In the past few years, Hungary has been portrayed as a negative example of memory politics in both mainstream and academic press. It was charged with being the “ground zero” for a paradigm change in World War II memory politics that was echoed in Poland when the right-wing populist PiS government passed its infamous law on criminalizing certain perspectives in historical research. The elements of this paradigm change include the nationalization of a hitherto transnational narrative, de-Judaization, competing victimhood, establishing new terminology, double speech, and anti-intellectualism. The talk discusses examples of how this new Holocaust memory paradigm is created in cooperation with international institutional actors and the academic community in Hungary. It also analyses the impacts of the war of Russia against Ukraine on the illiberal Holocaust narrative.