Aristocratic statesman who led Hungary’s delegation to the Paris peace talks in 1920 and pleaded for revising Trianon at the League
A count born in Vienna, he entered parliament in 1877 and was a leading orator for half a century. As education minister in 1906–1910 he drafted the Apponyi laws of 1907, which imposed Hungarian-language teaching on non-Hungarian schools. He led the Hungarian delegation at the Paris peace talks in January 1920 and spoke on 16 January, without changing the terms, and in March lost the regency vote to Horthy. Thereafter, as a legitimist opposition deputy and Hungary’s representative at the League of Nations, he denounced the injustice of the Trianon borders. He died in Geneva in 1933, where he had come for the Disarmament Conference.
Conservative viceroy of India and foreign secretary who gave his name to the Curzon Line and led the Allies at Lausanne
Born into an aristocratic Derbyshire family and educated at Eton and Oxford, he entered Parliament in 1885 and wrote travel books warning of a Russian threat to India. As Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905 he pursued administrative reform, but his 1905 partition of Bengal was criticised as an attempt to divide Bengali nationalism, and a major famine coincided with his tenure. In the First World War he served in Lloyd George’s war cabinet; appointed Foreign Secretary in October 1919, he gave his name to the proposed Soviet-Polish boundary, the Curzon Line. He designed the Treaty of Sèvres and, as chief Allied negotiator at Lausanne in 1922, settled the borders of Turkey. Passed over for prime minister in 1923, he died in 1925.
Defender of the Dual Monarchy who was Hungary’s wartime prime minister and was killed by soldiers on the day of the Aster Revolution
The son of Kálmán Tisza, prime minister from 1875 to 1890, he grew up in a Calvinist family of untitled lower nobility and studied in Budapest, Heidelberg and Berlin. He entered parliament for the Liberal Party in 1886, was prime minister of Hungary twice, in 1903–1905 and 1913–1917, and Speaker of the House in 1912–1913. The most zealous adherent of the Dual Monarchy with Austria, he opposed universal suffrage and the break-up of the great estates. In July 1914 he alone at first opposed war with Serbia, but in the end supported it. Asked to resign by the reforming King Charles, he stepped down in May 1917. On 31 October 1918, during the Aster Revolution, he was killed by soldiers who broke into his home in Budapest.
Head of the Finnish Senate who declared independence and sought German intervention in the civil war
On hearing of the February Revolution in his Siberian exile at Tomsk, he walked to the police station and announced, 'The person who sent me here has been arrested. Now I'm going home.'
Head of the Senate that declared Finland's independence in December 1917, he led the White government in the civil war of 1918 and sought German intervention. He was president from 1931 to 1937.
Career timeline
1894Began Diet work as representative of the Estate of Nobles
1907–1912Speaker of the Finnish Parliament
1914–1917Exiled to Tomsk for resisting Russification
1917–1918Chairman of the Senate (first head of government)
The appeasement architect whose bid to avoid war helped open the way to it
Returning from Munich in 1938, he declared the agreement to mean “peace for our time.”
Neville Chamberlain was a British Conservative politician whose career combined domestic administrative reform with finance before he became prime minister. Seeking to avoid another European war and gain time for rearmament, he pursued appeasement, but the strategy failed to restrain Nazi Germany's expansion. His government's acceptance of the Munich settlement in 1938, and its limited response to Soviet proposals for collective security, formed part of the international conditions surrounding the 1939 crisis and the Nazi-Soviet Pact. After declaring war on Germany following the invasion of Poland, he resigned in 1940 amid criticism of the Norway campaign.
Career timeline
1911–1915Birmingham city councillor; chair of the Town Planning Committee
1915Lord Mayor of Birmingham
1916–1917Director of National Service
1923–1924Minister of Health; Chancellor of the Exchequer
1924–1929Minister of Health
1931–1937Chancellor of the Exchequer
1937–1940Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
1938–1939Led the Munich settlement and appeasement policy toward Germany
Conservative aristocrat who set up the counter-revolutionary government in Szeged in 1919 and was prime minister of Hungary in 1931–1932
Born into an old aristocratic family in Nyírbakta, he was a first cousin of Mihály Károlyi. He entered the House of Magnates and was ispán of Arad County from 1906 to 1910. In May 1919 he formed a counter-revolutionary government against the Soviet Republic in Arad but was interned by the Romanians; after his release he reorganised it on 30 May in French-occupied Szeged, asking Miklós Horthy to set up the National Army as war minister, and the two became lifelong friends. After serving as foreign minister in Bethlen’s government in 1930–1931 he became prime minister in August 1931, and after the Biatorbágy viaduct bombing he imposed martial law and imprisoned Communists. He resigned in September 1932, and in 1939 he gave up all his posts in protest against the second Jewish law. He died in Budapest in 1947.
Career timeline
1906–1910Ispán of Arad County
1919Prime minister of the counter-revolutionary government in Arad and Szeged
1930–1931Foreign minister in the Bethlen government
Transylvanian aristocrat who, as prime minister in 1921–1931, consolidated the Horthy regime with a restricted franchise and a League loan
Scion of an old Transylvanian noble family, he entered parliament as a liberal in 1901. He joined the counter-revolution in Szeged in 1919 and became prime minister in April 1921, after King Charles’s first return attempt. He founded the Unity Party, secured its victories by restoring the open ballot in the countryside with the Franchise Act of 1922, concluded a pact with the Social Democrats, and stabilised the economy through League of Nations membership and a loan. He resigned in the Depression in 1931 and in 1941 opposed war with the Soviet Union. Arrested by the Soviets in 1945, he died in a Moscow prison in 1946.
Career timeline
1901Enters parliament as a liberal
1919Joins the Szeged counter-revolution
1921–1931Prime minister
1921Bethlen–Peyer Pact
1922Founds the Unity Party; Franchise Act
1924League of Nations loan
1945–1946Arrested by the Soviets; dies in a Moscow prison
Master of famine relief and the 31st president, broken by the Great Depression
'Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!', Hoover's reply when asked whether feeding Russia would not help Bolshevism.
A mining engineer who made a vast fortune, Hoover built his public fame on famine relief across two world wars before becoming the 31st president of the United States in 1929. During the First World War he headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium and the U.S. Food Administration ('food czar') in feeding millions, and after the war he refashioned the American Relief Administration (ARA) into a private body directing relief across Eastern Europe and Russia. When famine struck the Volga in 1921 he answered Gorky's appeal at once and personally drove the Riga agreement, securing the ARA's autonomy in distribution and Soviet gold payments and feeding more than ten million people a day at the operation's peak. He struggled as president amid the Great Depression but remained active in retirement, chairing reform commissions for the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.
Career timeline
1874Born into a Quaker family in West Branch, Iowa
1895Graduated from Stanford; made a fortune as a mining engineer in China, Australia and beyond
1914–1919Chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, feeding occupied Belgium
1917–1919Director of the U.S. Food Administration, celebrated as the 'food czar'
1919–1923Director of the American Relief Administration, leading relief in Eastern Europe and Russia
1921.08.20Conclusion of the Riga agreement, setting the terms of Volga famine relief
1921–1928Secretary of Commerce
1929–193331st president; lost reelection amid the Great Depression
Geographer of the “Red map” who was twice prime minister and killed himself in 1941 as German troops crossed Hungary
Born in Budapest to an aristocratic family from Transylvania, he was a geographer, university professor, member of the Academy of Sciences and chief scout of the Hungarian Scout Association. In 1918–19 he compiled the “Red map” of ethnic distribution based on the 1910 census. As foreign minister he attended the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, became prime minister in July and led the government of the numerus clausus period until April 1921. Prime minister again from 1939, he wrote the preamble to the Second Anti-Jewish Law and prepared the Third. He killed himself on 3 April 1941 when German troops were about to cross Hungary to invade Yugoslavia.
Conservative ally of Bethlen who as interior minister twice used the police to hold down radical movements of left and right
A lawyer born into a Catholic professional family of Pécs, he was prefect of Baranya County from 1921 and of Somogy County from 1925. A close friend and ally of István Bethlen, he was interior minister in 1931–1935 and 1938–1944, directing the police against radical movements of both left and right, and in 1939 he banned the Hungarist movement. In 1941 he was the only minister to vote against declaring war on the Soviet Union, and he served briefly as acting prime minister after Teleki’s suicide and after Bárdossy’s resignation. Arrested by the Gestapo when Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, he was taken to Mauthausen, and he died of lung cancer in Vienna in 1948.
Career timeline
1907Opens a law office in Pécs
1921–1931Prefect of Baranya and Somogy counties
1931–1935Interior minister
1938–1944Interior minister
1941Acting prime minister
1942Acting prime minister
1944–1945Arrested by the Gestapo; concentration camps
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
General who as prime minister in August–October 1944 halted the Jewish deportations and prepared an armistice until the Arrow Cross coup
Born in Budapest, he graduated from the Ludovika Academy in 1910 and in 1919 served at the Hungarian Red Army’s headquarters before joining Horthy’s National Army. Military attaché in Prague from 1928 to 1934, he commanded the Second Army from 1943 and the First Army from April 1944. Recommended by István Bethlen, he succeeded Sztójay as prime minister on 29 August 1944 with a secret mandate to prepare an armistice; his government stopped the deportation of Jews and replaced the state secretaries responsible. When Operation Panzerfaust and the Arrow Cross coup thwarted the armistice on 15 October, he negotiated through the night with Veesenmayer, then urged Horthy to surrender; forced to resign, he was imprisoned by the Germans. Never prosecuted, he lost his pension and lands, and in 1965 joined his daughter in Adelaide, where he died in 1967.
Austrian chancellor who shut down parliament, built the Fatherland Front dictatorship and was assassinated in a Nazi coup in 1934
Born to a poor peasant family in Lower Austria, he studied law at the University of Vienna and served for 37 months on the Italian front in the First World War. Working for the Lower Austrian Peasants’ Union he became known as an agrarian expert, and he was appointed minister of agriculture and forestry in 1931 and federal chancellor in May 1932. In March 1933 he shut out parliament and ruled by emergency decree, banned the Communists, the Nazis and then the Social Democrats, and built a one-party dictatorship under the Fatherland Front modelled largely on Italian Fascism. He crushed the socialist movement in the civil war of February 1934 and in March signed the Rome Protocols with Mussolini and Gömbös. On 25 July 1934 he was shot dead in the Chancellery during an attempted Nazi coup.
Archbishop of Esztergom and cardinal sentenced to life in a 1949 show trial, who sheltered in the US embassy in Budapest from 1956
Born at Csehimindszent in Vas County into a family with a German surname, he was ordained in 1915 and in 1919 was arrested by the Károlyi and then the Kun government. He later took the name Mindszenty from his home village. Consecrated Bishop of Veszprém in March 1944, he was arrested by the Arrow Cross government in November and released in April 1945. Appointed Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate in 1945 and made a cardinal in 1946, he resisted the Communists, notably over church schools. Arrested in December 1948 and beaten until he confessed, he was sentenced to life imprisonment at a show trial in February 1949. Freed during the 1956 revolution, he took refuge in the US embassy when the Soviets invaded and stayed there fifteen years. Allowed to leave in 1971, he settled in Vienna; in February 1974 Paul VI declared the see of Esztergom vacant, and he died in Vienna in 1975.
Career timeline
1915Ordained priest
1919Arrested by the Károlyi and Béla Kun governments
1944Bishop of Veszprém; arrested by the Arrow Cross government in November
1945–1974Archbishop of Esztergom, Primate of Hungary
1946Made a cardinal
1948–1949Arrested; sentenced to life at a show trial
1956–1971Freed in the revolution; refuge in the US embassy in Budapest
A Greece expert at the boundary of resistance and empire
After the 1942 Gorgopotamos operation, he stayed in Greece rather than evacuating, building the mission that linked the resistance to Cairo.
Christopher Montague Woodhouse was a British army officer, SOE and MI6 operative, and historian of Greek politics. In occupied Greece he helped establish and later led the British Military Mission, maintaining contact with ELAS and EDES while linking the resistance to Allied strategy. His work also reveals the tension between military cooperation with a broad resistance and Britain's effort to restore the monarchy and preserve its influence after liberation. He later served as an MP and wrote extensively on modern Greece.
Career timeline
1939Enlisted in the Royal Artillery
1941Served on an SOE mission to organize resistance in Crete
1942Second-in-command of the Harling Force in Operation Harling
1942–1943Maintained liaison with ELAS and EDES through the British Military Mission
1943–1945Commanded the Allied Military Mission in Greece
1945–1946Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Athens
1959–1974MP for Oxford and ministerial office in Conservative governments
