Magyar Rádió és Telefonhírmondó iratai

The records of the Hungarian Radio at the Budapest City Archive provide an invaluable and underutilized source for the study of the era of Nazism and the Holocaust in Europe. Hungarian radio records exist not only for the years of anti-Semitic radicalization in Hungary but also for 1944, the main year of the Holocaust in Hungary as well as the early postwar period when the first wave of dealing with these recent pasts could be observed. More concretely, the collection contains the existent scripts of Hungarian radio shows originally broadcasted on short and medium waves between the years 1933 and 1950. The collection consists of three main parts: there are the shows that were originally broadcasted on short wave between 1942 and 1944, the foreign language news of the Hungarian radio in the years 1936 to 1950 and the radio lectures originally broadcasted between 1933 and 1950. The latter were divided into the lectures of the morning and the so called directed (rendezett) lectures. The latter dealt with a host of areas where the "Jewish question" could potentially be raised in these years and they are arranged thematically in the collection. The foreign radio broadcasts may be of special interest to international researchers since they show how the Hungarian radio interpreted and aimed to explain the ongoing developments for an international audience, including how it dealt with the crimes of its allies prior to 1944 and its own policy of mass deportation in 1944.

All three parts of the collection are arranged chronologically in the collection with the exception of the so called directed lectures, which are arranged thematically.