Béla Miklós

Béla Miklós

Béla Miklós Edler von Dálnok [ beːlɒ mikloːʃ ] (officially Hungarian vitéz LOFO Dalnoki Miklos Béla ; German and Béla Miklós Dalnoki * 11. June 1890 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , † 21st November 1948 ) was a Hungarian officer and statesman . Miklós was Prime Minister of a provisional counter-government of Hungary in 1944/45 and in 1945 he was Prime Minister of the first Hungarian government after the Second World War .

Origin and education

Miklós comes from a family of the lower Szekler aristocracy ( lófő ). He attended the Honvéd High School in Ödenburg until 1907 and graduated from the Pest Ludovika Military Academy as a lieutenant in 1910 .

First World War and the interwar period

During the First World War , Miklós was used on various fronts as well as in the general staff. After the war he returned to the Ludovika Academy as a teacher for a short time in 1920/21 and then worked in the War Ministry. From 1929 Miklós was deputy head of the military chancellery of the Hungarian Imperial Administrator , Admiral Horthy . From 1933 to 1936, Horthy sent him to the embassy in Berlin as a Hungarian military attaché .

Second World War

From 1936 Miklós served in various units and was deployed in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union , among others . As commander of the 24,000-strong Hungarian "Rapid Corps" ( Gyorshadtest ) from 1940 to 1942, he also took part in Operation Barbarossa and was assigned to Army Group South under von Rundstedt . After the Battle of Kiev , Miklós received the German Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross as the first Hungarian officer on December 4, 1941 in recognition of the encirclement of strong Soviet units . In November 1941 Miklós was promoted to field marshal lieutenant ( Altábornagy ) and returned to Budapest with the severely weakened "Rapid Corps". From 1942 to 1944 he was head of the military chancellery of the Reich Administrator and in 1943 received the rank of Colonel General ( Vezérezredes ).

As a confidante of Horthy, he met Adolf Hitler on July 21, 1944 , on the one hand to assure Hitler of the Hungarian allegiance after the July assassination attempt and on the other hand to convey Horthy's request for the withdrawal of the Hungarian troops.

On August 1, 1944, Miklós became the commander of the 1st Hungarian Army, which was assigned to the German 1st Panzer Army under Heinrici and was fighting in the Carpathian Mountains at that time .

End of the Second World War in Hungary

After the proclamation of an armistice between the Horthy government and the Soviet Union on October 15, 1944 and the subsequent arrest of Horthy by the representative of the Greater German Reich in Hungary Edmund Veesenmayer , Miklós crossed the front line on the night of October 16-17, 1944 and surrendered to the Soviet army at Przemyśl . In a radio address he called on his 1st Army in vain to lay down their arms and stop the fight against the Red Army .

In the weeks that followed, the Soviet side initiated negotiations to form a Hungarian counter-government. Finally, on December 5, 1944, an agreement was reached in Moscow . On December 21, 1944, Miklós was elected Prime Minister by a provisional national assembly in Debrecen with Soviet approval. The government consisted of officers and members of pre-war parties. Imre Nagy became Minister of Agriculture for the Communist Party .

The Miklós government saw itself as a royal Hungarian government under the head of state Horthy, who was interned in Germany . In January 1945, a three-member Regency Council was formed, which was supposed to temporarily assume the function of a collective head of state in the absence of Reich Administrator Horthy. Miklós became a member of the Regency Council. After the Battle of Budapest , the provisional government moved to the capital and became the sole government in Hungary after the Arrow Cross regime fled and the German troops withdrew in April 1945.

post war period

Grave of Béla Miklós in the Kerepesi cemetery in Budapest

Miklós remained Prime Minister until the first post-war election in November 1945 and resigned from the Regency Council on December 27, 1945. In 1947 he became a founding member of the Hungarian Independence Party, a split from the Small Farmers' Party. In the semi-free parliamentary elections in 1947 , he won a mandate for the party. However, the mandates of the independence party, which had been defamed as “ fascist ”, were canceled in November 1947 under pressure from the communist party . After that, Miklós withdrew from public life.

In the second half of the 1970s, Miklós was politically "rehabilitated" by the Hungarian communist government.

literature

• István Deák: Dálnoki Miklós, Béla . In: Biographical Lexicon on the History of Southeast Europe . Volume 1. Munich 1974, p. 362 f.

References and comments

1. ↑ "Vitéz" is not a name, but denotes belonging to the order of the same name ; in German translation, for example, knights or nobles , but without a legal quality in the sense of historical nobility law .
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Bernard A. Cook (Ed.): Europe since 1945: an Encyclopedia . Taylor & Francis, London 2001, ISBN 978-0-8153-4058-4 .
3. ↑ Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearers 1939-1945. The holders of the Iron Cross of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents of the Federal Archives. 2nd Edition. Scherzers Militaer-Verlag, Ranis / Jena 2007, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 544.
4. ↑ Nicholas Horthy: Memoirs . ( Memento of the original from March 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) Annotated by Andrew L. Simon. Simon Publications, Safety Harbor 2000, ISBN 978-0-9665734-3-5 . 
5. ↑ Götz Aly : Comfortable and uncomfortable story. Committed in 1941 and then hushed up: the Jedwabne pogrom stands for repression in Europe . In: Berliner Zeitung , July 14, 2001.
6. ↑ Siegfried Kogelfranz: As far as the armies come ... In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 1984, pp. 164-180 ( online ).
7. ^ Andy Anderson: Hungary '56 . AK Press, Oakland 2002, ISBN 0-934868-01-8 .
8. ^ RAD Background Report / 56. History: Written, Unwritten, and Rewritten .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) Radio Free Europe Research, March 16, 1983. Retrieved June 9, 2009.