Hungarian prime minister (1879–1941)
Count Pál János Ede Teleki de Szék (1 November 1879 – 3 April 1941) was a Hungarian politician who served as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1920 to 1921 and from 1939 to 1941. He was also an expert in geography, a university professor, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and chief scout of the Hungarian Scout Association. He descended from an aristocratic family from Transylvania.
Teleki tried to keep Hungary neutral during the early stages of the Second World War despite cooperating with Nazi Germany to regain Hungarian territory lost in the Treaty of Trianon. When Teleki learned that German troops had entered Hungary en route to invade Yugoslavia, effectively killing hopes of Hungarian neutrality, he committed suicide.
He is a controversial figure in Hungarian history because as prime minister he tried to preserve Hungarian autonomy under difficult political circumstances, but also proposed and enacted far-reaching anti-Jewish laws.
Early life.
Teleki was born to Géza Teleki (1844–1913), a Hungarian politician and Interior Minister, and his wife Irén Muráty (Muratisz) (1852–1941), the only child of a very wealthy Greek merchant and banking family, in Budapest, Hungary. Irén Muráty was fluent in Greek. Her family, the Muráty (Greek: Μουράτη), originally came from Kozani, in northern Greece. Teleki attended Budapest Lutheran elementary school from 1885 to 1889, and Pest Calasanz High School ("gymnazium") from 1889 to 1897. In 1897 he started upper-division work at Budapest University studying law and political science. Teleki then studied at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Economy in Magyaróvár ("Magyaróvári Magyar Királyi Gazdasági Akadémia"), and after struggling to complete his studies, graduated with a PhD in 1903. He went on to become a university professor and expert on geography and socio-economic affairs in pre-World War I Hungary and a well-respected educator. For instance, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was one of his students. He fought in the First World War as a volunteer.
In 1918–19, he compiled and published a map depicting the ethnographic make up of the Hungarian nation. Based on the density of population according to the 1910 census, the so-called "Red map" was created for the peace talk in Treaty of Trianon. His maps were an excellent composition of social and geographic data, even by today's well-developed Geographic Information System's point of view. From 1911 to 1913 he was Director of Scientific Publishing for the Institute of Geography, and from 1910 to 1923 he was Secretary General of the Geographical Society. He was a delegate to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Between 1937 and 1939, he was the Hungarian representative in the International committee on intellectual cooperation of the League of Nations.
Scouting.
In the summer of 1927, Teleki's son Géza, a member of the Hungarian Sea Scouts, was attending a Sea Scout rally held at Helsingør, Denmark. On a sailing cruise, he ignored a reprimand from his Scoutmaster, Fritz M. de Molnár, for failure to carry out a small but necessary exercise of seamanship. Molnár tried to drive home his point by threatening to tell the boy's father on their return to Budapest. Géza replied "Oh, Dad's not interested in Scouting." This roused Molnár's mettle, and he determined to take up the subject of Scouting with Count Teleki.
Molnár's talk about Scouting intrigued Teleki, and he was instrumental in supporting Scouting within Hungary. He became Hungary's Chief Scout, a member of the International Scout Committee from 1929 until 1939, Camp Chief of the 4th World Scout Jamboree held at The Royal Forest at Gödöllő, Hungary, Chief Scout of the Hungarian Scout Association, and a close friend and contemporary of Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell. His influence and inspiration were a major factor in the success of Scouting in Hungary, and contributed to its success in other countries as well.
Political life.
1905-1920.
He first ran in the 1905 elections under the banner of the National Constitutional Party, formed from the "dissidents" of the Liberal Party led by junior Gyula Andrássy, in the electoral district of Nagysomkút in Szatmár County. He was elected as a member of parliament. He secured his mandate again in the 1906 elections. However, by the 1910 elections, when the collapse of the coalition government became evident, he chose not to pursue another mandate and temporarily withdrew from politics. At that time, he was not yet a significant political figure. He served as a volunteer in World War I, fighting first on the Serbian front and then on the Italian front, where he held the rank of captain until 1917. He was subsequently appointed head of the National War Relief Office.
After the victory of the Aster Revolution, he retreated from public life and stayed in Switzerland during the period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Meanwhile, at the request of the Anti-Bolshevik Committee, he served as foreign minister in the counter-revolutionary governments in Szeged (all three of them).
In the first elections following the victory of the counter-revolution in 1920, he won a parliamentary mandate in the city center district of Szeged representing the Christian National Union Party. In the government formed on March 15 by Simonyi-Semadam, he was appointed foreign minister, a position he accepted on April 19. He attended the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in this capacity, although the actual signing was carried out by two other politically insignificant members of the Hungarian delegation. The government resigned a month later, and Horthy requested Teleki to form a new cabinet, which he accepted.
First premiership.
On July 25, 1920, Miklós Horthy was appointed Teleki as Prime Minister. Additionally, he served as the minister without portfolio for national minorities and led the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Following King Charles IV's attempt to return, he resigned from the premiership on April 14, 1921.
One of the most controversial issues during Teleki's first administration was the numerus clausus law, specifically the 1920 Act XXV ('regulating enrollment in universities, the technical university, the Budapest University of Economics, and law academies'), which means 'closed number' (i.e., a defined, fixed number). It was introduced to Parliament by the Minister of Religion and Public Education and was adopted in September 1920. The law aimed primarily to adjust the number of students in Hungarian higher education to the perceived or actual needs of the country, intending to limit the number of those entering higher education. The proportion of students was meant to reflect the ratio of the 'ethnic groups' living in Hungary. The main objective of the law was to ensure that 'Hungarians' (excluding Jewish Hungarians) participated in universities in proportion to their numbers within the population. The law provoked deep outrage among Jewish communities in Hungary as it questioned their Hungarian identity. Many regarded the law as the first anti-Jewish law, as it primarily restricted the Jewish community, treating them as a separate nationality rather than by their religious denomination, which deviated from previous legal practices, effectively categorizing them as non-Hungarians.
Party Leader.
In 1938, Teleki regained a parliamentary mandate in a by-election in the Tokaj district, resigning from his membership in the upper house to rejoin the House of Representatives. On May 14, 1938, he became the Minister of Religion and Public Education in the newly formed Imrédy government, a position he held until Imrédy's downfall. He was one of the leading members of the Hungarian delegation during the negotiations of the First Vienna Award. In contrast to the Imrédy government, which turned toward Germany and Italy, the Axis Powers, he was a staunch Anglophile.
On February 2, 1939, as a solution to the parliamentary conflict (after 62 government party representatives had previously split and turned against Imrédy), under Teleki's leadership, the government party and the former 'dissident' representatives reunited, and the government party adopted the name Hungarian Life Party (previously known as the National Unity Party).
Preserved Hungarian autonomy.
Some view Teleki as a moral hero who tried to avoid Hungary's involvement in World War II. He sent Tibor Eckhardt, a high ranking Smallholders Party politician, to the United States with $5 million for the Hungarian Minister in the United States, János Pelényi, to prepare the Hungarian government in exile, for when he and Regent Horthy would have to leave the country. According to supporters of this view, his object was to save what could be saved, under political and military pressure from Nazi Germany, and like the Polish government in exile, to try to survive in some fashion during the war years to come.
Teleki holds Hungary to "Non-belligerent" status.
Rejoining the government in 1938 as Minister of Education, Teleki supported Germany's take over of Czechoslovakia with the hopes that the dismemberment of Hungary completed in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon would be undone. On 16 February 1939, Hungarian Prime Minister Béla Imrédy, who had been known as a pro-fascist, anti-Semitic leader, was forced from office after it was revealed that he was of Jewish descent. Teleki became Prime minister for the second time on 15 February 1939. While he strove to close down several fascist political parties, he did nothing to end the existing anti-Semitic laws.
On 24 August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which stipulated the Soviet Union's long-standing "interest" in Bessarabia, Romania. One week later, on 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and demanded the use of the Hungarian railway system through Kassa (then in Hungary) so that German troops could attack Poland from the south. Hungary traditionally had strong ties with Poland, and Teleki refused Germany's demand. Horthy told the German ambassador that "he would sooner blow up the rail lines than to participate in an attack on Poland" (which would completely paralyse the only railway connection from Hungary to Poland, if the Germans decided to march through Hungary without permission). Hungary declared that it was a "non-belligerent" nation and refused to allow German forces to travel through or over Hungary to attack Poland. As a result of Teleki's refusal to co-operate with Germany, during the autumn of 1939 and the summer of 1940 more than 100,000 Polish soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them Jewish, escaped from Poland and crossed the border into Hungary. The Hungarian government then permitted the Polish Red Cross and the Polish Catholic Church to operate in the open. The Polish soldiers were formally interned, but most of them managed to flee to France by spring of 1940, thanks to the indulgent or friendly attitude of officials.
However, with Germany's seizure of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, the buffer nations between Hungary and the belligerent nations of Germany and Soviet Union had evaporated. Germany made economic demands on Hungary to support the war, and offered to repay with arms deliveries, but because of developments in the Balkans, they were routed to the Romanian Army instead.
In his diaries, Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, wrote that during a visit to Rome by Teleki in March 1940, Teleki "has avoided taking any open position one way or the other but has not hidden his sympathy for the Western Powers and fears an integral German victory like the plague". Ciano reported that Teleki later said that he hoped "for the defeat of Germany, not a complete defeat—that might provoke violent shocks—but a kind of defeat that would blunt her teeth and claws for a long time".
Germany demands Hungary's assistance.
In 1940, Germany used the Soviet Union's imminent movement to take over Bessarabia as an excuse to prepare to occupy the vital Romanian oil fields. Germany's General Staff approached Hungary's General Staff and sought passage of its troops through Hungary and for Hungary's participation in the takeover. Germany held out Transylvania as Hungary's reward. The Hungarian government resisted, desired to remain neutral and held out some hope for assistance from the Italians. Hungary sent a special envoy to Rome: "For the Hungarians there arises the problem either of letting the Germans pass, or opposing them with force. In either case the Hungarian liberty would come to an end". Mussolini replied, "How could this ever be since I am Hitler's ally and intend to remain so?" However, Teleki allowed German troops to cross Hungarian territory into southern Romania, with the reward in August 1940 of the return to Hungary of a large part of Teleki's ancestral Transylvanian homeland in the Second Vienna Award. In November, Teleki's government signed the Tripartite Pact, a move that would come back to haunt him only a few months later.
In March 1941,