When the Royal couple visited Debrecen on 23 October 1918 to attend the inauguration of the University “Clinic” site, nobody could have predicted that upcoming events would soon shatter the state order of Hungary and fundamentally determine the country’s fate. The town received the news of the monarch appointing Mihály Károlyi as head of government on 30 October. Citizens of Debrecen gathered in front of the Town Hall and demanded the display of the national flag. Soldiers pinned cockades in the national colours in place of their cap badges. The National Council of Debrecen was formed and joined the Hungarian National Council on 1 November. When the Republic of Councils was declared on 21 March 1919 in Budapest, the Directorate was also formed in Debrecen. However, the “glory days” of the Republic of Councils did not last long here, as
Romanian forces occupied the town only a month later on 23 April 1919. When the Romanian occupiers left on 11 March 1920, they left a ransacked and impoverished town in their wake. The University of Debrecen had three faculties in those days, namely the Faculties of Reformed Theology, Law and Liberal Arts. The Faculty of Medicine was under organisation. In October 1919, Béla Sz. Kun, dean of the Faculty of Law initiated an investigation into the conduct of every lecturer and employee of the University during the time of the Republic of Councils. The investigation was later extended to include the period of the Romanian occupation. This study set out to review the public disciplinary proceedings against lecturers non-exhaustively, mainly on the basis of sources in the archives. The author demonstrates through the examples of a number of disciplinary procedures how retaliations happened in the Horthy-period.