1951: Sandor Szucs, Hungarian footballer
June 4th, 2019 Headsman
Twenty-nine-year-old footballer Sandor Szucs was hanged on this date in 1951 for attempting to defect from communist Hungary.
The defender for Ujpest FC, who had also featured internationally for the emerging national team juggernaut destined for legend as the Golden Team, Szucs embarked a politically dangerous extramarital affair with singer Erzsi Kovacs.
When the two attempted to flee the country together, they were arrested just this side of the Yugoslavian border. Kovacs spent four years in prison — she would go on to a successful international career — while Szucs was harshly sentenced to death as a traitor on the strength of a murky military law that had been invoked in no other case. His comrades from the pitch found that their pull did not extend to any effectual aid for him.
It’s presumed that Szucs’s execution was at least in part meant as a warning to these very same mates not to exploit the international team’s travels for any embarrassing defections.
If so, they were right to worry: when the Hungarian Revolution erupted in 1956 while the Golden Team’s primary club mirror was playing an away match in Belgium, several players refused to return to their Soviet-occupied homeland, including superstars Ferenc Puskas, Sandor Kocsis and Zoltan Czibor.
On this day..
- 1571: Sigismondo Arquer, Sardinian scholar - 2020
- 1718: A horse thief and two travelers, "the worst rideing that ever I rid" - 2018
- 1886: A day in the death penalty around the U.S. South - 2017
- 1867: Gottlieb Williams, eyeballed - 2016
- 1886: Tabby Banks and Tom Honesty, for election rejection - 2015
- 1155: Arnold of Brescia - 2014
- 1937: Helmut Hirsch, secret bomber - 2013
- 2008: Curtis Osborne, poorly represented - 2012
- 1516 and 1530: Autos de fe in the Spanish Canary Islands - 2011
- 1999: Dole Chadee, crime lord - 2010
- 1814: Four of five deserters, in Buffalo - 2009
- 1913: Antonio Echazarreta, defending Matamoros - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Athletes,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Entertainers,Execution,Hanged,History,Hungary,Sex,Treason
Tags: 1950s, 1951, budapest, cold war, communism, erzsi kovacs, football, golden team, june 4, sandor szucs
