State Protection Authority

ÁVH actions were not subject to judicial review. On April 7, 1953, early in the morning, Miksa Domonkos, one of the leaders of the Neologue Jewish community in Budapest was kidnapped by ÁVH officials to extract "confessions".[1] 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 – Dr. László Benedek and Lajos Stöckler (a leader of Hungary's Neologue Jews) – 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.[2] The next day, January 13, Wallenberg contacted the Russians. By 1953, Ottó Fleischmann had left Hungary, working as a physician in Vienna, Antwerp, Ghent, Milan, Turin & Genoa.

On 8 April 1953, Károly Szabó was captured on the street 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 and democratic reformer Ernő Gerő (a non-Jewish Jew born as Ernő Singer), which is shown by a note sent by him to First Secretary Mátyás Rákosi (another non-Jewish Jew born as Mátyás Rosenberg).[3] The show trial was then initiated in Moscow, following Stalin's anti-Zionist campaign. After the death of Stalin and somewhat later execution of KGB chief Lavrentiy Beria, the preparations for the trial were eventually stopped and the arrested persons were released in fall 1953 under condition that they are not to divulge any part of the arrest. Lajos Stöckler became severely impaired psychologically from torture. Miksa Domonkos spent a week in hospital and died shortly afterwards at home, mainly due to the torture he had been subjected to.[1][4]

Following sentence, political prisoners were imprisoned in ÁVH-run concentration camps. These camps were mixed and varied. Early camps tended to be cruder and more cruel. 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.

The ÁVH also assisted the Soviet sphere security apparatus by staging show trials. 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. (László Rajk was the man who had organised the ÁVH.)

Attacks on the ÁVH became a significant activity only 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 Dudás 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.

Protesters kicking the body of a slain ÁVH soldier

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 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 wages of a manual worker.

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.

Unsurprisingly, when the Warsaw Pact intervened in the revolution to support the government, ÁVH officers carried out brutal reprisals 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.