US scholar returns Hungary award over Holocaust 'whitewashing'

An American professor and prominent Holocaust scholar said Sunday he was handing back a Hungarian state award in protest at the government's "falsification of history". "After following developments in Hungary in recent years, it is with heavy heart that I have made this decision," Randolph L. Braham, a professor at the City University of New York, wrote in a letter to the Hungarian state news agency MTI. Braham, 91, who received the award in 2011 for his research on the Holocaust in Hungary, also said he would not permit the use of his name for a department by the Holocaust Museum in Budapest. "The campaign of history falsification which aims to whitewash the (Miklos) Horthy era, has shocked me," he said. Miklos Horthy, Hungary's controversial leader during World War II, brought in several anti-Jewish laws, and is seen by many as complicit in the mass deportations to Nazi death camps in 1944 which resulted in the deaths of around 450,000 Hungarian Jews. Braham said the "history rewriting campaign" began shortly after Prime Minister Viktor Orban's right-wing government came to power in 2010. Orban has been accused of tacitly encouraging a rehabilitation of Horthy, despite telling a session of the World Jewish Congress in Budapest last year that he would ensure "zero tolerance" of anti-Semitism. The "last straw", Braham said, was a government decision last December to erect a monument for victims of the country's invasion by Nazi Germany in March 1944. The plan has drawn criticism from leaders of Hungary's 100,000-strong Jewish community, historians and opposition parties. Krisztian Ungvary, a prominent historian, told AFP that the monument sends a message that Hungarians were not to blame for the Holocaust. Ungvary and 25 other historians signed an open letter last week saying that the Holocaust in Hungary took place "with the active contribution of the Hungarian authorities".