A few days ago, I devoted a post to a great friend and supporter of Viktor Orbán in the U.S. Congress, the lone Republican congressman from Maryland, known for his far-right views. He was the beneficiary of a redrawn congressional district and therefore has had an easy time winning a seat in the House ever since 2010.
Andy Harris, the American politician
Until recently, Andy Harris was of interest to me only because of his close connection to and active support of the Orbán regime. But it’s worth taking a quick look at his political activities and positions in U.S. politics. In 2014, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) named him one of the most “anti-equality” members of the House, who “go out of their way to oppose any step toward equal protection under the law or to protect LGBT Americans from violence, discrimination, and harassment.”
In 2016, he became the member of the Freedom Caucus. In 2017, the House approved a resolution condemning QAnon. Seventeen Republicans voted against it; Harris opted to abstain. In the same year, he endorsed Roy Moore of Alabama, Donald Trump’s choice for the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Harris recently announced that he will run for a seventh term, although he promised in 2010 that he would quit politics after six. But as he said in a television interview, “Look, the situation is very different from then. No one would have anticipated that we have the pushback from liberals and socialists that we had then.” He continued: “this fight is not over,” and therefore he is needed.
Earlier I mentioned that during the debate over the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory, Harris taunted his Democratic colleagues, a taunt that almost ended in a fist fight. Andy Harris’s latest is that he set off a magnetometer that was installed in the Capitol after October 6 as a result of carrying a concealed gun yesterday afternoon. According to his spokesman, he and his family have been threatened by “someone who has been released awaiting trial.”
The Hungarian roots of Andy Harris
Now let’s get to the meat of today’s post. In my last piece on Andy Harris, I recalled that he takes every opportunity to tell the story of his father, also a doctor, who was taken to a forced labor camp in the Gulag. In Hungarian Free Press, György Lázár questioned that story. Lázár was correct in suspecting that the Gulag story wasn’t true because one of Hungarian Spectrum’s readers subsequently found a document from the database of the Magyar Népjóléti Minisztérium (Ministry of Social Welfare) listing the names and ranks of returning Hungarian prisoners of war from Russia. According to that database, Dr. Zoltán Hariss, first lieutenant, who was born in 1911, mother’s name Jolán Komor, returned to Budapest on July 18, 1947. So, my initial assumption was that Zoltán Hariss or Haris—because one finds both spellings in the documents—was one of those Hungarian soldiers who fought on the territory of the Soviet Union, where he was captured by the Russians and spent a few years in a prisoner-of-war camp. As you will see, however, the story is not so simple.
I found a small announcement in Magyar Nemzet from March 3, 1948 that reads: “The people’s prosecutor’s office indicted Dr. Zoltán Haris, a physician, for crimes against the people because, as a member of the Keleti Arcvonal Bajtársi Szövetség, he assisted the rule of the Szálasi regime.”
For those of you who are not familiar with that part of Hungarian history, Ferenc Szálasi, a former army officer, was the leader of the Arrow Cross Party. On October 15, 1944, when Regent Miklós Horthy announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the war and was promptly arrested, Szálasi came to be the country’s “nemzetvezető” (leader of the nation). During his rule, hundreds if not thousands of mostly Hungarian Jews were killed while the Russian troops were only a few kilometers away.
As for the Keleti Arcvonal Bajtársi Szövetség (KABSZ), it was a paramilitary group of former officers who fought in the Soviet Union and who, because of the hardships endured during the intense fighting at the bend of the River Don, were exempted from further military service. Since we know from other sources that Haris was in Budapest during 1944, he must have been captured not in the Soviet Union but during the fierce last-ditch fighting as a member of KABSZ during the siege of Budapest.
Zoltán Haris was born in 1911 in Miskolc, where he attended the Miskolc Katolikus Fiúgimnázium and excelled as a student. We don’t have any data on which medical school he attended, but by the late 1930s he lived in Budapest. At least one can find his name and telephone number there in a list of physicians. His name appears in the column listing dentists, but we must keep in mind that at that time all doctors, including dentists, received the same medical education.
On April 6, 1941, Nemzeti Újság announced the engagement of Erzsébet Sajóhelyi to Dr. Zoltán Hariss. Erzsébet was a highly educated woman who first attended Teleki Blanka Női Felső Kereskedelmi Iskola and then continued her studies at the Hungarian Royal József Nádor Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem (a university of technology and economics), where in August 1943 she received a doctorate, according to the announcement by the university.
Although Erzsébet and Zoltán got engaged in 1941, they didn’t get married until 1943 because, I suspect, Zoltán was called up and dispatched to the Russian front. Therefore, Erzsébet in 1942 was still single with her own telephone number and address under her maiden name. In 1943, however, she published an article in Mezőgazdasági Közlöny as dr. Hariss Zoltánné dr. Sajóhelyi Erzsébet on “The political significance of agrarian associations.” I also suspect that it was about that time that Haris changed his name to Hariss, which sounded more elegant. At least both his first wife and his son by Elizabeth used that spelling of his name.
How do we know that Zoltán must have spent 1944 at home and not in Russia? Zoltán’s first son, Gábor F. L. Hariss, was born on November 28, 1944 in Budapest, just a few days before the total encirclement of the city by the Soviet troops, so Zoltán had to have been in Budapest roughly nine months earlier in the year. The Soviets offered to provide humane surrender, which was turned down, and as a result 800,000 civilians and 33,000 German and 37,000 Hungarian soldiers were entrapped in the city. One of those soldiers was most likely Zoltán Hariss.
Keleti Arcvonal Bajtársi Szövetség
KABSZ was organized by Károly Ney, a war criminal who got away, a devoted supporter of Hitler and the Third Reich, who sometime in 1939 attended a training course in Berlin under the supervision of Heinrich Himmler’s SS. The group was at first the armed force of Béla Imrédy’s far-right party, Magyar Élet Pártja (Party of Hungarian Life), but later well-known anti-Semites such as Andor Jaross, Endre László, and László Baky, the trio from the Ministry of Interior who were responsible for the speedy transportation of Jewish Hungarians to Auschwitz, joined Ney to head a small group of about 150 young officers. I should add that in 1946 all four men met their maker, having been convicted of war crimes. KABSZ eventually abandoned Imrédy, and it became a group of stormtroopers of Szálasi’s Arrow Cross Party.
Béla Imrédy is giving a speech at the first large recruiting rally of KABSZ in June 1944
The goal of KABSZ was to prevent the Horthy regime from abandoning the German war effort. About two weeks before Horthy’s October 15th announcement of the Hungarian withdrawal from the war, they tried to stage a coup. It was foiled by the military prosecutor’s office, which was headed by Szilárd Bakay, one of the few Hungarian high officers who was not a devoted supporter of the German cause. The group might have been disbursed temporarily, but the pro-German officers made sure that it would survive. After October 15, the group became legal, and on October 20th an agreement was reached to permit the veteran volunteers from KABSZ to enlist in the Waffen SS via the SS-Ersatzkommando Ungarn. The story of KABSZ can be found on the internet version of Magyarok a II. Világháborúban. There is even a rather poor English summary of the event. The coup attempt was hardly known until 1986, when Dr. Ákos Major, brother of the famous actor Tamás Major and a military prosecutor, related the whole story.
A photo of KABSZ members in Esti Újság, June 23, 1944
Members of KABSZ wore black pants, black neckties, and yellow shirts. On their left arms they wore a black band with a skull intersected with a pair of swords. Esti Újság, one of the many far-right papers of the time, carried the story of the initial recruiting meeting of KABSZ, which drew an estimated crowd of 2,000 men. Here József Ambrus, who was best known as the leader of the Turul Szövetség, a right-wing organization of university students, the “national ideological leader of KABSZ,” gave a speech. Here are a few quotations from the lengthy oration he gave on June 23, 1944.
Recruiting post for KABSZ: “We are calling you for your sentry at home”
Ambrus began his speech by recalling the glorious days three years earlier when “the armed host of a new Europe began its defensive war against Jewish Bolshevism.” In case one is confused, Ambrus was talking about Hungary’s entry into World War II as Nazi Germany’s ally, invading the Soviet Union. According to him, the war was inevitable because “a satanic conspiracy was ready to destroy the national and Christian culture in Europe.” Hungarians who have not been corrupted by the “Jewish spirit,” he said, realize the threat to Hungary’s thousand-year-old past and know that the present half-hearted Hungarian war effort will lead to “the death of the nation.” Real national socialism must be introduced for total victory. He called on “the whole nation to fight shoulder to shoulder with our glorious allies for the final victory.” I should add that Dr. József Ambrus, according to a 1950 list of Hungarian Nazis who fled the country, escaped to Chile.
The American Harris family
But to return to the fate of Zoltán Hariss. I believe he was captured during the house-to-house battle that raged between December 24, 1944 and February 13, 1945. His wife may have died because, while previously her name appeared frequently in newspapers, after she gave birth to Gábor Frigyes László Hariss on November 28, 1944 there is no mention of her anywhere. I suspect that a maternal relative or perhaps his grandmother took care of the boy. After Zoltán Hariss returned in April 1947, he had to appear immediately for a political checkup, where his connection with KABSZ became known. We know that by April 1948 he was convicted, but given the light sentence, I suspect that his role in the organization was minor. According to the rough timeline we have, he could have left Hungary either before or after he served his eight months in jail. In any case, he left his four-year-old son behind.
Zoltán Hariss married Irene Koczerzuk, born in an area of Poland which later became part of Ukraine, on July 29, 1950 in Salzburg while they were waiting for their U.S. immigration papers. According to a note to Gábor Hariss’s obituary announcement (February 25, 2020) by a former neighbor, “Dr. Zoltan Harris worked very, very hard to bring [Gábor] over to the US from behind the iron curtain,” but he succeeded only after the 1956 revolution. Interestingly, Gábor never changed the spelling of his name; he died as Hariss.
So, Zoltán Hariss was never a forced labor inmate in the Gulag. Instead, he got involved with a very bad cause and ultimately served under the Hungarian branch of the SS. I suspect that Andy Harris is not entirely familiar with the true story of his father’s involvement with the Hungarian Nazi movement, which applauded the extermination of Jews and sent more than 400,000 people to die in Auschwitz. But if he is ignorant of his family history, it would be high time to learn the true facts.