Artúr Görgei

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Artúr Görgei by Görgő and Toporc, painting by Miklós Barabás

Artúr (Arthur) Görgey von Görgő and Toporc (born January 30, 1818 in Toporec (Hungarian Toporc) , then Zips county , now Slovakia ; †  May 21, 1916 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian general and politician during the revolution of 1848 and is valid as an internal opponent of the revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth . Since the revolution he wrote himself renouncing the noble ending -y Görgei .

career

Görgey joined the royal Hungarian bodyguard as a lieutenant in 1837 . After the death of his father, he left the army in 1845 and went to Prague , where he studied chemistry at Charles University .

In 1848 he joined the Hungarian Honvéd Army with the rank of captain and took part in the Hungarian War of Independence on the national side . Promoted to major , he was commissioned to organize the mobile national guards on the right of the Tisza . End of September Görgei was (according to the self-chosen name notation used from 1848 that a waiver of the noble ending -y meant) the advancing Banus Jelacic , who fought for the Imperial, the island of Csepel sent to meet. Here he had Count Ödön Zichy (1809-1848) executed on October 2, 1848 , who had been encountered with a proclamation of the ban.

After the Ban had been defeated in the Battle of Pàkozd on September 29 and entered into an armistice, he and his troops hurriedly turned to Vienna without informing his reserves of the defeat. Meanwhile, Görgei and his department joined the corps of Colonel Mór Perczel (1811-1899) and forced the imperial reserve troops (9,000 men), who should have protected the right wing of the Ban, to surrender on October 7 at Ozora . For this he was appointed colonel the next day. After the Battle of Schwechat , Görgei followed General János Móga (1784–1861) in the high command of the Hungarian Northern Army on November 15 and was promoted to general at the same time. When the imperial general Windisch-Grätz marched into Hungary, Görgei withdrew via Raab and Pest to Waitzen , where he issued a proclamation on January 5, 1849, with which all the blame for the previous failures was placed on the National Defense Committee . He announced that he would only defend the constitution approved by King Ferdinand . From Waitzen he took on the important function of getting the Austrians to take the shortest route to Debrecen , Hungary's provisional seat of government. He did the job very skillfully by luring the enemy into the mountains by feigning retreat.

In February 1849, the Pole Henryk Dembiński was given the supreme command of the insurgents because the National Defense Committee and the government deeply distrusted Görgei. Deeply offended, Görgei only carried out his tasks slowly. In the battle of Kápolna from February 26th to 28th, he and his corps were too late, so the battle ended in a draw. Thereupon Dembiński was relieved of the high command and Antal Vetter (1803-1882) was his successor. However, Vetter fell ill, and so Görgei received the supreme command back in early April 1849. He set up his headquarters near Nagykáta on April 4th .

In the April campaign that followed, Görgei demonstrated his skills as a war leader with an impressive series of victories, including a. on April 4, 1849 in the battle of Tápióbicske , on April 10 at Waitzen and on April 26 in the battle of Komorn . Instead of going offensively across the Austrian border, he then turned to Ofen , which the Austrians under General Hentzi still held, and took the Ofen Fortress on May 21 after a three-week siege . Görgei refused the dignity of field marshal , which Kossuth offered to thank him, but took over the post of war minister in the Szemere government .

After that, Görgei let three weeks pass while the Russians invaded several places across the border into Hungary in accordance with the Russian-Austrian intervention treaty. Jealousy and differences of opinion between Görgei and Kossuth led to a disastrous turn. Görgei was defeated by the imperial commander Haynau on June 21 with his main army at the Battle of Pered and refused to retreat towards the Tisza . Cut off from the seat of government Szegedin by the further advance of the Russians in the east , he surrendered to the imperial on July 2, 1849 in the battle of Ács in front of Komorn , but suffered a defeat. He had to retreat to the fortress and, after another defeat, began the march towards the Tisza on July 13th. The Russians pursued him but did not catch up with him, so that he arrived in Arad unmolested on August 8th . General Dembiński meanwhile suffered a complete defeat against Haynau on August 9th in the battle of Temesvar . The dispatch reached Görgei the next day. Görgei had previously told Kossuth that he would lay down his arms immediately in such a case.

At the same time, the Hungarian government - also at Görgei's urging - took the decision to propose the Hungarian crown to the Tsar of Russia. Görgei had been in contact with the Russians since July 21 and was to be tasked with implementing the decision. Now Görgei called on Kossuth to resign and demanded that the highest authority be given to him. On August 11th, Görgei received the dictatorship and two days later surrendered to the Russian troops under General Friedrich Alexander von Rüdiger (1783-1856) with 20,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry and 130 guns in the village of Világos .

Görgei was pardoned after his surrender and interned in Klagenfurt , where he worked as a private citizen and chemist in the Moroš cloth factory in Viktring until 1867 . Then he returned to Hungary and was employed in 1872 on the Schäßburg-Reps railway of the Transylvania Eastern Railway.

Fonts

  • Görgey and the capitulation at Világos. By an officer of the General Staff of the Hungarian Army . Otto Wigand, Leipzig 1850.
  • My life and work in Hungary in the years 1848 and 1849 . Two volumes. FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1852.
  • Letters without an address. German original edition, ... translated from the Hungarian original manuscript . FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1867.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Artúr Görgey  - Collection of images, videos and audio files