German WWII Preliminary Record for POW Report for Miklos Horthy-Miklos Horthy was a very interesting character. He was a Hungarian admiral and statesman who served as the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary between the two World Wars and throughout most of World War 2. Caught in the middle of the Soviets and Germany, he attempted to stop the mass deportation of the Jews and disobeyed direct orders from Germany. He knew Germany was going to lose the war, so declared an armistice with the Soviets. He sent his son, Miklós Horthy, Jr., to a meeting with Soviet representatives to finalize the surrender. During this meeting, the German Commando Skorzeny and his troops forced their way into the meeting and kidnapped the younger Horthy at gunpoint. Trussed up in a carpet, Miklós Jr. was immediately driven to the airport and flown to Germany to serve as a hostage. Skorzeny then brazenly led a convoy of German troops and four Tiger II tanks to the Vienna Gates of Castle Hill, where the Hungarians had been ordered not to resist. Horthy senior was captured by Veesenmayer and his staff later on the 15th and taken to the Waffen SS office, where he was held overnight. Veesenmayer told Horthy that unless he recanted the armistice and abdicated, his son would be killed the next morning. With his son's life in the balance, Horthy consented to sign a document officially abdicating his office.
He was allowed to stay under house arrest in Bavaria until the end of the war. As allied forces came closer to the castle in Bavaria where Horthy was being held, his SS guards fled, and he arrested by the American 7th Army, arriving at Camp Ashcan in late September 1945. There he was asked to provide evidence to the International Military Tribunal in preparation for the trial of the Nazi leadership. Although he was interviewed repeatedly about his contacts with some of the defendants. Horthy gradually came to believe that his arrest had been arranged and choreographed by the United States in order to protect him from the Russians. In late 1945, Horthy after being reunited with his son, was released from Nuremberg prison and allowed to rejoin his family in the German town of Weilheim, Bavaria. The Horthys’ lived there for four years, supported financially by ambassador John Montgomery, his successor, Herbert Pell, and by Pope Pius XII, whom he knew personally. For Horthy, returning to Hungary was impossible; it was now firmly in the hands of a Soviet-sponsored Communist government. In an extraordinary twist of fate, the chief of Hungary's post-war Communist apparatus was Mátyás Rákosi, one of Béla Kun's colleagues from the ill-fated Communist coup of 1919. Kun had been executed during Stalin's purges of the late 1930s, but Rákosi had survived in a Hungarian prison cell. In 1940, Horthy had permitted Rákosi to emigrate to the Soviet Union in exchange for a series of highly symbolic Hungarian battle-flags from the 19th century that were in Russian hands. He returned to Nuremberg in 1948 to testify in the Ministries Trial. In 1950, the Horthy family managed to find a home in Portugal, thanks to Miklós Jr.'s contacts with Portuguese diplomats in Switzerland. Horthy’s life sounds like it would make a very exciting movie!
Note: These are original vintage reprints of Prisoner of War Preliminary reports These are guaranteed as described. This paperwork would have been a prisoner “intake form”, with all of the individual’s personal details including the prisoner's name, fingerprints, place of birth, next of kin, date of capture, date of arrival, date of transfer, physical description, distinguishing marks, etc.
Copies of these would have been supplied to the different departments that needed access to this information. This is one of the vintage reprints that survived from the infamous Allied prisoner-of-war camp in the Palace Hotel of Mondorf-les-Bains, in Luxembourg, code named "Camp Ashcan". Each card is annotated "CCPWE #32", an abbreviation for the Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure #32. Operating from May to August 1945, it served as a processing station and interrogation center for the 86 most prominent surviving Nazi leaders prior to their trial in Nuremberg, including Hermann Göring and Karl Dönitz.