March 12th, 1946. Budapest, near freezing. A prison yard, mud on the ground, a wooden pole, 8 feet tall, bolted into the earth, a hook at the top, a rope hanging from that hook. A man walks out. Heavy coat, arms bound behind his back, face completely calm, not terrified, not begging, calm, like a man walking to Sunday church, not to his execution.
6 weeks ago, this man sat in a courtroom and told the judges that God personally chose him to save Hungary. He said it without embarrassment. He believed every word. In under 3 minutes, he will be hanging from that pole, not from a modern gallows, not with a clean drop, but slowly tied against wood, strangled by rope.
And somewhere in that crowd, a hidden photographer is raising a camera he has no permission to carry. taking 32 illegal black and white photographs in secret. Those photographs disappeared for decades when they finally surfaced at an American auction. They were labeled only hanging of an unknown Hungarian. The man in those photos was Fence Arazzi, Hungary’s Arocross leader, Hitler’s handpicked puppet, and the architect of one of the most savage final chapters of World War II.
A man so feared even after death that the Hungarian secret police buried him under a fake name to stop his followers from building a shrine. This is his full story. You are watching Untold War story where history’s darkest verdicts finally get a voice. If this is your first time here, subscribe right now and hit the bell.
What you’re about to hear has been buried in archives for almost 80 years. Here is the detail. Almost every documentary skips entirely. Fen Salacy was not born into hatred. He did not crawl up from the gutter. He was born on January 6th, 1897 in Casa into a military family. His mother was a devout Slovak Hungarian Catholic who by Salacey’s own words fed him faith the way other mothers fed milk.
That one sentence would echo through every decision he ever made. He entered the elite Terasian military academy and graduated in 1915. Walking directly into World War I, not logistics, not a desk job, frontline combat for three years. He came home with medals. His career climbed fast, promoted to captain by 1924, ahead of his peers on the Hungarian general staff by 1925, a major in Budapest by 1933.
His own defense minister, Carly Berfi, who would later die on the same pole beside him, once described Salasi as a man of brilliant tactical thinking, iron discipline, and spotless personal honesty. He did not drink. He did not steal. He had no mistresses, no secret accounts, no corruption. He lived in a modest apartment with his mother until 1944.
Even his prosecutors at trial acknowledged in his private life he was clean which makes what came next even more disturbing. In 1933, the same year Hitler rose to power in Germany, something shifted inside Salasi. He developed what he called hungerism. It was not simply politics. It was a theology.
He believed Hungary had been robbed by the 1920 Treaty of Trionon which stripped the country of 2/3 of its territory. a wound still raw, still humiliating across Hungarian society. He believed Jews simultaneously controlled global banking, media, Freemasonry, and Marxism. And he believed Hungary was divinely chosen to lead a Christian rebirth of Europe.
This was not Hitler’s racism. Hitler’s anti-semitism was biological, a pseudocience of blood. Salacy’s hatred was religious. He believed persecuting Jews was an act of Christian duty. He believed he was obeying God. In 1935, he resigned his military commission and entered politics. He founded a party. The government banned it.
He founded another. Banned again. In 1937, he officially established the Hungarian National Socialist Party. In 1938, Regent Miklo Horthy had him arrested and imprisoned. But imprisonment only grew the movement. While Salacy sat in his cell, his followers reorganized under a new name, the Arrow Cross Party. Their symbol, a green and white cross intersected by four arrows, was designed to look ancient, almost sacred.
By 1939, they held 31 seats in the Hungarian Parliament. A fringe movement had become a political force. For most of World War II, Regent Hory walked a dangerous line. He aligned with Hitler enough to survive, sent troops to the Eastern Front, but refused to deport Hungary’s Jews to Nazi death camps. That line held for years.
When Germany directly occupied Hungary in March 1944, the deportations finally began. Over 437,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Avitz in just 56 days between May and July 1944, one of the fastest mass deportations in Holocaust history. But roughly 200,000 Jews remained alive in Budapest. In October 1944, Horthy attempted to break from Hitler and open secret armistice talks with the Soviets.
Hitler’s response was immediate. German special forces kidnapped Horthy’s son as a hostage. German tanks deployed through Budapest streets. On October 15th, Horthy resigned at gunpoint. The man Hitler installed in his place was Fren Jalassi. He took his oath the next day. He pledged Hungary’s last resources to Germany. He voided the armistice.
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He ordered total mobilization even as Soviet forces were already crossing Hungarian borders, even as American bombers were hitting Budapest daily. His other priority was accelerating the killing. Aocross militia men swept through Budapest Jewish neighborhoods, dragging families from apartments, from basement, from safe houses.
Swedish diplomat Raul Wallenburgg was issuing protective passports at a desperate pace, personally pulling Jews off deportation trains. His efforts saved thousands, but he could not be everywhere. At the Danube embankment, Aerocross gangs carried out what history now calls the shoes on the Danube. Victims were ordered to remove their shoes. Shoes had value.
Shoes could be resold. Groups of three were tied together. The middle person was shot as they fell into the freezing river. The weight dragged the others in to drown. The shoes remained on the stone embankment. Today, 60 cast iron shoes are permanently fixed into the Danube embankment in Budapest, a memorial installed in 2005, designed by sculptor Kanto.
Each pair represents a person Salacy’s regime killed at that river. In 163 days, Arocross men murdered an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Jews inside Hungary. Tens of thousands more were forced onto death marches toward Austria in winter on foot without food. Those who collapsed were shot where they fell. Salacy never held a gun. He held a pen.
He signed the orders. He gave the speeches about Christian destiny. And each night he prayed. By December 1944, Soviet and Romanian forces had encircled Budapest. The siege, one of the longest urban sieges of World War II, lasting 102 days and killing over 38,000 civilians, had begun. Salasi did not stay.
On December 9th, he fled toward the Austrian border, taking Hungary’s historic crown jewels with him, including the thousand-year-old holy crown of St. Steven, which he had no legal authority to remove. Vienna by March 1945, Munich by April. By early May, he was hiding in Matsi, a quiet Alpine town in Austria. On May 6th, 1945, 2 days before Germany’s surrender.
American soldiers walked into Matsi. Shalasi did not resist. He surrendered quietly, then immediately claimed diplomatic immunity as a head of state. The Americans were not moved. During 5 months of US custody, he gave long theological answers to every question. He spoke about Hungarian destiny. He blamed Jewish financial power for the war.
US Army intelligence reports noted he appeared completely sincere, not performing, not softening himself. He simply believed everything he had done was righteous. On October 3rd, 1945, American forces transferred him to Hungary. He was flown to Budapest in chains and held in the basement of a building that had once been Arrow Cross Party headquarters.
The man who gave orders from upstairs was now imprisoned underground. The trial opened in February 1946 inside the Fence List Music Academy in Budapest, converted into a people’s tribunal because the city’s courts were overwhelmed with war crimes cases. There was no heating. Everyone in the room, judges, witnesses, prosecutors, wore heavy coats throughout. So did Shalice.
Charges, war crimes, and high treason. His defense was his belief. He told the court God had selected him to lead Hungary. He said Hungarism was divine instruction, not politics. When Danube massacre survivors stood and testified, he showed no reaction. When prosecutors read his personal telegrams to Berlin pledging loyalty to Hitler until the last Hungarian bullet, he did not deny them.
On March 1st, 1946, guilty, death by hanging. March 12th, 1946. Marco Street Prisonard, 8:00 a.m. Four men walked out that morning. Salesi Gabborvina, his interior minister. Koi Berikfi, his defense minister, the same man who had once praised him. Yojf Gara, the party’s chief ideologist.
All four had ordered, planned, or publicly justified the killings. A Catholic priest administered last rights to salacy before he was walked to the pole. The man who preached that persecuting Jews was Christian duty received communion one final time. The executioners did not use a standard drop gallows.
They use the Austrian pole method, an older technique where the condemned is stood against a vertical post, arms and legs tied, a rope looped from a hook at the top. When the steps beneath are pulled away, the body hangs, but with no drop, there is no neck break. Death comes from strangulation. Slowly, the arms and legs are tied for one reason only, to stop the body from fighting for air.
The official photographer raised his camera, but the second man, unauthorized, unnamed, had his concealed. Over the course of four executions, he took 32 photographs. Those photos vanished. Years later, they appeared at a US auction labeled unknown Hungarian. Researchers eventually confirmed through physical comparison and documentary records, it was Salasi.
He was 49 years old. He was buried in Budapest’s public cemetery. plot 298. But Hungarian secret police had one remaining fear. Arocross loyalists might locate the grave and turn it into a pilgrimage site. So they erased him. Historian Tamas Kovatch documented in 2008 that secret police altered the official burial records and registered the grave under a fabricated name, Fence Lucatch.
His birth records were altered to match. For over 60 years, the deception held. No shrine was ever built. He lay in a public cemetery under a name that never existed. One final extraordinary detail almost no one knows. On March 13th, 1946, the day after the execution, Hungary’s National Council of People’s Tribunals reviewed Salasi’s appeal for clemency and rejected it.
The justice minister forwarded the decision to President Zultan Tildi who signed the official death authorization on March 15th, 1946. Salacei had already been in the ground for 3 days. The legal paperwork authorizing his death arrived after he was already buried. The new Hungarian government wanted him gone so badly they did not wait for a signature.
Here is what this case leaves behind. He was not a coward. He earned combat medals in World War I. He was not a thief. He lived modestly his whole life. He was not a hypocrite in the ordinary sense. He genuinely believed what he preached. And he still signed orders sending Jewish families to a frozen river. He still built a regime that murdered thousands in 163 days.
He still went to his death convinced God was walking beside him. Evil does not always arrive screaming. Sometimes it arrives quietly in a clean uniform with a prayer on its lips and total certainty in its heart. Fence Salesi died slowly against a wooden pole in a Budapest prison yard on a cold March morning.
The photographs were hidden, the grave was renamed. The party was banned, but the case never fully closed. If this story hit you, if you believe history like this deserves to be told without filters, hit the like button right now. Subscribe to Untold War Story. Share this with someone who thinks they already know World War II.
The next case involves a regime that evaded justice for nearly three decades and the courtroom that finally caught up. Real stories, real verdicts, real footage. This was fen salacy.
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