Pál Prónay de Tótpróna et Blatnicza (November 2, 1874 – 1947 or 1948) was a Hungarian reactionary and paramilitary commander in the years following the First World War.

He is considered to have been the most brutal of the Hungarian National Army officers who led the White Terror that followed Hungary's brief 1919 Communist coup d'état.

Popular at first, Kun's so-called Hungarian Soviet Republic quickly lost the approval of the people, principally because of its failed economic policies, its inept military efforts to reclaim lost Hungarian lands from Czechoslovakia and Romania, and the Red Terror, in which Bolshevik-style gangs of young leather-clad thugs beat and murdered hundreds of the regime's “bourgeois” or counter-revolutionary opponents.

[1] An alternative government struggled to form in the south of Hungary and secure the approval of the Entente powers; military affairs were placed in the hands of the former commander of the Austro-Hungarian fleet, Admiral Miklos Horthy, who forged a counter-revolutionary force and called it the National Army.

After Kun's coup d'état, Prónay considered emigrating, but instead he traveled to Szeged in the south, where he joined Horthy, taking command of the admiral's bodyguards.

They sprinkled powdered sugar onto the battered and swollen faces of the men they bludgeoned, so as to attract hundreds of flies; they fastened leashes of string to their prisoners’ genitals and then whipped them to run in circles; and they tied their victims into stables and forced them to eat hay.

Prónay demanded, and received, suicidal loyalty to himself; soldiers were expected to follow the most brutal orders without hesitation, and those who had no stomach for these activities were expunged from the unit.

[1] The Soviet Republic collapsed in August 1919, as the invading Romanian army (supported by French occupational troops) reached the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

Furious with his former patron, whom he now condemned as a useless windbag, Prónay moved to the Austrian border, where he continued his atrocities, and proclaimed himself Supreme Leader of a buffer state, the Banat of Leitha.

Finally, in the fall of 1921, Prónay joined in the second failed attempt to oust Horthy and restore the Habsburg Charles IV, to the throne.

[1] The Prónay Battalion lingered for a few months more under the command of a junior officer, but the government officially dissolved the unit in January 1922 and expelled its members from the army.

In October 1944, as Budapest descended into chaos at the end of the Second World War, 69-year-old Prónay assembled a death squad and resumed his hunt for the old objects of his hatred, Hungarian Jews.

Written by Pál Prónay Bodó und Fogarassy:[1] Original diary in the archive of the National Security Service in Budapest, very difficult access for scholars.

Accessible for the public: Selection of his memoirs Pál Prónay, A hatában a Halál kaszál (übersetzt mit "Death mows at the border"), with preface and notes of Agnes Szabó and Ervin Pamlényi, Budapest 1963, especially about the White Terror Short English selections: Béla Bodó, Prónay, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, Nr.