The suicide of Pál Teleki

On the morning of 3 April 1941 the occupant of the Sándor Palace on Buda’s Castle Hill, the residence of the Hungarian prime minister, was found dead. Count Pál Teleki, head of the government since February 1939, had shot himself during the night in his apartment. On his desk he left a letter to the Regent, Miklós Horthy, in which he accused himself and his country of breaking faith. A few hours earlier he had learned that German troops had begun crossing Hungary on their way to attack Yugoslavia – a state with which, less than four months before, he had concluded a treaty of eternal friendship. His death became one of the most poignant gestures of protest in any of the countries allied to Hitler, but it stopped nothing.

Hungary between Berlin and Belgrade

From the outset Teleki’s foreign policy was an attempt to reconcile contradictions. Hungary wanted to recover the lands lost under the Treaty of Trianon, and it could do so only with the help of Hitler and Mussolini. That was how it obtained southern Slovakia, Carpathian Ruthenia and, in August 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, northern Transylvania. Each time it paid with growing dependence on the Reich. On 20 November 1940 it became the first country after the founding states to join the Tripartite Pact. At the same time Teleki, regarded as an Anglophile, wanted at all costs to keep the country out of the war and to keep open the way to an understanding with Britain and the United States, which, he believed, would win the war in the end.

Yugoslavia could have been one of the few counterweights to Germany. The dispute over Bačka and the other lands awarded to it in 1920 had not died down, but as early as 1926, in a speech on the battlefield of Mohács on the four-hundredth anniversary of the defeat, Horthy had held out his hand to his southern neighbour. On 12 December 1940 in Belgrade the Hungarian foreign minister, István Csáky, and his Yugoslav counterpart, Aleksandar Cincar-Marković, signed a treaty in which the two states pledged lasting peace and “eternal friendship” and undertook to consult each other on matters affecting them. The border question was left to future negotiations, and Hungary renounced any claim to Croatia. The instruments of ratification were exchanged in Budapest on 27 February 1941. Teleki saw the treaty as the seed of cooperation among the Danubian states, which together might resist the domination of the Reich.

Hitler’s demand

Everything changed overnight. On 25 March 1941 Yugoslavia joined the Tripartite Pact, and during the night of 26–27 March air force officers in Belgrade overthrew the government that had signed it. After the coup d’état Adolf Hitler resolved to destroy Yugoslavia as a state, and part of the attacking force was to set out from Hungarian territory. On 27 March the Hungarian minister in Berlin, General Döme Sztójay, brought Hitler’s message for the Regent to Budapest. Yugoslavia was to be destroyed, most of the German troops would have to pass through Hungary, and the Hungarian army, if it took part in the war, could recover all the lands lost to Yugoslavia. Hitler also hinted that Croatia might fall to Hungary.

Horthy was delighted and ready to accept the offer without reservation. Teleki and the new foreign minister, László Bárdossy, persuaded him, however, to promise in his reply of 28 March no more than military cooperation and to reject the proposal concerning Croatia. On the same day the Council of Ministers decided that the Hungarian army would enter Yugoslav territory only if Yugoslavia ceased to exist – for example after Croatia declared independence – or if the safety of the Hungarian minority were threatened. According to accounts cited by his biographers, Teleki complained that the Regent had assured him thirty-four times that he would never wage war in someone else’s interest, and had now changed his mind.

But the prime minister was no longer master in his own state. The Chief of the General Staff, General Henrik Werth, who had long pursued his own policy towards Germany, opened talks with the deputy chief of the German army general staff, General Friedrich Paulus, and, contrary to the government’s conditions, agreed that Hungarian troops would also operate beyond the lands that had once belonged to Hungary. He also settled with the Germans the details of their troops’ passage through the country. Teleki called this treason, but could not undo what had already been done. On 1 April the Supreme Defence Council, over the objections of Werth and the minister of defence, Károly Bartha, adopted the compromise put forward by Teleki and Bárdossy: the Hungarian army would not cross the line of the Danube and the Drava, would go into action only after Yugoslavia had disintegrated, and the decision to mobilise would be taken by the Regent alone, under whose command all units would remain. By then, though, nobody intended to bar the way to the German military trains that were to cross Hungary.

The last night

On 2 April a telegram reached Budapest from the minister in London, György Barcza, a friend of the prime minister. The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, had told him that if Hungary let German troops through to attack Yugoslavia, Britain would break off diplomatic relations, and that if Hungary itself attacked Yugoslavia, on whatever pretext, it must reckon with a declaration of war by Britain and its allies. Barcza warned that the whole English-speaking world would accuse Hungary of breaking faith and stabbing its new friends in the back. Bárdossy played the telegram down. For Teleki, who for two years had built his entire policy on the premise that Hungary must never find itself fighting Britain, it was a death sentence on his political course.

Personal troubles added to this. His biographers stress that Teleki had been utterly exhausted for weeks, suffered from insomnia and bouts of depression, and that his wife was mortally ill. On the evening of 2 April, after nine o’clock, he left the Foreign Ministry building and returned to his apartment in the Sándor Palace. Around midnight, it is believed, he received a telephone message that German troops had begun entering Hungary. During the night he wrote two letters to the Regent and shot himself with a pistol. His body was found in the morning.

The first letter, written in Hungarian, reads in translation roughly as follows: “Your Serene Highness! We have broken faith – out of cowardice – with the treaty of eternal peace based on the Mohács speech. The nation feels it, and we have thrown away its honour. We have sided with scoundrels – for not a word of the fabricated atrocities is true! Not against the Hungarians, not even against the Germans! We shall become robbers of corpses! The basest of nations. I did not hold you back. I am guilty.” The words about “fabricated atrocities” referred to the press campaign about alleged Yugoslav persecution of Hungarians and Germans, which was meant to justify the invasion. The second letter was short: in case the attempt failed and he survived, he was tendering his resignation.

From the start there were rumours that the prime minister had been murdered by the Germans, but historians, relying on the letters and the accounts of those around him, overwhelmingly accept that Teleki took his own life. He was buried in the cemetery at Máriabesnyő near Gödöllő, where in 1933 he had been commandant of the World Scout Jamboree.

The successor and the war

Horthy first offered the premiership to the interior minister, Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer, and when he declined, entrusted it on 3 April to Bárdossy, who also kept the foreign affairs portfolio. The new government was sworn in on 4 April, as a sign of mourning not in gala dress but in morning coats. On the evening of 3 April the Regent assured Hitler that Hungary would honour its treaty with Yugoslavia, adding, however, that it would cease to apply if Croatia broke away and Yugoslavia ceased to exist. He also ordered the mobilisation of two corps.

From then on the course of events was settled. On 6 April Germany attacked Yugoslavia and Greece, and over the following days part of its forces went into the attack from Hungarian territory. Britain, as Eden had warned, broke off diplomatic relations with Budapest in the first days of the war. On 10 April, after an independent Croatian state had been proclaimed in Zagreb, Horthy issued a proclamation declaring that Yugoslavia had ceased to exist and that the Hungarian army must protect its compatriots in the south. On 11 April the Hungarian 3rd Army entered Bačka, and over the following days Hungarian troops also occupied Baranya, Međimurje and Prekmurje. In the very first days of the occupation Hungarian soldiers killed, according to various estimates, from over a thousand to several thousand civilians, mainly Serbs and Jews.

After the war Winston Churchill wrote in his memoirs that Teleki’s suicide was a sacrifice intended to absolve himself and his people of guilt for taking part in the German attack on Yugoslavia. In Hungary a sentence attributed to the British Prime Minister is also often repeated, to the effect that at a future peace conference a chair would have to be left empty for Count Teleki. The words are widely quoted, but it is hard to identify a documentary source for them. Eden, for his part, said that attacking Yugoslavia a few months after concluding a pact of friendship with it would remain an everlasting disgrace for Hungary.

Significance

Teleki’s death closed the period in which Hungary had tried to profit from its alliance with Hitler without paying for it by taking part in the war. His successor believed that Germany would win the war or that it would end in a compromise, and pursued a policy ever more closely tied to the Reich. Taking part in the partition of Yugoslavia brought Hungary Bačka and the neighbouring lands, but also crimes: in January 1942, during a raid in southern Bačka, including Novi Sad, the Hungarian army and gendarmerie murdered more than three thousand Serbs and Jews. In June 1941, after Kassa (Košice) was bombed by unidentified aircraft, Bárdossy’s government declared a state of war with the USSR without the consent of parliament, and in December Britain declared war on Hungary. The road Teleki had warned against led through the destruction of the 2nd Army on the Don, the German occupation of March 1944 and the deportation of more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.

Teleki himself remains an ambiguous figure: he was a co-author of anti-Jewish laws and of a policy that bound Hungary to Hitler, yet also the politician who in 1939 refused to take part in the attack on Poland and in 1941 paid with his life for opposing the attack on Yugoslavia. His letter to the Regent remains one of the harshest indictments a Hungarian statesman ever made of his own policy.