Pál Prónay

Pál Prónay (1875-1945?) was a Hungarian reactionary and paramilitary commander in the years following the First World War. He is considered to have been the most brutal of the Hungarian National Army officers who led the White Terror that followed Hungary’s brief 1919 Communist revolution.

Background

The Hungarian people considered themselves humiliated and dismembered by the victors of the First World War. The Entente Powers stripped away two-thirds of the nation’s territory and awarded them to Hungary’s neighbors. With the lands went one-third of the country's Hungarian-speaking nationals.

Humiliation was inflamed by political instability. The first post-war attempt at a democratic government, under prime minister Mihaly Karolyi, floundered and was overthrown in March 1919 by a Communist coup. Its leader, Béla Kun, had Jewish roots and Soviet training. Popular at first, Kun’s so-called Hungarian Soviet Republic quickly lost the approval of the people, principally because of its failed economic policies, its inept military efforts to reclaim lost Hungarian lands from Czechoslovakia and Romania, and the Red Terror, in which Bolshevik-style gangs of young leather-clad thugs beat and murdered hundreds of the regime’s “bourgeois” or counter-revolutionary opponents.

The National Army

An alternative government struggled to form in the south of Hungary and secure the approval of the Entente powers; military affairs were placed in the hands of the former commander of the Austro-Hungarian fleet, Admiral Miklos Horthy, who forged a counter-revolutionary force and called it the National Army.

Horthy called for Hungarian officers to join; Pál Prónay was one of the first.

Prónay was born in 1875 to a minor gentry family in the town of Romhany, in northern Hungary. He attended the Lahne Military Institute, but advanced slowly in his officer’s career, in part because he was abusive and violent toward his own men.Bodó, Béla: "Paramilitary Violence in Hungary After the First World War", East European Quarterly, No. 2, Vol. 38, June 22, 2004]

After Kun’s revolution, Prónay considered emigrating, but instead he traveled to Szeged in the south, where he joined Horthy, taking command of the admiral’s bodyguards. He also began a close association with Gyula Gömbös, the right-wing politician and future prime minister.

In the summer of 1919, Prónay formed the first partisan militia of what would later be called the “White Guard.” As the National Army moved through the countryside and gathered momentum, Prónay and other officers began a two-year campaign of anti-Communist reprisals which are now known as the White Terror. Their goals were to exact revenge for the Communists’ transgressions – and to frighten a restless and volatile population into submitting to the counter-revolutionary government's control. Prónay also sought to “restore the traditional good relations between the landlords and estate servants,” which in essence meant enforcing obedience by the Hungarian servant class. [Szabo, Agnes, and Pamlenyi, Ervin, eds.: "A hatarban a halal kaszal: Fejezetek Prónay Pal feljegyzeseibol" (Budapest: Kossuth Konyvkiado, 1963), p. 113]

The White Terror

Pronay's name is essentially synonymous with the cruelty of the worst White Terror reprisals. He selected his targets from among Communists, Social Democrats (Hungary's second Marxist political party), peasants – and Jews, whom many in the National Army blamed wholesale for the failed and bloody Communist revolution because so many of its leaders were Jewish.Patai, Raphael, "The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology", Wayne State University Press, pp. 468–471] Unlike some agents of terror, Prónay never saw any need to disguise or mitigate his acts of torture and humiliation, and in his later writings, he described them with undimmed relish. His unit kidnapped and blackmailed Jewish merchants and hacked off the breasts of peasant and Jewish women. They slashed off the ears of their victims to keep as trophies, and fed the boiler of the battalion’s armored train with the bodies of their prisoners, some of them alive.

Prónay and his men liked to bring a demonic creativity to their humiliations. They sprinkled powdered sugar onto the battered and swollen faces of the men they bludgeoned, so as to attract hundreds of flies; they fastened leashes of string to their prisoners’ genitals and then whipped them to run in circles; and they tied their victims into stables and forced them eat hay.

Although technically soldiers in the National Army, Prónay’s men did not follow the standard chain of command. Prónay demanded, and received, suicidal loyalty to himself; soldiers were expected to follow the most brutal orders without hesitation, and those who had no stomach for these activities were expunged from the unit.

The Kun Revolution collapsed in August 1919, as the invading Romanian army (supported by French occupational troops) reached the Hungarian capital, Budapest. Kun and his allies fled, and the White Terror intensified.

The savagery of the White Terror cannot be blamed on Prónay alone. Other commanders, notably Ivan Hejjas, Gyula Ostenberg and Anton Lehár, led similar squadrons and committed similar brutalities. But Prónay seems to have outdone these colleagues in both fanaticism and cruelty.

Hungary reclaimed

In November 1919, Romanian troops withdrew, and Horthy rode into Budapest at the head of his army. There, he and the National Army consolidated their control over both capital and nation; in Budapest, Pronay installed his unit in Hotel Britannia, where the group swelled to battalion size. Their program of vicious attacks continued; they planned a city-wide pogrom until Horthy found out and put a stop to it. In his diary, Prónay reported that Horthy cquote|”...reproached me for the many Jewish corpses found in the various parts of the country, especially in the Transdanubia. This, he emphasized, gave the foreign press extra ammunitions against us. He told me that we should stop harassing small Jews; instead, we should kill some big Jews such as Somogyi or Vazsonyi – these people deserve punishment much more… in vain, I tried to convince him that the liberal papers would be against us anyway, and it did not matter that we killed only one Jew or we killed them all..” [ Szabo and Pamlenyi: "A hatarban a halal kaszal", pp.160 and 131]

Horthy's liability for Prónay's excesses is in fact difficult to measure. On several occasions, Horthy reached out to stop Prónay from a particularly excessive burst of anti-Jewish cruelty. And the Jews of Pest went on record absolving Horthy of the White Terror as early as the fall of 1919, when they released a statement disavowing the Kun revolution, and blaming the terror on a few units within the National Army.

Prónay himself may offer a kind of unintentional absolution to Horthy; after the re-taking of Budapest, he began to view Horthy with growing contempt, as a poseur who lacked the stomach to cleanse the nation with the necessary harshness.

Horthy has never been found to have personally engaged in White Terror atrocities. But his American biographer, Thomas Sakmyster, concluded that he "tacitly supported the right wing officer detachments" who carried out the terror. [Sakmyster, T.: "Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback: Miklós Horthy", 1918-1944, Columbia Univ. Press, 1993.]

In his 1956 memoirs, Horthy neither explained nor apologized for the savage acts of his officers, commenting merely that the Communist regime had unleashed “hell on earth” and had to be completely suppressed. “I have no reason to gloss over deeds of injustice and atrocities committed,” he wrote, “when an iron broom alone could sweep the country clean." [Admiral Miklos Horthy: "Memoirs", U. S. Edition: Robert Speller & Sons, Publishers, New York, NY, 1957]

Horthy declared that “I have been an anti-Semite throughout my life,” [Letter to Pal Teleki, cited in Patai, Raphael, "The Jews of Hungary", Wayne State University Press, p. 546] but his anti-Semitism was neither violent nor extreme.

His anti-Communism, on the other hand, was unwavering and fierce, and like many Hungarians he considered the Communist revolution to have been an essentially Jewish event. Horthy shared the paranoia of most Hungarian officers about the threat from “Bolshevism,” and allowed that hatred to guide some of his critical choices.

The admiral also had practical reasons for turning a blind eye to the terror his officers wrought: he needed the dedicated White Guard officers to stabilize and reclaim Hungary. In 1919 and 1920, the nation was, for all intents and purposes, in the throes of a civil war, and Horthy accepted that the price of his command would be high. [Sakmyster, "Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback", pp. 26-62 and Horthy: "Memoirs", 1957] There is probably some truth to Prónay’s sneering boast that “Horthy… knew perfectly well that he owed all his power to us. So he had to put up with us a little longer; he did not have the guts to prohibit our punitive expeditions, which sought to settle scores with the Jews. He did not dare to do this because the nationalist camp would have deserted him and found someone else.” [Szabó és Pamlényi: "A határban a halál kaszál", pp. 3-21]

In March of 1920, the Kingdom of Hungary was re-established, and Horthy was placed at its head in the position of regent. The people overwhelmingly supported a monarchy, but the Entente powers refused to accept the restoration of the Habsburg line. Thus the throne was intended to be symbolic, and destined to remain empty; two poorly-organized attempts by "legitimists" in 1921 to restore the deposed Habsburg Emperor, Károly IV, were thwarted. Horthy remained head of state for 24 years until October 15, 1944, when he was ousted and arrested by the Nazis.

Prónay’s career ends

After the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary, the terror continued. But tolerance for the reactionary violence was waning in the corridors of power. The White Guard units, particularly Prónay’s, were increasingly difficult to control, behaving less like army units and more like self-serving renegade gangs. Their savagery was outraging Hungary’s upper class, and drawing negative international press; it may also have hardened the feelings of the Entente powers toward Hungary at a crucial moment, just before the ratification of the Trianon Treaty.

Nevertheless, it was at least another year before the terror died down. In the summer of 1920, Horthy’s government took measures to rein in and eventually disperse the reactionary battalions. Prónay managed to undermine these anti-White Guard measures, but only for a short time.

After Prónay’s men were implicated in the murder of a Budapest policeman in November 1920, his bosses’ permissiveness declined sharply. The following summer, Pronay was put on trial for extorting a wealthy Jewish politician, and for “insulting the President of the Parliament” by trying to cover up the extortion. Found guilty on both charges, Prónay was now a liability and an embarrassment. His command was revoked, and he was denounced as a common criminal on the floor of the Hungarian parliament.

After serving short sentences, Prónay tried to convince Horthy to restore his battalion command. The regent turned him down. Furious with his former patron, whom he now condemned as a useless windbag, Prónay moved to the Austrian border, where he continued his atrocities, and proclaimed himself Supreme Leader of a buffer state (the Banat of Leitha). Finally, in the fall of 1921, Prónay joined in the second failed attempt to oust Horthy and restore the Habsburg Charles IV, to the throne. Horthy at last permanently severed his ties with Prónay.

The Prónay Battalion lingered for a few months more under the command of a junior officer, but the government officially dissolved the unit in January 1922 and expelled its members from the army.

Prónay entered politics as a member of the government's right-wing opposition. In the 1930s, he sought and failed to emulate the Nazis by generating a Hungarian fascist mass movement. In 1932, he was charged with incitement, sentenced to six months in prison and stripped of his rank of lieutenant colonel.

In October 1944, as Budapest descended into chaos at the end of the Second World War, 69-year-old Prónay assembled a death squad and resumed his hunt for the old objects of his hatred, Hungarian Jews. He vanished in the war’s final weeks, and is believed to have fallen during the siege of Budapest.

Horthy and the shadow of Prónay

Not surprisingly, arguments have smoldered for years about what responsibility, if any, Horthy might bear for failing to halt Prónay’s vicious excesses. Prónay’s crimes are undisputed; decades after his death, discussion of his savagery has in some ways become a subtext in the larger fight over the legacy of his commander-in-chief.

The Soviet-led Communist regime which ruled Hungary from 1945 to 1989 understandably saw Prónay as a vicious criminal. Hungarian historians with Communist sympathies, eager to discredit Horthy’s anti-communist reign, took pains to link Prónay directly to Horthy, and to depict Horthy’s regime as both the product, and the heir, of reactionary terror. The publication of Prónay’s diary in 1963 was considered an effort to taint Horthy’s regime with links to the murder squads.

Those inclined to protect Horthy’s legacy, including critics of the Hungarian Communist government, have sought to distance the regent from Pronay, Hejjas, Lehar et al. by insisting that they were “rogues” or “renegades.” (A similar debate seems to swirl around the number of victims of the White Terror, and how it compares to the number of victims of the preceding Red Terror. Estimates range from around 1,500 to 5,000, often depending on whether the tabulator is pro-Horthy or pro-Communist.)

Notes