The Execution of László Baky & László Endre – Real Footage of Nazi Collaborators Executed
March 29, 1946.
In the courtyard of a prison in Budapest, two men stood before the gallows.
László Baky and László Endre.
They had once held power as state secretaries in Hungary’s Ministry of the Interior.
Now they were convicted war criminals, awaiting death for their role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of people.
When Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, the Third Reich needed loyal local collaborators to carry out the Final Solution.
Baky and Endre did not hesitate.
They were not soldiers.
They did not fight on the front lines.
They were bureaucrats—men of paperwork, orders, and logistics.
And with those tools, they helped exterminate nearly half a million Hungarian Jews.
Baky exercised full control over the national gendarmerie.
He issued the orders to isolate, arrest, and deport Jews into ghettos.
Endre, working closely with Adolf Eichmann, organized the train transports, coordinated schedules, and ensured that nothing caused delays.
Their objective was terrifying in its simplicity:
to clear Hungary of Jews as quickly as possible.
Between May and July 1944, more than 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary.
Most were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where gas chambers awaited them.
Entire towns were emptied within days.
The elderly, children, pregnant women—no one was spared.
International pressure temporarily halted the deportations.
But in October, when the Arrow Cross Party seized power, Baky and Endre returned to action.
They resumed roundups.
Ordered new arrests.
And continued collaborating with Nazi forces even as the war was clearly being lost.
They worked until the very end.
After the war, both men fled.
But their roles were too visible, too infamous.
They were captured, returned to Budapest, and brought before a public tribunal in early 1946.
Eyewitness testimony.
Official documents.
Even railway records.
All of it sealed their fate.
At trial, neither man accepted responsibility.
They spoke of “loyalty to Hungary.”
They described their actions as “national defense.”
But their signatures were on the orders.
Their names were inseparable from mass death.
The court delivered the only possible verdict.
On the morning of their execution, they refused to speak final words.
They faced the nooses in silence.
Two men who had once wielded immense power—
brought down not by armies,
but by justice.
As the trapdoors fell,
so did the men who had turned railways into instruments of murder.
Today, the names Baky and Endre are not widely known.
But to historians, to survivors,
and to justice itself,
they represent a chilling truth:
Genocide is not carried out by bullets alone,
but by signatures, schedules, and men who choose to serve evil.
