On this date in 1946, the former wartime fascist Prime Minister of Hungary was shot for being the former wartime fascist Prime Minister of Hungary.
Dimitrije Stojakovic by birth, the Vojvodina-born ethnic Serb Magyarized his name to Döme Sztójay as he rose up the ranks in the intelligence services in independent, post-Habsburg Hungary.
He had for many years been the Hungarian ambassador to Berlin and a noted pro-Third Reich figure when in 1944 Nazi Germany took over its erstwhile Axis junior partner upon catching wind of Budapest’s interest in cutting a peace deal with the Allies to exit a fast-deteriorating war. Given a choice between outright German occupation and selecting a suitable local quisling, Regent Miklos Horthy appointed our guy Döme Sztójay.
He only held the office for five months before ill health and shifting political tectonics pushed him out, but he made his sinister mark in that time as an instrument of the Holocaust in Hungary. Hungarian Jewry had of course been afflicted prior to then by anti-Semitic laws and various outrages, but it had been spared wholesale deportation and extermination thanks to the resistance of Regent Horthy and others — the very domestic elite strata which Germany was here sidelining.
Now that the place was under Berlin’s management, Adolf Eichmann arrived to coordinate a terrifyingly swift mass slaughter, which in the span of a few months in the spring-summer 1944 took over 400,000 Hungarian Jews (from a prewar population of about 825,000) off to death camps. The special effort given to this particular extermination at a juncture in the war when the men and materiel involved were so obviously needed elsewhere has made it an event of special interest to Holocaust scholars.
As hostilities wrapped up, Sztójay managed a preferential-to-war-criminals surrender to the American army instead of the Red Army, but he had nothing of any unique value to offer the West that would have entitled him to special consideration — and so he was extradited back to Hungary to face the music.
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.
On this date in 1958, Angyal Istvan was hanged for the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution.
A working-class Jew who survived Auschwitz as a boy — his mother and sister were not so fortunate — Angyal was a convinced leftist who became disaffected with the Hungarian regime not because of its Communism but because of its failure to realize the democratic and egalitarian aspirations of that ideology.
A fixture on the youthful intellectual ferment in Budapest in the early 1950s, he was one of the leaders of street protests against Soviet domination during the doomed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, even conferring personally with Prime Minister Imre Nagy during its last days. In a gesture that not all of his comrades would have supprted, he set out the hammer and sickle along with the Hungarian national flag on November 7, the very eve of the revolution’s defeat, arguing to Soviet troops that they were fighting against true communism.
He’s commemorated today at an Angyal István Park in Budapest; it’s evidently “a modern social place with free Internet” and a nifty paper plane art installation.
VIENNA, Jan. 4 — Budapest radio said to-day that the Budapest military court had sentenced a 25-year-old Budapest transport worker, Geza Szivos, to death for illegal possession of arms. The sentence had immediately been carried out. The report said that Szivos had obtained a machine pistol on October 30 and with this had taken part in the attacks on the Budapest Communist Party headquarters. He had confessed to firing more than 100 rounds. As a result of the attacks several people were killed.
Szivos was said to have hidden the weapon, and others he had found, when the group was broken up. On December 18 he was betrayed to the police and arrested. The weapons were found in his house.
The radio also said that a summary tribunal at Debrecen had sentenced Gyoergy Tajko to 15 years in prison and Kalman Koris, aged 19, to 10 years. They were said to have been carrying loaded pistols and ammunition when stopped by a street patrol.
The Government newspaper Nep Szabadsag said to-day that the Hungarian police had seized “great quantities” of arms at Var Palota, in west Hungary, and were searching for a band of “blackmailers.” The arms were hidden near a pit shaft entrance and included sub-machine guns, rifles, hand grenades, and about 500 cartridges.
The newspaper also reported that small armed groups had caused disturbances in Transdanubia, in west Hungary, after the Hungarian rising. -Reuters
From the Monroe (Louisiana) News-Star, Jan. 4, 1957:
VIENNA (AP) — Budapest Radio reported today that a 25-year-old Hungarian rebel against the Communist regime was executed for hiding arms.
This brought the admitted number of rebels executed to six, although the actual number is believed to be much higher.
The broadcast said Geza Szivos, a teamster, was convicted and sentenced by a military court in Budapest. The Red radio gave these details:
Szivos got hold of an automatic pistol Oct. 30 and joined the rebel group which stormed the Communist party headquarters in Budapest.
He admitted having fired 100 shots at the building, and “several persons were killed in the building.”
On Nov. 4, the day of the Russian assault on Budapest, Szivos obtained two more automatic pistols, ammunition, eight hand grenades and two incendiary bombs. Tenants in the house where he lived informed on him to the police, and he was arrested Dec. 18. The arms were found in his quarters the next day.
Laszlo Bardossy, one of Hungary’s several wartime Prime Ministers, was shot on this date in 1946.
Bardossy was a longtime diplomat who had become Minister of Foreign Affairs under Pal Teleki — the Count fate tragically cast to lead Hungary into the Second World War’s meatgrinder.
An esteemed geographer in his non-political life, Teleki foresaw the whirlwind Hungary might reap should she ally herself with Germany. But the conservative governments he affiliated with drew much of its vitality from a restive irredentist movement wishing to retrieve for “Little Hungary” remnants of its historical empire that had been stripped away after World War I.
Under Teleki’s predecessor Bela Imredy, Hungary gratefully reclaimed sovereignty over parts of Slovakia and Ruthenia as its price for supporting Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1938; two years later, German arbitrators returned northern Transylvania from Romania to Hungary.
These were halcyon days for Hungary: for the pleasure of doubling its territory it had not been required to accept German occupation or political direction.
But those days changed for Teleki, whose ministry from 1941-1942 was characterized by an increasingly uphill struggle to maintain a free hand in the shadow of Berlin’s growing strength. In the end he couldn’t manage it, and when (with the support of Hungary’s regent and many of his peers in government) Germany marched into Hungary in 1941 en route to invading Yugoslavia, a country Hungary had a peace treaty with, Teleki shot himself and left behind an anguished note: “We broke our word, out of cowardice … we have thrown away our nation’s honor. We have allied ourselves to scoundrels … We will become body-snatchers! A nation of trash. I did not hold you back. I am guilty.”
With Teleki’s death, Hungary now became a firm partner of the Axis powers — a move personified by the immediate elevation of our man Bardossy.
His first order of business was joining the invasion of Yugoslavia, once again snatching back a piece of territory Budapest considered rightfully hers. He also tightened Hungary’s anti-Semitic laws — Bardossy’s Third Jewish Law basically attempted to cut Jews out of the economic life of the kingdom — and began approving deportations to Germany and direct massacres by Hungarian troops.
The enthusiasm of Bardossy’s participation in Germany’s project might have been his undoing — in the immediate political sense as well as his eventual fate. By the next spring, with Hungarian troops taking casualties as the junior associates in a dangerous invasion of the Soviet Union, Prince Regent Miklos Horthy was again looking to put some daylight between Hungarian policy and German, and he sacked Bardossy. Bardossy joined the leadership of a fascist party that eventually supported the pro-Nazi government installed by German invasion in 1944.
He was arrested after the war and tried as a war criminal by a People’s Court for war crimes and collaboration.
On this date in 1947, Hungarian politician Gyorgy Donath was executed for treason as the Hungarian state came into the hands of the Communists.
Gyorgy Donath awaits hanging in the courtyard of a Budapest prison on October 23, 1947. (Source)
Donath (Hungarian Wikipedia link) stood among the ranks of Eastern European politicians purged by Soviet-directed Communist parties behind the Iron Curtain in the first years of the Cold War — years when Stalin still called the shots for the Communist bloc.
Had Hungary’s postwar direction been determined by orderly ballot-boxing rather than great power machinations, Donath would have had a voice in it — for it was a conservative party, the Independent Smallholders Party, who won a big hold on government with 57% of the votes in the 1945 elections.
Though the Communists polled just 17% (with a similar tally for the Social Democrats), the General Secretary of the postwar party, Matyas Rakosi,* predicted that the putative defeat would “not play an important role in Communist plans.” And he was right.
Rakosi named his policy in response to the Smallholders “salami tactics” — as in slicing down the opposition piece by piece.
1947 was the knife’s edge.
From their post within the ensuing governing coalition — an outsized foothold relative to their electoral returns, as compelled by the presence of the still-occupying Red Army — the minority Communists in January 1947 announced the discovery of a conspiracy of “small agrarians,” and set about reducing the Smallholders and allies through a series of police raids and show trials.** Donath’s prominence in an irredentist fraternity, the Hungarian Community organization, was denounced the ringleader of the treasonable conspiracy.
He was hanged on October 23 — just eight weeks after a heavily rigged 1947 election put Hungary formally into the Communist camp.
Over the subsequent two years, independent and opposition parties were generally reduced to irrelevance, forced to take the Communist line, or dissolved entirely.
* Rakosi was the man whom Imre Nagy would eventually displace. The more moderate Nagy willingly swept himself up in Hungary’s abortive 1956 revolution against Communist domination. Soviet tanks crushed that revolution; Nagy hanged.
** In neighboring Romania and Bulgaria, similar tragedies were unfolding.
SCHOOLS DISPUTE IN HUNGARY
CARDINAL’S REPLY TO MINISTER
CATHOLICS’ CONCERN
BUDAPEST, June 8
The village priest and other persons held responsible for the murder of a policeman and the wounding of two others in a village in north-east Hungary last Sunday will be tried in Budapest on Thursday.
The letter of protest from the Minister of Education to the Primate, Cardinal Mindszenthy, says that the villagers had clearly been aroused to violence by the priest’s sermon, in which he spoke against the projected nationalization of the schools. They went straight from church to the mayor’s house and the municipal buildings, where the council had voted by a majority in favour of the nationalization, and the policeman was killed while trying to protect the mayor. The Minister asked the Cardinal to put an end “by central decree” to this pulpit agitation, adding: “If not, the responsibility will be shifted where it belongs, and the law will be evoked upon all who continue it or direct it.”
The Cardinal, in his reply, says that he knows no more of the incident than is contained in the Minister’s letter, and therefore can take no stand upon it. He adds that the idea of nationalization is still causing great excitement among Catholics all over the country, an that the only way to end the excitement is to abandon nationalization. He denies that the agitation is directed centrally (that is, by himself), and puts the responsibility on those who “insist on putting forward such provocative measures.”
Church’s Divine Right
The Primate has already refused to follow the example of the Protestant churches, which have agreed with the State that nationalization shall go through, but that their ancient seminaries shall be excluded and the teaching of religion in the schools continued, and that the State shall grant them a large annual payment, gradually decreasing, for 25 years. On the contrary, in his third pastoral letter, which was read in all Catholic churches on Sunday, the Cardinal said that nationalization violated natural law and the Church’s divine right.
People were saying, the pastoral letter continued, that it was now time for the State to take over; but certain principles, among them the ten Commandments, were timeless. It called upon the faithful “to pray for strength to resist with all their might this violation of the immortal soul.” Never had the shameful misleading of the people been so great in Hungary as now. The faithful must refuse to allow their families to read the newspapers of those who opposed their faith, and must offer a Novena to God that the “Satan prowling among us like a roving lion may be driven away.”
It is in this guise that the Cardinal sees the Communists. They see him as an inflexible survivor of the Middle Ages.
It was in the village of Pocspetri that all the trouble went down: a march to the local municipal building to protest school nationalization. For years after, Pocspetri would be shorthand (Hungarian link, as is the next) in the official press for any clerical backlash — something right out of the Middle Ages.
Kiralyfalvi, at his trial
At the end of this march, a policeman was dead. It’s alleged now — in anti-communist post-Cold War Hungary — that what really happened was that one of the policemen deployed for crowd control accidentally triggered his own gun and killed himself with it.
Whatever occurred in the march, it was a productive incident for Hungarian communists then executing their political takeover of Hungary. The resulting show trial (more Hungarian) is sometimes seen as one of the signal events in a concomitant crackdown on organized religion — a potential pole of opposition to the Soviet-backed state. The victim, of course, enjoyed the fallen cop’s prerogative, a fast-track beatification by the propaganda ministry. (No need for Hungarian to get the point of the pictures in this pdf.) Miklos Kiralyfalvi got the death sentence, but the prerogatives the church was focused on — those were the real prize.
London Times, June 12, 1948:
MURDERED HUNGARIAN POLICEMAN
PRIEST SENTENCED TO DEATH
BUDAPEST,June 11
Janos Astezlos, the priest whose trial on a charge of inciting his villagers to the murder of a policeman began here yesterday, was sentenced to death this afternoon. The villager who actually killed the policeman was also condemned to death, and of the other four who took part one received life imprisonment and the other three 12 years.
Such, five days after it happened, is the end of this affair, though not of the dispute that lies behind it. In this week’s edition of the Catholic weekly Hazank Mr. Barankovics, head of the Catholic Party in Parliament, which has at least 16 per cent of the country’s votes, writes that a true Christian is bound to defend the right of the Catholic Church to keep the schools, because once they were lost the Church would have nothing left to do but celebrate Mass, and its whole cultural influence would be gone. “Whoever is our leader,” he says, referring to rumours that he disagrees with the Cardinal, “we are bound to act in the same way.” Of the murder the newspaper writes that the Church never counselled violence and regrets deeply what happened.
BUDAPEST, June 11. — The villager accused of killing the policeman was hanged here tonight. -Reuter.
(The priest’s sentence was commuted to a prison term. Only Kiralyfalvi was executed for the Pocspetri murder.)
On St. Stephen‘s Day 1948, Cardinal Mindszenty himself was arrested for treason. This was old hat for the cardinal; he’d been arrested for opposing Bela Kun‘s interwar people’s republic, and arrested again by the Nazi collaborationist government in 1944.
Briefly released during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Mindszenty fled to the American embassy as Soviet tanks subdued the country. He would live on the embassy grounds for the next 15 years, a potent symbol of living martyrdom against communism until he was finally released to Vienna.
If your Magyar is up to snuff, this documentary on the Pocspetri incident might be enjoyable.
On this date in 1795, Ignac Martinovics was beheaded in Budapest with other leaders of a Hungarian Jacobin conspiracy.
A true Renaissance man, Ignac (Ignatius) Martinovics (English Wikipedia entry | the more detailed Hungarian) earned doctorates from the University of Vienna as both a scientist and a theologian.
He ditched a youthful commitment to the Franciscan order and went on a European tour with a Galician noble named Count Potoczki,* rubbing shoulders with the likes of Lalande and Condorcet.**
This journey stoked Martinovics’s political interests along with his scientific ones.
After spending the 1780s as a university instructor at Lwow, the ambitious scholar became the Austrian emperor’s “court chemist” — a position that got pegged back almost immediately upon Martinovics taking it by the 1792 death of the scientifically inclined Emperor Leopold II.
This at least gave Martinovics ample time to devote to his interest in the political secret societies coalescing in sympathy with the French Revolution. Despite his authorship of tracts such as Catechism of People and Citizens, his overall stance in this movement is debatable; Martinovics was also a secret police informant, and some view him as more adventurer than firebrand.
But the adventures would worry the Hapsburg crown enough for martyrs’ laurels.
Tiring of whatever gambit he was running in the imperial capital, Martinovics returned to Hungary and marshaled a revolutionary conspiracy by fraudulently representing himself as the emissary of the Parisian Jacobins.
About fifty Hungarian conspirators were arrested when this plot was broken up, resulting in seven executions. These “Magyar Jacobins” are still honored at Budapest’s Kerepesi cemetery.
* A much later Count Potoczki was assassinated by a Ukrainian student named Miroslav Sziczynski (Sichinsky) in 1908, who was in turn death-sentenced for the murder. Sziczynski won a commutation, and was eventually released from prison, emigrated to the United States, and became a respectable statesman for the Ukrainian national cause.
** See Zoltan Szokefalvi-Nagy in “Ignatius Martinovics: 18th century chemist and political agitator,” Journal of Chemical Education, 41, no. 8 (1964).
† Martinovics’s chemistry experimentation in this period led him to oppose Lavoisier‘s theories of combustion. The two shared the same fate, whatever their differing hypotheses.
On this date in 1938 — so the Soviet government finally announced in 1989, after decades of opacity — the Hungarian Communist leader Bela Kun was secretly shot by firing squad in the gulag.
The pudgy and pugnacious* onetime journalist whose capture by the Russians during World War I enabled him to get in on the ground floor with the Bolshevik Revolution became the de facto leader of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. For a few months in 1919, it was the world’s second Soviet state after Russia itself.
Bela Kun’s moment in the sun was particularly notorious for his advocacy late in the Soviet Republic’s brief life of a Red Terror against internal opposition. Several hundred people were killed over the last few weeks of the state’s existence, until a Romanian invasion toppled the reds and sent Bela Kun fleeing back to the Soviets. There, he’s supposed to have brought his gift for wholesale murder to surrendered White prisoners in the Crimea.
Still, Hungary was an insurrectionary success next to most everywhere else, and Bela Kun was detailed to Germany to revive the flagging fortunes of a revolution that the Bolsheviks thought would be critical to sustaining their own. Modeling on Lenin’s own coup d’etat in 1917, Kun pushed the Germans to go all-in on an aggressive 1921 “March Action” offensive to capture state power — which backfired catastrophically, essentially marking the end of the post-World War I revolutionary window. Vladimir Ilyich gave his Magyar counterpart a dressing-down for that gambit at that summer’s Comintern summit.
He’d become associated in this time with Zinoviev, an Old Bolshevik whose comradeship would blow an ill wind come the killing time of the 1930s. Kun himself was long past his sell-by date at this stage, knocking around Moscow feuding with other Hungarian exiles.
Stalin eventually had him arrested for “Trotskyism”, and he disappeared into the Gulag never to be seen again.
Like many purge victims, Bela Kun was rehabilitated under Khrushchev, which also made him fitting source material for statuary congenial to the post-World War II Hungary, situated (however unhappily) within Moscow’s sphere. Some of the detritus of this age can be found at Budapest’s Mememto Park outdoor fairgrounds of discarded Communist kitsch.
Bela Kun, marshaling the Magyar masses. The streetlamp behind him (a literary symbol of hanging) alludes to his martyrdom. Wider views of the entire monument: 1 | 2
On this date in 1944, Hannah Szenes was shot by the Nazis in her native city of Budapest — a city she had left five years before, and to which she had returned as a British special operative.
But with the onset of war, she signed up with the British Special Operations Executive and was parachuted behind German lines in March 1944.
Her brief: to save both Jews and downed Allied pilots. It is often described as the only military expedition to relieve European Jewry during World War II.
Hannah was nabbed crossing into Hungary on a mission that her colleagues (rightly, it seems) deemed too perilous to attempt, and withstood months of torture without divulging her codes.
By the time she went in the dock for treason, Nazi control of Hungary was collapsing and judicial administration itself was breaking down to the timpani of falling shells. Her sentencing November 4 was postponed; on November 7, an officer peremptorily informed her that she had been condemned to death. It’s believed that she was actually never formally sentenced, merely mopped up ahead of the unstoppable Red Army, which on this very day first entered Budapest’s suburbs.
A writer as well as a fighter, Szenes’ poetry survived as her monument to life — like the present-day Israeli standard “Blessed is the Match”, also the title of the documentary excerpted above; and, her “Halikha LeKesariya” (“A Walk to Caesarea”), also known as “Eli, Eli” (“My God, My God”). Here it is sung by Regina Spektor.
These lines were reportedly her last-known verses from prison:
One – two – three … eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark …
Life is a fleeting question mark
One – two – three … maybe another week.
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.
Dimitrije Stojakovic by birth, the Vojvodina-born ethnic Serb Magyarized his name to Döme Sztójay as he rose up the ranks in the intelligence services in independent, post-Habsburg Hungary.
The defender for 
A working-class Jew who survived Auschwitz as a boy — his mother and sister were not so fortunate — 
With Teleki’s death, Hungary now became a firm partner of the Axis powers — a move personified by the immediate elevation of our man 
A true Renaissance man, Ignac (Ignatius) Martinovics (
The pudgy and pugnacious* onetime journalist whose capture by the Russians during World War I enabled him to 
