Béla Király
Király Béla
The general and contested witness of 1956
“I was skin and bones coming out of five years of imprisonment.”
Béla Király was a Hungarian officer whose career crossed the Second World War, the construction of postwar socialism, and the 1956 Revolution. Sentenced to death by the postwar regime and later commuted and released, he became the highest-ranking military commander of the Hungarian armed forces that resisted the Soviet intervention. In exile he became a historian and teacher in the United States, while his memoirs and writings on the Tito–Stalin split argued that Stalin had prepared to invade Yugoslavia. Archive-based scholarship later disputed or qualified that claim, making Király both an important witness to 1956 and a contested author of Cold War memory.
Career timeline
- 1935Graduated from Ludovika Military Academy, commissioned second lieutenant
- 1942–1945Hungarian Army staff officer, Eastern Front service
- 1949–1951Commander of infantry in the Hungarian People's Army, major general
- 1951–1956Imprisoned in a political trial, sentence commuted from death to life
- 1956Commander-in-chief of the National Guard, military commander of Budapest
- 1957–1966Exile in the United States, earned a history PhD at Columbia University
- 1964–1982Professor of military history at Brooklyn College
- 1990Member of the Hungarian National Assembly