Attorneys at law

For attorneys it is perhaps the least appropriate to use the adjective “everyday”, since their financial success and public involvement have made many lawyers to stand out of Hungarian society. Yet it is absolutely unavoidable to talk about this occupational group when it comes to the Holocaust, since on the eve of the Second World War, in early 1938, 1,846 of the 3,386 attorneys in Budapest belonged to the Jewish denominations. Even if we exclude lawyers who had been baptized (in 1941 this group accounted for 17% of the Budapest attorneys), it is clear that the proportion of colleagues of Jewish origin within the profession was still extremely high. This is particularly remarkable if we consider that before 1867, Jews could only become lawyers in Hungary with a special royal permission. Between 1890 and 1910, however, 81% of the 2,461 newly registered attorneys at law were already Jewish.

Attorneys residing and working in urban centers had also played a significant role in the economic modernization of the country, which has resulted in considerable financial gains for many of them. By 1900, 35% of attorneys owned land and 47% owned tenements. Since many of the largest tenement houses in the capital were also owned by lawyers, in some cases attorneys were the employers of the concierges. At the same time, lawyers accounted for almost a quarter of the members of parliament, and nearly 40% of the members of the committees of the legislative bodies of the counties and towns. It is hardly surprising, then, that attorneys were also overrepresented among the members and chairmen of the local Jewish councils established throughout the country in 1944.

Within the legal profession, the most important factor was the Budapest Bar Association of Attorneys. The internal, relatively calm atmosphere of this organization in the interwar era was threatened mainly by the competitive situation arising from the growing number of lawyers, especially from the years of the Great Depression. However, for a long time these tensions did not have an anti-Semitic overtone. In this context, it is particularly interesting to note that the first group of lawyers within the Budapest Bar Association to be opposed by other attorneys because of their religious background was the circle of Jewish converts: the Christian and Jewish members of the Bar Association united in their efforts to expel the “converts” from the leadership of the Association. However, in 1932, after Gyula Gömbös came into power, one of the existing attorneys’ groups, the National Association of Hungarian Lawyers (MÜNE), elected a new president and adopted a radical anti-Jewish program. The legitimacy of this originally rather insignificant group of lawyers was helped by the fact that in November 1932 the Minister of Justice, Andor Lázár, attended the MÜNE’s yearly meeting. From 1935, the MÜNE published its own newspaper under the name Magyar Ügyvéd (Hungarian Attorney), edited by László Budinszky, the later Arrow Cross minister and convicted war criminal. The main message of the MÜNE and its newspaper was that the Jewish attorneys were oppressing Christians, a situation which the MÜNE members wanted to fight against. In 1935, in accordance with the MÜNE’s wishes, Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös prepared a bill in favor of Christian lawyers, which would have applied the restrictions of the Numerus Clausus Law to the bodies of the Budapest Bar Association. And although it was not passed by the parliament, the proposal can be seen as a direct precursor to the later anti-Jewish laws. Thanks to his strong propaganda activities, by 1939 every second Christian attorney in Budapest had become a member of the MÜNE. As an indication of radicalization, in 1938 the MÜNE compiled and published a list of Jewish attorneys. Subsequently, the first and second anti-Jewish laws capped the number of Jewish attorneys at 20 %, and then at 6 % of the total number of active attorneys. The former figure was still based on religious affiliation, but the 6 % was already a restriction based on origin. For the MÜNE, however, this was not enough: they wanted a “numerus nullus”, a total exclusion of Jews. In 1941, they took over the leadership of the Bar Association and were involved in preparing further anti-Jewish legislation. On the basis of the list they had drawn up, many Jewish lawyers were called up by the authorities for labor service in between 1941 and 1943.

In March 1944, Hungary was occupied by the Nazi German troops. As was the case with all invaded countries, one of the first measures of the Germans was to crack down on local intellectuals. They had an easy job against attorneys of Jewish origin, because the MÜNE had already sent a list of 700 “Jews” to the Gestapo. However, following an intervention by the Ministry of Justice, the arrests, which were to be carried out in alphabetical order, were abandoned at the “K”-letter by the occupiers and their Hungarian accomplices. Those already arrested were not released, however, but interned at Kistarcsa and on the Csepel Island. On March 30, 1944, the Secretary General of the Budapest Bar Association submitted a petition to the government for the introduction of a “numerus nullus” for attorneys, which was finally introduced at the beginning of April by Decree 1210/1944 of the Hungarian government. Jewish attorneys were removed from the register and their law offices were taken over by Christian attorneys. More than 640 attorneys in Budapest alone were victims of the Holocaust.

The portrait of Dr. István Mándy (1884-1945)
© Budapest Főváros Levéltára

Dr. István Mándy’s father, Dr. Samu (Samuel) Mandel, was one of the founding members of the then established Budapest Bar Association of Attorneys. His son, Dr. István Mándy, who was wounded in the First World War, was a monarchist to the end of his life and believed in the strength of the Hungarian legal system to the end. In November 1944, Dr. István Mándy was taken by the Arrow Cross to dig trenches in Vecsés close to the current international airport of Budapest. One day, he and his fellow forced laborers were lined up for execution on news of the Red Army’s approach, but the Arrow Cross militia had no time left for this, they escaped leaving behind the Jewish laborers. However, the Soviet troops retreated a few days later and did not take the Hungarian Jews with them, so they were returned to the Arrow Cross. István Mándy was eventually taken to the Weiss Alice hospital and, although in poor health, he survived through the liberation of Budapest. His daughter Stefánia also survived the deportation, but by the time she returned home, her father, Dr. István Mándy, as a result of his anxiety about his daughter and the ordeal of the war, died of a heart attack on March 31, 1945.

Photo of attorney Dr. Imre Diamantstein in the studio, following his return from the labor service in Ukraine. Marosvásárhely, November, 1944
© USHMM / Centropa

Marian Reismann: Dr. Ernő Vajda taking a photo, 1950
The photograph is property of the Hungarian Museum of Photography.

Dr. Ernő Vajda (1889-1980) was an attorney, photographer and botanist. He was born as Adolf Weisz in Budapest. As an attorney, he successfully represented the family of Béla Bartók in probate proceedings. He published several internationally renowned books on botany. His photographs of plants are of artistic quality and have been exhibited in the Hungarian National Gallery and the Vigadó. In April 1944, he was interned in the Horthy-liget work camp on the island of Csepel. He was chosen as the leader of the forced laborers, and in this position, he tried to save the lives of hundreds of journalists, attorneys and others.

A group photo taken at the wedding of János Vázsonyi and Panni Milkó at the entry of the Dohány Street synagogue. June 5, 1933
MFI -Gyula Czvek photo
© BTM Kiscelli Múzeum Fényképgyűjtemény

Dr. János Vázsonyi (1900-1945) attorney and politician. He was the son of attorney Dr. Vilmos Vázsonyi (Weiszfeld), the first Jewish minister of Hungary. IIn 1931, as leader of the National Democratic Vázsonyi Party, he was elected to the Parliament, of which he was the youngest member. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, he became an advocate of anti-Nazi efforts together with Albert Szent-Györgyi. He was deported to Dachau in 1944. After the liberation of the concentration camp, he died in a hospital near Hanover.

Dr. László Mártai (Moskovitz) (1903-1975) was born into a wealthy merchant family in Újpest, where he worked as an attorney. They founded the Uránia cinema and the Blaha Lujza theater in Újpest was also run by them. In the 1930s, as a result of an anti-Jewish complaint, the Ministry of Interior took the cinema from the Moskovitz family and handed it over to an owner related to right-wing political circles.
From 1941, he was drafted to the auxiliary labor service. In 1944, he was forced to work for seven long months in the mines of Bor. He managed to escape and walk on foot to Temesvár. Here he became a founding member of the Hungarian Anti-Fascist Movement of Deportees, and assisted the return of the deportees to their home country. Following the war, he participated in the trials of the war criminals.
The Moskovitz parents, their three children and two grandchildren all died in Auschwitz.

Dr. Géza Ferenc Dombóváry (Schulhof) (1848-1918) was working as an attorney in Budapest also a top legal scholar and published works on the law of nobility, furthermore, he was the author of the multi-volume “The Explanation of the Hungarian Penal Code”. He had been ennobled by King Franz Joseph in 1885. His son Dr. Géza Dombóváry also became an attorney, and between 1918 and 1921, he led the Neolog Pest Jewish Community’s Legal Aid Office. In these immediate post-First World War years, when anti-Jewish aggression suddenly intensified in Hungary, he recorded statements by the victims about the attacks and tried to initiate either legal proceedings or at least to get the responsible authorities to intervene. He committed suicide on December 24, 1938, on the news of the proposal of the Second Anti-Jewish Law by the Hungarian Prime Minister on the previous day, on December 23, 1938. His farewell note reads:
“I don’t owe anyone even a penny, I leave because of the Jewish law!”

“His return home is undesirable” Ordinary people and the Holocaust_QR3

Attorneys at law

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