Ferenc Szombathelyi (17 May 1887 – 4 November 1946), born Ferenc Knaus or Ferenc Knauz, was a Hungarian military officer who served, from September 1941 to April 1944, as Head of the General Staff of the Royal Hungarian Army during World War II.
Military career Knaus joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a cadet in 1902 and was subsequently promoted to lieutenant in 1907 in the 16th Infantry Regiment. From 1911, he studied at the Kriegsschule (military academy) in Vienna and was promoted to captain at the age of 28. After participating in World War I as a staff officer he joined the newly founded Royal Hungarian Army. Like most senior Honved officers, he was a "Swabian" as the Hungarian volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) were known (most of the families of the Hungarian volksdeutsche were believed to have originated from the Swabia region of Germany). Of the 27 senior two star and three star generals in the Honved in 1941, 21 were volksdeutsche. German was the language of command in the Imperial Austrian and Royal Hungarian Army, and as such Hungarian volksdeutsche tended to fare well as officer candidates as German was their first language, unlike the Maygar officer candidates who had to learn German.
From 1926 he taught at the Ludovica Military Academy in Budapest. From 1931 to 1933, he was Chief of Staff of the 3rd Mixed Brigade, after which he served as adjutant of the high command of the armed forces in 1935–36. In 1938, he became the commander of the Ludovica Military Academy. From 1934 onward, he used his mother's maiden surname of Szombathelyi rather than his own given surname of Knaus in order to sound more Magyar. Unlike most Honved officers who tended to be Germanophiles, Szombathelyi was a Francophile who greatly appreciated and loved French culture. Szombathelyi was described as being "tough" but "sensitive" soldier, known for his interests in history, fine wine and excellent food. A superb horsemen and an amusing raconteur who cut a dashing figure, Szombathelyi was famed within the Honved as a great womanizer. Szombathelyi's womanizing added to his reputation in an army where an officer's name was measured as much by the number of women he slept with as by the number of battles won. Besides for his native German, Szombathelyi was fluent in Magyar and French.
In 1938–39 he held the post of Deputy Chief of Staff. The second anti-Jewish law of 1939 imposed serious problems as he was not able to authenticate that neither he nor his wife had no Jewish blood owing to a lack of documentation, through he was eventually to convince his superiors that both he and his wife were of purely Christian descent. From 1939 to 1941, he commanded the VIII Corps before he was appointed commanding general of the "Carpathian group" (Kárpát Csoport), with which he took part in Operation Barbarossa. Unlike most of the other Honved officers who greeted Operation Barbarossa with joy, Szombathelyi was less than enthusiastic. Before embarking for the Soviet Union, Szombathelyi was heard to say: "What will come of this, good Lord! What will come of this? Did we really need this; to jump into this stupidity?" In August 1941 while commanding the Carpathian Group, Szombathelyi met István Horthy, the eldest son of the Regent Miklós Horthy who was already grooming him to be his successor. The younger Horthy was greatly impressed with Szombathelyi as an unusually intelligent officer. Through István Horthy, Szombathelyi was able to get into contact with the Regent. Szombathelyi later recalled: "At the beginning of September 1941 I handed the Regent a memorandum, the essence of which was that the Russian war would not be a 'Blitzkrieg', but rather a long drawn out, bloody struggle, the results of which were completely uncertain. Our troops, if possible, should be withdrawn before we plunger further into this war". In private, Szombathelyi told his colleague Gyula Kádár, whom he was to appoint chief of military intelligence in 1942, that "you know, we don't have an army, but a badly equipped poor peasantry". Despite being a fellow volksdeutsche, Szombathelyi was often in conflict with the chief of the general staff, Henrik Werth. Szombathelyi later recalled: "Since the high ranking officers and generals were completely pro-German, I was under their supervision to a certain extent...I knew that changing the attitude of the leaders had to be done step by step, and I often felt that I had come too later to change the poisoned attitude".
On 6 September, he was appointed by Regent Miklós Horthy to succeed the pro-German Henrik Werth as Chief of General Staff. Szombathelyi assessed the prospects of war with the Soviet Union sceptically and did not hesitate to share this view with his German counterparts. Shortly after his appointment he was present at a meeting between Adolf Hitler and Horthy in Vinista when the latter promised to provide more troops. He successfully delayed this measure until it could no longer be avoided following German Army setbacks in the winter of 1941-42 and the increased commitment of Romania. On 29 December 1941, Hitler wrote to Horthy asking for more Hungarian forces to the Eastern Front. In response, Szombathelyi stated: "If up to now their attitude to us had been that if we wanted to take part in the war at any cost then let us take part, now at the end of 1941 they suddenly turned the voluntary participation into an obligation".
The German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop arrived in Budapest to demand that Hungary send virtually the entire Honved to fight on the Eastern Front, and noted that Marshal Ion Antonescu of Romania had already promised 16 more Royal Romanian Army divisions for the 1942 campaign on the Eastern Front. Ribbentrop warned the prime minister László Bárdossy that Germany could always reverse the Second Vienna Award of 1940 and give northern Transylvania back to Romania, which had proved itself a more worthy German ally than Hungary. Bárdossy promised Ribbentrop that Hungary would make a greater contribution to the Eastern Front to match Romania's efforts in exchange for not giving northern Transylvania back to Romania. On 20 January 1942, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht arrived in Budapest for talks with the Defense Minister Károly Bartha and Szombathelyi about the precise scale of the contribution. Keitel wanted almost of the Honved sent to the Eastern Front, a demand that Szombathelyi resisted. However, Szombathelyi later stated: "We might had lost our independent Hungarian army, lost our independent state". On 22 January 1942, Szombathelyi signed an agreement with Keitel promising to send the 2nd Hungarian Army that consisted of 207, 000 men organised into 9 infantry brigades, 1 armored division and various support troops to the Eastern Front no later than April 1942.
in response to alleged attacks by communist partisans and Chetniks in the annexed Bácska, in January 1942 ordered a military intervention by General Ferenc Feketehalmy-Czeydner, which evolved into punitive action against Serb-inhabited villages and culminated in the massacre of Újvidék (present-day Novi Sad). To provide soldiers for the 2nd Army, Bartha and Szombathelyi changed the conscription process. In 1941, the Hungarians used their traditional system of calling up all of the eligible men in certain districts. In late January 1942, Bartha and Szombathelyi changed the conscription system to only call up 20% of the eligible men in all the districts of Hungary while leaving the other 80% behind to continue their civilian lives. Szombathelyi and Bartha wanted to avoid a repeat of the end of World War One where almost all of the Honved were serving on the Italian Front, which allowed Romania and Czechoslovakia to seize much of Hungary, and planned their new system of conscription to ensure that there would still be men to defend Hungary from Romania. However, the new system of conscription proved to be a political disaster as it provoked widespread resentment with those 20% of those called up for national service were angry that other 80% of the men in their neighborhoods and workplaces were not being called up. Between January-April 1942, Szombathelyi worked feverishly to prepare to send the 2nd Army to meet the deadline he had promised Keitel. Szombathelyi gave lectures to the officers attached to the 2nd Army about his own experiences of fighting the Red Army in 1941. In April 1942, he sent the Second Army of Gusztáv Jány to the Eastern Front.
As the elite German 6th Army was encircled in early November 1942 in Operation Uranus, Szombathelyi felt that the situation for the Axis on the Volga river was impossible and favored the withdrawal of the 2nd Hungarian Army, a request that Horthy refused. On 27 December 1942, Szombathelyi in the name of the Horthy as the Supreme Warlord issued an order to General Gusztáv Jány, the GOC of the 2nd Army, ordering his soldiers to fight to the death along the Don river. Szombathelyi's order read "no one is allowed to retreat; there is no backward, only forward!" On 12 January 1943, the Red Army opened an offensive against the 2nd Hungarian Army and 15 January Jány was begging Szombathelyi for permission to retreat, saying his entire army was on the brink of annihilation and retreat was the only option. In response to the catastrophic defeats of the second Army in the winter of 1942-43, Hungary increasingly tried to distance itself from its Axis partners. The destruction of the 2nd Army came as an immense shock in Hungary. Newspapers in Hungary had reported nothin but victories since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, which made the news of the loss of the 2nd Army all the more disturbing and frightening.
On 12 February 1943, Szombathelyi met Adolf Hitler and reported to Horthy afterwards that Hungary's future was not bright, saying there was a real possibility the Soviet Union would defeat Germany. He added: "We have to reckon that during the spring the Anglo-Saxon powers will attempt a landing in the Balkans...Hitler is of the opinion that such a landing is very probable". Szombathelyi also reported that Hitler had blamed the Hungarians for the catastrophic German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad, saying that the Hungarian 2nd Army was supposed to hold the flank of the German 6th Army, but instead collapsed in the face of the Red Army's offensive. Hitler told Szombathelyi that the Hungarians were useless as soldiers and he seriously regretted allowing the Hungarians to serve on the Eastern Front, a statement Szombathelyi said he agreed with, saying he never wanted Hungary to send an expeditionary force to the Eastern Front. Szombathelyi's proposal to use Hungarian divisions to occupy the Balkans as a substitute for the failure of the second Army was welcomed by Hitler but rejected by Prime Minister Miklós Kállay. Contacts with the Western powers were initiated, with Kállay and Szombathelyi playing leading roles.