Gábor Kemény (politician, 1910)

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Kemény in the Szálasi cabinet (in the first row, the second from the left)

Gábor Kemény (born December 14, 1910 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary ; died March 19, 1946 , Kingdom of Hungary ) was a Hungarian politician and foreign minister of the Hungarian Arrow Cross government from 1944 to 1945 .

Life

Baron Gábor Kemény had studied law in Budapest and worked for the Pester Journal newspaper . In the Arrow Cross movement he was promoted to the party leadership on February 5, 1943 and his name subsequently appeared on various cabinet drafts of the party leader Ferenc Szálasi . At the age of 33, Kemény became Hungarian Foreign Minister on October 16, 1944 and was this until March 27, 1945 in the puppet government of Ferenc Szálasi controlled by the German Ambassador and Plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer . With the support of the German occupying power, he had successfully carried out a coup against the Reich Administrator Miklós Horthy and had himself declared his successor on October 15, 1944 at 6 p.m. Szálasi was also the successor to Prime Minister Géza Lakatos .

Kemény had married the South Tyrolean Elisabeth von Fuchs, who was now approached in Budapest by the Swedish embassy employee Raoul Wallenberg when it came to the further recognition of protective passports for Hungarian Jews, which were issued in Budapest by the consulates of El Salvador , Switzerland , the Vatican and others and Sweden had been issued to the holders of forced labor or deportation to German concentration camps to prevent. Before, it was under the reign of döme sztójay between 27 April 1944 and July 11, 1944 already the deportation of 437,000 Hungarian Jews arrived. These deportations had been stopped under Géza Lakatos and have now been resumed. The Eichmann Command found willing helpers in the Arrow Cross government and a few courageous opponents in some Budapest embassies from neutral countries. It is estimated that another 50,000 Hungarian Jews perished during the short period of the Arrow Cross regime.

As Foreign Minister, Kemény wanted to achieve diplomatic recognition of the neutral states and he therefore had to accommodate Wallenberg. Elisabeth Kemény also urged her husband to ensure that the Hungarian government would continue to recognize these protective passports, and Kemény brought about such a resolution at the cabinet meeting on October 29, 1944, which was announced over the radio. As a result, Gábor Kemény got into a personal conflict because he was an ideologue of the Arrow Cross and thus an accomplice in the Hungarian persecution of the Jews. As Foreign Minister, he was the point of contact for the complaints of the embassies still present in Budapest and tried to “accommodate them” .

After the liberation of Hungary, Kemény fled to Austria and finally came back to Merano on May 3, 1945 , where his heavily pregnant wife had already left on December 4, 1944, so she never saw Raoul Wallenberg again. Kemény was arrested there by the Americans and extradited by them to Hungary on October 3, 1945, as the Three Powers had agreed in the Moscow Declaration of November 1, 1943 that all war criminals, except the main war criminals, would be brought to justice in the countries in which they had committed their crimes .

Kemény was charged with crimes against humanity during the Second World War before the Hungarian People's Tribunal and sentenced to death along with Ferenc Szálasi and other politicians and one week after the public execution of Szálasi, Gábor Vajna , Károly Beregfy and József Gera on March 19, 1946 hanged in Budapest together with Sándor Csia and Jenő Szöllősi .

Opera, film

Works

Translated journal articles in the holdings of the DNB

  • The time of national unity in Danube Europe: The prelude to the Hungarian nationality policy from Pázmány to Rákóczi , Vienna 1943
  • The political speeches and intellectual legacy of Miklós Barthas , Vienna 1943
  • Nation education and the question of nationalities , Vienna 1942
  • The Nationality Articles of Miklós Bartha , Vienna 1941

The ÖNB has twenty hits on writings by Gábor Kemény in the Hungarian language

Literature / sources

  • Randolph L. Braham : The politics of genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary. Columbia University Press, New York NY 1981, ISBN 0-231-05208-1 .
  • Peter Durucz: Hungary in the foreign policy of the Third Reich 1942–1945. V and R Unipress, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-89971-284-6 (Also: Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, University, dissertation, 2005).
  • Christoph Gann: Raoul Wallenberg. Save as many people as you can. Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-45356-2 .
  • Gyula Juhász: Hungarian foreign policy. 1919-1945. Revised edition of the Hungarian original. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 1979, ISBN 963-05-1882-1 .
  • Miklós Lackó: Arrow-cross men, national socialists. (= Studia Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. Vol. 61, ISSN  0076-2458 ). Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 1969.
  • Kati Marton : Wallenberg. Missing hero. Arcade Publishing, New York NY 1995, ISBN 1-55970-276-1 .
  • Ludwig Walther Regele: Hungary's Foreign Minister. In: Meran and the Third Reich. A reader. Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck 2007, ISBN 978-3-7065-4425-2 , pp. 153–157.
  • Margit Szöllösi-Janze : The Arrow Cross Movement in Hungary. Historical context, development and rule (= studies on contemporary history. Vol. 35). Oldenbourg, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-486-54711-9 (also: Munich, University, dissertation, 1985/1986).
  • Short biography (Hungarian).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Szöllösi-Janze, p. 275
  2. ↑ Juhász, p. 329
  3. ↑ Kati Marton, Wallenberg: missing hero , pp. 101 ff [1]
  4. ↑ Szöllösi-Janze, p. 432
  5. ↑ Christof Gann, Wallenberg, pp. 90f
  6. ↑ Szöllösi-Janze, p. 428, note 792
  7. ↑ Kemény was together with Béla Imrédy , in the group there were also hu: Jurcsek Béla , hu: Fiala Ferenc , hu: Kolosváry-Borcsa Mihály , Dullin Elek and Vajda Ferenc. See collection of statements from Holocaust survivors [2]
personal data
SURNAME Kemény, Gábor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian politician
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 1946
Place of death Budapest