The contemporary right-wing sees Horthy as a patriotic strongman who helped rebuild Hungary after the devastation of World War I, while the left views him as a shameful symbol of the country's collaboration with the Nazis, as Reuters has detailed. Horthys Order of Vitéz has a similarly complex legacy, as the U.S. State Department considered it an organization under Nazi control during World War II.
George Deák, an independent historian and an associate at Harvard Universitys Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, described the Order of Vitéz as a "tainted" but ambiguous symbol and cautioned to TPM that he could not say definitively that Gorka was wearing the order's medal in the photos from the Liberty Ball, one of several inaugural balls.
Deák noted that the chief architects of the 1944 mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, Secretary of State László Endre and Lt. Colonel László Ferenczy, were proud members of the order. He pointed out a small number of wealthy Jews allied themselves with the order as well.
Anti-Semitism was probably something shared among most of the members of that group, but it wasnt explicitly anti-Semitic, he said.
