People of the Revolution and the USSR

Hungary Fascists and Nazis 1886–1936 ○ Cancer

Right-radical officer who organised the Szeged National Army and as prime minister in 1932–1936 steered Hungary towards Italy and Germany

Born in Murga, Tolna County, the son of the village schoolmaster, he served as an Austro-Hungarian officer in the First World War. In Szeged in 1919 he founded the paramilitary MOVE and played a leading role in organising Horthy’s National Army, and in 1921 he led the armed opposition to King Charles’s return. He became defence minister in Bethlen’s government in 1929 and prime minister in 1932. He aligned with Mussolini, signing the Rome Protocols in 1934, and as the first foreign head of government to visit Hitler concluded a trade agreement with Germany. He died of illness in Munich in 1936.

Hungary Fascists and Nazis 1890–1946 ✕ Executed

Hungarian general who directed the Novi Sad massacre, fled to Germany after his conviction and joined the SS

Born Franz Zeidner into a Transylvanian Saxon family, he served as an artillery and staff officer in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, and between the wars changed his surname to the more Magyar-sounding Feketehalmy-Czeydner. In August 1941 he became commander of the Fifth Corps at Szeged. In January 1942 Chief of Staff Szombathelyi sent him against the partisans in Bačka; villagers there were massacred on his orders, and he organised the Novi Sad massacre. Sentenced to fifteen years by a court martial in January 1944, he fled to Vienna with other convicted officers and volunteered for the SS. As deputy defence minister under the Arrow Cross he signed the death warrant of his critic Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky. After the war he was handed via Hungary to Yugoslavia and executed in November 1946.

Hungary Fascists and Nazis 1891–1946 ✕ Executed

Prime minister who swung Hungary towards Germany and drafted the Second Jewish Law, then fell over his own Jewish ancestry

Born to a Catholic family in Budapest, he was an economist in the finance ministry who became Gömbös’s finance minister in 1932 and president of the National Bank in 1935. Prime minister from May 1938, he turned foreign policy towards Germany and Italy from that autumn, and under him the First Vienna Award returned southern Slovakia to Hungary. He pressed for a dictatorial reorganisation and the Second Jewish Law, but resigned in February 1939 when opponents exposed his Jewish ancestry. In 1940 he founded the pro-fascist Party of Hungarian Renewal, and after the German occupation of 1944 he served in Sztójay’s cabinet. Sentenced to death by a People’s Tribunal, he was shot in 1946.

Austria state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1892–1934 ✕ Assassinated in a Nazi coup

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.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1893–1946 ✕ Executed by hanging

Baltic German Nazi ideologue from Reval who served as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in 1941–1945

Born in 1893 in Reval (Tallinn), in the Governorate of Estonia of the Russian Empire, he studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. In 1918 he left for Germany with the retreating German army and in January 1919 joined the German Workers’ Party, eight months before Hitler; in 1923 he became editor of the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1930 he published his racial treatise The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and he fed Hitler’s belief in Jewish conspiracies by introducing him to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 17 July 1941, he had Hinrich Lohse installed as Reichskommissar for Ostland, though his own authority was severely limited. He saw the Baltic lands as German “Lebensraum”. Found guilty on all four counts at Nuremberg, he was hanged on 16 October 1946.

Hungary Fascists and Nazis 1895–1946 ✕ Executed by hanging

Interior Ministry state secretary who in 1944 ran the ghettoisation and deportation of Hungary’s Jews with László Baky

Born into a wealthy Abony family, he served as a hussar officer in the First World War and after the fall of the Soviet Republic joined counter-revolutionary groups such as MOVE, noted for his extreme cruelty. Chief magistrate of Gödöllő from 1923 and deputy lord-lieutenant of Pest county from 1938, he called the anti-Jewish laws too mild and imposed his own restrictions, such as banning Jews from beaches. After the German occupation in 1944 he became state secretary under Interior Minister Andor Jaross with far-reaching powers to ghettoise and deport the Jews, and with László Baky helped Eichmann deport over 400,000 Hungarian Jews between May and July. Removed in September, he returned under the Arrow Cross as commissioner for civil administration in the operational areas. Captured by US forces after fleeing in 1945, he was handed back, sentenced to death and hanged in 1946.

Hungary 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.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1896–1964 ○ Died in his home village

Nazi Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein who, as Reichskommissar for Ostland in 1941–1944, ordered the ghettoisation and expropriation of Jews

Born into a peasant family in Schleswig-Holstein, he was severely wounded in the First World War. He joined the Nazi Party in 1923, became Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein in 1925 and in 1933 also Oberpräsident of the province. Appointed Reichskommissar for Ostland on 25 July 1941, he shuttled between Riga and Kiel; his decree of 27 July ordered lists of Jews, the yellow badge, the confiscation of their property and their concentration in ghettos. Asked to explain his order forbidding the execution of Jews in Libau (Liepāja), he wrote on 15 November asking whether all Jews were to be liquidated regardless of economic interests, yet he stayed at his post for three more years. He fled Ostland without authorisation on 13 August 1944 and was removed. Sentenced in 1948 to ten years, he was released for ill health in 1951 and died in his home village in 1964.

Hungary Fascists and Nazis 1898–1946 ✕ Executed by hanging

Gendarmerie officer turned National Socialist who as state secretary for the interior in 1944 ran the deportation of Jews with László Endre

Born in Budapest, a military academy graduate and First World War officer, he made his name in Szeged in 1919 with violent counter-revolutionary work and rose to be one of the Gendarmerie’s leading figures. Retiring in 1938 as a major-general, he joined the Hungarian National Socialist Party, entered parliament in 1939 and edited the German-funded Magyarság. After the German occupation in 1944 he became political state secretary for the interior and, with László Endre, took charge of deporting the Jews; on 4 April he chaired a meeting with Eichmann’s officers that agreed to seize Jews’ possessions and move them into urban ghettos before deportation to Germany. Removed in the summer and arrested for plotting a coup against Horthy, he headed the National Security Office under the Arrow Cross. Arrested in Austria in 1945 and returned, he was hanged in 1946.

Fascists and Nazis 1901–1978 ○ Died in Graz, Austria

Estonian Vaps politician who headed the collaborationist Estonian Self-Administration under German occupation in 1941–1944

Born at Tuhala in Harju County, he studied in Berlin, Vienna, Innsbruck and Graz and took doctorates in geophysics (1927) and constitutional law (1930). After standing twice for parliament he joined the Vaps movement as its propaganda chief; sentenced in 1935 to twenty years’ hard labour, he was amnestied in 1938, went to Germany and took German citizenship. In May 1941 he founded the Estonian Liberation Committee in Helsinki, and returning with the German army that year he headed the Estonian Self-Administration from 1941 to 1944. In 1944 he fled to Austria, where the Western Allies cleared him of Nazi crimes and he later advised the Austrian government. In the 1990s Estonia’s International Commission named him among the Estonians chiefly responsible for crimes committed by Estonian police and SS units.