Anger after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's 'pure Nazi' speech

Orbán has been heavily criticized for speaking out against creating “mixed-race peoples”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been accused of “Nazi” rhetoric by his entourage after speaking over the weekend against the creation of “mixed-race peoples”.

A longtime adviser to the prime minister, sociologist Zsuzsa Hegedus, on Tuesday handed out a resignation letter in which she called Orban’s words “worthy of Goebbels” — a reference to the Nazi politician who served as an advocate under Adolf Hitler.

In the letter seen by HVG, Hegedüs – whose parents were Hungarian Holocaust survivors – described the speech as a “pure Nazi text”.

“Your ability to publicly deliver a racist speech wouldn’t even cross my mind in a nightmare,” she wrote.

Representatives of the Jewish community also expressed concern. The International Committee of Auschwitz on Tuesday called the speech “stupid and dangerous” and called on the European Union to “make it clear to the world that Mr. Orban has no future in Europe”.

In a statement sent to Agence France-Presse, the organization’s vice president, Christoph Hoebner, said the letter reminded Holocaust survivors of “the dark times of their exclusion and persecution.”

Huebner specifically called on Austrian Chancellor Karl Nahammer to take a stand when he hosts Orban on an official visit to Vienna on Thursday.

The Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities said its president, Andras Hessler, had asked to meet with Orbán.

“Based on our historical experiences and family stories living with us, it is important to raise our voice against expressions in Hungarian public life that are prone to misunderstanding,” the group said.

‘unacceptable’

Over half a million Hungarian Jews were systematically exterminated during the Nazi Holocaust in World War II. Today there are 75,000 to 100,000 Jews in Hungary, most of them in the capital, Budapest.

“On two legs, he works, talks and sometimes thinks that there is only one race on this planet: Homo sapiens sapiens,” the chief rabbi of Hungary, Robert Frolich, wrote on his Facebook page.

Bogdan Aurescu, the foreign minister of EU-member Romania, said Orbán’s “ideas” were “unacceptable”.

European Commission spokesman Eric Mammer declined to comment on the statement specifically, but said that “the EU has a certain number of values set out in treaties and implements policies in line with these values and these treaty articles.”

Orbán, who delivered the speech on Saturday in Romania, said the international left in Western Europe was “using a hoax, an ideological ploy: to claim – their claim – that Europe is by nature inhabited by people of mixed race”.

“We don’t want to become a mixed-race people,” he said. He also appeared to hint at the gas chambers of the German Nazi regime when he criticized Brussels’ plan to cut European gas demand by 15%.

Orbán has made similar statements in the past but without using the Hungarian term for “race,” according to experts.

Government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs played down Orbán’s statement saying it was “misinterpreted” by those who “clearly do not understand the difference between the mixing of different ethnic groups that all originated in the Judeo-Christian cultural sphere, and the mixing of peoples from different civilizations.”