Reform communist journalist executed alongside Imre Nagy
In the inaugural issue of Magyar Szabadság he wrote: 'Only this way can we build a free, independent, democratic Hungary.'
A Hungarian journalist of Jewish background, born in Budapest, who joined the illegal communist movement during the war and after 1945 became a writer for the party daily Szabad Nép, initially a loyal polemicist for the Rákosi regime. Shaken by the Slánský trial and the doctors' plot in Moscow, he broke with the party line, demanding László Rajk's rehabilitation in 1955 and was expelled. During the 1956 Revolution he was the most radical figure in Imre Nagy's inner circle, founding the newspaper Magyar Szabadság; after the Soviet intervention he refused to accept the Kádár government, led an underground press and the Hungarian Democratic Independence Movement, and was arrested, tried as third defendant in the Nagy trial, and hanged with Nagy and Pál Maléter on 16 June 1958. Rehabilitated in 1989, he was solemnly reburied alongside his fellow martyrs.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1942Joined illegal communist movement; called up for labor service
- 1944Escaped labor service, joined Yugoslav partisans
- 1945–1954Journalist, Szabad Nép
- 1954Correspondent in Zurich, Vienna, Paris
- 1955Expelled from MDP for demanding Rajk's rehabilitation; translator at Corvina
- 1956 summerReadmitted to MDP; joined Nagy's inner circle
- Oct–Nov 1956Founded and edited Magyar Szabadság
- Nov–Dec 1956Founded Hungarian Democratic Independence Movement, underground paper; arrested 5 Dec
Related historical events
Secret trial, execution and 1989 rehabilitation
Arrested on 5 December 1956, Gimes became the third defendant in the Imre Nagy case. The trial was held in closed session, and the Supreme Court's People's Tribunal under Ferenc Vida sentenced him to death on 15 June 1958. Nagy and Pal Maleter received the same sentence that day, while Ferenc Donath and others were given prison terms. The sentence was carried out at dawn the next morning in the courtyard of the Budapest Central Prison, when Gimes was forty years old.
The body was buried at once in an unmarked grave; on 24 February 1961 it was secretly exhumed and reburied under a false name in plot 301 of the Rakoskeresztur New Public Cemetery. For decades afterward the Kadar regime branded 1956 a "counter-revolution" and its leader and comrades counter-revolutionaries, a characterization that began to erode from 1988, when Imre Pozsgay recast 1956 as a "popular uprising" and Nagy's rehabilitation became a political question.
Gimes was officially rehabilitated in May 1989. On 16 June that year, exactly thirty-one years after the execution, he was solemnly reburied together with Imre Nagy, Pal Maleter, Jozsef Szilagyi and Geza Losonczy on Heroes' Square. About 200,000 people attended, and state television carried the ceremony live for the whole day. Among the five reburied, Miklos Molnar, a journalist who had made the newspaper with him, delivered the farewell address at Gimes's coffin.