The name of Povl Bang-Jensen, a Danish diplomat and international lawyer, is inextricably linked to the aftermath of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, as he sacrificed his life to protect Hungarian refugees while serving as Deputy Secretary of the United Nations Special Committee. After the Soviet suppression of the uprising, the UN established a commission of inquiry to investigate the events, and Bang-Jensen played a key role in its work. In New York, Vienna, and London, he interviewed more than 110 Hungarian refugees—including ordinary workers, students, and prominent politicians—who had firsthand knowledge of the revolution and the reprisals. Most of the witnesses were willing to testify only on the condition that their identities remain completely confidential, as they feared retaliation from the Soviet and Hungarian secret services, as well as the persecution of family members who had remained at home.
Bang-Jensen considered his promise to the witnesses a sacred duty, so when UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld demanded that the secret list be handed over, the Danish diplomat flatly refused. He feared that, through Soviet agents who had infiltrated the UN bureaucracy, the list would immediately fall into the hands of the KGB and the Kádár regime. At the end of the dramatic conflict with the UN leadership, in January 1958, the diplomat publicly burned the documents and records that could be used to identify the witnesses on the roof of the UN headquarters in New York, in the presence of an official committee. With this courageous act, he permanently protected the Hungarian revolutionaries, but it also brought his diplomatic career to an end: because of his defiance of bureaucracy and the political interests of the great powers, disciplinary proceedings were initiated against him, and he was dismissed from his post that very summer.
His unwavering support for the Hungarian cause ultimately led to a tragic fate. A few days before the UN General Assembly was set to put the Hungarian issue back on the agenda, on November 25, 1959, Povl Bang-Jensen was found dead in a New York park with a gunshot wound to the head. Although the official investigation ruled it a suicide, the strange circumstances surrounding his death—such as the fact that, despite being left-handed, he was shot in the right temple, or that he had previously stated in writing that no matter what happened to him, he would never take his own life—continue to justify suspicions of political assassination to this day. For his heroism and loyalty to the Hungarian nation, Povl Bang-Jensen is revered in Hungary as the Danish martyr of the revolution; his memory is honored by a street named after him in Budapest, a bust in Enying, and a bust in the lobby of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is wreathed every year in the presence of the diplomatic corps.