Veszprémy László Bernát - Gyilkos irodák - A Hungarian közigazgatás a german megszállás and a holokauszt

In the late spring and summer of 1944, the Hungarian bureaucracy, famous for its sluggishness and incompetence, uprooted nearly half a million Hungarian citizens from their homes and communities, deprived them of their rights and property, and then deported them to the territory of occupied Poland, where they were driven to gas chambers by the Nazis and murdered. What processes led to the fact that the Hungarian public administration was willing to assist the Germans' mass murder plans? What role did the representatives of the Hungarian state - high-ranking officials, high-ranking officials, chief clerks, chief clerks, mayors, members of the gendarmerie and the police - play in the unprecedented speed of action in the history of the Holocaust? Did they operate under coercion, or would they have had the opportunity to resist and refuse to cooperate?
Bernát László Veszprémy's book tries to answer these questions without ideological biases and relying on abundant source material. After analyzing the relationship between bureaucracy and modern genocide, the historian talks in detail about the consequences of the German occupation, the development and activities of the collaborative public administration, and its role in the deportations. In a separate chapter, he analyzes the operation of the law enforcement agencies, which is an underexplored chapter of the history of the Holocaust in Hungary. Finally, analyzing the people's court documents after 1945 and the often contradictory judgments, as well as examining the responsibility of public servants, he looks for the answer to how much room for maneuver the members of the Hungarian bureaucracy had during the events.
LÁSZLÓ BERNÁT VESZZPRÉMY graduated from Károl Gáspár Reformed University in 2016, then obtained a master's degree in Holocaust and genocide research at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the ELTE BTK Doctoral School of Cultural History. His research area is the history of political ideas and the history of Judaism. Between 2016 and 2018 he was a permanent employee of the Jewish magazine Szombat, and between 2017 and 2018 he was a researcher at the Veritas Historical Research Institute. Currently, he is a research assistant at the Hungarian Jewish History Institute of the Milton Friedman University and the deputy editor-in-chief of the Jewish news portal neokohn.hu.