State Protection Authority
Encyclopedia
The State Protection Authority ( or ÁVH) was the secret police
force of Hungary
from 1945 until 1956. It was conceived of as an external appendage of the Soviet Union
's secret police forces, but attained an indigenous reputation for brutality
during a series of purge
s beginning in 1948, intensifying in 1949 and ending in 1953. In 1953 Joseph Stalin
died, and Imre Nagy
(a moderate reformer) was appointed Prime Minister of Hungary. Under Nagy's first government from 1953 to 1955, the ÁVH was gradually reined in.
The subsequent government of János Kádár
didn't want to resurrect the ÁVH under this name after 1956 (Kádár was tortured by the ÁVH in the '50s), yet it flourished in the system of the BM, or Ministry of the Interior. This should be considered in the light of the use of the Soviet security apparatus directly in Hungary after the 1956 revolution, and in preparation for the trial of Nagy and "his accomplices". Between 1956 and 1963 Kádár, a natural opportunist, fought an inner party battle against hardline Stalinists, although he accepted the services of many cruel former AVH torturers. Kádár's victory was signalled in 1963 by a general amnesty
for the 1956 revolutionaries, an indication of the absence of a political police. Hungary would go on to be the only Warsaw Pact
country without a formal intelligence service, since all intelligence and espionage functions were vested in the AVH, and later: the Ministry of Interior.
s, like the system used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi
) in the German Democratic Republic
.
The investigation network was supplemented with a mechanism of secret arrests, followed by extensive periods of torture
(lasting between 3 and 18 months). When the apparatus had extracted confessions
of varying quality from a prison
er, the State's system of public procurator
s and court
s would be called in, in order to make a ruling on the sentence
. This was the norm of operation for the ÁVH, and was only diverged from in matters of utmost state security; for example, the illegal arrest and indefinite solitary detention of the Communist Party of Great Britain
operative Edith Bone
. Despite the forced nature of confessions, retraction
s at trial were not considered a danger to the process, due to the obvious threat of continued torture during a recess of the trial.
. On April 7, 1953, early in the morning, Miksa Domonkos, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Budapest was kidnapped by ÁVH officials to extract "confession
s". Preparations for a show trial
started in Budapest in 1953 to prove that Raoul Wallenberg
had not been dragged off in 1945 to the Soviet Union but was the victim of cosmopolitan
Zionists. For the purposes of this show trial, two more Jewish leaders – László Benedek and Lajos Stöckler – as well as two would-be "eyewitnesses" – Pál Szalai
and Károly Szabó
– were arrested and interrogated by torture.
The last people to meet Wallenberg in Budapest were Ottó Fleischmann, Károly Szabó, and Pál Szalai, who were invited to a supper at the Swedish Embassy building in Gyopár street on January 12, 1945. The next day, January 13, Wallenberg contacted the Russians. By 1953, Ottó Fleischmann had left Hungary, working as a physician
in Vienna
.
Károly Szabó was captured on the street on April 8, 1953 and arrested without any legal procedure. His family had no news of him throughout the following six months. A secret trial
was conducted against him of which no official record is available to date. After six months of interrogation, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.
The idea that the "murderers of Wallenberg" were Budapest Zionists was primarily supported by Hungarian Communist
leader Ernő Gerő
, which is shown by a note sent by him to First Secretary Mátyás Rákosi
. The show trial was then initiated in Moscow, following Stalin's anti-Zionist campaign. After the death of Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria
, the preparations for the trial were stopped and the arrested persons were released. Miksa Domonkos spent a week in hospital and died shortly afterwards at home, mainly due to the torture he had been subject to.
s were imprisoned in ÁVH-run concentration camps. These camps were mixed and varied. Early camps tended to be cruder and crueler. In particular, the status of ex-party members varied. In camps prior to 1953 they were more harshly treated than other prisoners. After 1953, ex-party members were a virtual aristocracy
within prisons. Additionally, prior to 1953 certain camps had as their goal the eventual death of inmates due to overwork and maltreatment. In a number of cases, torture was an essential part of camp life and discipline.
Imre Nagy's first government from 1953 to 1955 vastly improved conditions in the camps, and halted the efforts to exterminate political prisoners.
s. In two cases, the ÁVH was given the privilege of leading an attack on undesired elements throughout Hungary. In 1948 the Roman Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty was tried and imprisoned. In 1949, the ÁVH arrested Hungarian Communist Party
member László Rajk
, who was then tried and executed for nationalism
and Titoism
in a show trial that signified to the international communist movement that Yugoslavia was now a threat. (Ironically, László Rajk was the man who had organised the ÁVH.)
, elements of the insurgents tracked down and killed both known and suspected ÁVH officers and informants. When the Revolution began, a crowd of some thousand people attacked the police headquarters in Budapest
, shouting slogan
s as "tear down the star!" and "free the prisoners!", referring to the enormous red star
that stood on the building's roof
, a symbol of socialism
, and to the many prisoners kept inside. Fearing for the lives of both himself and his officers, the chief of the police let the crowd into the building, allowing them to take any political prisoner
s they wanted.
During and after the siege of the Hungarian Working People's Party headquarters (in Republic Square, Köztársaság tér), some members of the ÁVH were lynched, a fact later extensively used in party propaganda to back up the claim that the revolution was of a "fascistic, anti-Semitic and reactionary" nature.
militia planned a series of reprisals against ÁVH officers, informants, and on a few occasions against ordinary Communist-party members caught up in the revolution. József Dudás' militia is often considered a far-right group, but others claim he was a communist; either way, his militia's violence is not contested.
On October 29, in the second week of the revolution, the Dudás militia attacked the headquarters of the secret police in Budapest, massacring the ÁVH inside. This event was well documented by both western and eastern journalists and photographers, and constituted the primary evidence against Imre Nagy and other members of his cabinet in the White Books.
A Western eyewitness said:
After Dudás' militia assaulted the building, the surrounding crowd lynched
a number of ÁVH officers. Highly visible in photographs of this attack are the party's paybooks displayed on to the corpses, demonstrating that ÁVH soldiers received at least 10 times the wage
s of a manual worker.
intervened in the revolution to support the government, ÁVH officers carried out brutal reprisal
s against those who had killed their comrades. The ÁVH generally targeted all revolutionaries, and received significant assistance from the Soviet Union's security apparatus, who arrested the Nagy government, General Pál Maléter
, and deported thousands of students and workers to the Soviet Union.
left it, the building under the address 60 Andrássy Road
became the ÁVH Headquarters. The building is now a museum called The House of Terror
, commemorating the victims of both political systems.
Secret police
Secret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy and beyond the law to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian political regime....
force of Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
from 1945 until 1956. It was conceived of as an external appendage of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
's secret police forces, but attained an indigenous reputation for brutality
Brutality
Brutality or brutal may refer to:* Brutality , an American death metal band* Brutality , a 1912 film* Brutality , a finishing move in the video game Mortal Kombat* Brutalist architecture, an architectural style...
during a series of purge
Purge
In history, religion, and political science, a purge is the removal of people who are considered undesirable by those in power from a government, from another organization, or from society as a whole. Purges can be peaceful or violent; many will end with the imprisonment or exile of those purged,...
s beginning in 1948, intensifying in 1949 and ending in 1953. In 1953 Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
died, and Imre Nagy
Imre Nagy
Imre Nagy was a Hungarian communist politician who was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Hungary on two occasions...
(a moderate reformer) was appointed Prime Minister of Hungary. Under Nagy's first government from 1953 to 1955, the ÁVH was gradually reined in.
History of the ÁVH
This is a summary of the organisations acting as political police between 1945 and 1956.- 1945, BudapestBudapestBudapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...
Police Main Command Political Department, (Budapesti Főkapitányság Politikai Rendészeti Osztálya, PRO) - 1946, Hungarian State Police State Protection Department, (Magyar Államrendőrség Államvédelmi Osztálya, ÁVO)
- 1950, State Protection Authority, (Államvédelmi Hatóság, ÁVH)
- 1956, the agency was abolished by the revolutionary government of Imre NagyImre NagyImre Nagy was a Hungarian communist politician who was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Hungary on two occasions...
.
The subsequent government of János Kádár
János Kádár
János Kádár was a Hungarian communist leader and the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, presiding over the country from 1956 until his forced retirement in 1988. His thirty-two year term as General Secretary makes Kádár the longest ruler of the People's Republic of Hungary...
didn't want to resurrect the ÁVH under this name after 1956 (Kádár was tortured by the ÁVH in the '50s), yet it flourished in the system of the BM, or Ministry of the Interior. This should be considered in the light of the use of the Soviet security apparatus directly in Hungary after the 1956 revolution, and in preparation for the trial of Nagy and "his accomplices". Between 1956 and 1963 Kádár, a natural opportunist, fought an inner party battle against hardline Stalinists, although he accepted the services of many cruel former AVH torturers. Kádár's victory was signalled in 1963 by a general amnesty
Amnesty
Amnesty is a legislative or executive act by which a state restores those who may have been guilty of an offense against it to the positions of innocent people, without changing the laws defining the offense. It includes more than pardon, in as much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the...
for the 1956 revolutionaries, an indication of the absence of a political police. Hungary would go on to be the only Warsaw Pact
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance , or more commonly referred to as the Warsaw Pact, was a mutual defense treaty subscribed to by eight communist states in Eastern Europe...
country without a formal intelligence service, since all intelligence and espionage functions were vested in the AVH, and later: the Ministry of Interior.
Policy and methods
While the security apparatus were operating, they supported the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) directly, with little reference made to Government norms. This support was primarily through the secret gathering of intelligence, primarily through a vast network of informantInformant
An informant is a person who provides privileged information about a person or organization to an agency. The term is usually used within the law enforcement world, where they are officially known as confidential or criminal informants , and can often refer pejoratively to the supply of information...
s, like the system used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi
Stasi
The Ministry for State Security The Ministry for State Security The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), commonly known as the Stasi (abbreviation , literally State Security), was the official state security service of East Germany. The MfS was headquartered...
) in the German Democratic Republic
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...
.
The investigation network was supplemented with a mechanism of secret arrests, followed by extensive periods of torture
Torture
Torture is the act of inflicting severe pain as a means of punishment, revenge, forcing information or a confession, or simply as an act of cruelty. Throughout history, torture has often been used as a method of political re-education, interrogation, punishment, and coercion...
(lasting between 3 and 18 months). When the apparatus had extracted confessions
Confession (legal)
In the law of criminal evidence, a confession is a statement by a suspect in crime which is adverse to that person. Some authorities, such as Black's Law Dictionary, define a confession in more narrow terms, e.g...
of varying quality from a prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...
er, the State's system of public procurator
Public procurator
A public procurator is an officer of a state charged with both the investigation and prosecution of crime. The office is a feature of a civil law inquisitorial rather than common law adversarial system of law and is usually found in current or former communist states...
s and court
Court
A court is a form of tribunal, often a governmental institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance with the rule of law...
s would be called in, in order to make a ruling on the sentence
Sentence (law)
In law, a sentence forms the final explicit act of a judge-ruled process, and also the symbolic principal act connected to his function. The sentence can generally involve a decree of imprisonment, a fine and/or other punishments against a defendant convicted of a crime...
. This was the norm of operation for the ÁVH, and was only diverged from in matters of utmost state security; for example, the illegal arrest and indefinite solitary detention of the Communist Party of Great Britain
Communist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain was the largest communist party in Great Britain, although it never became a mass party like those in France and Italy. It existed from 1920 to 1991.-Formation:...
operative Edith Bone
Edith Bone
Edith Hajós Bone was an aristocrat and medical professional, journalist, and translator who later became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain....
. Despite the forced nature of confessions, retraction
Retraction
A retraction is a public statement, by the author of an earlier statement, that withdraws, cancels, refutes, diametrically reverses the original statement or ceases and desists from publishing the original statement...
s at trial were not considered a danger to the process, due to the obvious threat of continued torture during a recess of the trial.
1953 Wallenberg show trial preparations in Hungary
ÁVH actions were not subject to judicial reviewJudicial review
Judicial review is the doctrine under which legislative and executive actions are subject to review by the judiciary. Specific courts with judicial review power must annul the acts of the state when it finds them incompatible with a higher authority...
. On April 7, 1953, early in the morning, Miksa Domonkos, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Budapest was kidnapped by ÁVH officials to extract "confession
Confession
This article is for the religious practice of confessing one's sins.Confession is the acknowledgment of sin or wrongs...
s". Preparations for a show trial
Show trial
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as...
started in Budapest in 1953 to prove that Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish businessman, diplomat and humanitarian. He is widely celebrated for his successful efforts to rescue thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary from the Holocaust, during the later stages of World War II...
had not been dragged off in 1945 to the Soviet Union but was the victim of cosmopolitan
Rootless cosmopolitan
Rootless cosmopolitan was a Soviet euphemism widely used during Joseph Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign of 1948–1953, which culminated in the "exposure" of the alleged Doctors' plot...
Zionists. For the purposes of this show trial, two more Jewish leaders – László Benedek and Lajos Stöckler – as well as two would-be "eyewitnesses" – Pál Szalai
Pál Szalai
Pál Szalai also spelled Pál Szalay and anglicized as Paul Sterling was a high ranking member of the Budapest police force and the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party during World War II....
and Károly Szabó
Károly Szabó
Károly Szabó was an employee of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest from 1944 to 1945. He was a supporter of Raoul Wallenberg and had a significant role in making contact with the representatives of the Hungarian police and other state officials...
– were arrested and interrogated by torture.
The last people to meet Wallenberg in Budapest were Ottó Fleischmann, Károly Szabó, and Pál Szalai, who were invited to a supper at the Swedish Embassy building in Gyopár street on January 12, 1945. The next day, January 13, Wallenberg contacted the Russians. By 1953, Ottó Fleischmann had left Hungary, working as a physician
Physician
A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...
in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
.
Károly Szabó was captured on the street on April 8, 1953 and arrested without any legal procedure. His family had no news of him throughout the following six months. A secret trial
Secret trial
A secret trial is a trial that is not open to the public, nor generally reported in the news, especially any in-trial proceedings. Generally no official record of the case or the judge's verdict is made available. Often there is no indictment...
was conducted against him of which no official record is available to date. After six months of interrogation, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.
The idea that the "murderers of Wallenberg" were Budapest Zionists was primarily supported by Hungarian Communist
People's Republic of Hungary
The People's Republic of Hungary or Hungarian People's Republic was the official state name of Hungary from 1949 to 1989 during its Communist period under the guidance of the Soviet Union. The state remained in existence until 1989 when opposition forces consolidated in forcing the regime to...
leader Ernő Gerő
Erno Gero
Ernő Gerő was a Hungarian Communist Party leader in the period after World War II and briefly in 1956 the most powerful man in Hungary as first secretary of its ruling communist party.-Life and career:...
, which is shown by a note sent by him to First Secretary Mátyás Rákosi
Mátyás Rákosi
Mátyás Rákosi was a Hungarian communist politician. He was born as Mátyás Rosenfeld, in present-day Serbia...
. The show trial was then initiated in Moscow, following Stalin's anti-Zionist campaign. After the death of Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....
, the preparations for the trial were stopped and the arrested persons were released. Miksa Domonkos spent a week in hospital and died shortly afterwards at home, mainly due to the torture he had been subject to.
Concentration camps
Following sentence, political prisonerPolitical prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....
s were imprisoned in ÁVH-run concentration camps. These camps were mixed and varied. Early camps tended to be cruder and crueler. In particular, the status of ex-party members varied. In camps prior to 1953 they were more harshly treated than other prisoners. After 1953, ex-party members were a virtual aristocracy
Aristocracy
Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...
within prisons. Additionally, prior to 1953 certain camps had as their goal the eventual death of inmates due to overwork and maltreatment. In a number of cases, torture was an essential part of camp life and discipline.
Imre Nagy's first government from 1953 to 1955 vastly improved conditions in the camps, and halted the efforts to exterminate political prisoners.
International activities
The ÁVH also assisted the Soviet sphere security apparatus by staging show trialShow trial
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as...
s. In two cases, the ÁVH was given the privilege of leading an attack on undesired elements throughout Hungary. In 1948 the Roman Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty was tried and imprisoned. In 1949, the ÁVH arrested Hungarian Communist Party
Hungarian Communist Party
The Communist Party of Hungary , renamed Hungarian Communist Party in 1945, was founded on November 24, 1918, and was in power in Hungary briefly from March to August 1919 under Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The communist government was overthrown by the Romanian Army and driven...
member László Rajk
László Rajk
László Rajk was a Hungarian Communist; politician, former Minister of Interior and former Minister of Foreign Affairs...
, who was then tried and executed for nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
and Titoism
Titoism
Titoism is a variant of Marxism–Leninism named after Josip Broz Tito, leader of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, primarily used to describe the specific socialist system built in Yugoslavia after its refusal of the 1948 Resolution of the Cominform, when the Communist Party of...
in a show trial that signified to the international communist movement that Yugoslavia was now a threat. (Ironically, László Rajk was the man who had organised the ÁVH.)
The ÁVH in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956
During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution1956 Hungarian Revolution
The Hungarian Revolution or Uprising of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the government of the People's Republic of Hungary and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956....
, elements of the insurgents tracked down and killed both known and suspected ÁVH officers and informants. When the Revolution began, a crowd of some thousand people attacked the police headquarters in Budapest
Budapest
Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...
, shouting slogan
Slogan
A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a political, commercial, religious and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose. The word slogan is derived from slogorn which was an Anglicisation of the Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm . Slogans vary from the written and the...
s as "tear down the star!" and "free the prisoners!", referring to the enormous red star
Red star
A red star, five-pointed and filled, is an important ideological and religious symbol which has been used for various purposes, such as: state emblems, flags, monuments, ornaments, and logos.- Symbol of communism :...
that stood on the building's roof
Roof
A roof is the covering on the uppermost part of a building. A roof protects the building and its contents from the effects of weather. Structures that require roofs range from a letter box to a cathedral or stadium, dwellings being the most numerous....
, a symbol of socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
, and to the many prisoners kept inside. Fearing for the lives of both himself and his officers, the chief of the police let the crowd into the building, allowing them to take any political prisoner
Political prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....
s they wanted.
During and after the siege of the Hungarian Working People's Party headquarters (in Republic Square, Köztársaság tér), some members of the ÁVH were lynched, a fact later extensively used in party propaganda to back up the claim that the revolution was of a "fascistic, anti-Semitic and reactionary" nature.
Persecution by József Dudás' militia
Attacks on the ÁVH only became a significant activity as informal truces developed between the student-controlled combat organisations and the Soviet troops in Budapest. Freed from the necessity of immediate combat, the József DudásJózsef Dudás
József Dudás , a Romanian/Hungarian politician and resistance fighter, was born in Marosvásárhely in Austria-Hungary ....
militia planned a series of reprisals against ÁVH officers, informants, and on a few occasions against ordinary Communist-party members caught up in the revolution. József Dudás' militia is often considered a far-right group, but others claim he was a communist; either way, his militia's violence is not contested.
On October 29, in the second week of the revolution, the Dudás militia attacked the headquarters of the secret police in Budapest, massacring the ÁVH inside. This event was well documented by both western and eastern journalists and photographers, and constituted the primary evidence against Imre Nagy and other members of his cabinet in the White Books.
A Western eyewitness said:
- "The secret police lie twisted in the gutter [...] the Hungarians will not touch the corpse of an ÁVH man, not even to close the eyes or straighten the neck."
After Dudás' militia assaulted the building, the surrounding crowd lynched
Lynching
Lynching is an extrajudicial execution carried out by a mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake or shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people. It is related to other means of social control that...
a number of ÁVH officers. Highly visible in photographs of this attack are the party's paybooks displayed on to the corpses, demonstrating that ÁVH soldiers received at least 10 times the wage
Wage
A wage is a compensation, usually financial, received by workers in exchange for their labor.Compensation in terms of wages is given to workers and compensation in terms of salary is given to employees...
s of a manual worker.
Reaction of revolutionary forces to Dudás
When the students' and workers' councils discovered what the Dudás group was doing, they instituted armed patrols to arrest and detain ÁVH members for their own safety, and for future planned trials. As a result of Dudás' massacres, and the students' policy of arrest, many ÁVH voluntarily turned themselves in to students' or workers' councils to seek protective custody. This was a reflection of the shared student-worker policy of keeping the revolution pure and bloodless. Dudás was sought for arrest by the students' and workers' councils.Retaliation
Unsurprisingly, when the Warsaw PactWarsaw Pact
The Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance , or more commonly referred to as the Warsaw Pact, was a mutual defense treaty subscribed to by eight communist states in Eastern Europe...
intervened in the revolution to support the government, ÁVH officers carried out brutal reprisal
Reprisal
In international law, a reprisal is a limited and deliberate violation of international law to punish another sovereign state that has already broken them. Reprisals in the laws of war are extremely limited, as they commonly breached the rights of civilians, an action outlawed by the Geneva...
s against those who had killed their comrades. The ÁVH generally targeted all revolutionaries, and received significant assistance from the Soviet Union's security apparatus, who arrested the Nagy government, General Pál Maléter
Pál Maléter
Pál Maléter was born to Hungarian parents in Eperjes, a city in the northern part of Historical Hungary, today part of Slovakia. He was the military leader of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution....
, and deported thousands of students and workers to the Soviet Union.
House of Terror
Shortly after the Arrow Cross PartyArrow Cross Party
The Arrow Cross Party was a national socialist party led by Ferenc Szálasi, which led in Hungary a government known as the Government of National Unity from October 15, 1944 to 28 March 1945...
left it, the building under the address 60 Andrássy Road
Andrássy Avenue
Andrássy Avenue is an iconic boulevard in Budapest, Hungary, dating back to 1872. It links Erzsébet Square with the Városliget. Lined with spectacular Neo-renaissance mansions and townhouses featuring fine facades and interiors, it was recognised as a World Heritage Site in 2002...
became the ÁVH Headquarters. The building is now a museum called The House of Terror
House of Terror
House of Terror is a museum located at Andrássy út 60 in Budapest, Hungary. It contains exhibits related to the fascist and communist dictatorial regimes in 20th century Hungary and is also a memorial to the victims of these regimes, including those detained, interrogated, tortured or killed in the...
, commemorating the victims of both political systems.
External links
- The history of ÁVH (in Hungarian), from the website of the Public Historical Files of the Hungarian Secret Services http://www.th.hu/
- Homepage Raoul Wallenberg Asso.fr
- An informative review in East Central Europe (in English)