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Judit Molnár
Senior Fellow (10/2015 - 03/2016)


The Role of the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie in the Holocaust and their Punishment after the Second World War


MolnarThe Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie was one of the most important state institutions between 1881 and 1945. Its task was to preserve law and order in the countryside, to prevent peasant uprisings as well as a socialist agitation in the villages, and, in 1944, to deport the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. This project involves reading, classifying, and analysing the thousands of documents on the gendarmes at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, as well as to write a comprehensive monograph on the gendarmerie.


One of the questions the monograph will address is why it was the Hungarian gendarmerie that Adolf Eichmann and his “specialists” primarily counted on in 1944, when the Jews in Hungary were deprived of their property, herded into ghettoes and collecting camps, and finally deported. That is, one of the basic questions is the problematic of the crime, in other words the deportation, and the role the gendarmerie played in the Holocaust. The other basic question is the problem of the punishment, of accountability. What was the cause behind the punishment of gendarmes after the Second World War, what was the extent of their punishment, and how was it done?

 

Judit Molnár is Associate Professor at the University of Szeged since 1998. Since 1994, she has been the deputy director of the Hungarian research group of the Yad Vashem Archives. She organised the first Hungarian permanent Holocaust exhibition as the director of the Program Bureau of the Permanent Exhibition (2004-2006) and was the chief historical advisor at the Holocaust Memorial Center between 2009 and 2011.Her field of research is the history of the Jews in Hungary in the 20th century. She focuses on the history of the Hungarian Jewish Leaders during World War II and the Role of the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie in the Holocaust.

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The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) is funded by:

 

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