Description: Provides an objective, quantitative analysis of Hungary's post-World War II people's courts that tried wartime atrocity participants, with special focus on the gender aspects of these trials and their contribution to discussions of Hungarian war guilt.
Review Quotes:
Using very original methods combining case studies and quantitative tools, mixing testimonies and statistics, this outstanding work offers a complete reassessment of the postwar justice in Hungary as well as it provides a stimulating model to analyze others forms of contemporary transitional justice.
--Henry RoussoIldikó Barna and Andrea Pető are to be congratulated for demonstrating the potential for court records to provide precious insights on wider sociological and political phenomena and issues. The section on Arrow Cross membership, for example, contributes to the empirical refutation, if it was needed, of simplistic assumptions about the middle class nature of support for fascism in Hungary, and corroborates similar findings about the social basis of other European fascisms.
--Roger GriffinIn their precise quantitative analysis, based on 500 court cases, the two researchers explain the origins, functioning, and social and political composition of the so-called people's courts. In a field sadly lacking comparative studies, the two authors excel in offering a nearly unique overview of what happened in Europe as a whole to those charged with treason, collaboration, war crimes, and crimes against people. The numbers tried and sentences are dizzying but so is the subsequent high rate of amnesties. What distinguishes Hungary is that although the number of Jews killed was enormous, the survivors were numerous enough for their "grievances" to constitute nearly half of the people's court cases. Hence the popular charge, very much alive today, that the people's courts were but an instrument of Jewish revenge. In fact, as the book clearly reveals, Jewish victims of the Holocaust by far not always saw justice served in court.
--István Deák