Since we have been talking so much about military matters, I decided to devote an article to some of the activities of the Nemzeti Hadsereg (1919-1922), the predecessor to the Magyar Királyi Honvédség, as the Hungarian armed forces during the Horthy regime were called. This topic is especially appropriate since it was 100 years ago, on February 17, 1920, that members of the counterrevolutionary officer detachments murdered Béla Somogyi and Béla Bacsó, journalists at Népszava, the newspaper of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party. Somogyi, the editor-in-chief of the paper, was the real target. Bacsó was a rookie reporter who offered to accompany him home.
The first time I wrote on Hungarian Spectrum about the early years of the counterrevolutionary regime was in 2010, when I also discussed the number of the victims of both the red and the white terrors. By that time, it was pretty well established that more men and women fell prey to the summary executions of the officer detachments than were killed by the Lenin Boys. According to Ignác Romsics’s estimation, approximately 1,200 people were executed during the white terror and about 300-400 during the Hungarian Soviet Republic. During the Horthy period, naturally not much was said about the perpetrators of the white terror, while during the Kádár regime, historians accepted the very high numbers reported by liberal and social democratic politicians in exile at the time.
Excerpts from Pál Prónay’s notes, written years after the events, were published in 1963, from which one could get a fair picture of the activities of the marauding officer detachments in the countryside and in smaller and larger cities. According to Prónay’s memoirs, Miklós Horthy, the leader of the Nemzeti Hadsereg, gave him a free hand to take radical action, meaning the summary execution of the allegedly guilty communists.
A few days ago, an article appeared in Index by Ádám Gellért, who, together with Gergely Bödők, established the Clio Intézet. It is comprised of junior researchers “committed to carefully analyzing and depicting the pivotal events of twentieth-century Hungarian history within its regional context, based on first-hand investigation of relevant primary sources.” Among the Clio Institute’s fields of research is the history of the red and white terrors.
Members of the officer detachments, Szeged 1919
The occasion for Gellért’s article was the discovery of a contemporary document in Szekszárd, where several “communists” were executed. The document is a handwritten report, dated August 10, after the execution of eight people by the officers. The text reads: “Relying on the order of the commander of Department VI [of the National Army], we executed the following local communists (death by hanging) based on the unanimous indictment and verdict of the people.” Gellért points out that this is the first written document which confirms that the officers were following orders, which their superiors refused to affirm in writing. One of the signatories, Lieutenant János Gömbös, brother of Gyula Gömbös, who was to become prime minister of Hungary, admitted during a later investigation of the case that Károly Ottrubay, a colonel with the general staff, told the officers that they were “allowed to arrest well-known communists and follow a short procedure,” which for them meant that “we must free society of them in the shortest possible time.”
Ottrubay’s “order” was vague, I suspect intentionally. This phraseology reminds me of Horthy’s infamous statement when he was asked whether there would be a pogrom in Budapest. He said, “No, there will be no pogrom, but a few will have a bath,” which could be taken to mean that they might end up in the Danube.
On the basis of this written note found in Szekszárd, Gellért considers Horthy’s claim in his memoirs that “the Supreme Command never gave orders for the perpetration of a single unlawful act” to be a legend. I don’t know whether in a court of law this document would be taken as proof of guilt. I have the feeling that it wouldn’t be, mostly because of the vagueness of the “order.”
Pál Prónay in his memoirs tells a similar story of a much more explicit “verbal order” from General Károly Soós “to restore order and execute the ringleaders in a summary fashion,” which again the general refused to give in writing.
From these and other sources, I think we have enough indirect evidence to be confident that the white terror was prepared ahead of time in Szeged, way before the officers set out to enter Hungarian-held territories. In that case, the perpetrators of these crimes didn’t have to worry about the consequences. The few whose cases were investigated received a general pardon from Horthy.
And finally, a few words about the murder of Béla Somogyi, with a focus on Horthy’s “instructions.” As Ödön Beniczky, a legitimist politician, testified in 1925, sometime in January 1920, after dinner at Horthy’s headquarters in the Hotel Gellért, someone read an accusatory article from Népszava about the atrocities being committed by Horthy’s officers. Some people at the table thought that Somogyi should be thrown into the Danube, to which Horthy responded by saying that “talking about it is useless, one should act.” In Prónay’s version, Horthy at one point was worried about the foreign reaction to the murders committed by the detachments and asked him to stop “these atrocities against little Jews and concentrate on important Jews like [Béla] Somogyi and [Vilmos] Vázsonyi,” an important politician and former minister of justice. When the murders were committed and the bodies were left on the bank of the Danube, a scandal ensued. Horthy was in a tight spot due his pending election to become the country’s governor. First, he suspected Prónay, who this time wasn’t responsible. When Prónay reminded him that he himself had urged them to murder important Jews like Somogyi, Horthy answered: “But not in this way.”
The White Terror has a vast literature. The most recent English-language title is White Terror: Anti-Semitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919-1921 by Béla Bodó. And Péter Csunderlik wrote a thoughtful obituary of Béla Somogyi and Béla Bacsó in the February 15 issue of Népszava.