Ferenc Münnich

Ferenc Münnich

Ferenc Münnich [ ˈfɛrɛnts ˈmynːiç ] (born November 16, 1886 in Seregélyes , Austria-Hungary , † November 29, 1967 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian politician and from 1958 to 1961 Prime Minister of the People's Republic of Hungary .

After Münnich fought on the eastern front on the side of the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I , he was deported to a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp in Tomsk after his arrest in 1915 . After his liberation and return to Hungary in 1918, Münnich co-founded the Communist Party of Hungary and took an active part in the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic , which only lasted four months.

After their failure, Münnich emigrated and lived in the Soviet Union until 1936 after various stops . He took part in the Spanish Civil War and was most recently (under the name Otto Flatter ) commander of the XI. International Brigade . During the Second World War he was an officer in the Red Army.

After the end of the Second World War , Münnich became police superintendent of Budapest. From 1949 to 1956 he worked in the diplomatic service, including as ambassador to Bulgaria, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. During the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, he was initially an official member of Imre Nagy's government as Minister of the Interior, but fled to the Soviet Union shortly afterwards . A few days later he returned to Hungary with János Kádár and was reappointed Minister of the Interior (later also Minister of Defense ) under the latter's "Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government" . From 1958 to 1961 Münnich was Hungarian Prime Minister, from 1961 to 1964 Minister of State.

Shortly before his death in 1967, Münnich was awarded the Soviet Order of Lenin .

literature

• Rochus Door: Münnich, Ferenc , in: Heinz Tillmann u. a. (Ed.) Biographies on world history. Lexicon . Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-326-00218-1 , p. 403
• Eva Haraszti-Taylor : The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: a collection of documents from the British Foreign Office . Nottingham: Astra Press 1995, pp. 381–383 (short biography, not used here)