Miklós Horthy

Who was Miklós Horthy?

Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya was a Hungarian Admiral and statesman who served as prince regent of the Kingdom of Hungary between World Wars I and II and throughout most of World War II, from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944. He was styled "His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary".

Horthy started his career as a Frigate Lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Navy in 1896 and attained the Admiralty in 1918. He served in the Otranto Raid and at the Battle of the Strait of Otranto and became Commander-in-Chief of the k.u.k. Navy in the last year of the First World War. In 1919, following a series of revolutions and interventions in Hungary involving the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, Horthy returned to Budapest with the National Army and established a regency government.

Horthy led a conservative nationalist government through the interwar period, banning the communist party and pursuing an irredentist foreign policy in the face of the Treaty of Trianon.