The Trial of László Rajk

This photograph shows László Rajk during his trial in September 1949. 

In the 1940s and 1950s, when most of the volunteers who returned to Hungary from the Spanish Civil War were still alive, they were afraid to talk about their involvement, because the communist dictator of the country, Mátyás Rákosi, had initiated a purge among the members of the Hungarian anti-fascist resistance. The charge against them, in line with the so-called Moscow trials, was Trotskyism, which was then considered the main enemy of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Those who had taken part in the Spanish Civil War were accused of being recruited by Western secret services. 

One of the most notorious of the so-called “Spanish Trials” was the 1949 trial of László Rajk and 16 other ex-volunteers on charges of Trotskyism, espionage and treason. After leaving Spain, many of them had continued to fight the Nazis in the French and Belgian resistance or joined the British army in Africa, but became suspects in their home country for being “contaminated” by too many Western influences. Rajk, one of the Communist party secretaries of the 13th International Brigade, was wounded in the Battle of the Ebro, was sent to a French camp, and from 1941 became one of the organizers of the anti-fascist resistance in Hungary. He later became a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party and served as Minister of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs, presiding over the first Hungarian show trials and orchestrating the brutal torture of prisoners. He was the most popular man in the party among the young, the democratic left, and intellectuals, and was an independent communist of firm convictions.For Rákosi, Rajk was his most dangerous rival. 

The indictment against Rajk emphasized that he had arrived in Spain as an agent of the right-wing Horthy government to carry out subversive activities. He was investigated, relieved of all his official functions, and expelled from the party. He was accused of having met Yugoslav agents of foreign spy organisations in the French internment camps, being recruited by the Gestapo to spy in Hungary, and placing Trotskyists, provocateurs and spies, most of whom had previously fought in the International Brigades, in high positions. According to the prosecution, they were all spies involved in a conspiracy that began on the battlefields of Spain.  

Knowing the torture he would face (as he had developed much of it earlier), Rajk confessed to everything, thereby declaring the Hungarians who had participated in the Spanish Civil War to be collaborators, or at least suspects. Rajk was convicted and executed; 155 people were sentenced in total, including 16 prominent members of the International Brigades. The hundreds of Hungarian volunteers who were not prosecuted suffered mistrust until the 1960s. Those convicted were rehabilitated after Stalin’s death in 1956.  Rajk was reburied in an official state ceremony on October 6, 1956, an event that was a precursor to the Hungarian revolution that began three weeks later.