State Protection Authority The State Protection Authority ( or " ÁVH " ) was the secret police force of Hungary from 1945 until 1956 . It was conceived of as an external appendage of the Soviet Union ' s secret police forces , but attained an indigenous reputation for brutality during a series of purge s beginning in 1948 , intensifying in 1949 and ending in 1953 . In 1953 Joseph Stalin died , and Imre Nagy ( a moderate reformer ) was appointed Prime Minister of Hungary . Under Nagy ' s first government from 1953 to 1955 , the ÁVH was gradually reined in . History of the ÁVH . This is a summary of the organisations acting as political police between 1945 and 1956 . The subsequent government of János Kádár didn ' t want to resurrect the ÁVH under this name after 1956 ( Kádár was tortured by the ÁVH in the 1950s ) , yet it flourished in the system of the BM , or Ministry of the Interior . This should be considered in the light of the use of the Soviet security apparatus directly in Hungary after the 1956 revolution , and in preparation for the trial of Nagy and " his accomplices " . Between 1956 and 1963 Kádár , a natural opportunist , fought an inner party battle against hardline Stalinists , although he accepted the services of many cruel former AVH torturers . Kádár ' s victory was signalled in 1963 by a general amnesty for the 1956 revolutionaries , an indication of the absence of a political police . Hungary would go on to be the only Warsaw Pact country without a formal intelligence service , since all intelligence and espionage functions were vested in the AVH , and later : the Ministry of Interior . Policy and methods . While the security apparatus were operating , they supported the Hungarian Working People ' s Party ( MDP ) directly , with little reference made to Government norms . This support was primarily through the secret gathering of intelligence , primarily through a vast network of informants , like the system used by the Ministry for State Security ( Stasi ) in the German Democratic Republic . The investigation network was supplemented with a mechanism of secret arrests , followed by extensive periods of torture ( lasting between 3 and 18 months ) . When the apparatus had extracted confessions of varying quality from a prisoner , the State ' s system of public procurator s and court s would be called in , in order to make a ruling on the sentence . This was the norm of operation for the ÁVH , and was only diverged from in matters of utmost state security ; for example , the illegal arrest and indefinite solitary detention of the Communist Party of Great Britain operative Edith Bone . Despite the forced nature of confessions , retraction s at trial were not considered a danger to the process , due to the obvious threat of continued torture during a recess of the trial . 1953 Wallenberg show trial preparations in Hungary . ÁVH actions were not subject to judicial review . On April 7 , 1953 , early in the morning , Miksa Domonkos , one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Budapest was kidnapped by ÁVH officials to extract " confession s " . Preparations for a show trial started in Budapest in 1953 to prove that Raoul Wallenberg had not been dragged off in 1945 to the Soviet Union but was the victim of cosmopolitan Zionists . For the purposes of this show trial , two more Jewish leaders – László Benedek and Lajos Stöckler – as well as two would - be " eyewitnesses " – Pál Szalai and Károly Szabó – were arrested and interrogated by torture . The last people to meet Wallenberg in Budapest were Ottó Fleischmann , Károly Szabó , and Pál Szalai , who were invited to a supper at the Swedish Embassy building in Gyopár street on January 12 , 1945 . The next day , January 13 , Wallenberg contacted the Russians . By 1953 , Ottó Fleischmann had left Hungary , working as a physician in Vienna . Károly Szabó was captured on the street on April 8 , 1953 and arrested without any legal procedure . His family had no news of him throughout the following six months . A secret trial was conducted against him of which no official record is available to date . After six months of interrogation , the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion . The idea that the " murderers of Wallenberg " were Budapest Zionists was primarily supported by Hungarian Communist leader Ernő Gerő , which is shown by a note sent by him to First Secretary Mátyás Rákosi . The show trial was then initiated in Moscow , following Stalin ' s anti - Zionist campaign . After the death of Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria , the preparations for the trial were stopped and the arrested persons were released . Miksa Domonkos spent a week in hospital and died shortly afterwards at home , mainly due to the torture he had been subject to . Concentration camps . Following sentence , political prisoners were imprisoned in ÁVH - run concentration camp s . These camps were mixed and varied . Early camps tended to be cruder and crueler . In particular , the status of ex - party members varied . In camps prior to 1953 they were more harshly treated than other prisoners . After 1953 , ex - party members were a virtual aristocracy within prisons . Additionally , prior to 1953 certain camps had as their goal the eventual death of inmates due to overwork and maltreatment . In a number of cases , torture was an essential part of camp life and discipline . Imre Nagy ' s first government from 1953 to 1955 vastly improved conditions in the camps , and halted the efforts to exterminate political prisoners . International activities . The ÁVH also assisted the Soviet sphere security apparatus by staging show trials . In two cases , the ÁVH was given the privilege of leading an attack on undesired elements throughout Hungary . In 1948 the Roman Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty was tried and imprisoned . In 1949 , the ÁVH arrested Hungarian Communist Party member László Rajk , who was then tried and executed for nationalism and Titoism in a show trial that signified to the international communist movement that Yugoslavia was now a threat . ( Ironically , László Rajk was the man who had organised the ÁVH . ) The ÁVH in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 . During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution , elements of the insurgents tracked down and killed both known and suspected ÁVH officers and informants . When the Revolution began , a crowd of some thousand people attacked the police headquarters in Budapest , shouting slogans as " tear down the star ! " and " free the prisoners ! " , referring to the enormous red star that stood on the building ' s roof , a symbol of communism and to the many prisoners kept inside . Fearing for the lives of both himself and his officers , the chief of the police let the crowd into the building , allowing them to take any political prisoners they wanted . During and after the siege of the Hungarian Working People ' s Party headquarters ( in Republic Square , " Köztársaság tér " ) , some members of the ÁVH were lynched , a fact later extensively used in party propaganda to back up the claim that the revolution was of a " fascistic , anti - Semitic and reactionary " nature . Persecution by József Dudás ' militia . Attacks on the ÁVH only became a significant activity as informal truces developed between the student - controlled combat organisations and the Soviet troops in Budapest . Freed from the necessity of immediate combat , the József Dudás militia planned a series of reprisals against ÁVH officers , informants , and on a few occasions against ordinary Communist - party members caught up in the revolution . József Dudás ' militia is often considered a far - right group , but others claim he was a communist ; either way , his militia ' s violence is not contested . On October 29 , in the second week of the revolution , the Dudás militia attacked the headquarters of the secret police in Budapest , massacring the ÁVH inside . This event was well documented by both western and eastern journalists and photographers , and constituted the primary evidence against Imre Nagy and other members of his cabinet in the White Books . A Western eyewitness said : After Dudás ' militia assaulted the building , the surrounding crowd lynched a number of ÁVH officers . Highly visible in photographs of this attack are the party ' s paybooks displayed on to the corpses , demonstrating that ÁVH soldiers received at least 10 times the wages of a manual worker . Reaction of revolutionary forces to Dudás . When the students ' and workers ' councils discovered what the Dudás group was doing , they instituted armed patrols to arrest and detain ÁVH members for their own safety , and for future planned trials . As a result of Dudás ' massacres , and the students ' policy of arrest , many ÁVH voluntarily turned themselves in to students ' or workers ' councils to seek protective custody . This was a reflection of the shared student - worker policy of keeping the revolution pure and bloodless . Dudás was sought for arrest by the students ' and workers ' councils . Retaliation . Unsurprisingly , when the Warsaw Pact intervened in the revolution to support the government , ÁVH officers carried out brutal reprisal s against those who had killed their comrades . The ÁVH generally targeted all revolutionaries , and received significant assistance from the Soviet Union ' s security apparatus , who arrested the Nagy government , General Pál Maléter , and deported thousands of students and workers to the Soviet Union . House of Terror . Shortly after the Arrow Cross Party left it , the building under the address 60 Andrássy Road became the ÁVH Headquarters . The building is now a museum called " The House of Terror " , commemorating the victims of both political systems .