Super-scareheads frightened many citizens of Budapest: "CHIEF OF POLICE NADOSSY AND PRINCE WINDISCH-GRAETZ TEARFULLY CONFESS TO COUNTERFEITING 30,000,000,000 FRENCH FRANCS! Possible Fascist Putsch to Set up Archduke Albrecht of Hapsburg as Kaiser of Hungary Nipped by French Detectives! Premier Count Stephen Bethlen Believed Well Pleased at Developments, Which May Discredit His Rival, the Regent of Hungary, Nicholas Horthy!"
Such revelations together with rumors that Premier Bethlen will now try to give a push to a putsch which would raise up the young Prince Otto of Hapsburg as King of Hungary, provided last week one of the major political sensations of the decade since the World War.
The Counterfeiting. Writers of detective fiction lamented that last week's superfluity of revelations could not have been doled out in installments and syndicated somewhat as follows:
For months the Bank of France has been aware that attempts were being made to pass counterfeit 1,000-franc notes in Holland, Italy, Hungary. One day an Amsterdam banker, Mynheer Severin, sent to the Bank of France a 1,000-franc note which he had recognized as counterfeit when his Hungarian housemaid, one Vrouw Kovacs, asked him to change it for her into Dutch florins.
Detectives, despatched by the Bank of France to Amsterdam, found that the housemaid was receiving counterfeit bills regularly from her family in Hungary. They discovered that her father was the valet of the celebrated Prince Ludwig Windisch-Graetz.
The Prince is "a descendant of the Holy Roman Emperors," a Hapsburg, and a grandson of Feldmarschall Alfred Windisch-Graetz who put down the Kossuth revolution of 1848. Once he was the intimate adviser of the ill-fated Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary (1915-1918), and he is the present owner of the famed Eleventh Century castle at Saros-Patak. He is well known as "the most notorious titled gambler in Budapest," and is an avowed Fascist champion of the Archduke Albrecht as King of Hungary. The French detectives ferreted into his affairs excitedly.
Their excitement was caused by the fact that the Bank of France had long suspected the Hungarian-Fascist Albrechtists of being in some way connected with the French bank-note counterfeiting. It was now decided to make an exhaustive search of the 15 miles of natural tunnels in the rock upon which Windisch-Graetz Castle stands. The tunnels had once romantically housed the adherents of the famed Hungarian revolutionary Prince Francis Rakoczy. They might now have been unromantically degraded to the use of counterfeiters. The French detectives poked about with flashlights during many a weary night, found nothing.