This short book is an analysis of 500 files of court cases. The materials come from the work of the Hungarian “People’s Tribunals” from the years 1945–1949. Pető and Barna purposely eschew posing questions whether the judgments were just or not. Indeed, they examine no individual case and the reader will get little sense of how the trials actually functioned. Instead, the authors provide us with a statistical analysis of the social background, age, geographic distribution, and gender of the accused, as well as of those who made the denunciations and even those of the witnesses.

The authors’ findings are not particularly surprising, but nevertheless interesting and valuable and can be easily summarized. People from the social elite were more likely to be tried for collaborating with the Nazis, and the most prominent among them received severe punishments that made the greatest impression on the public. People from the lower classes and especially in the countryside were most frequently accused of joining the Nyilas party (the Hungarian equivalent of the Nazis) and of taking possession of property that had belonged to Jews. In Hungary, a disproportionate number of post-war trials dealt with perpetrators of crimes committed against Jews. While only the Polish and Soviet Jewries surpassed the suffering of the Hungarian Jewry, a large number of Hungarian Jews were still alive in 1945 and were in a position to accuse their previous tormentors. In the political climate in Hungary, unlike in the Soviet Union, it was possible to point out the special suffering of Jews. Although the vast majority of the perpetrators managed to escape punishments, anti-Semites to this day have been able to depict the Tribunals as examples unfair Jewish revenge.

The authors rightly divide the period into two. In the immediate post war year, men and women were tried for crimes committed at wartime. After 1947, the People’s Tribunals became one more instrument in the hands of the communist leaders, who used them against their political enemies and in order to wrest power from the previous political elite. It helped the Communists to consolidate a Soviet form of government.

In an international context, the post war punishments for political crimes were not particularly severe. A large number of people were tried but the sentences were rather light and a large percentage of the accused were not punished at all. In Hungary, no lynching took place. Probably the relative mildness of postwar punishments can be explained by recognizing that German occupation lasted for a short time and in 1944–1945, the great majority of Hungarians did not hate Germans and accordingly, cooperating with them was hardly resented.