Pál Prónay

Pál Prónay de Tótpróna et Blatnicza (November 2, 1874 – 1947 or 1948) was a Hungarian reactionary and paramilitary commander in the years following the First World War. He is considered to have been the most brutal of the Hungarian National Army officers who led the White Terror that followed Hungary’s brief 1919 Communist coup d'état.

The Hungarian people considered themselves humiliated and dismembered by the victors of the First World War. The Entente Powers stripped away two-thirds of the nation’s territory and awarded them to Hungary’s neighbors. With the lands went one-third of the country's Hungarian-speaking nationals.

Humiliation was inflamed by political instability. The first post-war attempt at a democratic government, under prime minister Mihály Károlyi, floundered and was overthrown in March 1919 by a Communist coup. Its leader, Béla Kun, had Jewish roots and Soviet training. Popular at first, Kun’s so-called Hungarian Soviet Republic quickly lost the approval of the people, principally because of its failed economic policies, its inept military efforts to reclaim lost Hungarian lands from Czechoslovakia and Romania, and the Red Terror, in which Bolshevik-style gangs of young leather-clad thugs beat and murdered hundreds of the regime’s “bourgeois” or counter-revolutionary opponents.

An alternative government struggled to form in the south of Hungary and secure the approval of the Entente powers; military affairs were placed in the hands of the former commander of the Austro-Hungarian fleet, Admiral Miklos Horthy, who forged a counter-revolutionary force and called it the National Army.

Horthy called for Hungarian officers to join; Pál Prónay was one of the first.

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