Aurél Stromfeld

Aurél Stromfeld was one of the ablest general staff officers the Austro-Hungarian army ever produced, and at the same time one of the most remarkable figures in twentieth-century Hungarian history. A lecturer in tactics in Vienna and the teacher of a future prime minister, Gyula Gömbös, he joined the Social Democratic Party after the collapse of the monarchy. In the spring of 1919, as chief of staff of the Red Army of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he halted the Romanians on the Tisza and led an offensive that drove the Czechoslovaks out of a large part of Slovakia. When the government of Béla Kun, under pressure from the Entente, withdrew the army from the conquered territory, Stromfeld resigned. The new regime of Miklós Horthy convicted him of high treason, and towards the end of his life he himself became a communist. Hungarians nevertheless remembered that it was his soldiers who in 1919 had recovered Kassa (Košice) for a few weeks. To the nationalists he was a gifted commander serving a bad cause; to the communists after 1945 he was the “red general”.

Youth and the academies

He was born on 19 September 1878 in Újpest, then a separate town near Budapest and today one of its districts. He was the third child of János Stromfeld, an engineer at the Schlick–Nicholson machine works, and Johanna Táborszky. The family was of German origin and Lutheran by confession. His father died when Aurél was six, and the boy grew up in modest circumstances. After four years of grammar school, when the only alternative was an apprenticeship, he entered the Royal Hungarian Honvéd Ludovika Academy in Budapest in October 1892 on a foundation scholarship. He chose it deliberately over the cadet schools of the Common Army, where the language of command was German. Stromfeld’s brother János (who later wrote under the name Somfai) became a socialist journalist.

In 1896 Stromfeld graduated from the Ludovika and began serving in the 18th Honvéd Infantry Regiment in Sopron, and later in Munkács (Mukachevo). In 1897 he became a second lieutenant. From 1900 to 1905 he studied at the Kriegsschule (War College) in Vienna, the training ground of general staff officers, graduating ninth in his year. In April 1905 he married Adrienne Urbányi, the daughter of a retired general. After a year of staff service in Vienna and a year with a regiment in Igló (today Spišská Nová Ves), he returned to the Ludovika as a lecturer in 1907. He taught modern tactics based on the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War and wrote a textbook on army organisation; in a separate study he argued that promotion to officer should depend on ability rather than school certificates, and that the officer corps should be opened to poorer young men as well.

In 1912 he was promoted to major, and in 1913 he became the first Honvéd officer to hold a chair at the War College in Vienna, where he taught tactics. There he became friends with another popular lecturer, Major Theodor Körner, later President of Austria. Among his students was Lieutenant Gyula Gömbös.

The First World War

In 1914 Stromfeld was responsible for the supply of XIII Corps in the campaign against Serbia. When the Serbian counter-offensive in December forced the Austrians to retreat across the Sava, he directed the evacuation of Belgrade, which they had taken earlier, and saved a great deal of equipment in the process, earning a reputation as a specialist in orderly retreats. He then fought on the Eastern Front as chief of staff of General Imre Hadfy’s corps and, as a lieutenant colonel, directed the crossing of the Dniester and the defence of the bridgehead on its far bank. During the Brusilov Offensive of 1916 he withdrew his units slowly, preserving their fighting value.

In January 1918 he moved with XXVI Corps to the Italian Front, where he served as the corps’ chief of staff. Because the Italian artillery could observe the Austrian positions, he had shelters tunnelled into the mountainsides and cableways built. In the autumn of 1918 the Austro-Hungarian army began to disintegrate: the Croatian regiments of the corps mutinied, and then the Hungarian ones. Stromfeld directed the corps’ retreat during the negotiations for the armistice, which came into force on 4 November. He remained on the demarcation line until mid-November and then set off for Hungary at the head of a disciplined regiment. At the border he was ordered to disband it. He reached Budapest in the second half of November.

Revolution and republic

After the Aster Revolution the Ministry of War appointed Stromfeld commandant of the Ludovika. In December 1918 he was elected to the leadership of the officers’ trade union founded at that time. When the government of Mihály Károlyi ordered the retirement of officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel, Stromfeld went to the ministry to protest. There he found only the Social Democratic deputy minister Vilmos Böhm, who allowed him to remain in service. It was the beginning of a collaboration that shaped the rest of his life. In January 1919 Stromfeld joined the Social Democratic Party of Hungary. When Böhm became Minister of War, he made him state secretary responsible for organising the new army. Stromfeld drew up a plan for a volunteer force of 70,000 men, but in five weeks of recruitment only 5,000 came forward.

On 20 March 1919 Böhm asked Stromfeld and Colonel Jenő Tombor for their opinion on the note from the French Lieutenant Colonel Fernand Vix, which demanded that Hungarian troops withdraw far to the west. Both concluded that the note could not be accepted. The next day the communists and Social Democrats took power. József Pogány, an opponent of Stromfeld, became People’s Commissar for War, and one of the new regime’s first decisions was to abolish military ranks. Shaken, Stromfeld asked to be retired on 27 March and went to stay with his brother in Győr.

Chief of staff of the Red Army

In mid-April the Romanians launched an offensive in Transylvania and the Hungarian front collapsed. Summoned to Budapest, Stromfeld at first refused, but on 21 April (according to some sources as early as 19 April) he accepted the post of chief of staff of the forces beyond the Tisza, which were commanded by Böhm. Within a single day he set up an army headquarters in Szolnok for a front 250 kilometres long. At the beginning of May the Romanians reached the Tisza, while from the north the Czechoslovaks entered Hungary and took Miskolc. Stromfeld, now chief of staff of the whole Red Army, decided to stand on the defensive against the Romanians along the Tisza and to strike at the weaker Czechoslovaks.

On 9 May Hungarian troops advanced from the area of Hatvan, and over the following days won an important victory at Miskolc that separated the Czechoslovak and Romanian forces. At the end of May the main northern offensive began. The Red Army took in turn Sátoraljaújhely, Érsekújvár (Nové Zámky), Kassa (Košice) and Eperjes (Prešov), and by mid-June had driven the Czechoslovaks back some 150 kilometres. On 16 June the Slovak Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Prešov. For many officers, who were fighting for the integrity of historic Hungary rather than for world revolution, this was a bad sign.

In June the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau demanded the withdrawal of Hungarian troops from Slovakia, promising that in return the Romanians would leave the territory east of the Tisza. The Soviet government agreed. Stromfeld believed that the fruits of victory were being given away without any guarantees, and that an army retreating after a victorious campaign would fall apart. According to Hungarian studies he was also outraged that Böhm had agreed to a ceasefire without consulting him. On 3 July 1919 he resigned. His place was taken by Ferenc Julier. The Romanians did not leave the Tisza line, and the July offensive across the river ended in a defeat that decided the outcome of the Hungarian–Romanian War and the fall of the Soviet Republic on 1 August.

Trial and last years

On 17 August 1919, two weeks after the fall of the republic, Stromfeld was arrested in Siófok. His trial before a military court began on 1 July 1920. The prosecution charged him with high treason and incitement, on the grounds that he had urged other officers to join the Social Democratic Party. He was not charged with commanding the Red Army as such. Stromfeld pleaded not guilty. He said that throughout the revolution he had been guided by national and patriotic considerations, and that the army which had beaten the Czechs had not fought for the dictatorship but as a Hungarian army against the country’s enemies. He recalled Napoleon’s words that, whatever the system of government, every patriot’s place is in the army when the enemy stands at the border. On 19 July 1920 the court sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment (according to some sources, two years and nine months) and to the loss of his rank, decorations and pension.

He was released in 1921. He worked as a storekeeper and then as a clerk in a private firm. He was active in the Social Democratic Party of Hungary, heading its stewards’ corps, which protected party meetings, and in the workers’ hiking society Friends of Nature. In 1923 he spent six months in pre-trial detention on suspicion of involvement in a communist conspiracy. From 1925 he belonged to the illegal Communist Party of Hungary, without breaking his ties with the Social Democrats. He died in Budapest on 10 October 1927, before reaching the age of fifty, and was buried in the Kerepesi Cemetery.

Memory

In 1930, at the request of the Minister of Defence Gyula Gömbös, his former student, the Regent granted Stromfeld’s widow an allowance equal to a colonel’s pension. It was a gesture towards an officer whom the regime itself had earlier convicted. After the Second World War communist Hungary made Stromfeld a hero. In 1945 he was posthumously promoted to colonel general; in 1952 the post office issued a stamp bearing his portrait; and his name was given to barracks in Miskolc and to schools and streets in many towns.

Significance

Stromfeld was an outstanding soldier whose talent coincided with a time when every military decision was also a political one. His offensive of 1919 was the only victory of Hungarian arms in the wars over the borders that followed the collapse of the monarchy, and proof that Hungary could still fight. At the same time it showed that without the consent of the great powers gains on the battlefield counted for nothing: Hungary had to give up Slovakia, and in 1920 the Treaty of Trianon took from Hungary about two-thirds of the territory of the old kingdom, mainly in favour of Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Kassa, which his soldiers had taken in June 1919, was regained by Hungary only in November 1938 through the First Vienna Award – that is, by the grace of Germany and Italy. It was along this road that Horthy’s Hungary entered into alliance with Adolf Hitler, and one of those who charted it was his former student Gömbös, prime minister from 1932 to 1936. Stromfeld remained in Hungarian memory a divided figure: an officer who in 1919 fought for the borders of the old kingdom in the ranks of a communist army, and who years later became a communist himself.