The Hungarian Garda is not the only growing Neo-Nazi movement in Hungary. The Magyar Orseg (free translation: the Hungarian Guard Group) is more openly linked to Hungarian nazi past, to the Arrow Party. They use almost Arrow party uniforms and manners. They are armed and in the semi-clandestinity.
When the Communists took over in 1946-7 in Hungary, they did a bad work in erradicating Hungarian Nazis but co-opted them in government service, even in the police and the army. I see that in retrospective, because the general idea is that the Communist dictatorshp ruthlessly destroyed the Nazi. That was not so, they even favoured the so called kis-nyilas (little nazis) class. The reason was that the Communist Party itself was almost an ethnic Jewish group, and they felt the weakness of their regime, which was barely tolerated by the antisemitic population. In Germany, the Nazi regime demostrably caused a national disaster, and it was largely eliminated by the Occupation, that had no ethnic or psychological inferiority complexes. In Hungary, local nazis went in hibernation and now they are waking up. One of the engines of current Hungarian renewal is the constant harassment that over-the-border ethnic Hungarian minorities are exposed to.
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I don't think hibernation is the explanation - those Nazis than went into hiding are all now in their 80s or dead. These are "neo-Nazis" who claim to be inspired by the original Nazis but they could just as well claim to be inspired by the Inquisition or the ancient Huns. While Marxism had its appeal to the intelligentsia, they say that fascism is the Marxism of fools - that's what these guys are.
In the West, we had the same thing - once the cold war began in earnest, Nazism was forgotten and all the Nazi war criminals were recruited into building rockets, intelligence work, etc.
However, in recent years, Germany appears to have made a sincere effort to confront and memorialize the deeds of the Nazis. I recently learned that the name of my father and his brothers are inscribed on large tablets located on the site of his little KZ camp (only a few hundred prisoners) in a small town in Germany. Apparently they were able to find all the names from a transport list - the Nazis kept records with German thoroughness. I wish my father was here to see it - I think he would find it funny that he was being honored in this way.
In the East, Communism put a lid on all such discussions but was surprisingly nationalistic for what was supposed to be a "international" movement - to this day the Chinese Communist party is co-opting nationalist feeling and channeling that into love for the Party. And so there was never a proper national emotional cleansing so that the Arrow Cross was romanticized by a few as supporters of the national interest. Germans on the other hand have the opposite problem - they were made so allergic to nationalism that they are afraid to confront their Muslim minority (soon to be a majority) or deal with their social pathologies (having multiple wives while collecting welfare benefits, etc.)for fear of appearing racist.
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