Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946)

The interwar Kingdom of Hungary, retrospectively called the Regency or the Horthy era, existed as a country from 1920 to 1946 under Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary, who officially represented the Hungarian monarchy although the throne stood vacant — there was no king, and the return attempts of King Charles IV were prevented by Horthy. The state emerged from the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, which stripped Hungary of 72 per cent of its historical territory and 58 per cent of its population and left more than three million ethnic Hungarians under the new borders of Romania, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; revision of that treaty defined its foreign policy. Hungary under Horthy was conservative, nationalist and fiercely anti-communist, with a government resting on an unstable alliance of conservatives and right-wingers, a system some historians have described as para-fascist. In the Second World War Hungary joined the Axis, recovered territory from Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia in 1938–1941, and was occupied by Germany in 1944; it passed under Soviet occupation in 1945, and the monarchy was formally abolished when the republic was declared in 1946.