Miklós Kállay

Miklós Kállay von Nagy-Kálló [ ˈmikloːʃ ˈkaːlːɒi ] (born January 23, 1887 in Nyíregyháza , Hungary ; † January 14, 1967 in New York ) was a Hungarian politician who tried unsuccessfully as Prime Minister to break Hungary out of the alliance with Germany .

Miklós Kállay 1942

Life

Miklós Kállay von Nagy-Kálló came from an old and influential family of the Hungarian landed nobility. From 1921 to 1929 worked in local politics and from 1929 to 1931 in the Ministry of Economic Affairs. From 1932 to 1935 he was Minister of Agriculture. Because of differences of opinion with Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös , he resigned and stayed away from active politics until 1942. In 1942 he was asked by Reich Administrator Miklós Horthy to form a government. He was supposed to revise the policy of László Bárdossy , who had brought the country into a dangerous dependence on Germany. His memoirs Hungarian Premier; A Personal Account of a Nation's Struggle in the Second World War was published in 1954.

prime minister

Kállay was Prime Minister from March 9, 1942 to March 19, 1944 and also Foreign Minister until 1943. He tried to protect the Hungarian Jews , the press and the parties of the left. The situation of the slave laborers who remained in Hungary improved after he took office. In April 1942, Kállay called for the “resettlement” of 800,000 Jews as a “final solution to the Jewish question” in order to accommodate Hitler, but emphasized that this could only be carried out after the end of the war. In agreement with Miklós Horthy, Kállay avoided drastic steps and withstood pressure from the German government. She was dissatisfied with Kally's half-hearted measures and increased the pressure on Hungary from October 1942 to achieve the complete removal of the Jewish population from economic and cultural life, the wearing of the Jewish star and finally deportation to the extermination camps through legislative measures .

Kállay pursued a policy of peaceful rapprochement with the Western powers during the war against the Soviet Union . Hitler first demanded in early 1943 that Kàllay be deposed. This tried unsuccessfully to realize the change of alliance.

Flight and Exile

After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944 in the " Enterprise Margarethe ", Kállay sought refuge in the Turkish embassy in Budapest on March 19, 1944 . He stayed there until his arrest on November 19, 1944. He was taken to the Dachau concentration camp and later to Mauthausen . As a member of the hostage transport, Kállay was deported to South Tyrol by prominent concentration camp inmates and clan prisoners by resistance fighters and freed there on May 4, 1945 (see Liberation of the SS hostages in South Tyrol ). After the liberation he remained in exile and went to the USA in 1951 .

literature

• György Ránki: Margarethe Company. The German occupation of Hungary. Böhlau, Vienna 1984, ISBN 3-205-00600-3 .
• István Deák : Kállay from Nagykálló, Miklós . In: Mathias Bernath, Felix von Schroeder (Ed.), Gerda Bartl (Red.): Biographical Lexicon for the History of Southeast Europe . Volume 2. Oldenbourg, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-486-49241-1 , p. 324 f.
• Franz Sz. Horváth: Kállay, Miklós , in: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Volume 2/1, 2009, pp. 420f.

Web links

Commons : Miklós Kállay  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Kállay Miklós , at nagyhalasz.hu (Hungarian)
• A hintappolitikus: 40 éve halt meg Kállay Miklós egykori miniszterelnök , near Múlt-kor (Hungarian)
• Newspaper article about Miklós Kállay in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Turkish Embassy Budapest: Büyükelçilik Tarihi ve Önceki Büyükelçilerimiz , accessed on November 18, 2011.
2. ↑ Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol , online edition Mythos Elser 2006