Ernő Gerő

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Ernő Gerő, 1955

Ernő Gerő [ ˈɛrnøː ˈɡɛrøː ] (actually Ernő Singer ; born July 8, 1898 in Terbegec , Hont County , Hungary , Austria-Hungary , today Trebušovce, Slovakia ; † March 12, 1980 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian politician and agent of the Soviet secret service NKVD . In 1956 he was briefly party leader of the Hungarian Communist Party of the Hungarian Working People and in the entire Stalin era in Hungary he was one of the most feared figures of the oppressive apparatus. It was probably he who gave the State Security Police Államvédelmi Hatóság (ÁVH) the order to shoot the demonstrators on October 23, 1956 , which is considered to be one of the main causes of the Hungarian uprising .

origin

Ernő Gerő was born as Ernő Singer in then Upper Hungarian Terbegec (today Trebušovce, Slovakia) and came from a Jewish family. His father Móric Singer was a bank clerk and his mother died when he was 12 years old. Few details are known about his childhood and youth and about his family. After graduating from high school in Újpest , he began studying medicine at the Budapest Academy of Sciences in 1916 .

Political résumé

After the First World War

Gerő broke off his studies in 1918 and first joined the Socialist Workers' Youth Association and shortly afterwards the Communist Party of Hungary. During the Communist Soviet Republic of 1919 he was active in the Communist Workers' Youth Movement and a member of the Hungarian Red Army , but without being used at the front.

After the fall of the Soviet Republic on August 1, 1919, Gerő initially fled across several countries.In 1922 he was finally arrested in Germany and deported via Austria to Hungary, where the monarchy and the right-wing nationalist-authoritarian Horthy regime had since been restored prevailed. At his instigation, Gerő was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but released to the Soviet Union in 1924 .

In the Soviet Union and in the Spanish Civil War

In the Soviet Union, Gerő first went to the International Lenin School , took on Soviet citizenship and soon became an agent of the NKVD . In addition to Hungarian and Russian, he spoke German, Spanish and French, which enabled him to work as an agent under numerous different identities. As such, he served in the Central Committee of the Communist International , but above all in the Spanish Civil War , where he was one of the most important NKVD henchmen on the republican side under the code name Pedro Rodríguez Sanz (or just ' Pedro '). In 1937, he was personally involved in the kidnapping and murder of the leader of the Marxist united front POUM , Andreu Nin, probably initiated by Stalin .

In Stalinist Hungary after 1945

During the Second World War , in which Hungary fought on the German side , Gerő stayed again in the Soviet Union and prepared there with other Hungarian communists the resumption of political and media activity in his home country. After the fall of the fascist terror regime, which had been in power since 1944, in April 1945, he returned to Hungary and from the beginning belonged to the inner leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party, in whose gradual total takeover he played a key role. During the occupation of Hungary by the Soviet Red Army , which began in the autumn of 1944 , he had already taken on Stalin's duties in the security service as a confidante. According to Sándor Kopácsi , Budapest police chief in the later Stalinist regime under the party leader Mátyás Rákosi , Gerő was number one in the Soviet secret service in Budapest. Especially in his function as Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister from 1952 to 1954, he was one of the most feared politicians of the Stalinist apparatus of repression and terror in Hungary. The most important support in the persecution and mistreatment of opponents of the regime was the Hungarian "State Security Authority " Államvédelmi Hatóság (ÁVH), which at that time arrested or killed thousands.

During the de-Stalinization after 1953

In mid-1953, when “ de-Stalinization ” began in the Eastern Bloc after the death of Stalin , the reform communist Imre Nagy became Prime Minister of Hungary . Around this time - a few years before the Hungarian People's Uprising  - Gerő also became deputy party chairman of the Communist Party ( called the Hungarian Working People's Party since 1948 ). As such, he was involved in the repeated power struggle between the Stalinist Rákosi and the reformer Imre Nagy. On April 14, 1955, Nagy was removed from office for "deviating" from the party leadership and expelled from the party a few months later.

In the restorative phase that followed, many of the reforms from 1953 to 1955 were reversed, until in February 1956 the famous secret speech of the party leader of the CPSU Nikita Khrushchev against the Stalinist " personality cult " leaked. On June 17, 1956, when a popular uprising was already emerging, the nationwide hated Rákosi had to resign as Communist General Secretary under Soviet pressure. In the course of the "second de-Stalinization", Gerő has now been appointed as the new party leader. This also increased the fermenting unrest in the country, and students and intellectuals in particular found this retrograde change extremely unsatisfactory.

Gerő and the Hungarian People's Uprising

When a revision of the party line was called for in other countries of the Eastern Bloc and the suppression of the Poznan workers' uprising began in Poland , the mood against the Communist Party regime also culminated in Hungary. On October 23, 1956, the Hungarian people's uprising began with an approved demonstration by the students of the Technical University of Budapest (“Solidarity with Poland's Workers”). After their political demands were read out, 300,000 Hungarians spontaneously joined by the evening. The very next day the movement spread to all major cities in the country.

Gerő responded to demands for democratization and the reinstatement of Nagy as prime minister by alerting the Soviet troops and a radio speech, which further heated the minds after he described the events as a “ counterrevolution ” and the demonstrators as “ chauvinists, anti-Semites, reactionaries ” and “ Mob "had defamed. Then units of the State Security Police ÁVH opened fire on the demonstrators in front of the broadcasting center , which is considered to be one of the triggers of the popular uprising. Sections of the population armed themselves, fought against Soviet troops and the ÁVH, overthrew the Budapest statue of Stalin and forced Gerő's resignation. Imre Nagy became Prime Minister again.

October 25 (“Bloody Thursday”) brought heavy fighting across the country and ÁVH massacres in front of parliament and in the provincial town of Mosonmagyaróvár . The Soviet leaders Mikoyan and Suslov came to Budapest and also deposed Gerő as head of the Communist Party; his successor was János Kádár , but this too could no longer calm the situation.

During the five days of fighting and a general strike , workers' councils were formed in factories and mines, and national committees took over the provinces. Colonel Pál Maléter held the important Kilián barracks against the Soviet troops. The government also accepted non-communists and ordered a general cease-fire on October 28th . Nagy reintroduced a multi-party system , dissolved the ÁVH and announced the withdrawal of the Soviet troops with which Gerő left the country.

Grave on the Farkasréti temető

After his final disempowerment in 1956

Gerő only returned to Hungary in 1960 long after the popular uprising in November 1956 had been bloodily suppressed by János Kádár with Soviet help. Nevertheless, the Kádár regime denied him any political future after his parliamentary mandate had already been withdrawn in 1957 in absentia. In 1962 he was finally expelled from the Communist Party (now renamed the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party). Since then, he has lived a life of seclusion and temporarily hired himself as a translator.

literature

  • András B. Hegedűs; Manfred Wilke (Ed.): Satellites after Stalin's death. The "New Course" - June 17, 1953 in the GDR - Hungarian Revolution 1956. Oldenbourg Akademieverlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-05-003541-2 .
  • Agnes Heller , Ferenc Fehér: Hungary 1956 Revisited: The Message of a Revolution - a Quarter of a Century After . Allen and Unwin, London 1983, ISBN 0-04-321031-7 .
  • János M. Rainer: Imre Nagy. From party soldier to martyr of the Hungarian uprising. A political biography 1896–1958. Schöningh, Paderborn 2006, ISBN 3-506-75836-5 .
  • Martin Mevius: Agents of Moscow: the Hungarian Communist Party and the origins of socialist patriotism, 1941-1953 . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005
  • Paul Lendvai : The Hungarian uprising in 1956 - a revolution and its consequences . Bertelsmann, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-570-00579-8 .
  • Anne Applebaum : The Iron Curtain: The Suppression of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 . Munich: Settlers 2013

Web links

Commons : Ernő Gerő  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S9vVl29j20 (Hungarian video)
  2. Maria Dolors Genovés: Operación Nikolai o el asesinato de Andreu Nin ( Memento of the original of August 7, 2007 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fundanin.org
  3. ^ Sándor Kopácsi: The Hungarian tragedy. ISBN 3-548-38021-2 , p. 35.
  4. ^ Sándor Kopácsi: The Hungarian tragedy. ISBN 3-548-38021-2 , p. 35.
  5. According to the playwright Julius Hay (1900–1975), the order to shoot for the evening of October 23 came from Gerő personally - in breach of a promise to the contrary that he had made on the same day to a delegation of writers, including Hay. See Hays autobiography Born 1900 , German paperback edition Munich 1980, p. 343.
  6. 1956 kézikönyve. Első kills. Kronológia. 1956-os Intézet kiadása, Budapest 1996. 77th oldal.