Pál Prónay de Tótpróna et Blatnicza (November 2, 1874 – 1947 or 1948) was a Hungarian
reactionary
In political science, a reactionary or a reactionist is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the ''status quo ante'', the previous political state of society, which that person believes possessed positive characteristics abse ...
and paramilitary commander in the years following the
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
. He is considered to have been the most brutal of the Hungarian National Army officers who led the
White Terror
White Terror is the name of several episodes of mass violence in history, carried out against anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, revolutionaries, or other opponents by conservative or nationalist groups. It is sometimes contrasted wit ...
that followed Hungary's brief 1919
Communist coup d'état.
Background
The Hungarian people considered themselves humiliated and dismembered by the victors of the
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
. The
Entente Powers
The Triple Entente (from French '' entente'' meaning "friendship, understanding, agreement") describes the informal understanding between the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as well a ...
stripped away two-thirds of the nation's territory and awarded them to Hungary's neighbors. With the lands went one-third of the country's Hungarian-speaking nationals.
Humiliation was inflamed by political instability. The first post-war attempt at a democratic government, under prime minister
Mihály Károlyi
Count Mihály Ádám György Miklós Károlyi de Nagykároly ( hu, gróf nagykárolyi Károlyi Mihály Ádám György Miklós; archaically English: Michael Adam George Nicholas Károlyi, or in short simple form: Michael Károlyi; 4 March 1875 ...
, floundered and was overthrown in March 1919 by a Communist coup. Its leader,
Béla Kun
Béla Kun (born Béla Kohn; 20 February 1886 – 29 August 1938) was a Hungarian communist revolutionary and politician who governed the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. After attending Franz Joseph University at Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoc ...
, had Jewish roots and Soviet training. Popular at first, Kun's so-called
Hungarian Soviet Republic
The Socialist Federative Republic of Councils in Hungary ( hu, Magyarországi Szocialista Szövetséges Tanácsköztársaság) (due to an early mistranslation, it became widely known as the Hungarian Soviet Republic in English-language sources ( ...
quickly lost the approval of the people, principally because of its failed economic policies, its inept military efforts to reclaim lost Hungarian lands from
Czechoslovakia
, rue, Чеськословеньско, , yi, טשעכאסלאוואקיי,
, common_name = Czechoslovakia
, life_span = 1918–19391945–1992
, p1 = Austria-Hungary
, image_p1 ...
and
Romania
Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, S ...
, and the
Red Terror
The Red Terror (russian: Красный террор, krasnyj terror) in Soviet Russia was a campaign of political repression and executions carried out by the Bolsheviks, chiefly through the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. It started in lat ...
, in which Bolshevik-style gangs of young leather-clad thugs beat and murdered hundreds of the regime's “bourgeois” or counter-revolutionary opponents.
The National Army
Prónay was born in 1874 to an old and distinguished aristocratic family in the town of
Romhány
Romhány is a village in Nógrád County, Northern Hungary Region, Hungary
Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the nor ...
,
Nógrád County
Nógrád ( hu, Nógrád megye, ; sk, Novohradská župa) is a counties of Hungary, county ( hu, megye) of Hungary. It sits on the northern edge of Hungary and borders Slovakia.
Description
Nógrád county lies in northern Hungary. It shares bor ...
, in northern Hungary. He attended the Lahne Military Institute, but advanced slowly in his officer's career, in part because he was abusive and violent toward his own men.
[Bodó, Béla: ''Paramilitary Violence in Hungary After the First World War'', East European Quarterly, No. 2, Vol. 38, June 22, 2004]
An alternative government struggled to form in the south of Hungary and secure the approval of the
Entente
Entente, meaning a diplomatic "understanding", may refer to a number of agreements:
History
* Entente (alliance), a type of treaty or military alliance where the signatories promise to consult each other or to cooperate with each other in case o ...
powers; military affairs were placed in the hands of the former commander of the Austro-Hungarian fleet,
Admiral Miklos Horthy, who forged a counter-revolutionary force and called it the National Army.
After Kun's coup d'état, Prónay considered emigrating, but instead he traveled to Szeged in the south, where he joined Horthy, taking command of the admiral's bodyguards. Pál Prónay was one of the first officers to join Horthy. He also began a close association with
Gyula Gömbös
Gyula Gömbös de Jákfa (26 December 1886 – 6 October 1936) was a Hungarian military officer and politician who served as Prime Minister of Hungary from 1 October 1932 to his death.
Background
Gömbös was born in Murga, Tolna County, Kingdo ...
, the right-wing politician and future prime minister.
In the summer of 1919, Prónay formed the first partisan militia of what would later be called the “White Guard.” As the National Army moved through the countryside and gathered momentum, Prónay and other officers began a two-year campaign of anti-Communist reprisals which are now known as the
White Terror
White Terror is the name of several episodes of mass violence in history, carried out against anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, revolutionaries, or other opponents by conservative or nationalist groups. It is sometimes contrasted wit ...
. Their goals were to exact revenge for the Communists’ transgressions – and to frighten a restless and volatile population into submitting to the counter-revolutionary government's control.
Prónay also sought to “restore the traditional good relations between the landlords and estate servants,” which in essence meant enforcing obedience by the Hungarian servant class.
The White Terror
Prónay's name is essentially synonymous with the cruelty of the worst White Terror reprisals. He selected his targets from among Communists, Social Democrats (Hungary's second Marxist political party), peasants, and Jews,
whom many in the National Army blamed wholesale for the failed and bloody Communist coup d'état because 55–75% of its leaders were Jewish.
[Patai, Raphael, ''The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology'', ]Wayne State University Press
Wayne State University Press (or WSU Press) is a university press that is part of Wayne State University. It publishes under its own name and also the imprints Painted Turtle and Great Lakes Books Series.
History
The Press has strong subjec ...
, pp. 468–471 Unlike some agents of terror, Prónay never saw any need to disguise or mitigate his acts of torture and humiliation, and in his later writings, he described them with undimmed relish. His unit kidnapped and blackmailed Jewish merchants and hacked off the breasts of peasant and Jewish women. They slashed off the ears of their victims to keep as trophies, and fed the boiler of the battalion's armored train with the bodies of their prisoners, some of them alive.
Prónay and his men liked to bring a demonic creativity to their humiliations. They sprinkled powdered sugar onto the battered and swollen faces of the men they bludgeoned, so as to attract hundreds of flies; they fastened leashes of string to their prisoners’ genitals and then whipped them to run in circles; and they tied their victims into stables and forced them eat hay.
Although technically soldiers in the National Army, Prónay's men did not follow the standard chain of command. Prónay demanded, and received, suicidal loyalty to himself; soldiers were expected to follow the most brutal orders without hesitation, and those who had no stomach for these activities were expunged from the unit.
The Soviet Republic collapsed in August 1919, as the invading Romanian army (supported by French occupational troops) reached the Hungarian capital,
Budapest
Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...
. Kun and his allies fled, and the White Terror intensified.
The savagery of the
White Terror
White Terror is the name of several episodes of mass violence in history, carried out against anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, revolutionaries, or other opponents by conservative or nationalist groups. It is sometimes contrasted wit ...
cannot be blamed on Prónay alone. Other commanders, notably
Iván Héjjas
Iván Héjjas (19 January 1890 – December 1950) was a Hungarian anti-communist soldier and paramilitary commander in the years following the First World War. He played eminent role in the anti-communist and Antisemitism in Hungary, anti-Semi ...
, Gyula Ostenburg-Moravek and
Anton Lehár
Anton may refer to: People
*Anton (given name), including a list of people with the given name
*Anton (surname)
Places
*Anton Municipality, Bulgaria
**Anton, Sofia Province, a village
*Antón District, Panama
**Antón, a town and capital of th ...
, led similar squadrons and committed similar brutalities. But Prónay seems to have outdone these colleagues in both fanaticism and cruelty.
In November 1919, Romanian troops withdrew. When Horthy and the National Army consolidated their control over the capital and the nation, Prónay installed his unit in Hotel Britannia, where the group grew to battalion level. The program of vicious attacks continued; their plan included a citywide
pogrom
A pogrom () is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russia ...
until Horthy put a stop to it. In his diary, Prónay reported that Horthy
End of Prónay’s career
After the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary, the terror continued. But tolerance for the reactionary violence was waning in the corridors of power. The White Guard units, particularly Prónay's, were increasingly difficult to control, behaving less like army units and more like self-serving renegade gangs. Their savagery was outraging Hungary's upper class, and drawing negative international press; it may also have hardened the feelings of the Entente powers toward Hungary at a crucial moment, just before the ratification of the Trianon Treaty.
Nevertheless, it was at least another year before the terror died down. In the summer of 1920, Horthy's government took measures to rein in and eventually disperse the reactionary battalions. Prónay managed to undermine these anti-White Guard measures, but only for a short time.
After Prónay's men were implicated in the murder of a Budapest policeman in November 1920, his bosses’ permissiveness declined sharply. The following summer, Pronay was put on trial for extorting a wealthy Jewish politician, and for “insulting the President of the Parliament” by trying to cover up the extortion. Found guilty on both charges, Prónay was now a liability and an embarrassment. His command was revoked, and he was denounced as a common criminal on the floor of the Hungarian parliament.
After serving short sentences, Prónay tried to convince Horthy to restore his battalion command. The regent turned him down. Furious with his former patron, whom he now condemned as a useless windbag, Prónay moved to the Austrian border, where he continued his atrocities, and proclaimed himself Supreme Leader of a buffer state (the Banat of Leitha). Finally, in the fall of 1921, Prónay joined in the second failed attempt to oust Horthy and restore the Habsburg
Charles IV, to the throne. Horthy at last permanently severed his ties with Prónay.
The Prónay Battalion lingered for a few months more under the command of a junior officer, but the government officially dissolved the unit in January 1922 and expelled its members from the army.
Prónay entered politics as a member of the government's right-wing opposition. In the 1930s, he sought and failed to emulate the Nazis by generating a Hungarian fascist mass movement. In 1932, he was charged with incitement, sentenced to six months in prison and stripped of his rank of lieutenant colonel.
In October 1944, as Budapest descended into chaos at the end of the Second World War, 69-year-old Prónay assembled a death squad and resumed his hunt for the old objects of his hatred, Hungarian Jews. He vanished in the war's final weeks, and was formerly believed to have fallen during the
siege of Budapest
The Siege of Budapest or Battle of Budapest was the 50-day-long encirclement by Soviet Union, Soviet and Kingdom of Romania, Romanian forces of the Hungarian capital (political), capital of Budapest, near the end of World War II. Part of the b ...
.
Opening of the Soviet archives revealed that Prónay was captured on 20 March 1945; held as a POW; sentenced by the Soviet authorities to twenty years forced labour on charges of sabotage and espionage; and died in the Gulag in 1947/8.
Notes
Sources
''Magyar életrajzi lexikon''(in Hungarian)
Written by Pál Prónay
Bodó und Fogarassy:
[Carl Beck Papers, S. 44 bzw. Burgenländische Heimatblätter 1] Original diary in the archive of the National Security Service in Budapest, very difficult access for scholars. Text selected by Prónay for the public in the 1930s and 1940s.
1. volume: lost
Accessible: written with the typewriter and handwritten additions und photo-illustrations.
2. volume: End of Oktober 1918 bis August 31, 1922
3. volume: Subsequently, until the end of 1922
4. volume: Fogarassy supposes existence, but never found.
Accessible for the public:
Selection of his memoirs
Pál Prónay, A hatában a Halál kaszál (übersetzt mit "Death mows at the border"), with preface and notes of Agnes Szabó and Ervin Pamlényi, Budapest 1963, especially about the White Terror
Short English selections: Béla Bodó, Prónay, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, Nr. 2101, Pittsburgh 2011, S. 1 ff im gesamten Text verteilt
German summary of his texts about the Lajtabánság:
Lászlo Fogarassy, Paul Prónays Erinnerungen an das 'Lajta-Banat', in: Burgenländische Heimatblätter, 52. Jahrgang, Heft 1, Eisenstadt 1990
About Pál Prónay
Béla Bodó, Prónay, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, Nr. 2101, Pittsburgh 2011
Lászlo Fogarassy, Paul Prónays Erinnerungen an das 'Lajta-Banat', in: Burgenländische Heimatblätter, 52. Jahrgang, Heft 1, Eisenstadt 1990
External links
Info (ungarisch) über Prónay im ''Magyar életrajzi lexikon''
Bodó-article (en): http://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp
Botlik-monograph English: http://www.hungarianhistory.com/lib/austria/The_Fate_of.pdf
Fogarassy-Artikel (German): http://www.zobodat.at/pdf/Burgenlaendische-Heimatblaetter_52_0001-0010.pdf
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pronay, Pal
1874 births
1950s deaths
Counter-revolutionaries
Year of death missing
People from Nógrád County
Military history of Hungary
Hungarian soldiers
Hungarian monarchists
History of Budapest
Hungarian anti-communists
Hungarian people of the Hungarian–Romanian War
Hungarian fascists
Hungarian Nazis
Hungarian mass murderers
Politicide perpetrators
Prisoners who died in Soviet detention