Arresting War Criminals: Some New Details
Salzburg, Kitzbühel, Brixen: May 1945
An exciting find today! I located Opapa’s diary from his trip to Austria in May 1945, when he traveled around the countryside arresting war criminals. I’ve written about these arrests before — especially his arrest of former Hungarian Prime Minister Béla Imrédy — but I wasn’t 100% sure about the dates or locations. Now I have them!
Perhaps even more significantly, I now know who Opapa arrested (in addition to Imredy). And wow. What a list of evil people — honestly, some of them make Béla Imrédy look downright moderate.
It will take me a few posts to get through all of the details and to give the full context, but for now, I’ll show you the full document:
There’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, I can now map out Opapa’s movements, and significantly, I now know where a lot of these Hungarian war criminals were hiding: Brixen, Kitzbühel, Elixhausen, Kammer, Vöcklaberg, Bad Ischl, St. Gilgen, and Attersee.
Béla Imrédy was in the Kitzbühel/Brixen region (one of my favorite places!). Here is how Opapa described the arrest in this document:
Another two-day trip to Kitzbuhel and Brixson netted Imredy Bela. We picked him up on his way back from registration by the 42nd Div., where he gave his name, but no other data. He looked more broken, sour and hunchback th[a]n ever. Wore breeches, with his thin legs showing. Wife and daughter stayd in the farm where he lives, some 8 km. off the main road. Also there was Kolozsvary-Borcsa Mihaly Chief of Press Chamber. Fiala also lives there but was out. Will go back for him.
There’s some fascinating information in this brief paragraph:
Description of Béla Imrédy: he was “more broken, sour and hunchback th[a]n ever. Wore breeches, with his thin legs showing.”
Imrédy was living in a remote farmhouse with his wife and daughter. The farmouse was “some 8 km. off the main road.”
Perhaps most significantly, Imredy was living with other Hungarian war criminals: Kolozsvary-Borcsa Mihaly and Fiala Ferenc, both of whom were tried and convicted of war crimes the following year. Kolozsvary-Borca was executed, while Ferenc spent twelve years in prison.
I’m going to write more tomorrow about this arrest (and others). It was surprising to me that Imrédy was living with Kolozsvary-Borcsa and Fiala, both of whom were involved with the Arrow Cross party in Hungary. The Arrow Cross party was the far-right, extremist, genocidally anti-Semitic group that came into power after the German invasion of 1944. Imredy, as I wrote early, was Prime Minister in 1938-9 and he was forced to step down after his own Jewish heritage was revealed. So I supposed I thought the Arrow Cross men wouldn’t want anything to do with him. But clearly I need to rethink that assumption.