According to the Jewish news portal Neokohn, in the coming days a number of memorial events will be held for the fallen German and Hungarian soldiers of the 1944-45 siege of Budapest.(1)
Hungarian far-right extremities regularly organise such events in order to remember the German and Hungarian fallen of the siege and the final “outbreak” of the soldiers.
According to Neokohn, the Hungarian-Jewish anti-Semitism watchdog organisation, Tett és Védelem Alapítvány (Action and Protection Foundation) is aware of the coming events and is prepared to combat hate speech and the showing of illegal symbols – such as swastikas – by any legal means.
Neokohn has also learned that a “memorial run” will be organised in the memory of the fallen German military commander of Budapest, Gerhard Schmidhuber. This event will be held by historian and pundit Krisztián Ungváry.
Ungváry has previously sparked serious criticism on the part of Hungarian Holocaust scholars for having said in a 2021 Holocaust movie that the Germans did not commit atrocities against the Jewish populace of Budapest.(2)
In 2018 Ungváry has said that he thought it acceptable to vote for the anti-Semitic Jobbik party.(3)
Ungváry has compared Zionism to racism in a 2016 book of his: “Zionism is racism just like all other ideas that reject a free choice of identity and instead base it on ancestry”.(4)
Sources:
(1) https://neokohn.hu/2021/02/11/iden-is-lesz-neonaci-kitores-emlekezes-a-tev-jogi-lepesekkel-keszul/
(2) https://neokohn.hu/2021/02/11/iden-is-lesz-neonaci-kitores-emlekezes-a-tev-jogi-lepesekkel-keszul/
(3) https://huilmediacenter.com/2021/02/09/shoah-movie-by-news-portal-444-under-attack-by-holocaust-scholars/
(4) Ungváry Krisztián: A Horthy-rendszer és antiszemitizmusának mérlege. Jelenkor publishing house, Budapest. 2016 edition. Page 276.