Vilmos Böhm

Vilmos Böhm was one of those Hungarian Social Democrats whom the revolution of 1918 carried from trade union offices into ministerial ones. A mechanic by trade and an organiser of the metalworkers’ union by experience, he became Minister of War in January 1919 and, in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, commander-in-chief of its Red Army. It was under his command that Hungarian forces fell back before the Romanians to the Tisza in the spring of 1919 and then retook part of Slovakia. That summer Böhm, disillusioned with communist rule, held talks in Vienna with representatives of the Entente about removing the communists from power. After the fall of the republic he spent a quarter of a century in exile, first in Vienna, then in Czechoslovakia and Sweden. In Stockholm during the Second World War he worked with socialists from all over Europe who were planning the post-war order. After 1945 he briefly returned to state service, but the communist seizure of power in Hungary made him an exile for a second time.

A trade unionist from Budapest

He was born on 6 January 1880 in Budapest into a Jewish family, the son of Lipót Böhm and Rozália Rosenzweig. That is the date given by the Hungarian biographical dictionary Magyar életrajzi lexikon, although some sources give 20 January. He completed secondary school and trained as a precision mechanic, and from his youth he spoke fluent German. At the beginning of the twentieth century he worked as a technical clerk. In 1905 he married Mária Steiner.

He entered the labour movement as a young worker. He became secretary of the National Union of Iron and Metal Workers, one of the strongest trade unions in Hungary, and in 1911 he was elected to the Trade Union Council. At the congress of 1913 (according to some sources as early as 1912) he joined the leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary. Within the party he belonged to the centre, which stood between the reformist leadership and the left.

During the First World War he served in the Austro-Hungarian army and rose to officer rank. In 1918, during the general strike, he was arrested.

The Aster Revolution and the war ministry

Böhm took an active part in the Aster Revolution in the autumn of 1918. After Mihály Károlyi took power, he became State Secretary – in effect deputy minister – at the Ministry of War and chairman of the demobilisation commission. The republic’s first Minister of War, Béla Linder, wanted to disband the army returning from the fronts and declared that he “did not want to see soldiers any more”. At first Böhm shared the pacifist mood of the revolution. At the end of 1918, however, he met at the ministry Colonel Aurél Stromfeld, commandant of the Ludovika Military Academy, and allowed him to remain in service, even though the government had just ordered senior officers to be retired.

In January 1919 Böhm became Minister of War in the government of Dénes Berinkey. He brought Stromfeld in as State Secretary responsible for organising the new army. This was to be a volunteer army of 70,000 men, but in five weeks only about five thousand came forward. Meanwhile the country was losing more and more territory to its neighbours, and in Transylvania the Romanian army, which had been occupying the lands beyond the Carpathians since November 1918, kept advancing. Böhm, who only a few months earlier had been a pacifist, began to speak of defending the country. In a speech to Székely soldiers in Szatmár (today Satu Mare), published on 4 March 1919 in the Social Democratic Népszava, he warned the participants of the peace conference in Paris that the partition of Hungary would deprive people of their livelihood, and that for Hungarians it would then become simply a question of life and death.

On 20 March 1919, when the French Lieutenant Colonel Fernand Vix handed the government a note demanding the withdrawal of Hungarian troops far to the west, Böhm asked Stromfeld and Colonel Jenő Tombor for their assessment. Both officers judged that the note could not be accepted. Károlyi resigned, and the Social Democrats decided to come to terms with the communists. Böhm was one of the Social Democrats who negotiated the union of the two parties with the imprisoned communist leader Béla Kun. On 21 March the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed.

Commander-in-chief of the Red Army

In the Soviet government Böhm was at first one of the people’s commissars for socialisation and then People’s Commissar for War. He also commanded the forces in the Tiszántúl, the lands east of the Tisza, which were to defend the country against the Romanians. In mid-April 1919 the Romanians launched an offensive. The Hungarian front collapsed, and within two weeks the Romanians had reached the river. It was Böhm who then brought back into the army Stromfeld, who had resigned in protest after the proclamation of the Soviet Republic. From 21 April Stromfeld was his chief of staff, and in a single day he set up a command for the shattered army in Szolnok.

At the beginning of May Böhm took command of the entire Hungarian Red Army, and Stromfeld became chief of the general staff. The trade unions mobilised tens of thousands of workers in Budapest, and former officers who wanted to defend the borders volunteered for the army. The enemy chosen for the blow was the Czechoslovaks, who were weaker than the Romanians. In the Northern Campaign the Red Army recaptured Miskolc, entered Košice and advanced deep into Slovakia. Throughout, Böhm was a politician in uniform: in May he offered his resignation, which was not accepted, and his relations with the communists grew steadily worse.

In June the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau demanded the withdrawal of Hungarian troops from Slovakia, promising in return that the Romanians would leave the territory east of the Tisza. The Soviet government accepted these terms. According to Hungarian accounts, it was Böhm who on 23–24 June agreed to a ceasefire with Czechoslovakia and gave the order to stop fighting without consulting his chief of staff. Stromfeld, who believed that the fruits of victory were being given away without any guarantees, resigned on 3 July. The Romanians did not withdraw from the Tisza.

Vienna and the end of the Soviet Republic

On 15 July 1919 the Social Democratic Népszava announced that Böhm, exhausted by eight months of uninterrupted work, was relinquishing command to undergo treatment. Command passed to the communist Jenő Landler. A few days later Böhm left for Vienna as the Soviet Republic’s envoy. In reality, on the instructions of the Social Democratic Party leadership, he held talks there with representatives of the Entente missions about removing the communists from power and forming a Social Democratic government that the Allies could recognise. The talks did not stop the war. On 20 July the Hungarian Red Army, directed by its new chief of staff, Ferenc Julier, launched an offensive across the Tisza, which collapsed after a few days. The Romanians crossed the river and marched on the capital, deciding the Hungarian–Romanian War. On 1 August the Soviet government resigned, power passed to the Social Democratic government of Gyula Peidl, and on 3 and 4 August the Romanian army entered Budapest.

In his memoirs Böhm blamed Julier for the defeat and wrote of his “despicable treachery”. This version was later taken up by socialist and communist historiography. More recent Hungarian research does not confirm that Julier was a traitor, while stressing that, as an opponent of the communists, he was no supporter of the Soviet Republic.

Exile

After the fall of the republic Böhm did not return to Hungary. The White Terror was raging there, and the new regime of Miklós Horthy was persecuting the men of the revolution and identifying communism with the Jews. Böhm settled in Vienna, where he earned his living as a department manager in a department store. Together with Zsigmond Kunfi and Sándor Garbai he led a group of émigré Social Democrats centred on the monthly Világosság, published in Vienna from 1923 to 1933. In 1923 he published his memoirs in Munich, Két forradalom tüzében (“In the Fire of Two Revolutions”), one of the most important testimonies to the years 1918–1919. From 1931 he represented the Hungarian émigrés, with an advisory vote, in the leadership of the Labour and Socialist International.

In February 1934, after a short civil war, the authoritarian Austrian government crushed and outlawed the Social Democrats. Böhm moved to Czechoslovakia, and in 1938, when Adolf Hitler threatened that republic too, he left for Sweden.

Stockholm in wartime

In Stockholm Böhm belonged to the circle of the so-called Little International, a group of democratic socialists from more than a dozen countries that met from September 1942. Among its most active members were the young émigrés Willy Brandt, later Chancellor of West Germany, and Bruno Kreisky, later Chancellor of Austria. On 1 May 1943 the group announced its peace aims: the right of nations to self-determination, including for a democratic Germany, the democratisation of states, the unification of Europe, the end of colonialism and the creation of an organisation of united nations. Böhm took part in its meetings until 1945.

These years are also linked to the most contentious episode of his life. The Swedish historian Wilhelm Agrell claimed that Böhm had been an informant of Soviet intelligence, because a person of that name appears in Soviet cables decrypted under the Venona project. Böhm’s grandchildren sued Agrell for defamation. The court acquitted him, in accordance with Swedish press law, although apart from the mention in the cables he had presented no other evidence. The matter remains unresolved.

Return and second exile

Böhm returned to Hungary only on 30 December 1945. The country he found disappointed him. He had hoped for a return to the principles of the democratic revolution of 1918, and even that Mihály Károlyi would become president of the new republic. Instead, the coalition period was increasingly becoming a façade behind which everything was decided by the Soviet-chaired Allied Control Commission and the communists. From 1 May 1946 Böhm headed the Hungarian legation in Stockholm, and in 1948 he was also accredited to Norway and Denmark. When in June 1948 the Social Democrats were forced to merge with the communists into the Hungarian Working People’s Party under the leadership of Mátyás Rákosi, Böhm resigned his post and became an exile for the second time. On 3 June 1949 he was stripped of Hungarian citizenship. He died in Stockholm on 28 October 1949. In Hungary his death was passed over in silence.

Significance

Böhm’s life traces the path taken by Hungarian Social Democracy in 1918–1919: from the pacifism of the Aster Revolution, through the defence of the borders, to the alliance with the communists that was meant to save the country’s territorial integrity and ended in defeat. Under his command the Hungarian Red Army won its only successes in the wars of 1919, but it could not stop the Romanians. The fall of the Soviet Republic, which he had tried to hasten in Vienna, opened the way to power for Horthy, who for a quarter of a century pushed the left to the margins, accusing it of betraying the nation and the Jews of Bolshevism. Böhm, a Jew and a socialist, was one of the convenient symbols of “revolutionary rule” in that propaganda. From exile he watched Horthy’s Hungary draw step by step closer to Germany. In 1945 he hoped that the country would return to democracy, but within three years he witnessed Hungary becoming a communist state. He left memoirs that remain one of the basic sources for the history of both Hungarian revolutions.