On this date in 1946, fascist Hungarian politicians Laszlo Baky and Laszlo Endre were executed by hanging in Budapest for their role in the decimation of Hungarian Jewry.
These two charmers were major figures in Hungary’s horrible final months of World War II.
Post-Stalingrad, the Hungarians had realized they were yoked to the losing side and started looking for an exit strategy; instead, early in 1944, they got a German occupation.
This occupation lifted the virulent anti-semites Baky and Endre into national power, because along with keeping Hungary in the Axis coalition, the Nazis also forcibly overcame its junior partner’s former reticence about Jewish genocide.
Adolf Eichmann arrived into Nazified Hungary and used our day’s two principals (along with another executed collaborator, Andor Jaross, they’re known as the “deportation trio”) as his instruments. Within months, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being shipped to the gas chambers. This period is one of the waypoints of pernicious Nazi race theory, when the collapsing German regime spent military resources urgently needed at the front to organize the mass slaughter of Jews.*
And they had to work fast, because by that next winter the Red Army was seizing Budapest. These enthusiastic fascist operators did not fare well by the postwar government.
Most photos from Kuruc.info (the garishly branded ones) and the Yad Vashem database (the not garishly branded).
Laszlo Endre under arrest.
Both men, just prior to their execution.
* To do justice to the breadth of the human capacity, this is also the time and place where we find Raoul Wallenberg minting lifesaving Swedish passports by the thousands.
On this day..
- 1987: Lawrence Anini, The Law
- 1623: Reinier van Oldenbarnevelt, family tradition
- 1825: El Pirata Cofresi
- 1929: Luther Baker, moonshine bootlegger
- 1560: Baron de Castelnau, for the Amboise Conspiracy
- 4 BCE: Antipater, disinherited Herodian
- 1875: Richard Coates, gunner and rapist
- Daily Double: Victorian Soldiery
- 1944: Roger Bushell and others for the Great Escape
- 1946: Phillip and William Heincy, father and son
- 1935: Thomasina Sarao, miscalculated
- 1796: Francois de Charette, Vendee rebel
- 1720: Charles Vane, an unsinkable pirate