Von Neumann was a comparative outlier among the era's left-leaning, socialism-sympathetic scientists because his formative experiences—Hungary's brutal six-month communist regime, the even worse authoritarian Horthy counter-regime with public hangings and killings of Jews, and the Nazi destruction of German science—made him deeply allergic to authoritarianism and suspicious of Stalin from the start, so as a committed democrat he sought to put his expertise in the hands of the elected US government rather than make decisions for it.