarországon? Élet és irodalom, October
26. and Pető Andrea. 2009. Arrow Cross Women and Female Informants.
Baltic Worlds, 2: 48–52. I am grateful to Ildikó Barna for her help with
methodology. The data base does not contain the sentences received by
those who were found guilty. The reason is that this information could be
gathered only through the individual examination of each file of the 70,000
cases. See more on this research in: Barna, Ildikó and Pető, Andrea. 2015.
Political Justice in Budapest after World War II. Budapest: CEU Press.
12. See recent studies: Mailänder, Elissa. 2015. Female SS Guards and
Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942–1944. East
Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press; Heise, Ljiljana. 2009.
KZ-Aufseherinnen vor Gericht. Greta Bösel. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
13. Kretzer, Anette. 2009. NS-Täterschaft und Geschlecht. Der erste britische
Ravensbrück-Prozess 1946/47 in Hamburg. Berlin: Metropol Verlag; Taake,
Claudia. 1998. Angeklagt. SS-Frauen vor Gericht. Oldenburg: Universität
Oldenburg; Schwarz, Gudrun. 1992. Verdrängte Täterinnen. Frauen im
Apparat der SS (1939–1945). In Nach Osten. Verdeckte Spuren nationalso-
zialistischer Verbrechen, ed. Theresa Wobbe, 197–227. Frankfurt: Verlag
Neue Kritik.
14. Summary of the research results see Paul, Gerhard. 2002. Von
Psychopathen, Technokraten des Terrors und „ganz gewöhnlichen”
Deutschen. Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung. In Die Täter
der Shoah. Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche?, ed.
Gerhard Paul., 13–90. Göttingen: Wallstein; and: Gross, Jan. 2000.
Themes for Social History of War Experience and Collaboration. In The
Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath, eds.
Deák István, Jan Gross, Tony Judt, 15–35. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
15. For example: Bormann, Martin. 2000. Leben gegen Schatten. Gelebte Zeit,
geschenkte Zeit. Paderborn: Bonifatius; Nissen, Margret. 2005. Sind Sie die
Tochter Speer? München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt; Schirach, Richard.
2005. Der Schatten meines Vaters. München: Carl Hanser Verlag.
16. Püski, Levente. 2006. A Horthy-rendszer (1919–1945). Budapest:
Pannonica; Sipos, Balázs. 2011. A Horthy-korszak politikai rendszere. In
16 A. PETŐ

Magyarországi politikai pártok lexikona (1846–2010), ed. István Vida,

137–147. Budapest: Gondolat—MTA–ELTE Pártok, Pártrendszerek,
Parlamentarizmus Kutatócsoport.
17. See Paksa, Rudolf. 2013. Szálasi Ferenc és a hungarizmus. Budapest: Jaffa
Kiadó; Karsai, László. 2016. Szálasi Ferenc. Politikai életrajz. Budapest:
Balassi.

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 CHAPTER 2

Invisible Party Members

Abstract The first analytical chapter, based on the documents of the

women’s section of the Arrow Cross Party, party press material and mem-
oires, and documents collected by the people’s tribunals, shows who these
women were, in what kinds of activities they were engaged in, what kinds
of political, professional and material aspirations they had; it argues that
most Hungarian far-right women belonged to the first generation of
Hungarian intellectual and wage earning women and joined the ranks of
the far-right because they did not find the “conservative offer”of the
Horthy regime acceptable as it would have forced them into the role of
care-takers, but at the same time the leftist alternative, i.e. the trade unions
or the social democratic movement was also unappealing for them after
the failed 1919 revolution.

Keywords People’s tribunals • Forgetting • Women’s employment •

Intellectual women

From the onset of the Second World War, the framework of Hungarian
women’s politics went through radical changes: some charity societies
engaged in beforehand frowned-upon “high politics,” and many women
who experienced workplace discrimination decided to join the feminists,
the Arrow Cross, the social democrats or the communists. The analysis of
the Hungarian case reveals what the national socialist movement offered

© The Author(s) 2020 19

A. Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51225-5_2
20 A. PETŐ

to its female members,1 and the scrutiny of Hungarian woman war crimi-
nals brings closer the connections between gender and politics. This chap-
ter provides an overview of the social history of Hungarian far-right
women. It aims to show how the far right’s mobilization of a versatile,
multilayered recruitment base eventually led to the stereotype of the
“Arrow Cross woman” in public and legal discourse.

2.1   Gender Politics of the Far Right

With the extension of suffrage (1918) and the election of the first
Hungarian female parliament member (1920), women slowly became
political factors. The question was, which political party will represent
their interests best (Paksy 2009). In an international comparison it is clear
that before the Nazis came to power the right-wing Deutschnationale
Volkspartei’s (DNVP) women’s politics had gradually radicalized (Scheck
2001, 2004). There was a continuity between the politics of the DNVP
and the Nazi party, and the same kind of continuities were observable in
Hungary, as many women members of the Arrow Cross Party arrived to
politics through the mainstream conservative MANSZ (Magyar Asszonyok
Nemzeti Szövetsége/National Association of Hungarian Women). This
however holds true only for those intellectuals who joined the Arrow
Cross during the Second World War, as in the 1930s the far-right parties
and the MANSZ, i.e. the two political movements that mobilized women,
relied on different recruitment bases.2
Another comparison can be made with the gender politics of the
Croatian Ustasha movement. Upon coming to power, the Ustasha, just
like the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party, started to control acceptable
expressions of masculinity and femininity alike. Based on his analysis of
contemporary Croatian press, Rory Yeomans showed that while Ustasha
men could follow only one role model, that of the fearless warrior, the
Ustasha women had a relatively wide array of roles to choose from: mother,
wife, worker, writer and artist (Yeomans 2005). In 1941 the Ustasha
Independent State of Croatia was formed and the Ustasha commenced to
put theory into praxis. Their official goal was to send women back to the
family homes after twenty years of emancipation, which were perceived as
a failure. When the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party formed government on
October 15, 1944, they posited a similar goal, but due to their limited
governing time they could not achieve it. These parties faced the same
problem: how to integrate women who have increasing economic and
 2 INVISIBLE PARTY MEMBERS 21

psychological independence into the movement and into the ideal state as
envisioned by the movement, when in principal the objective of the state
is to confine women in their homes.
A further point of comparison is the gender politics of the Republic of
Salò, the German puppet state in Italy. There are some similarities between
the Republic of Salò and the Arrow Cross rule: both were short lived and
both excelled in violence. However, it would be a mistake to approach the
activists of the Fascist women’s movement and the woman members of
the Arrow Cross as equivalent. In their memoires, the women who served
in the Republic of Salò’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps mention this
period as “the time of freedom” because they could finally leave the politi-
cally sanctified confinement of motherhood—in uniforms and armor
(Schiavo 2016: 135–145). During the period of the war’s radicalization,
these small and often previously banned parties entered the government,
and together with them their woman party members and supporters also
experienced a measure of independence and power. Still, in Hungary the
German-Hungarian military leadership did not set up a woman’s militia,
unlike in Italy, where the prolonged civil war necessitated it.
The primary bases of post–First World War far rights movements were
men’s friendships and connections (Mosse 2001). This holds true for the
Romanian Garda de Fier, the Iron Guard, which did not allow women
among its ranks (Ioanid 2004). They created a separate organization for
women; who as wives, lovers or mothers supported the men. While men
trained or engaged in strategic planning, women cooked, washed and per-
formed other household duties (Clark 2012).
The Arrow Cross Party had been formed in the misogynistic political
milieu of interwar Hungary, in which “women,” especially working, inde-
pendent, single women were regarded as a threat by the male economic,
political and cultural hegemony. The comradeship forged during the First
World War also created a cohesive force among male members. The Arrow
Cross leaders considered that women are inferior factors that hinder men
in achieving higher goals—therefore shaping the rhetoric of their wom-
en’s politics was especially challenging (Theweleit 1989).
After the First World War Hungarian women’s position fundamentally
changed with the right to vote in 1918 and the increase in women’s
employment. However, from the 1920s on women were again steadily
squeezed out from public life, which was achieved in part by restricting
their newly gained suffrage, and in part by attempts to restrict their access
to higher education gained in 1895 (Pető and Szapor 2004). It was against
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