Ladislaus Almásy

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Portrait, circa 1915
Bronze bust of László Almásy in the courtyard of the Hungarian Museum of Geography

Ladislaus Eduard (László Ede) Almásy [ ˈlaːsloː ˈɛdɛ ˈɒlmaːʃi ] (born August 22, 1895 in Bernstein , then in the Kingdom of Hungary ; † March 22, 1951 in Salzburg ) was an explorer, Sahara researcher, pilot, automobile pioneer and an active defense officer on the German side during the Second World war. Thanks to numerous expeditions in desert regions and business trips to Egypt , he became a connoisseur of the eastern Sahara . As an officer in the Wehrmacht in the Brandenburg divisionAmong other things, he smuggled spies through the desert to Egypt on behalf of the German Abwehr .

Life

Early years

Almásy was born in 1895 as the son of the well-known ethnologist and zoologist György Ede Almásy Count von Zsadány and Törökszentmiklós at Bernstein Castle in German-populated western Hungary (Austrian Burgenland since 1921 ). He was raised by a private tutor in Eastbourne , UK , where he lived from 1911 to 1914. His enthusiasm for boy scouts also stems from this time .

During the First World War Almásy served in the kuk aviation troops . In 1921 Almásy became the international representative of the Hungarian Scout Association. He returned to England, where he studied at the Eastbourne Technical Institute from November 1921 to June 1922. Here he was also a member of the Eastbourne Flying Club .

In the spring of 1921 he chauffeured ex- king Charles IV (ex-emperor Charles I of Austria) to Budapest on his first (failed) attempt to regain the throne of the Kingdom of Hungary.

Expeditions

After 1921 Almásy worked as a representative for the Austrian Steyr Automobile in the Hungarian Steinamanger near the new border with Austria and won several car races for Steyr. During this time he organized hunting trips for Europeans in the Kingdom of Egypt .

In 1926 Almásy developed a greater interest in the region during a trip from Egypt to Sudan along the Nile and later returned to trips and hunting. In 1929 he tested Steyr vehicles under desert conditions with two Steyr trucks and thus began his desert expeditions. In 1930 he drove from Khartoum along the railway line in four days to Wadi Halfa and further in the Nile Valley to Cairo .

In 1932 Almásy set out with three Britons, Sir Robert Clayton, Commander Penderel and Patrick Clayton , to look for the legendary Zerzura , the "oasis of birds". The combined expedition to car and airplane was financed by the Egyptian Prince Kemal el Din , who wrote an article about the Gilf el-Kebir for the US American National Geographic Magazine in 1921 . The expedition cataloged prehistoric rock carvings such as the Swimmers' Cave in Uwainat and Gilf el-Kebir.

In 1933 Almásy declared that he had found the third valley of Zerzura in the Wadi Talh. Almásy met the Magyarab tribe in Nubia , who speak Arabic but are considered the descendants of Hungarian (Magyar) soldiers in the Ottoman army of the 16th century.

In his discoveries, he was one of the first to rely on combined explorations by car and plane. He also evaluated the historical reports of ancient writers such as Herodotus .

Almásy, called Abu Ramla 'father of the sands ' by his Bedouin friends , recorded his adventures in the book Az ismeretlen Szahara , which was first published in Budapest in 1934 . He wrote it in German under the title Unknown Sahara. With airplane and automobile in the Libyan desert , published in 1939 by Brockhaus Leipzig. It contains accounts of most of his discoveries, such as the Jebel Uwainat (the highest mountain in the Eastern Sahara), the rock carvings in Gilf el-Kebir and the lost oasis of Zarzura , which he shared with pilot Penderel, Robert Clayton and Richard A. Bermann discovered. Almásy changed from being an autodidact to a serious explorer.

Gilf el-Kebir was not discovered by Almásy, but presented for the first time in Europe. The Bedouins knew them, but avoided them except when looking for stray cattle. They associated the cave paintings with jinn or unknown spirits. Almásy mapped the caves and made sketches of the cave paintings.

In the mid-1930s, the time of research and adventure came to an end for Almásy: His sponsor Clayton had died in 1932, but not, as rumored in The English Patient , in a crash landing, but on the bite of a desert fly in Gilf el-Kebir. Clayton's wife died a year later in an unexplained plane crash in England.

Together with Count Pál Teleki , Almásy supported the preparation of the 4th World Scout Jamboree in Gödöllő , Hungary, near Budapest, where he presented the Air Scouts to the founder Robert Baden-Powell on August 9, 1933 .

During the Italian war against Abyssinia , Almásy is said to have provided intelligence information to the Governor General of Italian North Africa (Africa Settentrionale Italiana) , Marshal Italo Balbo , by investigating the feasibility of an Italian advance into Sudan and Egypt.

Almásy later led archaeological and ethnographic expeditions with the German ethnologists Leo Frobenius and Hans Rhotert . He worked as a flight instructor at the Al Maza airfield in Egypt.

Second World War

After the outbreak of World War II , he had to return to Hungary in the autumn of 1939, as the British in Egypt suspected him of being a spy for the Italians and the Italians in Libya of being the British. As a Hungarian, he had always worked for the colonial power that gave him the best research assignment.

Hungary, which was leaning towards the German Reich , formally joined the Axis powers on November 20, 1940 with the ratification of the Tripartite Pact under the leadership of Miklós Horthy . The German defense now engaged Almásy, who lives in Budapest. The Hungarian reserve officer was taken over as a captain in the air force and assigned to the Africa corps for the Africa campaign with a command of the defense of the Brandenburg division. In 1941 and 1942, this troop under the command of Erwin Rommel used its desert experience for operations and exploration of the southern desert.

The order of a transport through the desert, which is described in the book Rommel Calls Cairo by the German spy Johannes Eppler (alias Husain Gafaar) and the radio operator Hans-Gerd Sandstede, who was smuggled through the Egyptian desert by Almásy, is secured . During "Operation Salaam" from April to June 1942, a command under Almásy with the two German spies in Egypt to Cairo seeped through the enemy lines into British-controlled territory - in a similar way to the opposing Allied Long Range Desert Group . Operation Salaam was not a covert operation because Almásy and his team wore German uniforms. However, they used US cars and a truck with German national emblems that were hidden in the vehicle camouflages. Almásy was promoted to major and was awarded the Iron Cross .

In 1944 Almásy was still involved in the failed Operation Dora , which was carried out from Greece to recapture an abandoned Italian airfield in the Libyan desert . The base should have been used to enable German agents to set up radio listening posts in North Africa.

After the end of the African campaign without a win for the Germans, Almásy was transferred to Turkey , where he was involved in the preparation of an uprising in Egypt that did not take place.

He eventually returned to Budapest, where he used his contacts with the Catholic Church to save some Jewish families from deportation to concentration camps.

post war period

After the war, Almásy was arrested in Hungary and taken into Soviet captivity. After the communist seizure of power in Hungary, Almásy was charged with high treason in a people's court, but acquitted. He later left Hungary, allegedly with the help of the British secret service . The British are said to have brought him to their zone of occupation in Austria (Styria, Carinthia, East Tyrol and some districts of Vienna) and later supported him on his journey to Egypt.

Almásy then stayed in Egypt at the invitation of King Farouk and became the technical director of the newly established desert research institute, which can be found today in the Al-Matariyyah district of Cairo.

death

During a visit to Austria in 1951, Almásy fell ill with amoebic dysentery . He died of the consequences in a Salzburg hospital, the Wehrle sanatorium . His tomb in the Salzburg municipal cemetery (Rayon 75), erected by Hungarian donors in 1995, honors him as a pilot, Sahara researcher and discoverer of the Zarzura oasis .

Almásy in novel and film

In the novel The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje 's Vita is the presentation of the title character. The story described there, however, has only a little to do with Almásy. The affair with Katherine Clifton described in the book (and, above all, central to the film adaptation) has no basis, since Almásy was homosexual . He also dies in the novel in Tuscany, Italy , of burns as a result of a plane crash.

The film based on the novel and completed in 1996, The English Patient, proved to be extremely successful and received numerous awards. Laszlo Almásy is played by Ralph Fiennes in the film .

In 1958, Wolfgang Schleif made the movie Rommel calls Kairo . The film deals with "Operation Salaam". Almásy is played by Peter van Eyck in the film .

Works

  • Az ismeretlen szahara , Budapest, 1934
  • Levegőben, homokon , Budapest, 1937
    • German translation (both together, shortened): Unknown Sahara. Brockhaus , Wuppertal 1939
    • New edition as a swimmer in the desert. Haymon, Innsbruck 1997
  • With Rommel's army in Libya in 1943

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ LE de Almasy: By Motor Car from Wadi Halfa to Cairo. In: Sudan Notes and Records. Volume 13, No. 2, 1930, pp. 269-278.
  2. ↑ Anja Stehmeyer: Rommel's spy - Saddam's hostage. In: Hamburger Abendblatt . October 17, 1990, archived from the original on December 4, 2014 ; Retrieved April 4, 2010 .
  3. ^ Matthias Schulz: Desert researcher Almásy. Nazi spy, lover, devil guy. Spiegel Online Einestages
  4. ↑ For more information about the literary processing of Almásy see: Will the Real Almásy Please Stand Up! - Transporting Central European Orientalism via The English Patient . ( Archived copy ( Memento of June 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive )) Eugene Sensenig-Dabbous - Notre Dame University (www.ndu.edu.lb), Lebanon; in: COMPARATIVE STUDIES of SOUTH ASIA, AFRICA and the MIDDLE EAST (CSSAAME) Volume 24 | No. 2 | 2004 - German Orientalism - In Memory of Annemarie Schimmel. Guest Editor: Jennifer Jenkins, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Modern German History, Department of History, University of Toronto.
personal data
SURNAME Almásy, Ladislaus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Almásy, Ladislaus Eduard; Almásy, László Ede; Almásy, Ladislaus from
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Pilot and automobile pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH August 22, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH at Bernstein Castle , Burgenland
DATE OF DEATH March 22, 1951
Place of death Salzburg