People of the Revolution and the USSR

Czechoslovakia state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1892–1948 ○ Natural causes

A legion commander who carried battlefield success into White politics

After capturing Yekaterinburg, Gajda set up his headquarters in the very Ipatiev House where the Romanovs had been murdered by the Bolsheviks less than a week earlier.

Radola Gajda was a Czechoslovak Legion commander who rose to prominence in the First World War and the Russian Civil War, later becoming a general and politician in interwar Czechoslovakia. In 1918 he led the Legion's eastern group, seizing the railway from Novonikolaevsk to Irkutsk and pressing the argument for armed struggle over neutrality. He joined Kolchak's White forces, lost his command, and returned home to serve as acting chief of the general staff before leading the National Fascist Community. His military anti-Bolshevism became fascist politics in Czechoslovakia, while during the Nazi occupation he aided resistance networks.

Hungary state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1896–1946 ✕ Executed by firing squad

Hungarian minority leader in Czechoslovakia who, as interior minister in Sztójay’s cabinet in 1944, organised the deportation of Jews

Born in Komáromcsehi, Komárom County (now Čechy, Slovakia), he entered the politics of the Hungarian minority in Upper Hungary, cut off by Trianon, in the early 1920s. He became chairman of the Hungarian National Party in 1933 and a deputy in Prague in 1935, and was general secretary of the United Hungarian Party. From 1938 to 1940 he was Hungary’s minister without portfolio for Upper Hungary, and in 1940 he co-founded the far-right Party of Hungarian Renewal with Béla Imrédy. As interior minister in Sztójay’s cabinet after the German occupation of 1944, he organised the deportation of the Jews with his state secretaries László Baky and László Endre. He resigned under Horthy’s pressure on 17 August. After the war he fled west, was captured by the Americans, handed over to Hungary, sentenced to death by the People’s Tribunal and shot in 1946.