village south of Budapest. The entire Hungarian delegation was therefore invited to come and discuss the precise date when Soviet troops would leave Hungary. In response to this invitation, the elated and victorious Hungarians went to the Soviet headquarters. To their amazement they were suddenly surrounded, seized and imprisoned. Simultaneously a new all-out attack was ordered by Khrushchev against the whole Hungarian population.
The new Soviet attack was in the form of a massive invasion, It involved 5,000 tanks and a quarter of a million soldiers. They poured in from Czechoslovakia, Russia and Rumania. On Sunday, November 4, 1956, the radio station in Budapest pleaded:
“People of the world, listen to our call! Help us…. Please do not forget that this wild attack of Bolshevism will not stop. You may be the next victim. Save us! SOS! SOS!”{97}
A little later the voice said:
“People of the civilized world, in the name of liberty and solidarity, we are asking you to help. Our ship is sinking. The light vanishes. The shadows grow darker from hour to hour. Listen to our cry…. God be with you—and with us.”
That was all. The station went off the air.
As the student of history contemplates those tragic days, he cannot help but wonder: Where was the conscience of the Free West? Where was the U.N.? Where were the forces of NATO? What had happened to the whole fabric of gilded promises of the U.N. made at San Francisco in 1945:
“…to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.
“…to reaffirm faith in fundamental rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.
“…to establish… respect for the obligations arising from treaties.
“…to ensure that armed force shall not be used.”{98}
As it turned out, the massacre of tens of thousands of Hungarians finally smothered into oblivion the heroic Hungarian fight for freedom. Prime Minister Imre Nagy was executed. Most of the other leaders of the revolution were deported to Russia and never heard of again. In the U.N. Security Council America’s Ambassador Lodge introduced a resolution proposing that Russia be censured for this atrocious Hungarian attack.
This amazing and treacherous series of events was personally supervised by Nikita Khrushchev. Without any serious challenge whatever, he was allowed to carry them out in direct violation of the Yalta agreement, the Warsaw Pact and the first two articles of the U.N. Charter. It was the greatest opportunity the Western Bloc had ever had to show whether or not the mighty and strong had the courage to expel Russia and then put the high- sounding phrases of the U.N. to work.
Instead, the U.N. appointed a committee to gather the facts, prepare a report, and then submit it to the General Assembly.
This gave pro-Soviet forces an additional chance to pull sensitive strings in the U.N. and further obscure the vicious conquest of Hungary.
The U.N. Investigation of the Hungarian Revolution
The average American has no conception of the deep Penetration of the Communist conspiracy inside the United Nations.
A Danish diplomat, Povl Bang-Jensen, said he began feeling strong Communist pressures soon after he started serving as the deputy secretary of the U.N. committee which was investigating the Russian attack on Hungary.{99} He claimed pro-Soviet influence came sweeping down upon him from the Secretary General’s office and even from many of the committee members.
Bang-Jensen did not know where to turn for help; Finally he started writing protests both to the committee and the Secretary General. He pointed out errors in the report which would allow the Russians to discredit it. He said the Committee Chairman had refused to correct these errors. He stated that important facts were being eliminated which established the official responsibility of the Russian government for what had happened. He also noted that the committee was going soft in its treatment of Janos Kadar who headed up the new Communist puppet government in Hungary.
But most of all, Povl Bang-Jensen was outraged when the Secretary General demanded that he reveal the secret list of Hungarian witnesses. He had been authorized in writing to tell the witnesses that their names would never be disclosed since this would bring cruel and immediate reprisal on their families in Hungary. Bang-Jensen stood by this commitment. He declared that turning over the names to the U.N. Secretariat would permit possible leaks to the Russians. The word was already getting around the U.N. that Russian agents were offering extravagant bribes to anyone who would get them the list.
Suddenly Bang-Jensen found the U.N. Secretariat and the investigating committee attacking him personally. Instead of dealing with the issues, high U.N. officials began describing Povl Bang-Jensen as “mentally ill.”
Three leading American employees in the U.N. participated in the attack on Bang-Jensen. They were Andrew Wellington Cordier, a former associate of Alger Hiss, who had become No. 2 man in the U.N.; Ernest A. Gross who had tried to get the United States to allow recognition of Red China; and Dr. Ralph Bunche, U.N. Under-Secretary, who was one of the first to put the “mentally ill” label on Bang-Jensen in an official memorandum.
Gradually Povl Bang-Jensen felt himself going down under the avalanche of opposition. When the U.N. officials could not force him to disclose the secret list of Hungarian witnesses, he was ordered to burn them in the presence of a U.N. representative. This he did. Then they fired him. Povl Bang-Jensen was discharged by Dag Hammarskjold on December 4, 1957. Nevertheless the U.N. pressure against Bang-Jensen as a mentally-ill person continued. Derogatory reports from the U.N. prevented him from securing several highly important positions.
For some time Bang-Jensen had also feared the possibility of physical harm. He had been a Danish underground fighter against the Nazis and Communists in World War II and was familiar with the technique of doing away with an enemy by making it look like a suicide. Therefore he wrote the following note to his wife on November 30, 1957:
“Under no circumstances whatsoever would I ever commit suicide. This would be contrary to my whole nature and to my religious convictions. If any note was found to the opposite effect in my handwriting, it would be a fake.”
It was Thanksgiving Day, 1959, that the body of Povl Bang-Jensen was found in a secluded area two miles from his home with a bullet hole in his head. A pistol and scribbled note were by his side.
He had left home 72 hours earlier to catch a bus. The coroner found he had been dead only a few hours. What had happened during that tragic interval of two days or more while Bang-Jensen was still alive?
Professional investigators suspected murder. If so, it was carefully executed to look like suicide. And suicide was the final, official verdict. Many remained unconvinced.
But by this time the U.N. investigation of the Hungarian Revolution had long since been completed. The expurgated, distorted and watered down report had been turned over to the U.N. and officially accepted by the General Assembly.
Inside Khrushchev’s Russia
