- Allied with Nazi Germany during World War II in order to regain Hungarian lands. There is dispute among historians as to how much Horthy knew about the Holocaust.
- He allowed Hungary to participate in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Hungarian forces performed a front-line role during the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43. In April 1943 he supplied 10,000 Hungarian Jewish deportees for labor battalions in Germany.
- He passed anti-Semitic laws in Hungary in the 1930s.
- Signed the Tripartite Pact on 20 November 1940.
- He was likely only spared from execution after World War II because Joseph Stalin did not want to make a martyr of him (he was then in his late 70s). The Soviet dictator pressured the Communist government of Hungary not to request his extradition, and he moved to Portugal in 1949.
- Declared war on the Soviet Union on 27 June 1941, and sent 500,000 Hungarian soldiers to fight on the Eastern Front.
- Josip Broz Tito, the postwar ruler of Yugoslavia, asked that Horthy be charged with complicity in the 1942 massacre of Serbian and Jewish civilians by Hungarian troops in Vojvodina. A Serbian historian claimed that not only was Horthy aware of these genocidal massacres, but had approved of them.
- Despite his postwar denials, it is widely believed that he was fully aware of the Final Solution in 1943.
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