Breaking Ilona Benoschofsky, or the Birth of an Agent

‘In recent years, articles mentioning this aspect of her life have almost exclusively referenced “Xavér” in this context. While we do not intend to question this moral judgment of her activities as an informant, it is important to recognize that before she became “Xavér”, Benoschofsky was also a victim of the Rákosi regime. Her arrest and interrogation left behind a chilling 284-page dossier.’

Members of a People's Court Council attend an execution in the courtyard of the Capital City Court of Law in Markó Street, Budapest on 12 March 1946.

Victim or War Criminal? A Woman Before the People’s Court in 1946

People’s Courts were special judicial bodies in Hungary set up after WWII, operating between February 1945 and 1 April 1950, established primarily for the purpose of prosecuting war criminals. However, they became the controversial instrument of a regime change originally intended to be democratic, sometimes abused to exact personal revenge.

Kőszeg Jews being marched by gendarmes to the railway station on 18 June 1944. After their transfer to the Szombathely ghetto they were deported to Auschwitz on 4 July 1944. (Fortepan)

The Holocaust in Hungary and the Legal Tools of Oppression

‘Hungarian Jews were generally known for their assimilated and law-abiding nature. By and large, they saw themselves as loyal Hungarian citizens and followed the law of the land to the letter. This was part of a well-rehearsed strategy on the part of their leaders. Between the emancipation of Hungarian Jewry and its nearly complete annihilation, Hungarian Jewish leaders experienced various levels of antisemitism. For most of their history, they could and did turn to the state authorities to ease their suffering. This strategy, useful during the previous decades, turned self-destructive in 1944–45.’

Vice Regent, Air Force First Lieutenant István Horthy before takeoff (unknown author, before 1942)

The Tragic Death of István Horthy

István Horthy, the son of Miklós Horthy, lost his life in a plane crash on the Russian front barely six months after he was elected Vice Regent of Hungary.

Flowers laid on the triangular stone at the centre of a memorial pool of the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism at the Tiergarten in Berlin on 27 January 2023.

Roma Holocaust: ‘A Methodical Attack on Our Most Fundamental Values’  

In her address marking Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, Fidesz MEP Livia Járóka said: ‘Almost 80 years later, it is still clear that what happened at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was genocide and a series of crimes against humanity in which innocent European citizens were exterminated on the basis of an exclusionary ideology whose only purpose was organised destruction.’

Historian Gyula Szekfű delivers a lecture on 30 July 1945.

Between a Dictatorship and a Hard Place: Gyula Szekfű’s Struggles in the Twentieth Century

‘Szekfű described “capitalism” as “having grown in size over time, becoming a more and more fearsome monster, creating factories and cramming hundreds of thousands and millions of people into the unhealthy, immoral air of smoky cities. And the longer the unrestricted freedom proclaimed by liberalism lasts, the more freely the capitalist big business devours the little ones, the more freely it exploits the economic weaklings, especially the workers.” Szekfű’s book Three Generations, in which he also called for extensive worker protection and the regulation of industrialists by law, bears a striking resemblance to the basic tenets of socialism.’