Endre Rajk

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Endre Rajk (born 1899 in Székelyudvarhely , Austria-Hungary ; died September 6, 1960 in Kronach , Federal Republic of Germany ) was a Hungarian fascist politician.

Life

Endre Rajk's father was a German-born shoemaker in Transylvania , who renamed his family name Reich to Rajk Magyar in 1890 . In the family with many children and willing to move up, his eldest brother became a doctor, another electrical engineer, and he himself a commercial clerk in Budapest. His younger brother László Rajk (1909–1949) became a communist activist and politician.

Endre Rajk left middle school in 1915 without a degree and was not drafted into military service because of an eye injury. He moved to Budapest to live with an older brother, who found him a job as an office clerk. Rajk made a career and became head of the agricultural purchasing cooperative "Hangya Szövetkezet". From 1937 to 1939 he was director of the agricultural cooperative "EKE".

Rajk joined the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross members in 1936 and moved up to the leadership of the largely influential party in 1939. According to the memory of Péter Nádas , whose parents worked for Lászlo Rajk after 1945, he was also a parliamentarian. After the putsch in October 1944, supported by the Germans, and the deposition of the Reich Administrator Miklós Horthy , Rajk was appointed State Secretary for Supply in the short-lived Ferenc Szálasi government. The Arrow Cross government continued the persecution of the Jews, which in the Horthy regime had led to the deportation of over 400,000 Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp , with anti-Jewish terror against the Jews who remained in Budapest.

His brother László was in the communist resistance and was arrested by the Arrow Cross members. Endre Rajk appeared as a witness before the court martial in March 1945 and was able to delay the immediate sentencing and execution of his brother. When the Arrow Cross administration, including Endre Rajk, had to flee from the Red Army , László Rajk was also deported to the German Reich in Munich . He returned to Hungary at the end of the war.

In June 1945 Endre Rajk was interrogated as a war criminal by the US Army and was interned in a camp in Salzburg for two years . The fact that Endre Rajk was not extradited to Hungary as a war criminal like other Arrow Cross members from the American Zone of Austria and charged there before the People's Tribunal was due to the intervention of his brother, who quickly rose to higher political positions in Hungary, including the position of Minister of the Interior. László Raijk was executed in 1949 after a Stalinist show trial for alleged espionage, in which he was also accused of his contacts with his fascist brother.

Endre Rajk lived in emigration with his second wife and two children in the Federal Republic of Germany and continued to follow fascist ideas. His autobiographical notes remained unpublished and in 2006 served as a basis for the book The Brothers Rajk published by the British journalist Duncan Shiels , in which the nephew László Rajk, Junior contributed and wrote an afterword.

Fonts

  • Rajk Endre: László öcsémmel beszélgetek . In: Társadalmi Szemle, Heft 8/9, 1991, pp. 144-154 ISSN 0039-971X

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Péter Nádas: Securing of evidence . Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-8270-0759-9
  2. ↑ Jörg Plath: Dramatic events undramatically presented , review, at Deutschlandfunkkultur, July 16, 2008
personal data
SURNAME Rajk, Endre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian fascist politician
DATE OF BIRTH 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Székelyudvarhely
DATE OF DEATH September 6, 1960
Place of death Kronach