hungarian studies - EPA - Országos Széchényi Könyvtár

SOME QUESTIONS ON HUNGARIAN-SOVIET RELATIONS 9
cosmopolitanism. Rákosi alluded to the recent arrest of the secret police's Jewish
leader Gábor Péter, whom he accused of having worked with Nazi and Zionist
police informers, and promised to "investigate" whether Zionists had infiltrated
the party. Of this infiltration, Rákosi seemed to be convinced. He called for increased
vigilance in view of the fact that the president of the Israelite religious
community in Budapest had "turned out" to be a former "spy for the Gestapo".
The drive against the Zionists would not be anti-Semitism. "Good" Jews, who
supported the people's democracies, would not be persecuted. The allusion to
Zionism as a center for American spying was by no means a coincidence. Although
the trial was never staged because Stalin suddenly died, the preparations
for a large anti-Semitic campaign had begun in the Fall of 1952. The Hungarian
authorities had prepared various scenarios, all of which followed the pattern set
by the Slansky trial in 1952. 44 According to Slansky's confession, American and
Israeli leaders had agreed at a secret conference in 1947 that the Zionist organizations
in Eastern Europe would be the center of anti-Communist espionage and
subversion. In return the United States would support Israel. That is, Zionist agents
had wormed their way into the higher echelons of Hungarian political life, the
economy, and the state security organs. All of them had previously served the
Gestapo. According to the preliminary hypothesis, Jewish conspirators could be
found in the political police, in the Jewish religious organizations, and in important
economic positions. They received their instructions from the World Jewish
Congress and Joint and passed on intelligence to the United States secret service.
Zionist engineers were sabotaging production; and Zionist doctors were standing
ready to murder party and state leaders.
The first phase in the preparation for the "trial of trials" was the arrest of the
leader and other high ranking officers of the AVH, or political police. Even though
the ÁVH men had themselves been working on unmasking a Zionist conspiracy,
they now found themselves accused of being Zionists themselves. On January 6,
1953, three days after Gábor Peter's arrest, Ernő Gerő, Mihály Farkas and Béla
Vég instructed the ÁVH to pursue the matter along the following lines: Yugoslavia,
American spying, the Horthy police and the Zionists. One doctor, a colonel of
the ÁVH who was arrested, found himself accused among other things of several
murders and of deliberately maltreating senior comrades. Some eighty to ninety
people were detained, including Lajos Stöckler, the president of the National Representation
of Hungarian Israelites. The great show trial never took place. The
charges of Zionist conspiracy were dropped in the summer of 1953, and with the
help of Soviet experts a new party line was initiated. Many of the suspects were let
go. Gábor Péter and "his gang" stood trial for economic crimes, such as selling
passports to rich people who wanted to leave the country. These charges were
well-grounded. Their arrest provided a great opportunity for the HWP leaders to
accuse Péter of "misleading" them about Rajk and the other communist victims