Miklós Szücs

Miklós Szücs was born on June 7, 1921 in Balatonszentgyörgy, his father was a village doctor, his grandfather was a village notary. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the Ludovika Academy, and was promoted to infantry lieutenant in 1942. In the spring of 1944, he was sent to an infantry training camp near Döberitz in Germany for a six-week assault course. From 1943 he served in the 8th Infantry Regiment as commander of the 1st Company, completed the Panzer Breaker Cannon Commander Course near Berhida (Várpalota), and from 15 November 1944 he took part in the fighting as commander of the regiment's mechanised Panzer Breaker Cannon Company.

His unit fell apart by the end of 1944.According to his statement, he had planned to transfer at the end of 1944, but for various reasons this failed.The Division Corps' intelligence officers arrested him for a short time, then from 25 December 1944 he was assigned to the Division Corps, and from 15 January 1945 he was assigned to Lieutenant Colonel Oszkár Variházy, the commander of the collection unit.

His autobiography is somewhat contradictory, because he claims to have defected with Varihazy, but on the other hand he always consistently gave the date of his defection as 9 February 1945, whereas Varihazy only surrendered to Soviet troops on the 11th - and "did not defect". However, Szűcs also admitted that his unit was not deployed, so it is quite possible that he was only wrong about the date. He was then first transferred to the prisoner-of-war camp in Jászberény, where he became commander of a company after the 1st Infantry Regiment was formed. Between 1947 and 1949 he graduated from the Military Academy. From then on he served in general staff positions and had the brightest career of all the officers discussed here. In addition to his political loyalty, his outstanding intellectual abilities (he spoke five languages, a rarity in the People's Army at the time) were the most important factor in this. After two years at the Vorosilov General Staff Academy in Moscow, he was appointed Deputy Chief of the Operations Group (equivalent to the former Chief of the General Staff of the Army) in 1955 and was also to be promoted to General.

He was arrested between 1956 and 1958, accused of being an "accomplice" of Pál Maléter. He was released after producing several exculpatory witnesses and was offered the chance to return to the People's Army, but he refused and took a job as an editor and proofreader at the Zrínyi Publishing House. He applied for membership of the MSZMP, which was initially rejected, but he was later accepted as a member of the party.

He was awarded the Silver Medal of Freedom and the Soviet Budapest Medal (1947), the Gold Medal of the Hungarian People's Republic, the Medal for Outstanding Service (1955), the Silver Medal of the Republic of Hungary (1963).In 1989 he published his work I was a Colonel in 1956 in the General Staff, in which he tried to place his own role between the forces defending socialism and Prime Minister Imre Nagy.

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