Pál Teleki

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. Regarding Irén Muráty, a possible Aromanian origin has also been speculated, as "Greek" primarily referred to Orthodox merchants from the Balkans, rather than an ethnic group. Furthermore, a member of the Muráty family appears on the list of donors for the 1868 Romanian Youth ball in Pest.

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). Teleki was first based in Vienna as a member of the Anti-Bolshevik Committee while in the French-occupied city of Szeged, another more radical anti-Communist group led by Admiral Miklós Horthy and Gyula Gömbös was forming the National Army to fight the Soviet Republic. The two anti-Communist groups eventually merged, not the least of which was the Szeged group actually had a military force. Despite what Admiral Horthy was to later claim as he maintained that he had overthrown the Soviet Republic, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was overthrown in August 1919 after being defeated in a war with Romania and after the Romanians pulled out of Hungary in November 1919, Horthy with French permission led his National Army in occupying the rest of Hungary.

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 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. As an internationally respected geographer, Teleki was known as the scholar politician, which had attracted attention both at home and abroad. Besides for his native Magyar, Teleki was fluent in German, French and English. In Britain, Teleki was best known as the Honorary Chief Scout of Hungary, who appeared at Scouting conventions dressed in his Baden-Powell cap and badges.

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. One of Teleki's first acts was to introduce the second Jewish law on 24 February 1939 to Parliament for ratification, following widespread complaints that the first Jewish law passed by the Imrédy government was not extreme enough.

The former prime minister István Bethlen had advised Horthy against appointing Teleki as prime minister. Bethlen considered Teleki to be too idealistic to be a successful politician as well as having a naive "childlike romanticism" that made him ill-suited for the rough world of politics. Finally, Teleki was not a great orator as his speeches failed to create any enthusiasm in whose who heard them and he was an equally poor debater, who did not fare well in parliamentary debates. Teleki's work as a geographer had convinced him that the lands around the Danube river were a natural geographical and economic unit, which accordingly should be united politically. He had lost his family's estate in Transylvania, which had become part of Romania, and he was strongly opposed to the Treaty of Trianon. However, Teleki was one of the few Hungarian politicians prepared to moderate the campaign against the Treaty of Trianon as he favored creating some sort of Danubian federation as the ultimate objective instead of simply restoring Hungary to the pre-Trianon frontiers.

Teleki's major interest in foreign policy was seeking to annex the autonomous Carpatho-Ukraine region of Czecho-Slovakia (as Czechoslovakia had been renamed in October 1938). Carpatho-Ukraine, also known as Ruthenia, had belonged to Hungary until 1919, but however the region had an Ukrainian majority with the Magyars as a minority. Teleki put forward the demand for annexation on a geographic and economic grounds as he noted that the Tisza river flowed down from the Carpathian mountains and he accused the Czechoslovak authorities of permitting deforestation in the Carpathians, which were the cause of floods on the Great Hungarian Plain. Teleki's real reason for seeking to annex Carpatho-Ukraine was to secure a common border with Poland as he felt that a Polish-Hungarian alliance was the best way of resisting Germany's claims that all of Eastern Europe should be belong to the exclusive German sphere of influence, both politically and economically. Teleki's plans for an invasion of Czechoslovakia were exploited by Adolf Hitler for his own ends. Teleki was informed that Germany supported his plans for Carpatho-Ukraine. Unknown to Teleki, he was being used. Father Jozef Tiso, the leader of the autonomous Slovakia region had proved reluctant to declare independence as he wanted to maintain a link with the Czechs to resist Hungarian claims against Slovakia. Tiso was told by the Germans that he either declare independence with Slovakia under the protection of the Reich or else see all of Slovakia annexed to Hungary. On 14 March 1939 Tiso declared independence, which was used by Hitler as an excuse to occupy the Czech half of Czecho-Slovakia on 15 March 1939 under the grounds that Czecho-Slovakia was faced with a civil war that would be threatening to Germany. The Czechoslovak president Emil Hácha was summoned to the Reich Chancellery where Hitler accused him of permitting "disorder" on Germany's borders, and to put an end to the "disorder" (which Hitler himself had instigated) was told to sign away his country's independence or else face a German invasion. Hácha promptly capitulated and signed away Czecho-Slovakia's independence. The occupied Czech lands became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Hungarians were rewarded by Hitler for their part in the destruction of Czecho-Slovakia by being permitted to invade and annex Carpatho-Ukraine (which also declared independence on 15 March 1939), which thus allowed Teleki to boast that he taken back some of the land lost under the Treaty of Trianon.

Germany demands Hungary's assistance

In June 1940, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to Romania demanding the return of the Bessarabia region or else the Soviets would declare war on Romania. After Bessarabia was returned to the Soviet Union, Teleki demanded that King Carol II of Romania return Transylvania to Hungary under the grounds that if the Soviet Union was entitled to take back Bessarabia, Hungary was entitled to take back Transylvania. France, Romania's chief ally, had been defeated in June 1940 while King Carol had renounced the British "guarantee" given in April 1939. With Romania's two principle allies unable to help, Teleki believed that the summer of 1940 was the ideal time for Hungary to take on Romania. However, Romania was rich in oil and the most efficient way for Romanian oil to reach Germany was via Hungary. On 10 July 1940, in a meeting in Munich Ribbentrop told Teleki that Germany did not want a war in the Balkans that might threaten its access to Romanian oil, and stated that Germany wanted the Transylvania dispute resolved peacefully. After the failure of the Hungarian-Romanian talks, Bartha pressed very strongly at a meeting of the Council of Ministers for a war against Romania, saying "...that means that for our part if we start military action Romania will talk differently". On 23 August 1940, Werth announced that Hungary had started mobilising and an invasion of Romania would start on 28 August 1940. On 26 August, Ribbentrop ordered both Hungary and Romania to send delegations to Vienna, saying that Germany along with Italy was going to resolve the Transylvania crisis before it caused a war. At the conference in Vienna on 30 August 1940, Ribbentrop announced that the northern part of Transylvania would be returned to Hungary while the Romania would keep the rest, a compromise that deeply displeased both sides. The news of the Second Vienna Award was greeted with joy in Hungary, but Teleki was extremely depressed at the award, complaining that his entire policy was to keep Germany out of the crisis, which had been sabotaged by Werth who told the German air attache that Hungary was willing to accept German arbitration. Upon his return from Vienna, Teleki did not come out of his train to greet the cheering crowds and refused to give any speeches to mark the award.

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.

Teleki must choose between Axis and Allies

The event that eventually led to Teleki's suicide began on 25 March 1941 when Yugoslav Prime Minister Dragisa Cvetkovic and Yugoslav Minister for Foreign Affairs Aleksandar Cincar Marković travelled to Vienna and signed the Tripartite Pact. In the late evening on 26/27 March 1941, Air Force Generals Dušan Simović and Borivoje Mirković had executed a bloodless coup d'état, refuted signatures on the alliance and accepted a British guarantee of security instead. Germany saw its southern flank potentially exposed just as it was preparing Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Germany planned the invasion of Yugoslavia (Directive No. 25) to compel it to remain part of the Axis. Hitler used Hungary's membership in the Tripartite Pact to demand that Hungary join in. Döme Sztójay, the Hungarian ambassador to Germany, was sent home by air with a message for Horthy:

Yugoslavia will be annihilated, for she has just renounced publicly the policy of understanding with the Axis. The greater part of the German armed forces must pass through Hungary but the principal attack will not be made on the Hungarian sector. Here the Hungarian Army should intervene, and, in return for its co-operation, Hungary will be able to reoccupy all those former territories which she had been forced at one time to cede to Yugoslavia. The matter is urgent. An immediate and affirmative reply is requested.

Teleki had signed a non-aggression pact, the Treaty of Eternal Friendship, with Yugoslavia on 12 December 1940, only five months earlier, and would not assent to assisting with the invasion.

At the meeting in the Royal Castle, where Sztójay presented Hitler's letter to Horthy, the regent was overjoyed and accepted the offer immediately. Teleki felt as a Hungarian gentleman that Hungary could not attack a nation it had just signed a treaty of eternal friendship with. He stayed up late in an lengthy attempt to persuade Horthy to not join the planned invasion, and eventually the regent agreed that he would think more about what to do. In the debates in the Council of Ministers, Bartha-supported by Werth who was allowed to attend the meetings of the council despite not being a minister-argued that here was an unprecedented chance to take back of the lands lost to Yugoslavia, and urged Horthy to pass up this opportunity. Against Teleki, Bartha claimed that Hungary could had annexed all of Slovakia if only it had been more pro-German during the Sudetenland crisis in 1938 and stated that this "mistake" must be repeated again. Bartha sought to pressure Horthy into choosing the invasion by saying that the morale of the honved would be destroyed if Hungary did not take this opportunity as the defense minister asserted that the vast majority of the honved wanted a war. Teleki's government chose a middle ground, opting to remain out of the German-Yugoslav conflict unless either Hungarian minorities were in danger or Yugoslavia collapsed. Teleki relayed his government's position to London and sought allowance for Hungary's difficult position. Teleki had learned at the end of March 1941 that his wife who was had been hospitalised for cancer was now terminally ill and had only a few months to live. In addition, Teleki's beloved mother was also dying. As a result of both personal and political crises in his life, Teleki been suffering from insomnia and depression. However, Teleki was a devout Roman Catholic who attended Mass regularly, and few people who knew him took seriously his references to ending his life, believing that his suicidal talk about shooting himself in the head was to be taken metaphorically instead of literally.

Germany enters Hungary, Teleki commits suicide

Shortly after 9:00 p.m., he left the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for his apartment in the Sándor Palace. At around midnight, he received a call that is thought to have informed him that the German army had just started its march into Hungary. Teleki committed suicide with a pistol during the night of 3 April 1941 and was found the next morning. His suicide note said in part:

"We broke our word, – out of cowardice [...] The nation feels it, and we have thrown away its honor. We have allied ourselves to scoundrels [...] We will become body-snatchers! A nation of trash. I did not hold you back. I am guilty."

Winston Churchill later wrote, "His suicide was a sacrifice to absolve himself and his people from guilt in the German attack on Yugoslavia." On 6 April 1941, Germany launched Operation Punishment (Unternehmen Strafgericht), the bombing of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Some historians consider Teleki's suicide an act of patriotism. Britain shortly afterward broke diplomatic relations but did not declare war until December.

Befitting his commitment to Scouting and to Hungary, Teleki was buried at Gödöllő, the location of the Royal Palace.

Legacy

From Philosemitism to antisemitism

Teleki is considered "one of the most consistently unaccommodating anti-Semitic politicians of the post-Trianon period". His attitude towards Jews parallels the changing demographic and social situation in Hungary before and after World War I. In the Austro-Hungarian empire the generally fiercely patriotic Hungarian Jews were securing the tenuous Hungarian majority in the Hungarian kingdom. Consequently, Teleki stated at the peace conference of 1919 that "the majority of the Hungarian Jews have completely assimilated to the Hungarians [...] from a social point of view, the Hungarian Jews are not Jews any more but Hungarians." After 1920, with a greatly reduced Hungarian territory, Teleki changed his mind about the Hungarian Jews: he regarded the Jews as a "problem of life and death for the Hungarian people". After Regent Horthy appointed Teleki Prime Minister on 19 July 1920 he introduced the first antisemitic laws introduced in Europe after the First World War, the so-called "Numerus clausus Act" of 22 September 1920 which allowed Jews to attend universities only in a direct relation to their proportion of the Hungarian population. He and his government resigned less than a year later on 14 April 1921 when the former king, Karl IV, attempted to retake Hungary's throne.

From 1921 until 1938, Teleki was a professor at Budapest University. While there, journalists asked him what he thought about the anti-Jewish violence that had occurred on the university campus. He replied: "This din does not bother me. In any case, the students take examinations that test their knowledge of the sea and this din is aptly suited to that of the sea."

Due to the feudal nature of pre-War Hungarian society, where both rich and impoverished aristocrats tried to maintain an "aristocratic" life style and a disadvantaged peasant class had no means of learning and social mobility, the Hungarian Jews constituted a disproportionally large part of the Hungarian middle class. In the 1930 census, Jews comprised 5.1% of the population, but among physicians 54.5 percent were Jewish, journalists 31.7%, and lawyers 49.2%. Persons of Jewish faith controlled four of the five major banks, from 19.5 to 33% of the national income, and around 80 percent of the country's industry. Already after the short lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (21 March – 1 August 1919), whose leaders, concomitantly with their middle class origins, were often of Jewish parentage, and even more after the worldwide depression struck in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which conversely was associated with Jewish wealth and financial power, the country's Jews were made scapegoats for all of Hungary's economic, political and social plights.

Statue controversy

In 2004, the Teleki Pál Memorial Committee, initially supported by Budapest mayor Gábor Demszky, proposed erecting a statue by Tibor Rieger in his honor on the 63rd anniversary of his death in front of the palace on Castle Hill where he governed and, finally, committed suicide. Because of his close connection with Hungarian anti-Semitism there was a strong opposition both by Hungarian liberals and Hungarian and international Jewish organizations, especially the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its leader Efraim Zuroff. Consequently, the mayor withdrew his support and the Minister of Culture István Hiller canceled the plans. On 5 April 2004, the statue was finally placed in the courtyard of the Catholic Church in the town of Balatonboglár on the shore of Lake Balaton. Balatonboglár had during World War II been host to thousands of Polish refugees who opened in that town one of only two secondary schools for Poles in Europe during 1939–1944. They credited Teleki with opening Hungary's borders to them and named a street in Warsaw for him after the war ended. In 2001 he was posthumously awarded Commander's Cross with Star of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. In 2020 Teleki earned two monuments in Poland, one in Skierniewice and one in Kraków, both related to his pro-Polish stand during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920.

A street in Borča, a suburb of the Serbian capital Belgrade, was named "Ulica Pala Telekija" ("Pal Teleki Street") in 2011.

A statue honoring Teleki was supposed to be placed in Serbian city of Novi Sad.