Károly Dám

Károly Dám was born on 25 March 1911 in Bosna-Brod, Bosnia, his father was a railway assistant officer. After World War I, the family moved to Pécs. According to Károly's 1949 biography [!], his first choice at the end of secondary school was to become a priest, but his teachers dissuaded him and he applied to the Ludovika Academy. He spent his entire military service with the 8th Infantry Regiment, during which he received several commendations, a sword and a Signum laudis of peace, the former for his brave conduct in the 1941 campaign in the South. He also applied to the War College for General Staff Training and passed the entrance examination, but was not admitted (allegedly because of his negative opinion of Germany). After fighting in the Carpathians and the Lowlands, he was deployed in the Gödöllő area from 21 November 1944. On 16 December 1944, the regiment was withdrawn from the front line (he claimed because the unit was considered unreliable by the Germans). From then on, the regimental headquarters acted as a kind of substitute and hid more than 400 men from the Germans, while a company and then a platoon of the entire regiment fought on the front line, first as 8/III Battalion, but from February 1945 none of them.

During the siege, Dam was given one combat mission, to organise the defence of Piliscsaba between 24-25 December 1944 with the help of a detachment of Lions. His regiment commander, Colonel László Nagy, died of a bombing on 2 January 1945, and from then on Dám was in charge of the regiment in practice. According to his credentials, he rescued several people persecuted because of their origins and was involved in armed conflict with the Arrow Cross. His regimental headquarters was at Margit krt. 7 in Margrit Square, officially taking food for 76 people, while about 500 people were hiding here and in the surrounding buildings. From here, they moved to Fő Street in early February and did not take part in the outbreak. In his autobiography, he described the surrender as a moment when he himself was surprised to see how many members of the regiment had taken refuge in their neighbourhood and had come out of hiding when the Russian soldiers arrived.

He was a Soviet prisoner of war from 12 February 1945 to 30 September 1947, after which he was returned to the army. On 19 March 1948 he joined the Hungarian Communist Party, which probably led to his being recalled and soon became the head of the Personnel and Material Department of the Hungarian Ministry of Defence. At the same time he joined the Freedom Fighters Association. At the end of 1948 he was sentenced to three months' suspended imprisonment for not keeping secret documents in a safe. His rating in 1950 was unusually positive for a former "Horthysta officer", although it was noted that he had not yet shed certain "petty bourgeois vestiges". There is no record of his later service, he was certainly discharged shortly afterwards.