István Kovács, army officer ( b. 1917)
Kovács was born in Nádudvar, Hajdú-Bihar County, where his father was a waiter, and after 1945, a policeman. He received his school-leaving certificate from the István Széchenyi Upper Commercial School in 1935 and then worked at the Korona chocolate factory in Budapest. He lost his job after the first Jewish Law was passed in 1938 and then worked as a labourer. Kovács became involved in the youth movement of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party, which he joined in 1936. He was arrested soon after an attack on a rally by the fascist Arrow-Cross Party. In 1940, he was conscripted into labour service and sent to the Eastern front with his unit in 1942. After the breakthrough on the Don, Kovács escaped to the Soviet side and was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. He then attended an anti-fascist school at Krasnodarsk and joined the Hungarian Communist Party. In December 1943, he attended partisan schools in Kiev and then Moscow. He was posted to a Soviet partisan unit early in 1944 and took part in several actions in Subcarpathia. In January 1945, he was sent to Debrecen, where he worked initially in the Hungarian Communist Party headquarters and from 1946 in the Partisan Federation. He transferred to the Hungarian army in 1947, completing an officer-training course and being commissioned as a lieutenant. In 1951, he was sent to the Frunze Military Academy. On his return, he was appointed commander of the Defence Ministry's Operations Department, with the rank of major general. During the revolution, Kovács was appointed chief of staff on October 31, 1956, and on November 2, he became a member of the Hungarian delegation negotiating on the withdrawal of Soviet troops. As a delegation member, he was arrested at Tököl by the KGB, in the evening of November 3. On September 9, 1958, Kovács was sentenced by the Special Council of the Military College of the Supreme Court to three years' imprisonment, which was increased to six years on January 30, 1959, by the Presidential Special Council. However, he was released under an individual amnesty in April 1961. He then worked as a warehouseman at a fuel depot. After a car accident in 1961, he joined the National Translation and Authentication Bureau, from where he retired in 1978. Kovács was rehabilitated by the Supreme Court on December 15, 1989 and promoted, first to lieutenant general, and then in March 1997, to colonel general.
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