Bombing of Kassa

The bombing of Kassa took place on 26 June 1941, when still unidentified aircraft conducted an airstrike on the city of Kassa, then a part of Hungary, today Košice in Slovakia. This attack became the pretext for the government of Hungary to declare war on the Soviet Union the next day, 27 June.

On 26 June 1941, four days after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in violation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression treaty, three unidentified planes of apparently Soviet origin bombed the city, killing and wounding over a dozen people and causing minor material damage.

The true identity of the attacking nation has never been established. The official explanation preferred by Soviet historians was the idea of a feigned attack by Germany to provoke Hungary into attacking the Soviet Union, employing Soviet planes captured on conquered airfields. Another possibility is that the Soviet bombers mistook Kassa for a nearby city in the First Slovak Republic, which was already at war with the Soviet Union. Colonel Ádám Krúdy, the commander of the Kassa military airfield, identified the attackers as German Heinkel He-111 bombers in his official report but was ordered to keep silent about it.

Three renowned Hungarian aviation historians, Iván Pataki, László Rozsos and Gyula Sárhidai have later proven that the attack was actually not a false flag operation but Soviet aircraft attacked the city by mistake. At the time Slovakia (occupied by Germany and governed by a puppet government) was already at war with the Soviet Union and the Germans set up a radio station in the city of Prešov (Eperjes) just about 30 kilometers north of Kassa. The two cities are not only close to each other but also look very similar from the air. All three bombers aimed at the post office building which had a large radio antenna on its roof. After releasing a total of 29 bombs, one plane dropped a single one outside the city which did not explode. It was a 105 kg Soviet bomb. Ádám Krúdy has most probably misidentified three Soviet TB-3 bombers as German He-111s which indeed looked similarly. His report about sighting German planes was immediately dismissed, but not "hushed up" as suggested by post-war Communist propaganda which favored the theory of a German false flag operation to lure Hungary into the war over a genuine Soviet bombing raid.

After the incident Hungary declared itself at war with the Soviet Union.