On October 15, 1944, Regent Miklós Horthy announced on Hungarian national radio that Hungary had signed an armistice with the Soviet Union and was withdrawing from the Axis alliance. Within hours, German forces launched Operation Panzerfaust, arresting key officials and forcing Horthy to resign.
By that evening, the fascist Arrow Cross Party, led by Ferenc Szálasi, had taken control of the government. The new regime immediately resumed and intensified the persecution of Jews.
Armed Arrow Cross units patrolled the streets, arrested political opponents, and began systematic killings. Between November 1944 and January 1945, approximately 38,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered in Budapest alone, many of them shot along the banks of the Danube River and thrown into the water.
Among the commanders of these death squads stood a Roman Catholic priest who combined religious authority with ideological fanaticism. His name was András Kun.
András Kun was born on November 8, 1911, in the town of Nyírbátor, then part of Austria-Hungary. He grew up in a country marked deeply by the consequences of the First World War, which ended in 1918 and destroyed the empire.
The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 reduced Hungary's territory and population dramatically, creating a lasting sense of national humiliation and resentment. Political life in the interwar period was dominated by revisionist ambitions, conservative nationalism, and growing hostility toward minorities, especially Jews.
With the support of the Catholic Franciscan order, Kun studied philosophy and theology in Rome. There he was exposed not only to Catholic doctrine but also to the political climate of Mussolini's fascist Italy.
The regime presented itself as strong, disciplined, and united under a single leader. For some foreign students, this atmosphere appeared modern and purposeful compared with the political instability of most states in Central Europe.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939. While war reshaped the continent, Kun finished his studies and, in 1941, was ordained as a friar and sent to a monastery in Hungary. Yet behind the monastic walls, his views were becoming increasingly radical.
During the war, Hungary, led by Admiral Miklós Horthy, who served as regent in a kingdom without a king, had aligned the state with Nazi Germany, joining the Axis alliance in November 1940. In June 1941, Hungarian troops participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union alongside German forces.
Anti-Semitic laws had already been ratified in Hungary long before the German occupation. Jews were excluded from many professions, subjected to forced labor, and stripped of civil rights. Radical right-wing movements gained strength, and public discourse became increasingly violent.
According to later accounts, Kun embraced extreme nationalist and anti-Semitic ideas. In 1943, he was expelled from his monastery because of his political radicalism and moved to Budapest. Despite his expulsion, he continued to appear in clerical clothing and to preach.
As the war expanded and Germany suffered major defeats, Hungarian leaders began to fear the consequences of remaining on the losing side. In March 1944, when Regent Horthy attempted to explore a separate peace with the Western Allies, German forces occupied Hungary to prevent their partner from switching sides.
After the German occupation, deportations of the Jewish population began with alarming speed. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, approximately 440,000 Jews from the Hungarian countryside and cities were deported, most of them to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland. There, the majority were murdered in gas chambers immediately after arrival.
By the end of July, mainly the large Jewish community of Budapest remained, numbering around 200,000 people.
In early 1944, Kun joined the Arrow Cross Party, a Hungarian fascist movement led by Ferenc Szálasi. It combined extreme nationalism, anti-Semitism, and total loyalty to Nazi Germany.
In October 1944, after Horthy attempted to withdraw Hungary from the war, German forces organized a coup and installed Szálasi as head of a new government. Kun quickly became active in the new regime. He was appointed head of the propaganda department of the Ministry of the Interior.
In this position, he delivered speeches on Hungarian radio and in churches urging citizens to continue fighting and to remain loyal to the Arrow Cross cause. He also officiated at weddings for Arrow Cross couples. He presented the war as a sacred struggle and portrayed Jews as enemies of the nation.
In later statements, Kun described how propaganda shaped his thinking. He said he had come to believe that Jews stood behind Bolshevism and were responsible for Hungary's suffering. After the war, Kun said, "The propaganda drilled into us the belief that the Jews lurk behind the Bolsheviks. Amidst the wildest battles, I stood with this conviction and as Jews came before me, I beat them."
As Soviet forces surrounded Budapest in late 1944, the city became a battlefield. Bombardment, hunger, and fear shaped daily life. In this atmosphere of chaos, Arrow Cross death squads intensified their activities.
After Szálasi and his government left the capital at the end of November 1944, Kun remained and took command of a death squad in the 12th district of the city. Between November 1944 and the liberation of the city in February 1945, Arrow Cross units murdered thousands of Jews in Budapest.
Many were taken to the banks of the Danube, forced to remove their shoes, and shot so that their bodies fell into the river. Others were killed in hospitals, nursing homes, and so-called protected houses that were under the diplomatic protection of neutral states such as Switzerland and Sweden.
Kun's squad participated in these numerous massacres. On January 12, 1945, members of his unit entered the Chevra Kadisha Hospital on Maros Street and executed 92 patients.
On January 14, they attacked the Bíró Dániel Medical Institute on Városmajor Street. The 130 patients and 24 staff members, including doctors and nurses, were brutally executed. Those able to walk were led to the courtyard and shot in groups of five or six. Bedridden patients were killed in their beds, and the building was looted.
The next day, Kun's men returned to carry out further executions, and on January 17, they set fire to the building with the corpses inside.
In January 1945, Kun also ordered the arrest of Jewish author Ernő Ligeti and his family. Kun and his death squad subjected Ligeti's son and wife, the actress Margit Szanto, to brutal torture.
The family was taken to the Arrow Cross headquarters on Andrássy Street, where they were interrogated, stripped naked, and tied together. Around midnight, they faced a firing squad. Ernő Ligeti and his wife were killed instantly, but their son Károly survived four shots. Remarkably, he recovered from his wounds and later emigrated from Hungary.
Witnesses described how Kun continued to wear his priestly cassock and Roman collar during operations. Over his religious clothing, he wore an Arrow Cross armband and carried a pistol. His orders often began with the words, "In the name of Christ, fire."
The blending of sacred language and murder symbolized the moral collapse of those who used faith to justify violence.
In December 1944 and the following months, approximately 500 Jews were shot by Kun's squad into the Danube near the Széchenyi Chain Bridge. Jews caught while hiding, along with army deserters, were often tortured in the Arrow Cross houses, where beatings to death were common execution methods.
Amidst this chaos, Kun took full advantage of the situation for personal gain. He not only led interrogations, torture, and executions of Jews but also looted, robbed, and murdered with the help of his accomplices. He frequently arrested wealthy individuals on fabricated charges, stole their possessions, and then had them executed.
At the end of December, he arrested, tortured, and robbed Switzerland's diplomatic worker in Budapest, as well as staff from the Swedish Embassy office. From both embassies, Hungarian employees were abducted and later executed. Kun also ordered the execution of civilians suspected of sheltering deserters or Jews.
In his final days before his arrest, Kun's brutality continued. He reportedly threw several people, including a deserted sergeant, out of a second-story window of a house on Bor Street, killing them.
On January 19, 1945, Kun and his men took about 90 elderly residents from the Alma Street Nursing Home and executed them on Samos Street, with some bodies dumped into a nearby bomb crater.
By this time, his actions became so extreme that even Arrow Cross authorities regarded him as dangerous. Around January 20, 1945, a police patrol was sent to arrest him at his headquarters. Kun captured the police patrol, beat all of them, and then sent them back.
Ten more policemen were sent, but Kun also captured them, beat their commanders, and locked them in a basement. Eventually, 60 police officers surrounded his headquarters and issued an ultimatum: surrender Kun and his accomplices within 10 minutes or face a machine gun assault. The insiders handed over the men, ending Kun's three-month reign of terror.
Kun was charged with multiple murders and assaults, including the beating of police officers. A court sentenced him to death for 27 murders. Ferenc Szálasi commuted the sentence to 15 years in prison by radio telegram.
However, as the Soviet Red Army completed the siege and captured Budapest in February 1945, chaos reigned, and Kun was released from prison either through intervention or as a result of the freeing of prisoners by Soviet forces who did not know who he was.
For months, he disappeared. He reportedly attempted to pose as a Romanian citizen and joined Romanian troops leaving Hungary after the war. From Romania, he planned to escape to Italy. But on August 3, 1945, he was arrested near the Hungarian border and brought back to Budapest to face trial.
On September 19, 1945, he was tried by a Hungarian People's Tribunal. These tribunals were established after the war to prosecute war crimes and collaboration with a Nazi regime. Kun faced charges connected to approximately 500 murders. Witness testimony described hospital massacres, shootings along the Danube, torture, and abuse.
On the day of his execution, he gave an interview to journalist László Szirmai and said, "I always wanted to reduce human misery and suffering. This is why I fought against the Jews. They are the lords of capital. The Jews were always the ones to walk on the sunny side of the street."
He admitted to beating Jews but denied killing anyone. He claimed he had been falsely convicted and even stated that he considered himself more of a victim than the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
When asked whether his behavior showed signs of sadism, he replied, "This perversion exists in a dormant state in every soul." When asked if it existed in his soul as well, Kun responded, "If it did, then it was dormant. I was not conscious of it."
The 33-year-old András Kun was hanged in Budapest later that same day, on September 19, 1945.