{"id":28304,"date":"2019-11-12T10:55:59","date_gmt":"2019-11-12T10:55:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev2.atlatszo.exot.hu\/?p=28304"},"modified":"2022-07-07T08:27:39","modified_gmt":"2022-07-07T08:27:39","slug":"a-communist-show-trial-how-daniel-banffy-became-a-war-criminal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev2.atlatszo.exot.hu\/en\/english\/a-communist-show-trial-how-daniel-banffy-became-a-war-criminal\/","title":{"rendered":"A Communist Show Trial: How D\u00e1niel B\u00e1nffy Became a War Criminal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Romanian State to hang on tooth and nail to B\u00e1nffy forests: it relitigates what it had given back 12 years ago. The renationalisation is based on a genuine communist show trial from 1952.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The People\u2019s Republic of Romania sentenced D\u00e1niel B\u00e1nffy, then 59, to eight years of forced labour and confiscation of all property in 1952. At that time, he had been living in Hungary for more than ten years: first in his villa in R\u00f3zsadomb, the elite district of Budapest, as an aristocrat and a minister, then evacuated by the Hungarian state to a meat warehouse in J\u00e1szap\u00e1ti, a small town in the Hungarian Alf\u00f6ld. This is where he lived at the time of the second trial and sentence, whether being aware of it or not.<\/p>\n

The files of the trial are archived in file P007028 at the National Council for the Study of Securitate\u2019s Archives (CNSAS). Details of the files prove that<\/p>\n

the criminal action against the former politician was a show trial in all its aspects:<\/strong><\/h2>\n
    \n
  • it was initiated illegally, since he was acquitted for the same charges in 1946 with a legally binding sentence, and no new evidence was found;<\/li>\n
  • no real efforts were made to interrogate B\u00e1nffy, proving that it was never a priority for the state to find out the truth about the events;<\/li>\n
  • the prosecution claimed in the retrial request that the statement of the defence\u2019s witnesses should not have been taken into account at all;<\/li>\n
  • the witnesses of the prosecution confessed that their knowledge of how B\u00e1nffy received the Hungarian soldiers marching into Palotailva\/Lunca Bradului was only hearsay as they knew very little or no Hungarian at all;<\/li>\n
  • the court only heard the witnesses of the defence on condition that their statement cannot change the statements of facts, and they would only be taken into account in judging mitigating circumstances at best.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    The fact that D\u00e1niel B\u00e1nffy was convicted for the charge of instigation to war crimes to forced labour and property confiscation<\/p>\n

    has had its long-lasting consequences reaching to this day: <\/strong><\/h2>\n

    it was a precedent used by the Giurgiu County Court in 2018, when it took the legally binding decision to return to state ownership the more than 9300 hectares forest in Maros County, which had once been given back to the heirs of D\u00e1niel B\u00e1nffy in 2007, after a trial that had been going on for years. In the 11 year\u2019s time that passed between the two sentences, the state refused to execute the legally binding decision, and the forest has never been registered in the cadastre under the name of the inheritors.<\/p>\n

    Baron B\u00e1nffy\u2019s grandson, Farkas, who lives in the village of Fugad\/Ciuguzel, Feh\u00e9r\/Alba County, manages the restitution trials and estates of the extended family in Romania (800 hectares of forests and arable lands). By mid-2018, this amount was less than 5 percent of what the family reclaimed, he stated to the newspaper Kr\u00f3nika<\/a>. The family reclaimed 35 thousand hectares of woods on the Kelemen\/Calimani Mountains alone.<\/p>\n

    On the basis of the 2018 court decision, in 2019 the prefect of Feh\u00e9r\/Alba County started to win new lawsuits against Farkas B\u00e1nffy nullifying his certifications of property for some smaller territories (45 hectares of pasture, 23,75 hectares of forest, arable lands of 9 and 40 hectares). The restitution of three other forests (35 hectares altogether)<\/a> was also nullified by court decisions not yet legally binding.<\/p>\n

    The initiator of the renationalisation was the prefect of Maros\/Mures County, Vasile Oprea. After the 2007 final judgment favourable for the B\u00e1nffys, Oprea asked for retrial on the highest level four times, and finally succeeded in 2014. The basis he referred to was that the 9300 hectares of forests in the neighbourhood of Ratosnya\/Rastolita, G\u00f6demesterh\u00e1za\/Stanceni and Palotailva\/Lunca Bradului were not expropriated by the Romanian state during the communist nationalisation, but were confiscated as a result of a court sentence from 1952.<\/p>\n

    (What\u2019s more, the prefect had the trial relocated from the court of Sz\u00e1szr\u00e9gen\/Reghin in Maros\/Mures County to Giurgiu saying that the Hungarians living in Maros county reclaimed 9323 hectares of forests claiming that they were the descendants of the B\u00e1nffy Counts, Kr\u00f3nika writes<\/a>. That is, the prefect and the highest court which accepted his justification regard the Hungarian community living in the area as a possible source of danger.)<\/p>\n

    We need to follow up several threads in order to see how valid it was to justify the 2014 retrial and the 2018 sentence by a formal confiscation of property in 1952:<\/p>\n

      \n
    • Whether the single difference between the four unsuccessful and the final successful retrial attempts was the reference to the trial and sentence from 1952;<\/li>\n
    • Why the Giurgiu County Court, in July 2018, considered a show trial from 1951-52 relevant?<\/li>\n
    • When and under what circumstances did the Romanian state confiscate the estates of D\u00e1niel B\u00e1nffy<\/li>\n
    • What is it that proves even for an outsider that the 1951-52 trial was a show trial?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      Let\u2019s start with the last one: \u00c1tl\u00e1tsz\u00f3 Erd\u00e9ly requested and received the documents of the trial from CNSAS<\/a>. In this trial the prosecutor accused B\u00e1nffy (of the Losonc branch of the family) and two of his employees that they gave instigating speeches at Palotailva\/Lunca Bradului in the autumn of 1940, when the Hungarian troops marched into Transylvania. As a result of these speeches that<\/p>\n

      \u201ccaused hatred against the cohabiting populations, Romanians were imprisoned, tortured and expelled.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      The 1946 trial documents contain a more detailed description. The prosecution alleged that D\u00e1niel B\u00e1nffy, Ernest P\u00e1ter, the engineer of his sawmill, and Ida P\u00e1ter, the latter\u2019s wife, welcomed the Hungarian soldiers arriving to the settlement in the beginning of September, and the Baron and Ida P\u00e1ter said to the soldiers and the people gathered round that the Romanians had humiliated the Hungarians and they depleted the region during the twenty years of Romanian rule, but that the time of revenge and payback had arrived \u2013 that is, they instigated the Hungarians against the Romanians.<\/p>\n

      In order to make a greater impact \u2013 the indictment says \u2013 Ida P\u00e1ter also burst into tears and kissed the Hungarian officers. Ernest P\u00e1ter was accused of making a similar address to the people gathered in the yard of the Bangra sawmill: we have suffered enough for 22 years, the time of revenge has arrived.<\/p>\n

      The Hungarians incited by these speeches ganged up with the Hungarian soldiers and began arresting and assaulting Romanians. The indictment lists nine people who were arrested, taken to the sawmill yard and lined up against the wall to make them think they would be shot. Half an hour later they were surrounded by soldiers, lined in columns and marched to a settlement called Valea Ilvei (Ilva valley). [This was not a settlement, as the indictment suggests, but the valley of Ilva stream which flows into the river Maros\/Mures – Farkas B\u00e1nffy\u2019s clarification].<\/p>\n