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Làszlò
Karsai, “The Hungarian Holocaust as Reflected in the People’s Court
Trials in Budapest”
This
article analyzes the workings of the Hungarian people’s courts with
the help of the papers of 748 trials held in Budapest in 1946. There
are at least two myths in the public mind concerning the people’s
court trials in Hungary that do not stand up to the test of
scholarship. According to the antisemitic right, the “communist”
people’s courts engaged in a massacre. A widely held view among Jews
is that in Hungary with the exception of a few major war criminals,
and Arrow Cross mass murderers, nearly everybody escaped
prosecution. The Hungarian people’s courts passed 26,997 prison
sentences, 14,727 persons were acquitted, 477 were sentenced to
death, and 189 of them were executed. The people’s jurisdiction in
Hungary, in 1945-1946, followed the European practice in prosecuting
and punishing war criminals and perpetrators of crimes against
humanity. The most important criminals did not escape prosecution,
but both minor and major criminals escaped abroad, and many innocent
people were imprisoned, too. The people’s courts were not the
instruments of “Judeo-Bolshevists,” nor did most of the war
criminals escaped justice. Selecting and presenting the most
characteristic cases, the aim of the present paper is to make the
Hungarian Holocaust not only understandable, but also more
individual and personal. |
