HUNGARY: Another Mindszenty

The stage, the actors and the well-rehearsed dialogue were almost the same; only the victim's name was different. In the same drab Budapest courtroom in which Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty was condemned, before the same Communist judge and prosecutor, Archbishop Joseph Grösz of Kalocsa last week went on trial for treason. Like Mindszenty, he "confessed."* Again the world saw the spectacle of a strong man broken and repeating in court what the Red scriptwriters dictated.

"I Can Even Die." Archbishop Grösz (rhymes, roughly, with worse) comes from the same region as Mindszenty, was bishop of Szombathely when Mindszenty served under him as a parish priest. Like peasant-born Joseph Mindszenty, whom he succeeded two years ago as head of the Roman Catholic church in Hungary, peasant-born Grösz is a man whose character and courage are beyond question. When in 1945 Nazi bullies broke into his palace at Kalocsa and ordered him with raised Tommy guns to get out of town, Grösz said: "I can face any kind of machine gun and if necessary I can even die at my desk."

Like Mindszenty, Grösz had opposed Communism; he steadfastly refused to sign the Communists' phony peace petition or order his priests to do so.

Pet Villains. The charges against Grösz: black-marketeering, helping non-Communist refugees to escape to the West, plotting with the U.S. to overthrow the Hungarian government. The Communist version of the "plot": Yugoslavia's

Tito was to invade Hungary, and Grösz would become regent, paving the way for a restoration of Austrian Pretender Otto of Habsburg. Grösz was to prepare for this coup by organizing resistance groups inside Hungary, including the boy scouts. The U.S. would finance the whole affair. Once in power, Grösz would revoke Communist land reforms, return the big landowners and capitalists to power.

The story, which neatly lumped all the Reds' pet villains, fit the old Communist pattern. Some small parts which sounded true, i.e., that Grösz was "in touch" with the Vatican and the U.S. embassy, simply did not add up to treason; the really damaging details were plainly fantastic. But under questioning from Judge Vilmos Old (a former Nazi), Grösz—reported to be "calm and deliberate"—obediently confessed to the whole story.

This time, the West had a better idea of how the Communists did it: Robert Vogeler, the U.S. businessman who had been imprisoned by the Hungarian Communists for 17 months, had told how his jailers tortured him, physically and mentally, until he was ready to make his own false confession (TIME, May 7).

The Purpose. Eight alleged accomplices of Grösz—four Catholic churchmen, a Hungarian employee of the U.S. legation in Budapest, a former lawyer, a former member of Parliament and a former government official—also poured forth confessions.