Hungary / 4 November 2026

Hungary opened its secret police files.

On 4 November 2026 the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Services put three groups of records online. Anyone can search them, free, without registration, and the results can be downloaded. If you have Hungarian family, this page is about what you can find, what it means, and what to do next.

This is an independent guide. It is not run by the archive and it is not connected to it. It holds no records of its own and it names no living person. The official places are nyitottaktak.hu, where the search runs, and abtl.hu, the archive itself.

01 / What opened

The register, not the stories

Three groups of records became searchable: the network registration cards, the recruitment logbooks, and the magnetic tapes that hold the card index in digital form. What they contain is the administration of the network: who was registered, under what cover name, when, by which unit.

What is in it nowThe registers. They tell you that a person was entered into the network records. They do not tell you what that person did, wrote or refused to write.
What comes laterThe recruitment dossiers, which hold the actual reports and the circumstances, follow in a second step. According to the announcement they are due by 25 February 2027.
What is missing for goodA large part of the working dossiers that held the reports was destroyed before 1989. For many people the register entry is all that survives, and for many others not even that.

The numbers that circulated before the opening put the registered network persons at fifty to sixty thousand. Treat that as press reporting, not as a figure from the archive.

02 / How to search

Four things you can search for

The search runs on the archive's own site, nyitottaktak.hu. The interface is in Hungarian, but the fields are short and a name plus a year of birth is enough to try.

Name and birth dataThe most useful starting point. Hungarian records list the mother's maiden name as well, so if you know it, keep it at hand.
Cover nameEvery network person was registered under one. You will not know it in advance, and you do not need it to search.
Document typeWhich kind of record it is.
Document numberUseful only if you already have a reference from somewhere else.

Spelling matters more than it should. Hungarian names lost their accents when families emigrated: Szűcs became Szucs, Fehér became Feher. If the accented form gives nothing, try the plain one, and try the maiden name on its own.

03 / What it proves

A record is not a verdict, and an empty result is not an acquittal

I found the name. Does that prove my relative was an informer?

No. A registration card records that someone was entered into the network register. It does not say how they got there, what they did afterwards, whether they reported anything of substance, or whether they were themselves under pressure. The documents that could answer that are the dossiers, and most of them no longer exist.
I found nothing. Does that mean my family was never touched?

No. The surviving material is a fragment of what once existed, and the destruction in 1989 and 1990 was deliberate. An absence proves nothing in either direction. There is also no deadline on access: if there is nothing today, it is worth trying again in two or three years, because the archive keeps processing material.
The person was watched, not recruited. Are they in here?

Differently. The registers that opened are the network registers, which is a separate category from the people who were targets of surveillance, and separate again from the third persons who merely appear in someone else's file. Those appear in the dossiers, not in this card index.
What about public figures?

Hungarian law treats them separately: identifying data about the network past of a public figure can be obtained by anyone through a defined procedure, and the person concerned can contest the classification in court. That is a legal route, not a search box, and this page cannot advise on it.

04 / Requesting a file

If you live abroad

The public search shows you whether something exists. To see the file itself you send a written request to the archive, under Act III of 2003. You do not need to live in Hungary and you do not need a lawyer.

Who can askYou, for your own file. A relative, for the file of a deceased family member. Anyone, for a living person's file, with that person's written consent. Or someone acting for you under a power of attorney.
What the request must containYour full name including birth and earlier names, your place and date of birth, your mother's maiden name, your address, a postal address, a phone number, and the number of an identity document. For a relative's file, the same data about them, your relationship, and the year they died.
When the certificates are neededNot when you send the request. The archive asks for birth and death certificates once the search has actually found something, so a missing certificate is not a reason to wait.
How to send itBy post, by email, in person, or through the archive's online service. Without a Hungarian electronic identity you can still send the request, but the copies then have to be collected in person or requested by a signed original sent by post. For most people abroad that means post.
What it costsAccess itself is free. Copies were charged at 235 forint per A4 page and 500 forint per anonymised page in October 2026, which is a few cents a page. Prices change; the archive's own site is the authority.

The request has to be in Hungarian. That is the reason the generator below exists: you answer in English, and it writes the Hungarian letter, using the fields the archive's own access rules require.

05 / Tool

Request letter generator

Fill this in and you get a finished letter in Hungarian, ready to print, sign and post, or to paste into an email. The fields come from the archive's own access rules, which list what a request has to contain.

Nothing you type here leaves your browser. There is no server behind this form, nothing is saved and nothing is sent. You submit the letter yourself, in your own name.

Whose file are you asking for

My own file The file of a deceased relative I am acting under a power of attorney

Your details

Full name

Birth or maiden name

Place of birth

Date of birth

Mother's maiden name

Home address

Postal address, if different

Phone number

Email address

Identity document number

Anything that helps the search

Years the records are likely to come from

Occupation, workplace, address in those years

The event or activity behind the request

What you already found in the public search

Cover name

Dossier number or archival reference

Document number

What you are asking for

Access to the documents Copies of the documents Also the identifying data of the network person or operative contact who wrote the reports

The access rules treat that last point separately: the applicant may state whether they wish to learn the identifying data of the person who wrote the reports. If you leave it unticked, the letter says nothing about it.

The letter, in Hungarian

What to attach

Where to send it

By post: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, 1410 Budapest, Pf.: 119., Hungary In person: 1067 Budapest, Eötvös utca 7., Monday to Thursday, 10:00 to 16:00 By email: info@abtl.hu Online: lar.abtl.hu

If you send the request without a Hungarian electronic identity, the copies have to be collected in person or requested with a signed original sent by post. The letter says this at the end, so you do not have to raise it yourself.

06 / Glossary

Four terms with an official definition

These four come word for word from the archive's own access rules. Everything else you will read about the subject, including on this page, is description rather than definition.

Network personSomeone who gave reports in secret, under cover and with a cover name, who signed a recruitment declaration, or who received an advantage for that activity.
Operative contactSomeone registered as a "social" or "occasional" contact. A separate category from the network person, kept separately in the records.
Third personSomeone whose data was handled but who belongs to neither group above: a witness, a defence lawyer, a relative.
RelativeFor the purposes of a request: spouse, unmarried partner under conditions, direct relative, adopted, step and foster child, adoptive, step and foster parent, sibling.

You will also meet the "number six card" and the "B logbook". Those names are used in the literature, but the archive has not published a field-level description of either, so this page does not pretend to give one. The other fifty-two terms, including the number codes on the cards, are in the glossary, and the history behind them is in the background.

07 / Sources

Where the authoritative answers are

nyitottaktak.huThe public search itself, run by the archive. nyitottaktak.hu
abtl.huThe Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Services: the access rules, the fees, the forms and the public-service desk. abtl.hu
Public-service desk1067 Budapest, Eötvös utca 7., Monday to Thursday 10:00 to 16:00, phone +36 1 478 6025, email info@abtl.hu. They answer in Hungarian.

08 / About

About this page

This page exists because the opening is Hungarian, the interface is Hungarian and the request has to be written in Hungarian, while a large part of the families concerned have not lived in Hungary for two or three generations. Everything here that describes the procedure comes from the archive's own published information and from its access rules. Where something is press reporting rather than an official figure, the page says so.

It is written and maintained by Péter Veszprémi, polarisweb.hu. If you find something inaccurate, write to peter.veszpremi@polarisweb.hu and it gets fixed. Replies are in English or Hungarian.

Other countries in the region opened their secret police archives earlier, and the procedures are different in each. This page covers Hungary only. Saying anything about the German, Romanian, Polish or Czech process without measuring it first would be guesswork, and on this subject guesswork is expensive.