The ÁVH was conceived as an external appendage of the Soviet Union's KGB in Hungary responsible for supporting the ruling Hungarian Working People's Party and persecuting political criminals.

The ÁVH gained a reputation for brutality during a series of purges but was gradually reined in under the government of Imre Nagy, a moderate reformer, after he was appointed Prime Minister of Hungary in 1953.

Between 1945 and 1952, Gábor Péter (Benjamin Eisenberger) was the absolute head of the State Protection Authority (Államvédelmi Hatóság), responsible for much cruelty, brutality and many political purges.

László Rajk, the Communist Minister of Interior played a crucial role in organizing the State Protection Authority (ÁVH), but in 1949 he was one of its victims.

On April 7, 1953, early in the morning, Miksa Domonkos, one of the leaders of the Neologue Jewish community in Budapest was kidnapped by ÁVH officials to extract "confessions".

The last people to meet Wallenberg in Budapest were Ottó Fleischmann, Károly Szabó, and Pál Szalai, who were invited to a supper at the Swedish Embassy building in Gyopár street on January 12, 1945.

Freed from the necessity of immediate combat, the József Dudás militia planned a series of reprisals against ÁVH officers, informants, and on a few occasions against ordinary Communist-party members caught up in the revolution.

This event was well documented by both western and eastern journalists and photographers, and constituted the primary evidence against Imre Nagy and other members of his cabinet in the White Books.

Highly visible in photographs of this attack are the party's paybooks displayed on to the corpses, demonstrating that ÁVH soldiers received at least 10 times the wages of a manual worker.

When the students' and workers' councils discovered what the Dudás group was doing, they instituted armed patrols to arrest and detain ÁVH members for their own safety, and for future planned trials.

Unsurprisingly, when the Warsaw Pact intervened in the revolution to support the government, ÁVH officers carried out brutal reprisals against those who had killed their comrades.

While the security apparatus was operating, it supported the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) directly, with little reference made to Government norms.

This support was primarily through the secret gathering of intelligence, largely through a vast network of informants, like the system used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in the German Democratic Republic.

When the apparatus had extracted confessions of varying quality from a prisoner, the State's system of public procurators and courts would be called in to make a ruling on the sentence.