Budapest’s House of Terror: Examining the Dangers of Ideology and the Importance of Self-Determination

The winter of 1944-1945 saw 3,500 murders on the bank of the Danube, executions carried out by fascist Arrow Cross Party militiamen. This would be one of the final terrors the Nazis would inflict upon the people of Hungary, who were to be ‘liberated’ by the Soviets just two months later following the Siege of Budapest. The Soviet chokehold around the city would result in the starvation of 38,000 civilians, but would also force the desperate Nazi occupation to its knees. The unconditional surrender of the city on 13^th February 1945 was a major victory for the Allied powers, and for the Red Army on its long march to Berlin.

What followed was 44 years of Soviet occupation, coming to an end in 1989. For the war-weary civilian population of Hungary, the years of terror were only just beginning. Today, Budapest’s House of Terror tells the story of a nation held hostage by rival ideologies for half a century. For Hungary, the intricacies of the Nazi and Soviet occupations were lost to the overwhelming similarities of their methods. The Hungarian national socialist party, the Arrow Cross, boasted 300,000 members in 1939. Emboldened by the expansion of Germany and subordinate to the Nazi Party, the Arrow Cross recruited thousands from working-class districts around Budapest to march in its rank-and-file. By 1945, these young men and women were rounded up by the Hungarian Communist Party and the Soviet occupiers and forced to renounce their allegiances to the national socialists. An entire society was forced to turn coat overnight. For many members of the Arrow Cross Party, this was as simple as switching out their uniforms. Nazi terrorisers became Communist terrorisers over night through a costume change.

An ordinary Hungarian peasant at the time could be forgiven for not even noticing the dramatic shift of power in Budapest. Widespread land reform that was supposed to secure the livelihoods of peasant farmers made little real difference to their predicament due to the continuation of war time restrictions and compulsory food quotas to supply Soviet troops and their Hungarian lackeys. Those who refused to hand over their quota no longer had to fear the concentration camps of Germany and Poland, however; their fate lay eastwards in the Siberian gulags. Before being sentenced, many in Budapest would be processed at the “House of Horrors” by the State Protection Authority (AVH). Many locals knew of this building as the “House of Loyalty”, once used by the Arrow Cross secret police to ensure allegiance to the fascist regime and now repurposed by the AVH to ensure allegiance to the communists. The methods of physical and psychological torture utilised by the Arrow Cross and AVH at the House looked remarkably similar.    

As the House of Terror Museum demonstrates, these two rival ideologies each created a reality that was largely indistinguishable from the other. Ideology itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but any idea taken to its extremes necessitates imposition of that idea onto others. Often that means against their will. The 400,000 Jews forcibly moved to concentration camps throughout Hungary by the Arrow Cross in the 1940s and the 20,000 wounded and killed by Soviet tanks on November 4^th 1956, following the October revolution, were all victims of ideologies that painted anyone with differing opinions as enemies. Nothing mobilises men and women to kill their neighbours like ideology. But as the speed with which Nazi ideas were dropped and Communist ones adopted by so many complicit Hungarians demonstrates, ideology is usually just an excuse to exert power over others. For every genuine believer in the cause there are a hundred more willing to adopt it for their own personal gain. This includes the people who turn a blind eye to the violence committed in order to protect themselves.

Budapest is a testimony to the power of individuals and their capacity to overcome a uniform ideology. Today you can buy t-shirts depicting communist party members wearing party hats, drink at Communist-themed bars and visit memorials both commemorating the victims and denouncing the actions of those that embraced both Nazi and Communist ideals at the cost of their own sense of humanity. The actions of the parties of terror have become something to mock, and that is a good thing. It is by promoting individuality and encouraging us to see the fallacies in such simplistic thinking that we prevent something like this from happening again. It prevents these excuses for violence from gaining any traction in society. Today we have more information at our fingertips than at any other time in history, and yet many people still choose to listen to only one source, and to accept what they are told as fact because it is what they want to hear. At its most extreme, this kind of behaviour becomes dangerous.

The crushing of the 1956 revolution in Hungary by superior Soviet firepower at first appeared to be a defeat for the first student protestors and their many supporters, but it revealed some of the cracks in what otherwise appeared to be an iron-clad system of rule. Change did not come immediately after these brave actions and sacrifices, but the seeds were sowed. As best said by the House of Terror exhibition itself, “no people can be subjugated forever; one can and must take up the fight even against a power thought to be invincible”. History is awash with examples of dictators failing and regimes built on terror collapsing. The common denominator in those victories is the unwavering humanity of the individuals who fight against those systems of oppression. That is the only ideology worth fully embracing.