Mentesítési osztály

The collection can only be researched through the individual perusal of the files. In the years of anti-Semitic radicalization in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hungarian legislation increasingly redefined the category of Jews in a racial manner. The definiton it adoped was in some respects stricted than the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935. At the same time, under the German occupation of Hungary and the Holocaust in 1944, certain people defined and persecuted as Jews could be exempted. The major means of this was to acquire the status of an internationally protected person, which the neutral Embassies operating in Budapest at the time would grant. Next to this, there was also an official Hungarian office that granted exemption to Jews from particular measures. These exemptions concerned particular measures such as being forced to wear the yellow star but also such decisive matters as having to undergo ghettoization and deportation. This collection has a fragment of the Bureau of Exemptions that operated shortly in 1944. The collection contains lists of people eligible for exemption status and individuals applying for this status.