[2] The left-wing emigrant newspaper Bécsi Magyar Újság claimed in a 1921 article that Héjjas, according to an alleged police file, committed embezzlement against his mistress, a much older Jewish woman in 1911.

[2] Héjjas left Albania and returned to Austria-Hungary in 1916 to join the Austro-Hungarian Armed Forces as a volunteer with dozens of Bosnian and Albanian militiamen.

Héjjas and his companions proposed to establish national guards along the eastern and southern borders of the disintegrating Kingdom of Hungary, but the Károlyi government pursued a pacifist policy on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

Under his leadership, 350 reserve officers gathered in Kecskemét on 19 November 1918, to demand the government to pay their substantial cash allowance and integrate them to the labor market.

[6] Following the formation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in the spring of 1919, Héjjas began to organize his detachment – its core consisted of former members of the Aviation Troops – in his family's estate in the countryside near Kecskemét to overthrow the Communist government led by Béla Kun.

[6] In the presence of approximately 300 men, Héjjas issued the so-called Kecskemét Manifesto, an important document of the Hungarian radical right-wing ideology in the interwar period.

Héjjas rejected the Soviet Republic and the former pacifist policy too, intended to protect the "thousand-year borders" against the neighboring countries and demanded the division of large estates in favor of the WW1 veterans.

The insurgents planned to take over the military base located on the outskirts of Kecskemét, occupy the weapons warehouse in Orgovány, and then remove the Communists in the local government from power.

The rebellion was quickly suppressed, many leaders fled and hid in the surrounding farmsteads, including Iván Héjjas, Mihály Francia Kiss and Béla Liszka.

Becoming the de facto military governor of Kecskemét and the Danube–Tisza Interfluve, Héjjas ordered the internment and execution of those who allegedly collaborated with the former Communist regime.

[11] In October–November 1919, the Héjjas detachment murdered approximately 100 persons (including six police officers), moreover looting of their properties, whose participation in the Red Terror was not proven at all, according to an investigation conducted by Győző Drozdy, a member of parliament.

In late 1919, the police chief of Kecskemét forwarded a document to government commissioner Gedeon Ráday, according to which Héjjas' paramilitary organization was responsible for the death or disappearance of 50 people in the area.

[12] Héjjas and his militia (including Mihály Francia Kiss) usually transferred the abducted persons from the prison of Kecskemét to the forest of Orgovány, where they were tortured and executed.

The detachment usually organized antisemitic pogroms in the region, the most notorious is the one in Izsák on 17 November 1919, where hundreds of Jews were physically assaulted, robbed and forcibly displaced.

Justice minister István Bárczy ordered a preliminary investigation of the crimes within the National Army, but Miklós Horthy and the military command refused his request.

[17] Since his range of motion gradually narrowed in the Danube–Tisza Interfluve, Héjjas and several of his soldiers moved to Western Transdanubia to join Prónay's efforts to hinder the incorporation of those territories (later known as Burgenland) to the First Austrian Republic, which Hungary had lost in accordance with the Treaty of Trianon.

The latter was young and ambitious military officer who was not determined to dedicate his life and career to the isolating Prónay – who aimed to overthrow the Hungarian government – and his crude idea of an independent Burgenland.

After Charles IV recruited an army, Héjjas and his soldiers fled Western Hungary and swore allegiance to Regent Miklós Horthy.

[18] Under social pressure, the Hungarian government entrusted Deputy Crown Prosecutor Albert Váry to investigate the crimes committed by nationalist paramilitary units during the White Terror.

Although Váry was soon dismissed from his position due to the right-wing parties' distrust, the newly appointed Prime Minister István Bethlen was committed to the liquidation of paramilitary units and their integration into the regular army.

In his report, Váry stated the alleged communist sympathies and/or Jewish ancestry of the victims, for instance in the case of Adolf Léderer and three residents of Izsák – Zoltán Pánczél, Sándor Beck and Árpád Schmiedt – was merely a pretense to get their property, and these were ordinary robbery-murders.

Regarding the murders in Izsák, Héjjas was questioned only as a witness during a trial in June 1922, despite the fact that two perpetrators – János Zbona and Mihály Danics – claimed that the three men were killed on his orders.

[20] His role in Western Hungary and his pro-Horthy standpoint during the king's attempt to retake his throne saved Héjjas' paramilitary and political career, while Prónay and Gyula Ostenburg-Moravek were marginalized.

The Alföld Brigade, the ÉME and others were integrated under the supervision of the ministry-controlled Office of National Labour Protection, but the social network connections remained within the movements and lived on in the various departments of the Ministry of the Interior.

According to the memoir of Mátyás Pirity, Héjjas threatened the terminated pilots with a statutory court in view of the Second World War.

[29] During the end phase of the WW2, Horthy appointed Héjjas to supervise the organization of an irregular paramilitary unit of 5,000 people in the summer of 1943, which they intended to deploy against the Wehrmacht after a successful withdrawal from the Axis powers.

[23] Before the advancing Soviet Army, Héjjas fled from Hungary dressed as a Spanish Franciscan friar called Father Esteban and moved to Graz, Austria (then part of Nazi Germany) in late 1944 or early 1945.

[30] In his absence, the People's Court of Hungary sentenced him to death in August 1949 for his eminent role in the 1919–1921 White Terror (primarily the mass murders at the forest of Orgovány).

His ashes were transferred to the United States by his relatives in 1971, where he was buried in the Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery in North Hollywood, Los Angeles under the pseudonym Padre Esteban.

[31] They were engaged since 1920, but their marriage took place only in November 1938, after, according to his old oath, Héjjas intended to marry only after the first annexed territory since the Treaty of Trianon (i.e. Carpathian Ruthenia under the First Vienna Award) had returned to Hungary.