John Flournoy Montgomery

Montgomery was clearly expected to watch over the political intrigues not only in Budapest but, from his central location on the Danube, to monitor the goings-on in Hungary's neighbors (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia) and other countries in the region as well, including Bulgaria, Poland, Germany and Italy.

[5] He avidly collected and recorded information about his many contacts, including their earlier jobs, their families and hobbies, and even gossip he heard about them from his other friends.

His inability to read local newspapers or understand casual conversations in the street meant that Montgomery was cut off from much of the Hungarian capital's busy middle- and working-class political scene.

Montgomery was also plainly charmed by Budapest's Gilded Age atmosphere, and enchanted by the capital's old-world pageantry – the elaborate costumes and glittering, semi-feudal rituals to which Hungary still clung in the inter-war period.

Like many of its neighbors, Hungary had its own home-grown fascist movements and extreme right-wing politicians; a genteel anti-Semitism was embedded in elite Hungarian culture.

Horthy was also committed (as was virtually every Hungarian) to re-acquiring territories which had been carved away from Hungary as part of the Treaty of Trianon at the end of the First World War.

Montgomery's Hungarian friends convinced him that Hungary's capitulations to the Nazis were unavoidable, the only possible path for a weak nation facing a well-armed and ruthless neighbor.

[7]In this, Montgomery echoed the stance of the regent Horthy, who wrote in his own memoirs: It is easily said that we should have preferred to engage in a hopeless struggle rather than to submit to Hitler's demands, and such a view reads well on paper.

[8]This similarity of opinion is not unusual: a comparison of Horthy's memoirs and Montgomery's yields a broad alignment of their views, especially regarding Hungary's political choices before and during the Second World War.

[11] On the whole, Montgomery felt that Roosevelt held him at arm's length, and complained that FDR was insufficiently curious about real reports from the field.

Montgomery was recalled from his posting Budapest in March 1941, three months before Hungary finally joined the Axis as a full war partner during the invasion of the Soviet Union.

He viewed with anguish the destruction of virtually half the capital during the Battle of Budapest, and he bitterly mourned the ceding of Hungary to Soviet control at the war's end.

After the Horthy family relocated to Estoril, Portugal, Montgomery raised funds for their upkeep from a small committee of wealthy Hungarians in America.