Absztrakt

On 23 December 1952, a murder took place somewhere between the Baranya County villages of Mecseknádasd and Óbánya. The victim was János Kovács, the council chairman of Óbánya, which lent heightened importance to the case for both the local and the Budapest authorities. After a few days of interrogations, the perpetrators and their accomplices were identified, but many other local residents were also subjected to severe reprisals. The study focuses on two main aspects of the case. Drawing on a rich body of local police and state security records, it reconstructs the events of the murder and the perpetrators’ motives. Going beyond the facts, it also charts the shifting interpretive frameworks at work during the investigation, in contemporaneous and later press reports, in local recollections, and in attempts at judicial reviews in subsequent decades. The analysis demonstrates how the social perception of the crime has shifted over the seventy years after the details of the case came to light, and the ways in which the socio-political environment has influenced these interpretive frameworks between the 1950s and the present.