The book discusses a formerly unknown and invisible massacre in Budapest in 1944, committed by a paramilitary group lead by a women. Andrea Peto uncovers the gripping history of the fi rst private Holocaust memorial erected in Budapest in 1945. Based on court trials, interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and investigators, the book illustrates the complexities of gendered memory of violence. It examines the dramatic events: massacre, deportation, robbery, homecoming, and fi ght for memorialization from the point of view of the perpetrators and the survivors. The book will change the ways we look at intimate killings during the Second World-War. Watch our talk with the editor Andrea Peto here: https://youtu.be/dV6JEcE2RFk

This book analyses the actions, background, connections and the eventual trials of Hungarian female perpetrators in the Second World War through the concept of invisibility. It examines why and how far-right women in general and among them several Second World War perpetrators were made invisible by their fellow Arrow Cross Party members in the 1930s and during the war (1939-1945), and later by the Hungarian people's tribunals responsible for the purge of those guilty of war crimes (1945-1949). It argues that because of their 'invisibilization' the legacy of these women could remain alive throughout the years of state socialism and that, furthermore, this legacy has actively contributed to the recent insurgence of far-right politics in Hungary. This book therefore analyses how the invisibility of Second World War perpetrators is connected to twenty-first century memory politics and the present-day resurgence of far-right movements.

The twentieth century has been a century of wars, genocides and violent political conflict; a century of militarization and massive destruction. It has simultaneously been a century of feminist creativity and struggle worldwide, witnessing fundamental changes in the conceptions and everyday practices of gender and sexuality. What are some of the connections between these two seemingly disparate characteristics of the past century? And how do collective memories figure into these connections? Exploring the ways in which wars and their memories are gendered, this book contributes to the feminist search for new words and new methods in understanding the intricacies of war and memory. From the Italian and Spanish Civil Wars to military regimes in Turkey and Greece, from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to the wars in Abhazia, East Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Israel and Palestine, the chapters in this book address a rare selection of contexts and geographies from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. In recent years, feminist scholarship has fundamentally changed the ways in which pasts, particularly violent pasts, have been conceptualized and narrated. Discussing the participation of women in war, sexual violence in times of conflict, the use of visual and dramatic representations in memory research, and the creative challenges to research and writing posed by feminist scholarship, Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories will appeal to scholars working at the intersection of military/war, memory, and gender studies, seeking to chart this emerging territory with 'feminist curiosity'.

The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315584225 The twentieth century has been a century of wars, genocides and violent political conflict; a century of militarization and massive destruction. It has simultaneously been a century of feminist creativity and struggle worldwide, witnessing fundamental changes in the conceptions and everyday practices of gender and sexuality. What are some of the connections between these two seemingly disparate characteristics of the past century? And how do collective memories figure into these connections? Exploring the ways in which wars and their memories are gendered, this book contributes to the feminist search for new words and new methods in understanding the intricacies of war and memory. From the Italian and Spanish Civil Wars to military regimes in Turkey and Greece, from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to the wars in Abhazia, East Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Israel and Palestine, the chapters in this book address a rare selection of contexts and geographies from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. In recent years, feminist scholarship has fundamentally changed the ways in which pasts, particularly violent pasts, have been conceptualized and narrated. Discussing the participation of women in war, sexual violence in times of conflict, the use of visual and dramatic representations in memory research, and the creative challenges to research and writing posed by feminist scholarship, Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories will appeal to scholars working at the intersection of military/war, memory, and gender studies, seeking to chart this emerging territory with 'feminist curiosity'.

The book discusses a formerly unknown and invisible massacre in Budapest in 1944, committed by a paramilitary group lead by a women. Andrea Peto uncovers the gripping history of the fi rst private Holocaust memorial erected in Budapest in 1945. Based on court trials, interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and investigators, the book illustrates the complexities of gendered memory of violence. It examines the dramatic events: massacre, deportation, robbery, homecoming, and fi ght for memorialization from the point of view of the perpetrators and the survivors. The book will change the ways we look at intimate killings during the Second World-War.

Rural women have not had a formative role in the public histories of Central Eastern Europe. Izabella Agardi aims to correct that by concentrating on their life stories and their connections to general histories. She investigates how Hungarian-speaking, ordinary women in rural contexts born in the 1920s and 1930s remember and talk about the twentieth century they have experienced, and how, through their stories, they articulate historical change and construct themselves as historical subjects. In her analysis, Izabella Agardi traces the interactions between micro- and macro- narratives as well as the specific tools women of this generation appropriate to talk about personal memories of their often traumatic past. From these stories, a particular mnemonic community emerges, one that speaks from a highly precarious position 'on the verge of history'. It is up to future generations whether these women's experiences will be remembered or forgotten.

In Hungary, which fell under Soviet influence at the end of WWII, those who had participated in the wartime atrocities were tried by so called people's courts. This book analyses this process in an objective, quantitative way, contributing to the present timely discussion on the Hungarian war guilt. The authors apply a special focus on the gender aspect of the trials. Political justice had a specific nature in Hungary. War criminals began to be brought to trial while fighting was still underway in the western part of the country, well before the Nuremberg trials. Not only crimes committed during the war were tried in the same frame but also post-war ones. As far as the post-war period is concerned, legal proceedings regarding these crimes were most often launched on the basis of Act VII of 1946. This act of law concerned "the criminal law protection of the democratic constitutional order and the republic" and its basic aim was to facilitate the creation of a communist dictatorship and to deal with perceived or real enemies of the regime.

This book analyses the actions, background, connections and the eventual trials of Hungarian female perpetrators in the Second World War through the concept of invisibility. It examines why and how far-right women in general and among them several Second World War perpetrators were made invisible by their fellow Arrow Cross Party members in the 1930s and during the war (1939-1945), and later by the Hungarian people's tribunals responsible for the purge of those guilty of war crimes (1945-1949). It argues that because of their 'invisibilization' the legacy of these women could remain alive throughout the years of state socialism and that, furthermore, this legacy has actively contributed to the recent insurgence of far-right politics in Hungary. This book therefore analyses how the invisibility of Second World War perpetrators is connected to twenty-first century memory politics and the present-day resurgence of far-right movements.