decades, several former colleagues, including Lajos Varjassy, Oszkár Jászi and Mihály Károlyi himself regarded Friedrich as a traitor, who had joined the reactionary forces, abandoning the cause of the short-lived liberal democracy in Hungary. Following the resignation of the coalition government of Dénes Berinkey on 20 March 1919, which was caused by the intention of the Entente to further reduce the territory controlled by Hungary, the Social Democrats called the Communists to a coalition government, which gained power the next day, leading to the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Most prominent liberals left the country or took refuge in the countryside. However, Lovászy and Friedrich remained in the capital. In the face of the Hungarian-Romanian War, the new Soviet government took numerous hostages. On 19 April the authorities arrested Friedrich and sentenced him to death for counter-revolutionary activities. With the aid of People's Commissar Zsigmond Kunfi, a former member of the Károlyi Cabinet, he managed to have the sentence commuted and soon managed to escape with the aid of some of the workers of his factory; he remained in hiding until the end of the Béla Kun government on 1 August 1919. Coup d'état of 1919 During the period of his internal exile, Friedrich became associated with the White House Comrades Association (), a right-wing, counter-revolutionary group, which originated from a secret society of intellectuals founded by dentist and well-known anti-Semitic political figure András Csilléry in 1916. Initially sceptical, Friedrich refused to join them and worked closely with Lovászy and Bartha to bring together the formation of a new government after the expected collapse of the Kun regime. After attempting to negotiate with the new moderate Social Democrat prime minister, Gyula Peidl, in an attempt to replace his government with a coalition where the Socialists would be forced to the background and removed, Friedrich tried to gain support for his project from the representative of the Entente. Failing in both endeavours and fully aware of the conspiracies of the reactionaries, he decided to join the White House to control the plot. The first meeting of the conspirators took place on 1 August 1919 and it was decided that they would take power on 5 August, before the possibility that the prime minister could reach an agreement with the Entente which would reinforce his power or that he would agree to form a new coalition cabinet with the middle class