Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie

Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie 

Law enforcement agency founded in Hungary in 1881 based on the French model. Its primary tasks were to prosecute crime and maintain order in villages and rural areas. The police force was in charge of these tasks in towns. In 1944, the twenty-thousand-strong gendarmerie played a key role in the ghettoization and deportation of the Hungarian Jews. With few exceptions, gendarmes fulfilled their duty mercilessly, and some of them even went beyond orders, committing excesses out of antisemitic zeal and sadism. After the war, the gendarmerie was declared a criminal organization and dissolved.