Who Had Been Deprived Of An Honourable Death

On 19 August, the Ministry of Defence, the Hungarian Defence Forces, the MoD Institute of Military History, and the Budapest Organization of the Imre Nagy Society commemorated those who were executed in the "generals’ case". Before László Sólyom’s commemorative plaque inaugurated in 2008 in the MoD Institute and Museum of Military History, Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Imre Csáky, and Ferenc Donáth, the chairman of the Budapest Organization of the Imre Nagy Society paid a tribute to the martyr general, and later in the Farkasréti cemetery Minister of Defence Dr. Imre Szekeres also participated and delivered a speech at the wreath laying ceremony at the graves of László Sólyom and the other martyrs.

At the wreath laying ceremony at the graves of the martyrs – where many relatives were also present – Defence Minister Dr. Imre Szekeres said: seven officers were sent to the gallows – refusing them even the possibility of execution by firearms, the soldierly way. The minister said: honour was taken from those who had lived their whole life in that spirit. “The officers who were prosecuted and who were taken from us were the ones who voluntarily became the members of the antifascist Hungarian military resistance in 1944 and 1945. These officers, having seen the horrors of the Second World War and having realized the fatal turn to fascism, became the enemies of fascism not on order or suggestion but out of their own ree will – and later they became the members of the communist party, that was indeed regarded as an implacable antifascist organization. Imre Szekeres said that the soldiers who agreed to participate in the establishment of the post-war defence forces were not reliable in the eye of the party by the turn of 1949/50. “In show trials, following brief hearings, against sentences written in advance, they could not even defend themselves – said the minister, who finally asked the attendees not just to remember. “Let us recall their past on the pages of the history coursebooks and follow their example. We should follow their example because their education, work, and calling served the future – including the present generation, us, and if we continue our future the same way they had served their nation and their country, we can pay the most and the grandest mortuary honours to them that they could ever wish."