State Protection Authority

• 1. Introduction

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  The State Protection Authority, known in Hungarian as the Allamvedelmi Hatosag and by its initials AVH, held Hungary in a grip of fear from 1945 to 1956. It was designed from the outset as an arm of the Soviet Union's KGB operating on Hungarian soil, tasked with supporting the ruling Hungarian Working People's Party. Torture sessions lasting between three and eighteen months were standard procedure. Confessions extracted under such conditions were handed to public courts as if they were freely given. What makes this apparatus so worth examining is not just what it did, but who built it, who it ultimately consumed, and what it took for Hungarians to finally tear it down.

• 2. Birth of the Machine

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  In 1945, a unit called the Budapest Department of State Political Police was created to police political life in the newly Soviet-aligned country. By 1946 it had been reorganized into the Hungarian State Police State Defense Department. In 1950 it was redesignated again as the State Protection Authority, acquiring a new name and a new independence: on the 1st of January 1950, the AVH was removed entirely from the authority of the Ministry of Interior and also took over the Border Guard from the armed forces.

  Gabor Peter, born Benjamin Eisenberger, ran this apparatus from 1945 through 1952 with near-total authority. His tenure produced waves of purges and a reputation for deliberate cruelty. One of the most striking facts about the AVH's early history is that Laszlo Rajk, the Communist Minister of Interior who played a central role in organizing the AVH, was himself arrested by the agency in 1949. In 1950, after a show trial staged to signal to the international communist movement that Yugoslavia had become a threat, Rajk was executed for nationalism and Titoism. The man who built the machine became one of its victims.

• 3. Instruments of Control

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  The AVH supported the Hungarian Working People's Party directly, largely bypassing normal government channels. Its primary tool was an extensive informant network modeled on the system used by the Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, in East Germany. This network fed into a cycle: secret arrests, followed by interrogation periods of three to eighteen months, followed by forced confessions passed to public prosecutors and courts.

  The AVH also maintained a system of dedicated prisons and internment camps. These included the prison in Vac, the transit prison in Mosonyi Street, and internment camps in Kistarcsa, Recsk, Tiszalok, Kazincbarcika, and, according to later research, Bernatkut and Sajobabony. The most notorious were Recsk, Kistarcsa, Tiszalok, and Kazincbarcika. Early camps, particularly those operating before 1953, were the harshest: ex-party members were treated more severely than other prisoners, and certain camps were designed with the explicit goal of working inmates to death. The British Communist Party operative Edith Bone was one case that deviated from the standard process; she was held in illegal arrest and indefinite solitary confinement.

  Retractions at trial posed no practical obstacle to convictions. Prisoners who tried to walk back their confessions faced the obvious threat of resumed torture during any recess, which made the courts' reliance on such confessions a closed and self-reinforcing system.

• 4. The Wallenberg Conspiracy

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  On the 7th of April 1953, early in the morning, AVH officers kidnapped Miksa Domonkos, one of the leaders of the Neologue Jewish community in Budapest, to extract confessions for a planned show trial. The trial was designed to prove that Raoul Wallenberg had not been taken to the Soviet Union in 1945 but had instead been murdered by cosmopolitan Zionists.

  The last people to see Wallenberg in Budapest were Otto Fleischmann, Karoly Szabo, and Pal Szalai, who had shared a supper with him at the Swedish Embassy building in Gyopar Street on the 12th of January 1945. The next day, January 13, Wallenberg contacted the Russians. By 1953, Fleischmann had left Hungary entirely, working as a physician across Vienna, Antwerp, Ghent, Milan, Turin, and Genoa.

  On the 8th of April 1953, Karoly Szabo was captured on the street without any legal procedure. His family received no news of him for six months. Two other Jewish community figures, Dr. Laszlo Benedek and Lajos Stockler, along with two intended witnesses, Pal Szalai and Karoly Szabo, were arrested and interrogated through torture. The scheme was primarily backed by Hungarian Communist leader Erno Gero, born Erno Singer, who sent notes to First Secretary Matyas Rakosi on the matter. Stalin's death and the subsequent execution of NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria halted the preparations. The arrested were released in the fall of 1953 under orders to say nothing. Miksa Domonkos spent a week in hospital after his release and died shortly afterwards. Lajos Stockler was left with severe psychological damage from what he had endured.

• 5. Revolution and Retribution

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  When the Hungarian Revolution broke out in 1956, a crowd of around a thousand people attacked the police headquarters in Budapest, shouting slogans including "tear down the star!" and "free the prisoners!" The enormous red star on the building's roof had become a symbol of everything the AVH represented. The police chief, fearing for his officers' lives, let the crowd inside and allowed them to take political prisoners.

  The building at 60 Andrassy Avenue, which had briefly belonged to the Arrow Cross Party before the AVH took it over, was at the center of some of the bloodiest scenes. During and after the siege of the Hungarian Working People's Party headquarters at Republic Square, a number of AVH members were lynched. Photographs of the aftermath showed the party paybooks of dead AVH soldiers displayed on their corpses; those paybooks revealed that AVH personnel earned at least ten times the wages of an ordinary manual worker. One Western eyewitness described the scene: "The secret police lie twisted in the gutter … the Hungarians will not touch the corpse of an AVH man, not even to close the eyes or straighten the neck."

  The militia of Josef Dudas organized a more systematic campaign. On October 29, in the second week of the revolution, Dudas's group attacked the AVH's Budapest headquarters and massacred those inside. Both Western and Eastern journalists documented the event extensively, and it later became central evidence in the so-called White Books that Communist authorities used to prosecute Imre Nagy and his cabinet. Student and worker councils, committed to keeping the revolution pure and bloodless, responded by instituting armed patrols to detain AVH members for future trials rather than kill them. Many AVH officers voluntarily surrendered to these councils to seek protective custody. Dudas himself was sought for arrest by the same councils.

• 6. The Aftermath

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  Janos Kadar, who had himself been tortured by the AVH in the 1950s, chose not to revive the agency under its name after 1956. Instead its functions migrated into the Ministry of Interior, where many former AVH torturers continued working. Between 1956 and 1963 Kadar fought an internal party battle against hardline Stalinists while relying on Soviet security forces to arrest the Nagy government and deport students and workers to the Soviet Union. The Soviet apparatus also helped prepare the trial of Nagy and his associates.

  Kadar's 1963 general amnesty for the 1956 revolutionaries marked his victory in that internal struggle and signaled that a formal political police force was no longer needed. Hungary became, as a result, the only Warsaw Pact country without a dedicated intelligence service: all such functions had been concentrated first in the AVH, then distributed through the Ministry of Interior. The successor body, the Ministry of Internal Affairs III, handled domestic and foreign intelligence until the end of the Cold War and operated with considerably more restraint than the AVH ever had. The building at 60 Andrassy Avenue now houses a museum called the House of Terror, dedicated to the victims of both the Arrow Cross and the AVH.