Leszámolás a polgári közjegyzőkkel : 1945-1956

In 1945 the civil law notaries, deputy and trainee notaries had to undergo a kind of due diligence or scrutiny before the competent verification committee. Only those notaries were allowed to practise their profession who have passed such examination. After the political change of 1949 and following the nationalization of the notarial profession, there were endeavours to eliminate persons from society who held rightist pro-Horthy views, thus those notaries as well, who were not allowed to pursue their practice as state employees. To this end apart from the available legal instruments the State Security Authority (SSA), which was formed in 1948 by the gradual restructuring of the Political Police Department that had operated within the Ministry of Home Affairs was also deployed. Notaries against whom there was not sufficient evidence for conviction could have been deported subject to a decree issued by the Minister of Home Affairs in the Horthy era. The most severe type of retribution against notaries were the so called show trials. In these cases the notaries as defendants were ancillary figures in the lawsuits targeted against particular groups of society (churches, military, ethnicities) and launched by the SSA. Agents of the SSA permeated through the whole society. The show trials were constructed based on agents’ reports, which had a dual purpose: they served to intimidate and deter members of society, and to ruin the life of prominent persons who were respectable and exemplary figures in their own societal sphere. In the light of preserved documents it is clear that tens of thousands of innocent people were dragged through the mire during the Stalinist Rákosi regime, so that the system could be maintained through communist terror. However, the victims selected by the regime were not enemies of the system. Their bringing to heels was meant to mould the terrorized population into masses of obedient subjects