Ferenc Szombathelyi
Vitéz Ferenc Szombathelyi (born as Franz Knaus ; * May 17, 1887 in Győr ; † November 5, 1946 in Novi Sad ) was a Hungarian officer , most recently Colonel General during World War II and from 1941 to 1944 Chief of Staff and Commander-in-Chief of the Hungarian Armed Forces . After the war, he was convicted and executed as a war criminal by a Yugoslav court.
Life
Knaus joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a cadet in 1902 and was promoted to lieutenant in Infantry Regiment No. 16 in 1907 . From 1911 he studied at the kuk war school in Vienna . After participating in the First World War , he joined the newly founded Royal Hungarian Army. From 1926 he taught at the Ludovika Academy in Budapest . From 1931 to 1933 he was Chief of Staff of the 3rd Mixed Brigade, from 1935 to 1936 Adjutant of the High Command of the Armed Forces and then until 1938 Commander of the Ludovika Academy. From 1934 he used his mother's last name instead of his German name .
From 1938 to 1939 he held the post of Deputy Chief of Staff. From 1939 to 1941 he commanded the VIII. Corps before he was appointed commanding general of the "Carpathian Group" (Kárpát Csoport), with which he took part in Operation Barbarossa . On September 6, he was appointed by the head of state Miklós Horthy to succeed the pro-German Henrik Werth as chief of the general staff. Szombathelyi was skeptical about the prospects of the war against the Soviet Union and was not afraid to let his German counterparts know. Shortly after his appointment, he was present at Hitler's meeting with Horthy when Horthy promised to send further troops. However, he successfully delayed this measure until it could no longer be prevented after the setbacks of the German army in the winter of 1941/42 and the increased Romanian commitment. In April 1942, he sent the second army of Gusztáv Jany to the eastern front. Previously, in response to alleged attacks by communist partisans and Chetniks in the annexed Batschka, he had ordered an intervention by the military under General Ferenc Feketehalmy-Czeydner , which developed into a punitive action against Serbian villages and culminated in the Novi Sad massacre .
As a reaction to the catastrophic defeats of the 2nd Army in the winter of 1942/43 (→ Operation Ostrogoschsk-Rossosh ), Hungary tried more and more to evade its axis partner. The deployment of Hungarian divisions for occupation purposes in the Balkans as a substitute for the failure of the 2nd Army, proposed by Szombathelyi and welcomed by Hitler, was rejected by Prime Minister Miklós Kállay . Contacts were initiated with the Western powers, in which, besides Kállay, Szombathelyi was also involved. After German troops marched into Hungary in March 1944, Szombathelyi was removed from his position in April under German pressure and placed under house arrest. After the Arrow Cross took power in October 1944, he was arrested. Towards the end of the war he was abducted to Germany and then taken into custody by the Americans who extradited him to Hungary. There he was first sentenced to life imprisonment by a people's court, but then extradited to Yugoslavia. There, he was put on trial for his involvement in the massacre of Novi Sad, which led to his conviction and execution by the strand resulted in November 1946th The Hungarian judgment against Szombathelyi was annulled in 1994.
literature
- Lóránd Dombrády: Army and Politics in Hungary. 1938-1945 (= Atlantic Studies on Society in Change. Vol. 121 = East European Monographs. Vol. 679 = War and Society in East Central Europe. Vol. 38). Columbia University Press, New York NY 2005, ISBN 0-88033-577-7 .
- Pál Földi: Horthy tábornokai. 1938-1945. Anno, Budapest 2007, ISBN 978-963-375-487-0 .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Szombathelyi, Ferenc |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Knaus, Franz |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Hungarian chief of staff in World War II and convicted war criminal |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 17, 1887 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Győr |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 5, 1946 |
| Place of death | Novi Sad |