According to some sources (such as the US Embassy in Hungary – see below) Pope Sylvester II presented a crown to Stephen, the first King of Hungary – who had resolved to raise Hungary to the status of a Christian kingdom – for his coronation on Christmas Day in the year 1000. The crown became one of the most powerful symbols of Hungarian nationhood, and was last used in 1916 for the coronation of King Charles IV. It has had a fairly chequered history, being captured and recovered several times.
The crown is actually too big to fit any normal human head; it is fitted with a liner which can be adjusted to fit the wearer. Attached to the top of the crown is a cross, which leans to one side. Wikipedia suggests that the crookedness is the result of damage sustained in the 17th century, possibly when the top of the iron chest housing the insignia was hastily closed without the crown having been placed in it properly. Daily News Hungary agrees, but Britannica states that the cross is crooked "because the screw hole in the knob it stands on was set at an angle, suggesting that originally it was not meant to occupy the top of the crown but to go on a sloping surface, possibly the curve of the foremost arch."
Hungarian Spectrum ("reflections on politics, economics, and culture") provides more detail: "It was only after 1978 [see below] that serious study of the crown could be undertaken, and the experts came to the conclusion that the Holy Crown was assembled into its current form during the reign of Béla III (1172–1196). The lower part of the crown is of Greek origin (corona graeca), while the top was made somewhere in Italy (corona latina). The cross on top was added in the sixteenth century in a rather crude manner, affixing it through a picture of Christ on top of the crown. It was in the seventeenth century that the cross got bent when someone carelessly closed the box in which it was placed."
The cross is now typically depicted at an angle (for example on the national coat of arms, which was reinstated in 1990 following the fall of the Communist regime).
Wikipedia has a photograph taken at the coronation of Charles IV, which clearly shows the crooked cross and the unnatural size of the crown.
According to Wikipedia, the crown was discovered at the end of World War II in Mattsee, Austria (near Salzburg), along with the other Hungarian crown jewels. Wikipedia doesn't say how they got there, but its source (apparently an archive of early Internet material) states that on 4 May 1945 (six days before VE Day), US troops "captured the Austrian town of Mattsee and the erstwhile Nazi minister of Hungary, his staff, and the Crown of St Stephen." Daily News Hungary corroborates this story (but it uses pretty much the same wording as Wikipedia, and one of these stories has clearly been copied from the other).
The US Embassy in Hungary, however, states that "the crown was spirited out of Hungary to protect it from the Germans and the Soviets. On May 2, 1945, the Holy Crown and other jewels were handed over by a Hungarian Army Colonel to a U.S. Army Colonel near Egglesberg, Austria." 'Egglesberg' would appear to be a typo for Eggelsberg, which is about ten miles from Mattsee and not far from Brannau am Inn – coincidentally (at least, one assumes it's a coincidence) the birthplace of Adolf Hitler.
For much of the Cold War the crown was kept at Fort Knox. It was returned to Hungary on 6 January 1978, by order of US President Jimmy Carter, with strict conditions intended to ensure that the crown should be seen to belong to the Hungarian people and not to their Communist leaders. One would have hoped that such conditions had become redundant after 1990; however, the point of the Hungarian Spectrum article referred to above is that the crown has been used for political ends by right–wing opponents of the current Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (and indeed by Orbán himself).
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