Pál Prónay

Pál Prónay de Tótpróna et Blatnicza (November 2, 1874 – 1947 or 1948) was a Hungarian reactionary and paramilitary commander in the years following the First World War. He is considered to have been the most brutal of the Hungarian National Army officers who led the White Terror that followed Hungary's brief 1919 Communist coup d'état.

Background The Hungarian people considered themselves humiliated and dismembered by the victors of the First World War. The Entente Powers stripped away two-thirds of the nation's territory and awarded them to Hungary's neighbors. With the lands went one-third of the country's Hungarian-speaking nationals.

Humiliation was inflamed by political instability. The first post-war attempt at a democratic government, under prime minister Mihály Károlyi, floundered and was overthrown in March 1919 by a Communist coup. Its leader, Béla Kun, had Jewish roots and Soviet training. Popular at first, Kun's so-called Hungarian Soviet Republic quickly lost the approval of the people, principally because of its failed economic policies, its inept military efforts to reclaim lost Hungarian lands from Czechoslovakia and Romania, and the Red Terror, in which Bolshevik-style gangs of young leather-clad thugs beat and murdered hundreds of the regime's “bourgeois” or counter-revolutionary opponents.

The National Army Prónay was born in 1874 to an old and distinguished aristocratic family in the town of Romhány, Nógrád County, in northern Hungary. He attended the Lahne Military Institute, but advanced slowly in his officer's career, in part because he was abusive and violent toward his own men.

An alternative government struggled to form in the south of Hungary and secure the approval of the Entente powers; military affairs were placed in the hands of the former commander of the Austro-Hungarian fleet, Admiral Miklos Horthy, who forged a counter-revolutionary force and called it the National Army.

After Kun's coup d'état, Prónay considered emigrating, but instead he traveled to Szeged in the south, where he joined Horthy, taking command of the admiral's bodyguards. He was one of the first officers to join Horthy. He also began a close association with Gyula Gömbös, the right-wing politician and future prime minister.

In the summer of 1919, Prónay formed the first partisan militia of what would later be called the “White Guard.” As the National Army moved through the countryside and gathered momentum, Prónay and other officers began a two-year campaign of anti-Communist reprisals which are now known as the White Terror. Their goals were to exact revenge for the Communists’ transgressions – and to frighten a restless and volatile population into submitting to the counter-revolutionary government's control.

The White Terror Prónay's name is essentially synonymous with the cruelty of the worst White Terror reprisals. He selected his targets from among Communists, Social Democrats (Hungary's second Marxist political party), peasants, and Jews, Unlike some agents of terror, Prónay never saw any need to disguise or mitigate his acts of torture and humiliation, and in his later writings, he described them with undimmed relish. His unit kidnapped and blackmailed Jewish merchants and hacked off the breasts of peasant and Jewish women. They slashed off the ears of their victims to keep as trophies, and fed the boiler of the battalion's armored train with the bodies of their prisoners, some of them alive.

End of Prónay's career After the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary, the terror continued. But tolerance for the reactionary violence was waning in the corridors of power. The White Guard units, particularly Prónay's, were increasingly difficult to control, behaving less like army units and more like self-serving renegade gangs. Their savagery was outraging Hungary's upper class, and drawing negative international press; it may also have hardened the feelings of the Entente powers toward Hungary at a crucial moment, just before the ratification of the Trianon Treaty. Original diary in the archive of the National Security Service in Budapest, very difficult access for scholars. Text selected by Prónay for the public in the 1930s and 1940s.

1. volume: lost

Accessible: written with the typewriter and handwritten additions und photo-illustrations.

2. volume: End of Oktober 1918 bis August 31, 1922

3. volume: Subsequently, until the end of 1922

4. volume: Fogarassy supposes existence, but never found.

Accessible for the public:

Selection of his memoirs Pál Prónay, A hatában a Halál kaszál (übersetzt mit "Death mows at the border"), with preface and notes of Agnes Szabó and Ervin Pamlényi, Budapest 1963, especially about the White Terror

Short English selections: Béla Bodó, Prónay, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, Nr. 2101, Pittsburgh 2011, S. 1 ff im gesamten Text verteilt

German summary of his texts about the Lajtabánság: Lászlo Fogarassy, Paul Prónays Erinnerungen an das 'Lajta-Banat', in: Burgenländische Heimatblätter, 52. Jahrgang, Heft 1, Eisenstadt 1990

About Pál Prónay

Béla Bodó, Prónay, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, Nr. 2101, Pittsburgh 2011

Lászlo Fogarassy, Paul Prónays Erinnerungen an das 'Lajta-Banat', in: Burgenländische Heimatblätter, 52. Jahrgang, Heft 1, Eisenstadt 1990