A jogszolgáltatás területi szervei
- The Territorial Bodies of Jurisprudence
Scope and Content
During the ever more drastic anti-Semitic turn of Hungary in the late years of the 1930s and the years of the Second World War, anti-Semitic radicalization has largely been a legalized process – even if a host of regulations that may not have been explicitly anti-Semitic were also applied to anti-Semitic effect (called bureaucratic anti-Semitism) and there were initiatives coming from lower levels that often violated the discriminatory laws in place (i.e. illegal anti-Semitism). Nevertheless, how exactly the Hungarian justice system functioned in these years and how it related to the escalating “Jewish question” largely remains to be explored. The massive and mostly unexplored collection at the Budapest Municipal Archives on Territorial Bodies of Jurisprudence thus potentially feature much that is of interest to researchers of the era of the Holocaust. It includes the documentation of the Royal Court of Law of Budapest, of Penal and Commercial Courts, of the Court of Appeal as well as documentation from prisons. A part of the collection features documents on the local administrative units (the so called járás or district), including districts of Budapest from the times as well the towns of Újpest, Kispest, and Budafok (which were only incorporated into the capital city after the Second World War) but also the so called Central Court for the District Courts. Moreover, the collection on the Territorial Bodies of Jurisprudence contains the documents of over a hundred notaries, dozens of which concern the period of the Holocaust. The largest of the ones relavant for the period that all have at least three meters of paper are the documents of Béla Barcs, Ernő Barcs, Imre Cholnoky, László Fekete, Károly Haller, Szigfid Holitscher, Kamilló Horváth, Endre Kaprinai, József Kiss, Bertalan Kőrössy, Ferenc Lázár, Izsó Lukács, István Markó, László Meixner, Tibor Rónay, Bála Somogyi, Tibor Szemerjay Petrán, and Béla Teöke.
Rules and Conventions
EHRI Guidelines for Description v.1.0