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Source: Holocaust. Studii şi cercetări

Holocaust. Study and Research

Location: Romania
Author(s): Andrei Muraru
Title: Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (Ildiko Barna, Andrea Peto)
Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (Ildiko Barna, Andrea Peto)
Issue: 11/2018
Citation Andrei Muraru. "Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (Ildiko Barna, Andrea Peto)".
style: Holocaust. Studii şi cercetări 11:397-403.

https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=729517
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Political Justice in Budapest after World War II

ILDIKÓ BARNA, ANDREA PETŐ

POLITICAL JUSTICE IN BUDAPEST
AFTER WORLD WAR II

Central European University Press,

Budapest, 2015, 135 pp.

In the vast literature of retributive policies applied at the end of

World War II an important segment is dedicated to the states that were
initially under Soviet influence and afterwards under Soviet control.
Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary are just some of the countries that staged a
denazifying processes under the pressure of Soviet occupation. From the
approximately 22,000 cases instrumented by Budapest People’s Tribunal,
Ildikó Barna and Andrea Pető had chosen 500 (p. 33) on which they built a
very thorough statistical research. Their investigation, not very common to
historians from a methodological point of view, is all the more important
and interesting since it largely made use of sociological instruments,
nonetheless without neglecting the tension existent between history and the
memory of political justice. The research examines the People’s Tribunals
activity and tries to deeply understand how the system of political justice
worked using an unfamiliar applied quantitative methodology. They
elaborated a new methodology to examine the history of the People’s
Tribunals using explorative and confirmative research applied concurrently
(p. 27).
The authors are highly familiar with the tools used in the survey:
Ildikó Barna, an Associate Professor of Sociology, and Andrea Pető, known
for her wide-ranging scholarly work on gender studies and European
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contemporary history. The two researchers used the collected information in

building a new discourse, not affected by the pathos of the debate regarding
the political trials from the end of World War II. As an argument for
understanding how much the Hungarian society was affected by these trials,
the authors underline that around 1 of 10 Hungarians have personal
knowledge of cases tried by the People’s Tribunals (p. 1, 113). This is also
the reason why the authors chose a pioneering methodology, a “surgical”
one using micro histories from the archives of the People’s Tribunal for the
period 1946-1949, with particular regard to gendered aspects. They also
mentioned that, until this survey, the Hungarian political justice was treated
mainly as a masculine one (p. 85).
Even though not a stated goal, the research is also an instrument of
social introspection, not only analysing the status of the actors from the
tribunal but also offering important arguments for answering whether the
trials were exclusively political or only manifestations of legalist justice.
Obviously, this question is common to all the states behind the Iron Curtain,
Hungary being a notorious example as the war criminal trials happened
while the Sovietisation of the country was ongoing. The activity of People’s
Tribunals took place in a very complex context, marked by strong political,
social and cultural tensions. The ”fluid nature” (p. 13) of the legal
background, that was adapted over a period of years, made it harder to
understand the objective of the entire process.
Started in January 1945, when the bloody war was still raging the
western part of the country, the process of organizing special courts was
based on mixing the criminal laws. The retroactive effect is a common
feature of a legal framework rapidly built in the countries that were former
members of the Axis. But breaking the non retroactivity of criminal law
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Political Justice in Budapest after World War II

principle was not the only problem of the legal system. As in other states
under Soviet occupation, as Romania for instance, the political justice had
broader objectives, one of them being to sanction the members of the former
regime for ”political criminal act” (p. 21). The change, Andrea Pető and
Ildikó Barna underline, “fundamentally altered the public view of wartime
crimes and the entire justice process” (p. 17). The formation of the judging
body, the powers of political prosecutors, the limited rights of the defence,
the interpretable terminology of the crimes, the alternation of the criminal
liability of minors, the restrictions for appeal were just few of the ground
problems raised by the indicted persons.
The authors and their team made important investigative work for,
directly or indirectly, gathering the colossal amount of information from the
files. In order to dig into the 500 selected cases (100 cases per year, 1945-
1949), they elaborated a questionnaire containing many lines about the
trials. The questionnaire tried to cover various aspects of the cases: socio-
demographic data of the defendant, the lawyer, the indictment, the hearings,
the sentence and the witnesses. In spite of the very poor precision of the data
from the documents, as the authors mentioned (p. 80-1), some of
conclusions they reached are really spectacular. The analysis of the files
shows that the cases could be split into five types of trials.
Ildikó Barna and Andrea Pető emphasized the ethnical feature of the
trials: 43 percent of the cases were wartime crimes against Jews, higher
numbers in the trials launched in 1945 (55 percent), and only in 12 percent
of the cases the aggrieved parties were not Jews. In the first type of cases,
the average length of the case files are longer than for the other type of
cases. It could be surprising for a literature that abounds in examples and
theories about how political were the trials organised under the soviet
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umbrella, that only 12 percent of the cases taken into consideration by the
two researchers could be considered entirely ideological; 18 percent of them
were launched started 1948 and have a big percentage of the defendants as
dependents. Useful data could also be found for the ones interested in the
legal details of the files. For instance, denunciation was found in almost 25
percent of the case files. An interesting particular fact is that in the case files
related to wartime acts against Jews or involving women as perpetrators
denunciations were higher than average.
Analysing the defendants, the authors concluded that 18 percent
were women. From the whole amount of 500 cases, in 90 percent of the case
files there is only one defendant. From the age1 point of view, middle-aged
defendants are overrepresented in the trials (54 percent). According to the
place of birth, the defendants came mostly from rural areas (60 percent),
which is not surprising as around half of the general population came from
villages. A consistent part of controversies or food for interpretation is the
education level of the defendants. From the general group of defendants
most were part of the working class and middle class. One of the
conclusions is that the better educated and with relatively higher social
status are overrepresented among defendants. Political affiliation of the
defendants is also an important fact investigated by the authors. Their
analysis shows that up to 50 percent were members of pro Nazi
organizations.
From over 3,600 witnesses in all 500 analysed cases, 26 percent
were women, a large number as we could see, with an average age of 41
years old. Most of the testifiers in the cases were from Budapest. At the

1
For comparison, the authors took into consideration the structure of the general population
in the interwar Hungarian society.
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same time, 74 percent were incriminating witnesses, the decisive factor of

final judgement. In concerning defendants, they mostly came from current
social categories: working class, lower middle class and middle class. The
elite were underrepresented. Regarding the distribution of witnesses per
case, the numbers were higher in the cases related to wartime acts against
Jews (around 2000 witnesses) or non-Jews. Another relevant detail found by
the two researchers is that where a defendant was acquitted by the tribunal, a
higher-average ratio of supporting witness was found.
The questions about lawyers included in the questionnaire offered
remarkable data about this category of judicial actors. The data they
gathered (the authors identified lawyers for only 478 defendants from the
group of 617), shows that the percentage of appointed public lawyers vs.
paid lawyers was 41 vs. 59. 12 percent of the defendants had both types of
lawyers. From the gender perspective, not all the judges and lawyers were
men. At least one lawyer and one people’ judge were women.
The research, which could have benefited from a more extensive
interpretation of results, brings important arguments against the theory that
“all” trials organised in the countries undergoing Sovietisation were political
and ideological. For example, the trials that judged wartime acts were
generally longer (above the 2 years and a half average), while ideological
trials were shorter, as one of the conclusions shows. Proving a very good
investigation and interpretation of the archival material, the authors
concluded that 89 percent of the witnesses’ statements were highly valuable;
97 percent for the whole statements material in the cases of Jewish
aggrieved parties during Second World War is considered provable. This is
certain evidence against the theory mentioned above. But I strongly believe
that the most important argument against the theory is the very high
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proportion of the acquittals. The percent of acquitted is equal with the

percent of convicted: 43. Looking carefully on gender issues, authors stated
that women tried were more likely than men to be acquitted. Only four
persons out of 617 were condemned to death and all of them relating to
wartime acts. In spite of the fact that “Jewish survivors lost this symbolic
battle” of receiving justice (p. 98), the participation of Jews in the trials also
demonstrates that the status of victims was recognised and it could be
evidence against the theory, too. Authors estimate that Budapest People’s
Tribunal heard up to 16,000 Jewish witnesses only in the period 1945-1946
(p. 103). On the contrary, their participation in the trials maintained the anti-
Semitic feelings of the general public.
At the same time, there are also details that show wrongdoing in
conducting the trials or ignoring witnesses for political reasons. For
instance, one of three testifiers requested by the defence was ignored by the
court.
The conclusion of the authors is: the People‘s Tribunal failed to
make justice and to offer legal redress to victims. The manner in which
justice was administrated by the tribunal is rather negative (see the high
number of acquittals which shows the fact that the real perpetrators
remained unpunished). The authors described the trials as “full of
grievances and half-solutions”. At the same time, step by step, authorities
lost interest in the crimes committed during the former regime and the
narration of the genocide systems became “indistinguishable”. All in all, it
can be said that the victimization of all actors is what characterised the
tribunals and the trials.

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In the end, I would conclude that the book in discussion is one of the
most innovative surveys in the field and it is the authors’s merit that they
succed to build up a book which is mandatory for the researchers of political
justice. Not the figures are the highest virtue of the book, but the applied
quantitative methodology, usulay unfamiliar to mainstream historians. From
the moment it was printed, Political Justice in Budapest after World War
II should be used not as a Bible, but as a tool in trying to decompose the
complex and still unexplored stories of the trials. Given the fact that
statistics is just an instrument in such investigations, I have to add that such
a tool should not avoid the literature of the subject, the use of other sources
(diaries, letters, archival material, press from the period etc.) and, most
importantly, the broad analyses made by researchers in the last decades.
Andrei Muraru

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