Between April and early July 1944, 430,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz.
1. Military History Club Podcast focuses on Adam LeBor’s The Last Days of Budapest, Spies, Nazis, Rescuers, and Resistance, 1940 to 1945.
2. Saul David hosts Adam LeBor, who is introduced as an author, journalist, and historian because he wrote the book and lived in Budapest for more than 25 years.
3. The episode asks how Hungary moved between Britain and Nazi Germany, and why Budapest became a city of spies, rescues, and wartime catastrophe.
4. LeBor says he arrived in Budapest in 1991 as a foreign correspondent and saw bullet holes, shell impacts, and other visible war damage on buildings.
5. He explains that Hungary was technically neutral at the start of the war, even though Britain still had an embassy in Budapest until April 1941.
6. LeBor says SIS and SOE personnel operated from that embassy with Hungarian authorities aware of their activity.
7. He describes Admiral Miklós Horthy as an Anglophile authoritarian conservative nationalist who wanted to reverse the territorial losses of the Treaty of Trianon.
8. LeBor names Transylvania, parts of Slovakia, and northern Serbia as places Hungary regarded as historic lands lost in 1920.
9. He says Hungary joined the Axis in November 1940 while trying to keep contacts with London and Washington open.
10. The interview links Hungary’s shift in wartime fortunes to the destruction of the Hungarian Second Army at Voronezh in January 1943.
11. LeBor describes Istvan Horthy, the regent’s designated successor, as pro-English and horrified by the treatment of Jewish men on labour service.
12. He says Istvan Horthy died in a plane crash that many people believed had been sabotaged by the Germans.
13. LeBor recounts a September 1943 meeting in Istanbul where Laszlo Veres, escorted by SOE members, met the British ambassador to discuss Hungary changing sides.
14. He says Horthy refused to break with Hitler without telling him first, and that hesitation helped bring catastrophe.
15. LeBor highlights Klara Andraszyk, later Kaja Odeskulci, as an aristocratic anti-Nazi organiser whose Andrássy Palace salon became a rescue hub for Polish soldiers and refugees.
16. He also describes Andor Grosz as a courier and smuggler who moved between Hungarian intelligence, the Abwehr, Zionist networks, and American contacts.
17. LeBor calls wartime Budapest “the Casablanca of Central Europe” because British, German, Hungarian, Zionist, and other intelligence services all operated there at once.
18. The tone is conversational and explanatory, with Saul David prompting chronology and LeBor answering with names, dates, and institutional detail.
19. Listeners interested in espionage, Hungary, and WWII rescue networks will get the most from it.
20. Listeners wanting a short, lightly contextual chat without wartime political complexity may skip it.
