Kassai and Kemény
Propagandists for the Fascists
Today, we continue our investigation of the Hungarian war criminals that Opapa arrested in May of 1945.
This post focuses on Ferenc Kassai Schallmayer and Gábor Kemény. Both men were in the inner circle of the Arrow Cross party — the far right, rabidly anti-Semitic extremist group that took over the Hungarian government in fall/winter 1944. By May 1945, both men were hiding in Elixhausen, Austria, trying to escape both the Russian and American troops.
Below, you can see Kassai and Kemény in a photo of the Arrow Cross government. The leader of the Arrow Cross, Ferenc Szalasi, is sitting in the center of the photo, next to Kemény. Kassai-Schallmayer stands behind them.
Opapa visited the home of Kassai and Kemeny around May 16, 1945, and this is what he recorded:
~ May 16, 1945: Next day I went to Elixhausen, where Kassai and Sallmayer lived. Kassai and Kemeny had been picked up the day before by CIC. We took Sallmayer, Kassai’s brother and secretary since Szombathely days. He is electrical engineer by profession, and an amateur in politics.
Same day I talked to Kassai, former Minister of propaganda in the Szallasi government.
Kassai and Kemeny had been “picked up the day before” so Opapa took “Sallmayer, Kassai’s brother and secretary since Szombathely days.” But this was not all: on the “same day,” Opapa “talked to Kassai, former Minister of propaganda in the Szallasi [ie. Arrow Cross] government.”
To be a fly on the wall for that conversation… Opapa, a Jewish Hungarian refugee-turned-American-OSS-member, talking to Ferenc Kassai, the head of propaganda for the anti-Semitic, fascist Arrow Cross government that was responsible for murdering thousands of Jews (including Opapa’s father, though he didn’t know that yet).
I wonder how much Opapa knew about Kassai’s propaganda work. I’m especially curious because Opapa was a student - and practitioner - of journalism. In his later career as a communications scholar, he would focus his research on the dangers of mass media that could lead to fascism.
Kassai was the very embodiment of fascist propaganda. But he had not always been. According to his Hungarian biography, he was a communist before he was a fascist: he ran away from home at 16 to join the Red Army in Russia. When he returned, he became an organizer of the Socialist Youth Workers Association and apprenticed as a printer.
In the 1930s, he started a newspaper, Új Szó, but the articles he published demonstrated a growing commitment to fascism, and he was expelled from the Communist Party. He then jumped from one extreme to another, joining the Arrow Cross Party under Ferenc Szalasi. He was imprisoned from 1939-1941 for extremist views, but ascended once again after the German invasion of Hungary, with the Arrow Cross coup in fall 1944.
Kemény, like Kassai, was a skilled propagandist, and had been a journalist for several right-wing newspapers in the 1930s. In 1944, as foreign minister for the Arrow Cross Party, he informed the occupying Germans that the Hungarian Regent, Miklós Horthy, was trying to negotiate an armistice with the Allies. This led the Nazis to depose Horthy. The Germans then supported the Arrow Cross Party coup of the Hungarian government. During their brief reign of terror (from October 1944-early 1945), the Arrow Cross restarted deportations and murdered tens of thousands of Jews.
What did Arrow Cross propaganda look like? I haven’t been able to find material explicitly attributed to Kassai-Schallmayer and/or Kemény (yet), but I did find this pamphlet (below) from early fall 1944 — before the Arrow Cross coup — which calls upon “Patriots” (Honvédek) to overthrow Horthy and Lakatos, the Hungarian Regent and Prime Minister who had stopped deportations of Jews and were seeking to negotiate peace with the Allies. It urges readers to pick up their guns, and ends with a series of proclamations: “Long live our Holy Country: the reborn National Socialist Hungary. Endurance! Endurance! Long live Szálasi! the national leader of our people.” Not particularly creative, in my opinion.
More creative was this propaganda poster, which shows an idealized man breaking free of his chains, and holding a shield that shows the emblem of the Arrow Cross party, with four arrows pointing in the cardinal directions. The arrows symbolized the hope for Hungarian territorial expansion, and they offered an homage to the swastika. The text reads “Despite it all…”:
While we don’t have details about Opapa’s conversations with either Kassai-Schallmayer or Kemény, I *think* I can identify both of them in handcuffs, as they arrive in Budapest for their war crimes trials. Not 100% sure, but the similarities are striking — any thoughts?? Opapa is in both photos, looking towards the camera.
Both Kassai-Schallmayer and Kemény were tried and convicted of war crimes. They were executed in 1946.