Ethnic Hungarians Sass Kálmán and Istvan Hollos were shot in Romania on this date in 1958. Links in this post are in Hungarian.

Both were condemned — along with a third man, Vilmos Balasko, his sentence subsequently commuted — as the result of a mass trial earlier that year of alleged traitors and saboteurs.

The trial targeted the large ethnic Hungarian population in Transylvania, bordering Hungary, in the aftermath of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. There the feared Romanian secret police rolled up culprits for offenses ranging from subversive leaflets in simpatico with failed revolution, to a general penumbra of perceived unreliable loyalty.

Istvan Hollos, a lawyer and teacher, had fought in the German-allied Hungarian army during World War II and unsuccessfully attempted to flee to Switzerland afterwards. Sass Kálmán was a Calvinist pastor once close to anticommunist peasant party leader Ferenc Nagy; a previous brush with political scrutiny had been shielded by towering general Pal Maleter, but Maleter’s participation in (and execution for) the 1956 revolution played against Kálmán too. (A third man, pastor Vilmos Balasko, was condemned to death in the same mass trial but he received clemency and was released a few years later in a general amnesty. He lived until 2004 and published a memoir after the fall of the Iron Curtain.)

Kálmán’s Reformed Church, whose adherents are predominantly ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania, treat Kálmán as a martyr and have pressed hard for his official rehabilitation — thus far, to no avail.

On this day..

• 2005: Kenneth Boyd, the 1,000th modern execution in the U.S.
• 1780: Gerald Byrne and James and Patrick Strange, for carrying off the Miss Kennedy's
• 1884: Howard Sullivan, ravisher and murderer
• 1302: Audun Hugleiksson, Norwegian nobleman
• 1917: Lation Scott lynched
• 1644: Goodwife Cornish
• 1721: Jean-Pierre Balagny, Cartouche lieutenant
• 1715: Four Jacobites including George Lockhart's brother
• 1977: Larry Tacklyn and Erskine Burrows, for the murder of Richard Sharples
• 1938: Robert Lee Cannon and Albert Kessell, the first gassed in California
• 1859: John Brown's body starts a-moulderin' in the grave
• 2005: Van Tuong Nguyen