Editor of the Social Democratic Népszava who was murdered by an officer detachment in 1920 for exposing the White Terror
A former schoolteacher, he wrote for Népszava from 1903, led the organisation of teachers, and in 1906 became president of the Free Association of Hungarian Teachers. He was state secretary for education in Mihály Károlyi’s coalition government, but during the Soviet Republic declined any role on grounds of principle and criticised the dictatorship of the proletariat in the National Assembly of Councils. In September 1919 he became responsible editor of Népszava and wrote articles exposing the White Terror. On 17 February 1920 officers of the Ostenburg detachment abducted and murdered him together with his colleague Béla Bacsó and threw the bodies into the Danube. Horthy’s amnesty of 1921 ensured the killers were never punished.
Career timeline
1897–1898Editor of Népszava
1906President of the Free Association of Hungarian Teachers
1918–1919State secretary for education under Károlyi
1919Responsible editor of Népszava
1920Murdered by officers of the Ostenburg detachment
British press baron Lord Rothermere, who became a hero in Hungary by demanding revision of the Trianon borders in the Daily Mail
With his elder brother Alfred, later Viscount Northcliffe, he founded the Daily Mail in 1896 and the Daily Mirror in 1903, and on his brother’s death in 1922 acquired his controlling interest in Associated Newspapers. Made Baron Rothermere in 1914 and Viscount Rothermere in 1919, he served for a time during the First World War as President of the Air Council. His Daily Mail editorial “Hungary’s Place in the Sun” of 21 June 1927 called for the return to Hungary of large territories lost under the Treaty of Trianon; he became a national hero in Hungary, and over 1.2 million Hungarians signed a letter of thanks. In the 1930s he praised Hitler and in 1934 backed the British Union of Fascists. He died in Bermuda in 1940.
Christian Socialist politician who, as minister of religion and education, prepared and tabled the numerus clausus bill of 1920
Born in Mezőpetri, he left the Szatmár seminary after four years to become a journalist, edited the Christian Socialist Igaz Szó and the daily Új Lap, and was general secretary of the Catholic People’s Association from 1908 to 1918. After the fall of the Soviet Republic he was minister of propaganda in the Friedrich government and then, from November 1919 to December 1920, minister of religion and education. He prepared and tabled the numerus clausus bill, often seen as the first anti-Jewish act of twentieth-century Europe. He became chairman of the Christian National Union Party in 1920 but soon lost his seat, and by the time of his arrest in 1945 he was a textile merchant.
Career timeline
1905–1909Edits Igaz Szó and Új Lap
1908–1918General secretary of the Catholic People’s Association
1919Minister of propaganda in the Friedrich government
Russian anarchist intellectual who theorized anarchist synthesis and chronicled the revolution the Bolsheviks suppressed
In Golos Truda, 1917: 'Once their power has been consolidated and legalized, the Bolsheviks… will start running the life of the country and of the people from the top. They will develop an authoritarian political and state apparatus that will crush all opposition with an iron fist.'
Russian anarchist intellectual and leading theorist of the Makhnovshchina. Editor of Golos Truda in Petrograd, co-founder of the Nabat Confederation in Ukraine, and chairman of the Makhnovist Military Revolutionary Council, he developed the theory of anarchist synthesis to unite communist, individualist, and syndicalist anarchists. After exile from Soviet Russia in 1922, he wrote The Unknown Revolution, the definitive anarchist history of 1917–1921, and opposed the Platformist centralization pushed by his comrade Makhno.
Career timeline
1904Drops out of St. Petersburg University law faculty; joins Socialist Revolutionary Party; organizes workers' study groups
1905Participates in Bloody Sunday march and helps form the St. Petersburg Soviet; imprisoned at Peter and Paul Fortress
1907Arrested by Okhrana, deported to Siberia; escapes and flees to France
1911Becomes anarchist under Apollon Karelin's influence; joins Brotherhood of Free Communists in Paris
1915–1916Flees anti-war persecution in France to USA; edits Golos Truda in New York
1917Returns to Petrograd after February Revolution; relaunches Golos Truda as leading anarcho-syndicalist organ
1918–1920Co-founds Nabat Confederation in Ukraine; chairs Makhnovist Military Revolutionary Council; arrested twice by Cheka
1922Exiled from Soviet Russia after hunger strike and Profintern delegate intervention
1924–1939Moves to Paris at Sébastien Faure's invitation; contributes to Anarchist Encyclopedia; writes for anarchist periodicals in five languages
1940Completes The Unknown Revolution in Marseille while living in poverty
1945Dies of tuberculosis in Paris; buried at Père Lachaise near Nestor Makhno
Journalist and politician who, as vice-president and later president of Sfatul Țării, led the movement for Bessarabia’s union with Romania
Born to poor peasants in Cubolta, Bessarabia, in 1883, he graduated from the Chișinău seminary and entered the University of Yuryev, but as a Socialist Revolutionary had to quit after the 1905 revolution. Sought by the Tsarist authorities after printing the hymn “Deșteaptă-te, române!”, he took refuge in Iași and studied there in 1908–1912. From 1913 he published the newspaper Cuvânt moldovenesc in Chișinău, writing unceasingly for union, and in 1917 he founded the Moldovan National Party. He was elected first vice-president, then president of Sfatul Țării. After 1918 he served as minister for Bessarabia and in other posts and joined the National Peasants’ Party; in 1924 he accused the Romanian government of turning Bessarabia into an “inferno”. Arrested in 1950, he was sentenced in the Soviet Union to 25 years’ hard labour, was held until 1957 and died in 1979.
Career timeline
1908–1912Studies at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, University of Iași
1913Launches the newspaper Cuvânt moldovenesc
1917Founds the Moldovan National Party
1917–1918Vice-president, then president of Sfatul Țării
1919–1920Romanian Minister and Secretary of State for Bessarabia
1927Romanian Minister of Public Works
1950–1957Arrest and imprisonment (Sighet, Soviet hard labour, Aiud)
The 'Red Millionaire' who exposed Nazi terror through publishing, the Comintern's greatest propagandist, who broke with Stalin
"Stalin, you are a traitor!" — Münzenberg's response to the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
The Comintern's most brilliant mass-propagandist. He founded Workers International Relief, co-founded the League Against Imperialism, and his Brown Book (1933) exposed the Reichstag fire as a Nazi frame-up. He broke with Stalin and died under mysterious circumstances.
Career timeline
1915–1919Secretary, Intl. Union of Socialist Youth Organizations
1919–1921First Secretary, Young Communist International
1921–1937Founder & leader, Workers International Relief (IAH/Mezhrabpom)
1924–1933Reichstag deputy for Hesse-Nassau (KPD)
1927–1935Co-founder & leader, League Against Imperialism
Crimean Tatar politician who ran the military and foreign affairs of the Crimean People’s Republic and led the national movement in exile
Born in 1889 into a family of wealthy peasants in Kizil-Tash in the Yalta district, he met Noman Çelebicihan at the law faculty of Istanbul University. After publishing The Oppressed Crimean Tatar Nation in the 20th Century in 1911 he escaped arrest by studying in Paris, and on his return in 1914 he went through cadet school and became an ensign. In 1917 he briefly edited Millet and became director of military and foreign affairs in the Directory set up by the Qurultay. Driven out by the Bolsheviks in January 1918, he fled to Kyiv; under the German occupation he became foreign minister of Sulkiewicz’s Crimean Regional Government and sought recognition of its independence in Berlin. After the German withdrawal he went to Istanbul, founded the newspaper Emel and supported Prometheism. He took the surname Kırımer in 1934 and died in Istanbul in 1960.
Career timeline
1911Published The Oppressed Crimean Tatar Nation in the 20th Century
1914Graduated from cadet school; commissioned as an ensign
1917–1918Director of military and foreign affairs, Directory of the Crimean People’s Republic
1918Foreign minister of the Crimean Regional Government
1918–1960Led the Crimean Tatar émigré movement from Istanbul and Europe
Socialist writer and Népszava journalist murdered with Béla Somogyi in 1920 for writing against the White Terror
Born in Kassa (Košice), he began as a journalist on the local Kassai Napló and published the novel A Sefcsik ház in 1918. In 1919 he joined Népszava, writing about proletarians, the peasants’ hunger for land and migration, and against the White Terror associated with the names of Iván Héjjas, Pál Prónay and Gyula Ostenburg-Moravek. For this the Ostenburg detachment abducted him and his editor Béla Somogyi on 17 February 1920 and shot them, throwing the bodies into the Danube.
Baltic German Nazi ideologue from Reval who served as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in 1941–1945
Born in 1893 in Reval (Tallinn), in the Governorate of Estonia of the Russian Empire, he studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. In 1918 he left for Germany with the retreating German army and in January 1919 joined the German Workers’ Party, eight months before Hitler; in 1923 he became editor of the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1930 he published his racial treatise The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and he fed Hitler’s belief in Jewish conspiracies by introducing him to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 17 July 1941, he had Hinrich Lohse installed as Reichskommissar for Ostland, though his own authority was severely limited. He saw the Baltic lands as German “Lebensraum”. Found guilty on all four counts at Nuremberg, he was hanged on 16 October 1946.
Career timeline
1919Joined the German Workers’ Party
1923Editor of the Völkischer Beobachter
1930Published The Myth of the Twentieth Century
1941–1945Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories
Nazi Party propaganda chief and minister who promoted antisemitism and dictatorship.
Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi Party propaganda leader who headed the party organization in Berlin from 1926 and became its propaganda chief in 1930. Appointed minister of propaganda by Hitler in 1933, he brought the press, film, radio, and cultural life under Nazi ideological control and promoted antisemitism and persecution of Jews. He was a chief instigator of the November 1938 pogrom and later campaigned for total war.
Career timeline
1926–1945Nazi Party Gauleiter for Berlin
1930–1945Nazi Party propaganda chief
1933–1945Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda
Estonian Vaps politician who headed the collaborationist Estonian Self-Administration under German occupation in 1941–1944
Born at Tuhala in Harju County, he studied in Berlin, Vienna, Innsbruck and Graz and took doctorates in geophysics (1927) and constitutional law (1930). After standing twice for parliament he joined the Vaps movement as its propaganda chief; sentenced in 1935 to twenty years’ hard labour, he was amnestied in 1938, went to Germany and took German citizenship. In May 1941 he founded the Estonian Liberation Committee in Helsinki, and returning with the German army that year he headed the Estonian Self-Administration from 1941 to 1944. In 1944 he fled to Austria, where the Western Allies cleared him of Nazi crimes and he later advised the Austrian government. In the 1990s Estonia’s International Commission named him among the Estonians chiefly responsible for crimes committed by Estonian police and SS units.
Career timeline
1927–1930Doctorates in geophysics (Innsbruck) and constitutional law (Graz)
1935Sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour as a Vaps leader
1941Founded the Estonian Liberation Committee in Helsinki
Palestinian activist linking anti-colonialism and anti-fascism
In Spain in 1936 he addressed Moroccan soldiers serving Franco, confronting the tension between anti-fascist solidarity and colonial rule in North Africa.
Palestinian communist activist, writer, and translator. Raised in Jerusalem and educated in Moscow, he went to Spain in 1936 to support the Republic. His propaganda work among Moroccan soldiers serving Franco linked anti-fascism in Spain with Arab liberation. He later worked in journalism and literary translation. His memoirs provide an Arab participant’s perspective on the Spanish Civil War.
Career timeline
1924Worked in the British Mandate Department of Posts and Telegraphs in Jerusalem, where Jewish workers introduced him to communism, and he joined the Palestine Communist Party.
1925–1928Sent by the Palestine Communist Party leadership to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) in Moscow, where he married a Ukrainian communist.
1930Elected a member of the Palestine Communist Party Central Committee at its Seventh Congress in Jerusalem and helped edit its clandestine newspaper, ilal-amam.
1931–1933Arrested by the British authorities and sentenced to two years, served in the Jerusalem, Jaffa and Acre prisons; kept under police surveillance for six months after his release.
1933–1936Sent by the Comintern to Paris to edit the Arabic monthly al-Sharq al-Arabi, which the French authorities shut down in early summer 1936.
1935–1936Studied the Soviet experience of the national question in Tashkent, then was sent by the Comintern to Spain in August 1936 to conduct propaganda among Moroccan troops fighting for Franco.
1937–1939Moved to Syria and Lebanon, active in communist circles in Damascus and Beirut and writing for the party press; expelled from the Syro-Lebanese Communist Party for criticising the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939.
1939–1948Returned to Jerusalem to work for the British-run Near East Broadcasting Service and turned to literature, publishing Pushkin (1945) and Chekov (1947) in Cairo.
1948–1976Moved with the radio station to Limassol, Cyprus, after the 1948 Nakba, living there until 1950, then continued in Beirut as a journalist, translator and literary critic.
1976–1979Moved to Athens, where one of his daughters lived; he died there in 1979 and was buried in the city.
Communist who was the first editor of the underground Szabad Nép and died in custody after his arrest in 1942
Born in Budapest, he studied civil engineering in Karlsruhe and Dresden, where he led the socialist students’ association and wrote warnings against the Nazis. Back in Hungary in 1931, he was drawn by his brother Richárd into the underground Communist movement and in 1935 joined the leadership of the Communist Youth League. From 1938 he built Communist cells inside the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions, and after June 1941 he went underground as a leader of the “independence movement”. Editor-in-chief of Szabad Nép from February 1942, he was arrested on 1 June and died two weeks later in unclear circumstances.
Career timeline
1920sStudied in Karlsruhe and Dresden; led the socialist students’ association
1932Joined the Hungarian Communist Party
1935Leadership of the Communist Youth League
1938–1941Built Communist cells in the Social Democratic Party and unions
1942Editor of Szabad Nép; died in custody after arrest
Zionist lawyer who negotiated with Eichmann to send 1,684 Jews to Switzerland on what became known as the Kasztner train
Born into the Jewish community of Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca), he became a Zionist at fifteen and worked as a journalist for the Jewish paper Új Kelet and as a lawyer. Moving to Budapest in 1941, he became a leader of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, which smuggled Jewish refugees into Hungary. In the summer of 1944 he negotiated with Eichmann to let 1,684 Jews leave for Switzerland instead of Auschwitz on what became known as the Kasztner train, in exchange for money, gold and diamonds. Diverted to Bergen-Belsen, the passengers reached Switzerland in two groups in August and December 1944. After the war he moved to Israel and became a government spokesman, but a 1955 ruling in a trial over charges that he had collaborated with the Nazis said he had “sold his soul to the devil”; he was shot in March 1957 and died of his wounds. In 1958 the Supreme Court overturned two of the charges.
Career timeline
1921Joined a Zionist youth group
1930sJournalist for Új Kelet; lawyer
1941Moved to Budapest
1944Negotiations with Eichmann; the Kasztner train
1952Spokesman, Israeli Ministry of Trade and Industry
