Gömbös’s successor as prime minister in 1936–1938, who announced the Győr programme and introduced the First Jewish Law
Born in Budapest, he began his civil-service career in Pest County in 1909 and after the revolutions was head of Győr and Komárom counties. He entered parliament in 1927 and became Gömbös’s minister of agriculture in 1935. Succeeding Gömbös as prime minister in October 1936, he promised a return to Bethlen’s constitutional course and in 1937 banned the Party of National Will and had Szálasi imprisoned. In March 1938 he announced the Győr programme, but after the Anschluss he brought pro-German politicians into the cabinet and negotiated with the extreme right, and resigned in May. The First Jewish Law his government introduced passed under Imrédy, and from December 1938 until his death he was Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Career timeline
- 1909Civil servant in Pest County
- 1920sHead of Győr and Komárom counties
- 1927Member of parliament
- 1935Minister of agriculture
- 1936–1938Prime minister
- 1938Announces the Győr programme
- 1938–1939Speaker of the House of Representatives
Wartime prime minister who refused German deportation demands and sought a secret armistice with the Western Allies
From an old gentry family of Szabolcs County, he was a county lord-lieutenant and minister of agriculture from 1932 to 1935, a conservative of the Bethlen school. In 1941 he voted in the upper house against the Third Jewish Law. Made prime minister at Horthy’s request in March 1942, he kept up the war against the Soviet Union while refusing German demands to deport Hungary’s Jews and negotiating an armistice with the Western Allies. A secret preliminary armistice was signed off Istanbul in September 1943, but when Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944 he was ousted and hid in the Turkish legation. Captured in October 1944, he was held in Dachau and Mauthausen until freed in 1945; he went into exile in 1946 and died in New York.
Career timeline
- 1921–1929Lord-lieutenant of Szabolcs County
- 1929–1931Deputy under-secretary, Ministry of Trade
- 1932–1935Minister of agriculture
- 1942–1944Prime minister; secret armistice talks with the Allies
- 1944–1945Refuge in the Turkish legation; Dachau and Mauthausen
- 1946–1967Exile; settled in the United States
The Smallholders' general secretary whose Soviet abduction triggered his party's destruction
Arrested, he declared: "I took no part in the conspiracy, I feel no guilt in it; had I done so I would have betrayed my life's work."
A peasant politician of peasant stock who, with only four years of elementary schooling, joined the Smallholders in 1933 and rose by 1945 to general secretary of post-war Hungary's largest party. As agriculture minister in the Tildy and Nagy governments he drove the break-up of the great estates and the land reform, and defended his party's independence against Rákosi's salami tactics. When parliament refused to lift his immunity in February 1947, Soviet forces arrested him on fabricated espionage charges and carried him off to the gulag, and the abduction became the trigger for Ferenc Nagy's resignation and the dismantling of the Smallholders. He returned in 1955, served as agriculture minister in Imre Nagy's revolutionary government in 1956, and after the suppression cooperated with the Kádár regime until his death in 1959.
Career timeline
- 1933–1944Joined the Smallholders (FKGP); Baranya organiser; anti-Nazi resistance
- 1944–1945Political state secretary of the interior in the provisional government
- 1945–1946Minister of agriculture
- 1945.08–1947General secretary of the Smallholders' Party
- 1947–1955Abducted by the Soviets; 20-year sentence; gulag then Moscow prison
- 1955–1956Handed over to Hungary; released April 1956
- 1956.10–11Agriculture minister and state minister in Nagy's revolutionary government
- 1957–1959Cooperated with the Kádár regime; MP in 1958
A politician who linked revolution and reform while carrying the wounds of dictatorship
On 4 November 1956, he helped Imre Nagy draft a condemnation of the Soviet attack before taking refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy.
Ferenc Donáth was a Hungarian communist politician and agricultural economist who helped shape postwar agrarian policy. His role in land reform and collectivization was followed by imprisonment in a 1951 purge trial, rehabilitation, and a lasting confrontation with the tension between party policy and state violence. In 1956 he sided with Imre Nagy, helped frame the uprising as a revolution, and condemned the Soviet intervention; sentenced to 12 years in the Imre Nagy trial, he was released in 1960. He then devoted himself to agricultural research and helped bring Hungary’s opposition groups into dialogue in the 1980s, before being legally rehabilitated in 1989.
Career timeline
- 1934Joined the Hungarian Communist Party and worked underground
- 1937–1939Helped organize the March Front and took part in founding the National Peasant Party
- 1945–1948Vice-president of the National Landholding Settlement Council and political state secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture
- 1948–1951Led sections of the Hungarian Working People’s Party Central Committee Secretariat and rural department
- 1951–1954Sentenced to 15 years in a purge trial, then rehabilitated and released in 1954
- 1956Reformer around Imre Nagy and member of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party provisional executive committee
- 1958–1960Sentenced to 12 years in the Imre Nagy trial and released by individual reprieve in 1960
- 1976–1985Cooperative research fellow and organizer of opposition dialogue and the 1985 Monor Meeting
- 1989Posthumously rehabilitated when the Imre Nagy trial verdict was annulled
