Döme Sztójay

Döme Sztójay (center) as Hungarian ambassador in Berlin in 1940.

Döme Sztójay , born as Dimitri Stojakovic [ ˈdømɛ ˈstoːjɒi ] (born January 5, 1883 in Versec, today Vršac , Serbia , † August 22, 1946 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian military , diplomat and politician . From March 22, 1944 to August 29, 1944 he was Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Hungary in the authoritarian Horthy regime. Under his government, most of the Hungarian Jews were deported to German extermination camps , with the Hungarian administration and the Eichmann command cooperating.

Life

After graduating from the Honvéd Cadet School in Pécs , he joined the 28th Honvéd Infantry Regiment in 1902 as an ensign. He then attended the war school in Vienna and was assigned to the General Staff in 1910. In the First World War he served in the Austro - Army first as a staff officer in an infantry brigade, and later with a division and then the operation group on the side of the military commander of was appointed head of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Dalmatia appointed. On the Italian theater of war he was chief of staff of a mountain brigade in the Dolomites and then came to the army high command .

Towards the end of the war he served as a scout in the Austro-Hungarian Army and initially even joined the " Red Army " of Béla Kun's Soviet Republic . Then, however, he joined the National Army of the Counter-Revolution under Miklós Horthy , where he worked in the counter-espionage department.

From 1925 to 1933 he held the rank of colonel in the general staff, then major general as a Hungarian military attaché in Berlin .

From 1933 to 1935 he was section head in the Ministry of Defense. Promoted to lieutenant general, he was Hungarian ambassador in Berlin from December 1935 to March 22, 1944 .

He was always very benevolent towards National Socialism . This was clearly expressed in the way he influenced Hungarian politics from Berlin, so that Prime Minister Pál Teleki referred to him as a National Socialist (“Nazi”) in connection with the conflict surrounding the Hungarian entry into the war in early 1941.

As prime minister

When the German Wehrmacht marched into Hungary on March 19, 1944 (" Enterprise Margarethe "), Reich Administrator Miklós Horthy was to appoint a person of trust as head of government. However, he refused to entrust the personally hated Béla Imrédy .

That is why he brought up the name Sztójay, which was also highly trusted by the German leadership, but Horthy hoped that Sztójay as a soldier would remain loyal to him and would not blindly carry out all German orders. This ulterior motive was also known to the Germans, and Sztójay initially turned it down for health reasons. In the end, however, the new Reich German envoy and Reich plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer was able to prevail with his strategy of preventing Horthy from abdicating under all circumstances. Sztójay was appointed as a compromise candidate on March 22nd as prime minister and foreign minister.

In these offices, Sztójay and Veesenmayer initially pushed Horthy completely into the background. He immediately developed activities that were pleasant to the Germans, so that his government was also called the " Quisling government":

• To continue the war, he sent significant new troop contingents to the war against the Soviet Union .
• A very disadvantageous economic agreement for Hungary was concluded with the German Reich .
• Above all, Sztójay was responsible for the relentless implementation of the Holocaust in Hungary: Within a very short time, the Jews were completely disenfranchised with the help of 107 laws , then on April 27 , under the direction of Adolf Eichmann , the mass deportations of Jews from the Hungarian province began to Auschwitz . Following protests from abroad, the removal of the last 200,000 or so Jews from Budapest was not stopped by Horthy until the beginning of July 1944 and was temporarily suspended on July 9th. By then (according to a telegram from Veesenmayer on July 11), 437,402 Jews had been deported within just over two months.

At the same time, Horthy, awakened from his lethargy, intended to dismiss the Sztójay cabinet and set up a military and civil servant government and General Géza Lakatos , but carelessly betrayed this plan to Veesenmayer on July 7th. After a sharp direct intervention by Hitler, the imperial administrator had to drop his intention and seemed superficially to resign himself to the continued office of the Sztójay cabinet, although the latter would prefer to resign himself in view of his increasingly evident powerlessness.

However, the government now came under pressure from the SS , who pleaded for an even more pro -German government under the Hungarian National Socialist Fidél Pálffy . At the beginning of August, more and more ministers resigned from their offices; Sztójay himself withdrew to a sanatorium when he was sick.

After the collapse of Romania on August 23, 1944 and its transfer to the Allied camp , a rapid advance of the Red Army across the Carpathian Mountains into the heart of Hungary was to be feared. In view of this, Horthy vigorously resumed his efforts to achieve a separate peace with the Allies and therefore released Sztójay on August 29, 1944, without this having led to any particular reactions from the Germans.

Sztójay fled to Germany with the Wehrmacht , was arrested by the Americans in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and transferred to Hungary in October 1945.

Before the Hungarian People's Court he was charged as a war criminal, convicted and executed in 1946 .

literature

• Paul Lendvai : The Hungarians. A thousand years of history. Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-442-15122-8 .
• Ilona Reinert-Tárnoky: Sztójay, Döme . In: Biographical Lexicon on the History of Southeast Europe . Volume 4. Munich 1981, p. 263 f.

Web links

Commons : Döme Sztójay  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Newspaper article about Döme Sztójay in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .