March 12th, 1946. Budapest, a cold prison yard. A wooden pole stands waiting. A man walks toward it in a heavy coat. His arms are tied behind his back. He once called himself the leader of the nation. He once shook hands with Adolf Hitler. He once told his followers that God had picked him to save Hungary.

 Now his legs are being tied to the pole. Now a rope is going around his neck. In 2 minutes he will be hanging from that pole, dying very slowly. This is the man Hungary tried to bury under a fake name. This is the death photographed in secret. This is the case of the Hungarian Hitler. You are watching Veil History, real cases, real verdicts, real footage.

 If you like this story, hit subscribe. The next case has been hidden for almost 80 years. To know why this man died on a pole in 1946, you have to know who he was before. The truth is, he did not start as a monster. He was born in January 1897 in a town called Kassa. His father was a soldier. His mother was a strong Catholic with Slovak roots.

 He once said his mother fed him faith like milk. That one line would shape his whole life. He joined the Hungarian army as a young man. He went to a famous military school. He became an officer in 1915. He fought in the First World War for 3 years on the front line. Not in a desk job. Not behind the lines. He fought. He came home with medals.

 His career grew fast. By 1924, he was promoted to captain ahead of others. By 1925, he joined the top military staff of Hungary. By 1933, he was a major in Budapest. This is the part most videos skip. His own men loved him. Károly Beregfy, who would later die beside him on the same pole, once said Szálasi stood for great tactics, sharp discipline, and clean honesty.

He was known as a Puritan. He did not drink. He did not chase women. He did not steal. Even his enemies said he was honest in his private life. That is the strange thing about this case. The same man who later signed orders to shoot Jewish kids into a frozen river was, in his own home, a quiet officer who prayed every day and lived with his mother until 1944.

 History does not always make simple villains. He was not a thug. He was something worse. He was a true believer. In 1933, something inside him changed. He began to drift toward radical ideas. He called his belief Hungarism. He felt Hungary had been hurt by an old peace treaty. He felt Jews were the cause of every modern problem.

 He felt Hungary’s destiny was to lead Christian rebirth. In 1935, he left the army. He said politics was his real calling. He started a small party. The government banned it within months. He started another one. He called it the Hungarian National Socialist Party. In 1937, he made it official. In 1938, the Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy had him arrested and sent to prison.

 But the movement kept growing. While he sat in his cell, his men formed a new group. They called it the Arrow Cross Party. The symbol was a green and white cross with arrows pointing in four ways. It was made to look old. It was made to look holy. His hatred of Jews was the heart of his thinking.

 In June 1943, he openly said Jews ruled the world through politics, money, banks, freemasonry, and Marxism. He believed it for real. He believed hating Jews was part of being a Christian. Unlike Hitler, who built his racism on biology, Szálasi built his on religion. He thought he was doing God’s work. He was not greedy. He was not corrupt.

 He was a man of faith with full conviction. And that conviction would soon kill thousands. For most of the Second World War, Hungary stood on a knife’s edge. Horthy joined Hitler with care. He sent troops to fight the Soviets, but he did one thing that was rare. He refused to send Hungary’s Jews to the death camps. For years he held that line.

 In October 1944, that line broke. Horthy tried to pull Hungary out of the war. He told the Soviets he wanted peace. Hitler answered within hours. German troops kidnapped Horthy’s son. German tanks rolled into Budapest. The plan was called Panzerfaust. By October 16th, 1944, Horthy was forced to step down at gunpoint.

 The man Hitler put in his place was Ferenc Szálasi. He called himself Nemzetvezető, leader of the nation. On his very first day, he took the oath. On November 4th, he renamed the country. He canceled the peace deal. He ordered every man to fight. The Soviets were already inside the borders. Romania had switched sides. Bulgaria had switched sides.

 American and British planes were already bombing Budapest. He took charge of a country that was clearly falling. And his answer was to push every last drop of energy into the war and into hunting Jews. What came next was 163 days that would scar Hungary forever. When he took power, around 200,000 Jews were still alive in Budapest.

 They had escaped the spring roundups. They had no escape now. Arrow Cross gangs walked the streets in green shirts. They pulled Jewish families from their homes. They forced them to march to the Danube River. There, in the freezing winter of 1944, his men carried out the killings now known as the Shoes on the Danube.

 They tied victims together in groups. They forced them to take off their shoes at the river’s edge. They shot them so the bodies would fall into the icy water and be pulled away. The shoes left on the river walk are now a bronze memorial in Budapest. Each pair stands for a person his regime killed.

 In those 163 days, between 10 and 15,000 Hungarian Jews were killed by Arrow Cross men inside Hungary. Tens of thousands more were sent on death marches to Austria. Many froze. Many starved. Many were shot when they could not walk. Roma communities were also hunted. He himself never picked up a gun. He gave the orders. He signed the papers.

 He gave speeches about Christian destiny. And while his men shot families into the river, he prayed. By November 1944, Soviet and Romanian armies were closing in on Budapest. He did what dictators always do when the wall starts to crack. He ran. On December [clears throat] 9th, he fled the city to a small town near the Austrian border. He took the Hungarian crown jewels with him. By March 1945, he was in Vienna.

From Vienna, he ran to Munich. By the end of April, he was hiding in a small Alpine town called Matsee. On May the 6th, 1945, just 2 days before Germany lost the war, American soldiers walked into Matsee. He did not fight back. He gave up quietly. He even tried to claim he was a foreign leader and could not be touched. The Americans laughed.

 For 5 months he sat in American holding. He gave long religious answers when they asked him questions. He spoke about destiny. He blamed Jews for Hungary’s fall. He showed no regret. On October 3rd, 1945, the Americans handed him over to the new Hungarian government. He was flown back to Budapest in chains.

 He was put in a special cell built in the basement of the same building that once held his Arrow Cross headquarters. The man who had once given orders from those rooms was now a prisoner under them. The trial began in February 1946 inside the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy in Budapest. The People’s Court had taken over the music hall because the normal courts were full.

 There was no heat in the building that winter. The judges, the witnesses, even Szálasi himself wore heavy coats the whole time. The charges were war crimes and high treason. He walked into court calmly. He did not say he was innocent. He defended his actions with religion. He told the court he had acted on faith.

 He told them God had picked him to save Hungary. He said Hungarism was a divine teaching, not just politics. He said nothing about the dead Jews. Survivors of the Danube killings stood up to speak. Officers who had served under him stood up to speak. Papers were read out. Orders he had signed. Telegrams to Berlin promising loyalty until the very last bullet.

 By March 1st, 1946, the verdict was ready. Guilty. Death by hanging. The execution date was set for March 12th. Before we show you what happened in that prison yard, hit the like button if you believe history must be told without filters. Subscribe to Veil History so you never miss a verdict. March 12th, 1946. The cold yard of Marko Utcai Prison, Budapest.

Four men were brought out that morning. He was not alone. Beside him walked Gábor Vajna, his old interior minister. Behind him, walked Károly Beregfy, his old defense minister, the same man who had once praised him. With them, walked József Gera, the party’s chief thinker. All four had ordered, planned, or defended the killings.

 Just before the execution, a Catholic priest came up to him. Szálasi received the last sacraments by a Catholic priest before being executed. The man who had taught that hating Jews was part of being Christian took communion one last time. He was reportedly calm. Then, they led him to the pole. The Hungarian executioners did not use a modern gallows.

 They used a method that was hundreds of years old. The hanging was conducted in the Austrian pole method. A large post had a rope attached to a hook at the top. He walked up a small set of steps. His back was placed against the pole. His legs were tied. His arms were already tied behind him. The rope was placed around his neck.

 The rope was pulled tight against the hook. Then, the steps were pulled away. The pole was short. It is likely that he died slowly due to strangulation rather than being instantaneously rendered unconscious as would happen with the standard drop. There was no quick neck break. There was no fast blackout.

 The Austrian pole method was not made to be fast. The arms and legs were tied for one reason, to stop the body from kicking while the air was cut off. The official photographer raised his camera and clicked. But that day, a second man stood hidden in the crowd. He had no permission to be there. He took 32 black and white photos in secret.

 Years later, those photos showed up at an American auction. They were marked only as the hanging of an unknown Hungarian. Researchers later proved who it was. It was Szálasi. His three ministers were hanged right after him on the same pole. He was 49 years old. What happened after the death is almost stranger than the death itself. He was buried in a public cemetery in Budapest in plot 298.

But the new Hungarian secret police were afraid of one thing. They feared Arrow Cross loyalists might dig up the body and turn the grave into a holy site. So, they erased him. Hungarian historian Tamás Kovács in 2008 proved that the secret police changed the burial papers and buried him under a fake name, Ferenc Lukács.

 His birth record was also changed. The trick worked for over 60 years. No shrine was built. No memorial was raised. He vanished into the cemetery under a name that did not exist. There is one last fact almost no one knows. On March 13th, 1946, the day after the hanging, the National Council of People’s Tribunals looked at his appeal for mercy. They said, “No.

” The justice minister sent the answer to President Zoltán Tildy, who signed off on the death sentence on March 15th, 1946. By that date, Szálasi had already been buried for 3 days. The legal papers that allowed his death came 3 days after the death itself. The new Hungarian government wanted him gone so badly, they did not wait for a signature.

 He was a hard case to read, and that is why it still matters. He was not a coward. He was not a thief. He was given medals for bravery in the First World War. He was respected by his own men. He lived in a small home. He prayed every day. By every personal measure, he was disciplined, faithful, and honest.

 And he still ordered the deaths of thousands. He still signed the papers that sent Jewish families to the river. He still believed, even as the rope tightened on his neck, that God walked beside him. That is the warning his case leaves behind. Evil does not always come dressed as a thug. Sometimes, it comes dressed as a quiet, faithful soldier who is sure he is right.

 He died slowly against a wooden pole in a yard the world tried to forget. The photos were buried. The grave was renamed. The party was banned. And yet, the case has never fully closed. If this story answered a question you have been carrying for years, hit the like button. Subscribe to Vael History.

 The next case is a regime that escaped justice for almost 3 decades and a courtroom that caught up in the end. Real cases, real verdicts, real footage. This was Ferenc Szálasi.