Budapest's House of Terror: Cold War Crimes on Andrássy út

# Budapest's House of Terror Stands as Europe's Most Chilling Cold War Memorial

In Budapest, Hungary, the building at Andrássy út 60 served first as the headquarters of Hungary's Arrow Cross Nazi movement and later as the operational centre of the communist secret police — a fact that has made it one of the most visited dark history sites in Central Europe.

A Building With Two Regimes of Terror

During the Second World War, the Arrow Cross party used number 60 as its command post, overseeing the persecution and murder of Hungarian Jews and political opponents. When Soviet-backed communism replaced Nazism after 1945, the same building was taken over by the AVO — Hungary's feared state security service — and later its successor, the ÁVH, which was modelled directly on the Soviet KGB.

For roughly a decade, the basement of this elegant Budapest townhouse functioned as a place of interrogation, torture, sham trials and execution. Political prisoners were held in cramped cells, subjected to psychological and physical abuse, and in some cases hanged in the building's own gallows room. The cells and chambers were left largely untouched and are now open to visitors — among them a "wet cell," a "fox hole" isolation chamber, a dedicated torture room and the gallows room itself.

What the Museum Covers

The House of Terror Museum opened in 2002 and occupies the original building in its entirety. The permanent exhibition moves chronologically through Hungary's two totalitarian periods: the Arrow Cross years, the post-war communist takeover, the brutal 1950s under Soviet influence, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution — which was crushed by the Soviet Red Army — and the slow unravelling of the regime through to 1989–1990.

Key exhibition rooms include a reconstructed director's office, a "Justice Room" dedicated to the show trials of the communist era, a Hall of Tears commemorating identified victims, and the Perpetrators' Wall — a display of photographs of those who carried out the atrocities. The lobby contains a Soviet-era tank, a deliberately blunt symbol of occupation. A separate section documents the Soviet military withdrawal from Hungary in 1991, marking the formal end of the period the museum covers.