Count Pál János Ede Teleki de Szék (1 November 1879 – 3 April 1941) was a Hungarian politician who served as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1920 to 1921 and from 1939 to 1941.

Teleki tried to keep Hungary neutral during the early stages of the Second World War despite cooperating with Nazi Germany to regain Hungarian territory lost in the Treaty of Trianon.

When Teleki learned that German troops had entered Hungary en route to invade Yugoslavia, effectively killing hopes of Hungarian neutrality, he committed suicide.

On a sailing cruise, he ignored a reprimand from his Scoutmaster, Fritz M. de Molnár, for failure to carry out a small but necessary exercise of seamanship.

After the victory of the Aster Revolution, he retreated from public life and stayed in Switzerland during the period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

In the first elections following the victory of the counter-revolution in 1920, he won a parliamentary mandate in the city center district of Szeged representing the Christian National Union Party.

Rejoining the government in 1938 as Minister of Education, Teleki supported Germany's take over of Czechoslovakia with the hopes that the dismemberment of Hungary completed in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon would be undone.

On 16 February 1939, Hungarian Prime Minister Béla Imrédy, who had been known as a pro-fascist, anti-Semitic leader, was forced from office after it was revealed that he was of Jewish descent.

As a result of Teleki's refusal to co-operate with Germany, during the autumn of 1939 and the summer of 1940 more than 100,000 Polish soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them Jewish, escaped from Poland and crossed the border into Hungary.

Germany made economic demands on Hungary to support the war, and offered to repay with arms deliveries, but because of developments in the Balkans, they were routed to the Romanian Army instead.

[18] In 1940, Germany used the Soviet Union's imminent movement to take over Bessarabia as an excuse to prepare to occupy the vital Romanian oil fields.

[20] Teleki believed that only a Danubian Federation could help the Central and Eastern European states (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria) escape Germany's domination.

In the book, Transylvania The Land Beyond the Forest Louis C. Cornish[21][22] described how Teleki, under constant surveillance by the German Gestapo during 1941, sent a secret communication to contacts in America.

Hungary, he emphasized, stood ready to join in such collaboration, provided it was firmly based on the complete equality of all the members states.

[23]In 1941, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson supported the statement of others: "I took from Count Teleki's office a monograph which he had written upon the structure of European nations.

In the late evening on 26/27 March 1941, Air Force Generals Dušan Simović and Borivoje Mirković had executed a bloodless coup d'état, refuted signatures on the alliance and accepted a British guarantee of security instead.

Döme Sztójay, the Hungarian ambassador to Germany, was sent home by air with a message for Horthy: Yugoslavia will be annihilated, for she has just renounced publicly the policy of understanding with the Axis.

[24]Teleki had signed a non-aggression pact, the Treaty of Eternal Friendship, with Yugoslavia on 12 December 1940, only five months earlier, and would not assent to assisting with the invasion.

[25] Teleki's government chose a middle ground, opting to remain out of the German-Yugoslav conflict unless either Hungarian minorities were in danger or Yugoslavia collapsed.

[26] On 3 April 1941, Teleki received a telegram from the Hungarian minister in London that British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had threatened to break diplomatic relations with Hungary if it did not actively resist the passage of German troops across its territory and to declare war if it attacked Yugoslavia.

He could allow German troops to cross Hungarian territory even though it would betray Yugoslavia and lead the Allies to declare war on Hungary.

[38] Already after the short lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (21 March – 1 August 1919), whose leaders, concomitantly with their middle class origins, were often of Jewish parentage, and even more after the worldwide depression struck in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which conversely was associated with Jewish wealth and financial power, the country's Jews were made scapegoats for all of Hungary's economic, political and social plights.

It restated and reinforced the Numerus Clausus act of 1920 and extended its provisions (representation according to proportion of population) to the business world, regulating even the number of Jewish employees (one in five or two in nine maximum, depending on the size).

As a result of the laws established during Teleki's tenure, 15,000–35,000 Jews in the re-acquired part of Czechoslovakia, who had difficulty in proving their former Hungarian citizenship, were deported.

[49] Teleki devoted a great deal of energy and political savvy to the passage of the second anti-Jewish bill, stating that he pushed it not for tactical reasons but because of his deep personal convictions.

[51] Although the laws of the Labor Service System were put in effect during Teleki's lifetime, they were radically enforced only after Hungary had entered the war.

At least 27,000 Jewish forced laborers died before Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, after which the Hungarian state authorities in close cooperation with the German "Sonderkommando" of Adolf Eichmann[53] rapidly organized and implemented the mass deportation of Jews to the death camps.

[47] While it is true that tens of thousands of young Hungarians were conscripted into military service at the same time and sent to fight on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, often ill-equipped and badly trained, and bore the brunt of the miseries of the German defeat, the Hungarian participation in the Eastern campaign was voluntary,[54] and the suffering of its soldiers was war induced and not deliberately inflicted as with the Jewish labor battalions.

[55] In 2004, the Teleki Pál Memorial Committee, initially supported by Budapest mayor Gábor Demszky, proposed erecting a statue by Tibor Rieger [hu] in his honor on the 63rd anniversary of his death in front of the palace on Castle Hill where he governed and, finally, committed suicide.

[58] Balatonboglár had during World War II been host to thousands of Polish refugees who opened in that town one of only two secondary schools for Poles in Europe during 1939–1944.