A soldier caught between negotiation and armed resistance
“I have to go there, even if it costs me my life, because the country expects my assistance.”
Pál Maléter was a Hungarian officer who became a prisoner of war in the Second World War, joined the anti-German struggle, and entered the Communist Party after 1945. During the 1956 Revolution, he was sent to the Kilián Barracks, agreed to a ceasefire with insurgents, and joined their defense while helping negotiate between soldiers and civilian armed groups. As defense minister in Imre Nagy's government, he went to negotiate the withdrawal of Soviet forces, was arrested, and was executed with Nagy in 1958. Rehabilitated in 1989, he was reburied as one of the revolution's martyrs.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1939Entered military service
- 1940Cadet at the Ludovika Military Academy
- 1944–1945Soviet prisoner of war, then anti-German partisan
- 1945Commander of a guard battalion for the provisional government; joined the Hungarian Communist Party
- 1956.10Colonel; commanded the defense of the Kilián Barracks
- 1956.11Defense minister in Imre Nagy's government; promoted to major general
- 1956.11.3Negotiating delegate on troop withdrawal; arrested at Tököl
- 1958Executed
- 1989Rehabilitated, posthumously promoted and reburied
- 1956.10.23Commanded the armored unit sent to the Radio building
- 1956.10.25Led tanks sent to relieve the Kilián Barracks
- 1956.10.29–31Ceasefire and negotiations with armed groups; took part in organizing the National Guard
Related historical events
From the Arrest at Tököl to the Secret Trial and Execution
On 3 November 1956 Maléter travelled as a member of the Hungarian armistice delegation to the Soviet command post at Tököl, south of Budapest. He came to negotiate the terms of a Soviet withdrawal, and was arrested on the spot at the conference table, a seizure distinct from surrender or voluntary capitulation. Some accounts place his arrest a day later, on 4 November. He remained in Soviet custody until the end of January 1957, when he was handed over to the Hungarian interior organs.
Maléter, already in detention, was joined to the case of the Nagy group brought back from Romania, and so became a defendant in the Imre Nagy trial that opened on 5 February 1958 in the military court building on Fő utca in Budapest. The first hearing was held before the People's Tribunal of the Supreme Court led by Zoltán Radó. A decision to postpone the trial had already been taken on its first day, 5 February, and after the defendants' questioning ended on 6 February the proceedings were suspended for months. When they resumed from 9 to 15 June, the same courtroom heard the case before the People's Tribunal of the Supreme Court led by Ferenc Vida, presented as chairman of the phase after the interruption; the death sentence of 15 June was pronounced by that tribunal.
Under interrogation Maléter held consistently to the position that what had happened in Hungary between 23 October and 4 November 1956 had been a revolution. He did not change that view even when the film of the bloodshed in Köztársaság Square was shown to the defendants together with Zoltán Szántó's false testimony. In his final statement, however, he spoke of a counter-revolution, pleaded guilty to the charge of overthrowing the people's state order, and asked for a severe sentence.
On 15 June 1958 he was sentenced to death, and at dawn the next day he was hanged in the courtyard of the collection prison on Kozma utca. Imre Nagy and Miklós Gimes were executed the same day. His body was buried clandestinely in the courtyard of the National Prison in Budapest, exhumed in secret on 24 February 1961, and reburied under a false name in plot 301 of the New Public Cemetery.