• Leningrad He bears his weapon ready at the hip, not over his shoulder. The main citadel, (Gellért Hill), was defended by elite Waffen-SS troops who successfully repelled several Soviet assaults. Above the arches seagulls used to oscillate.  • Syrmian Front An estimated two thousand wounded were burned or suffocated to death in fires that broke out in the catacombs under the Royal Palace. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by Historynet LLC, the world's largest publisher of history magazines. On February 6, the Soviets, attacking from three sides, finally took Eagle Hill after six weeks of continuous fighting. This allowed the defenders to site artillery and fortifications above the attackers, greatly slowing the Soviet advance. Soviet soldiers plundered, looted, and raped the populace. In addition, the Axis’ only remaining crude oil plant was in southwest Hungary. The battle of Budapest (December 1944 to February 1945) was one of the longest and bloodiest city sieges of World War II. Here the Hungarian defense stabilized, heavily reinforced by German soldiers rushed to Budapest from throughout the Eastern theater. Fighting broke out in the sewers, as both sides used them for troop movements. The Germans were forced to withdraw on 12 January. Civilian corpses already lay in the streets. Refusing to authorize a withdrawal, German dictator Adolf Hitler had declared Budapest a fortress city (Festung Budapest), which had to be defended to the last man. For Adolf Hitler, Budapest was vital. This encirclement attempt failed. George Lang, a young Hungarian Jew who survived Budapest’s dangerous streets by using guile and luck, later wrote: It was a time when God was arranging our lives with his left hand. Chapter 5: With Hungary's capital), Серых, Семен Прокофьевич.  • Paris  • West Hunan Kati Marton vividly captured how Budapest was then in her book Wallenberg: Budapest is a dramatic, theatrical kind of place. In mid-January, Csepel Island was taken, along with its military factories, which were still producing Panzerfausts and shells, even under Soviet fire. On the night of 11 February, some 28,000 German and Hungarian troops began to stream north-westwards away from Castle Hill. Nearby, Soviet and German forces were fighting for the city cemetery amongst shell-opened tombs; it would last for several days. The majority of the escapees were killed, wounded, or captured by the Soviet troops. [21]:129 Hungarian girls were kidnapped and taken to Red Army quarters, where they were imprisoned, repeatedly raped and sometimes murdered.  • Belgrade  •  • Poland On 17 January 1945, Hitler agreed to withdraw the remaining troops from Pest to try to defend Buda. By January 14, Hungarian infantry and assault guns were locked in mortal combat for the Eastern Railway Station with most of General Nicholae Sova’s Seventh Romanian Rifle Corps. Buda perched on steep hills, her sprawling Royal Palace, and her Citadel carved into jagged cliffs which plunge into the river, craves the attention of the visitor arriving down the Danube from Vienna. On New Year’s Day the lead elements of the newly arrived Third SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head) and Fifth SS Wiking (Viking) Panzer Divisions, advancing in column and without initial artillery preparation, crashed into the overextended Soviet Fourth Guards Army near Táta. Chapter 18: Helping the European people. They tried to capture it in order to improve supplying the city by air. Three German division commanders lay among the fallen. SV. ISBN 978-3-421-06235-2.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link) From the appearance of the first Soviet tanks on the outskirts of the capital to the capture of Buda Castle, 102 days elapsed. At this point, the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, temporarily put Hungary's attempts to quit the war on hold. Battle area in the main street of Budapest, with Russian tanks in the distance. By mid-September, after a fighting retreat through Transylvania, the Germans and Hungarians managed to cobble together a sufficient armored force to fight the Soviets to a standstill near Debrecen in eastern Hungary. It provided an almost unlimited amount of charts showing combat strengths and casualties on both sides. Consisting of four of the most battle-hardened Waffen SS Panzer units, including the dreaded Leibstandarte and Das Reich divisions, this formidable force was squandered in early March during an ill-conceived panzer ‘death ride’ into waiting and well-prepared Soviet anti-tank defenses near Lake Balaton. The memoirs of Heinz Landau, Goodbye Transylvania, present a German soldier's view of the battle.  • Gothic Line Hungarian people standing by watching events. In the ensuing chaos a rapidly withdrawing German tank recovery vehicle almost ran Galantay down. In one week his troops managed to punch about seventy miles, up to Budapest’s eastern suburbs. In the capital, the progress of the offensive was closely monitored. In January 1945, while German forces were gathering, Soviet armies were poised on the Vistula River, preparing to thrust into eastern Prussia and the heart of Germany, and Allied forces, having stopped the Ardennes offensive, were preparing to cross the Rhine into Germany’s vitals. The Siege of Budapest or Battle of Budapest was the 50-day-long encirclement by Soviet and Romanian forces of the Hungarian capital of Budapest, near the end of World War II.Part of the broader Budapest Offensive, the siege began when Budapest, defended by Hungarian and German troops, was first encircled on 26 December 1944 by the Red Army and the Romanian Army.  • Hong Kong The "Leader of the Nation" (Nemzetvezető), Ferenc Szálasi, had already fled on 9 December. They then severed the main Budapest-Vienna highway at Bicske, eighteen miles west of Budapest, and continued north with the bulk of their forces. He went over to ask what was going on. Within a month Vienna had fallen. For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History today! The corps’ chief of staff, the highly capable Oberst (Colonel) Uscha von Lindenau, later wrote: The number and composition of the troops at our disposal proved unfit for the defense of a large city like Budapest from the very start. During the night of 28 December 1944, the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Front contacted the besieged Germans by radios and loudspeakers and told them about a negotiation for the city's capitulation. Malinovsky reportedly told the German commander, ‘If I didn’t have a direct order from Stalin himself, I’d hang you in the main square of Buda castle for all the trouble you caused us.’. It is giving the German command precious time to take extensive countermeasures in the Hungarian theater of war. Defenses were easily broken through and urban fighting began within the city. The improvised landing strip on the Vérmezö became untenable. Without enough forces to fully exploit their near coup de main of Budapest, the Soviets went to ground, but not before securing vital positions on Schwabian Hill and at the Janos Hospital, within one and a half miles of the Royal Palace. With three rifle corps on line, supported by heavy assault guns, armor, artillery, and combat engineers, the Soviet forces relentlessly ground down the outnumbered defenders. As the truck rattled toward the capital at dusk, the veteran Germans looked on with foreboding, as did the young lady, at the artillery flashes that lit up the darkening sky, heralding the Russians’ approach. They emerged phantom-like in captured buildings’ cellars to query cooperative Hungarian civilians as to the Soviets’ whereabouts. A German war correspondent dramatically reported: The sky gleams in red and violet colors over the Hungarian capital. Meanwhile, the tenacious General Gille would not give up. The Soviets on December 19, after a brief respite and aided by excellent deception — false radio signals and unit designations to conceal the intended breakthrough sector — launched a two-pronged attack against hastily built Axis Magarethe Line fortifications. The fighting traveled from track to track, through the rolling stock, and into the station. The Ministry of Defense, on the opposite side of the square, was aflame, too. [17] On January 17, 1945,[18] Wallenberg was detained by Soviet authorities on suspicion of espionage and subsequently disappeared. In a desperate race against time, the exhausted survivors slogged through the snow, forest, hills, and finally into the exposed plains toward German lines, receiving occasional Luftwaffe support as the Soviets intensified their efforts to round them up. On December 24, 1944, Hitler, over the heated objections of much of his staff, ordered SS Obergruppenführer (Lt. Gen.) Herbert Gille to immediately prepare his formidable Fourth SS Panzer Corps, then refitting in the Warsaw area, for deployment to Hungary to relieve the encircled German corps in Budapest.  • Budapest There was a real fear of typhus breaking out in the crowded, makeshift hospital in the tunnels and catacombs of Castle Hill where thousands of Buda civilians were sheltered from the fighting. The garrison was now engaged in a battle of attrition that it could not hope to survive. [23] (See Raoul Wallenberg. Nevertheless, German troops who got to less than 20 kilometres from the city were unable to maintain their impetus due to fatigue and supply problems. Josef Stalin also viewed Hungary’s capital city as a key political prize. For weeks afterward, especially after the spring thaw, bloated bodies piled up against these same pontoons and bridge pylons. Hungarian Defence Forces (4,618 words) exact match in snippet view article find links to article completed the encirclement of Budapest on 29 December 1944 and the Siege of Budapest began. All five bridges spanning the Danube were clogged with traffic, evacuating troops and civilians. Although a number had fled into western Hungary, the overwhelming majority of residents remained, including many who gravitated to the capital from the countryside. Wherever we passed, in every hall, corridor, there were wounded, operations were in progress on ordinary tables, we heard cries and wailing everywhere….  •  • Baltic States  • Leyte Faced with the annihilation of the entire Pest group, Hitler finally consented to giving up the eastern bridgehead and consolidating the garrison’s defense in Buda. [6] They also promised that the emissaries' groups would not bring weapons and would appear in cars with white flags. Deseő kept a diary throughout the siege. Units and fragments of units were completely mixed up in the city. Despite the lack of supplies, the Axis troops refused to surrender and defended every street and house.  • Eastern Romania When Soviet tanks overran the racetrack on January 9, the Germans converted the Vérmezö, an eight-hundred-yard-long park directly below Castle Hill, into a last-ditch landing zone. The Hungarian I Corps was virtually annihilated. Waffen SS General Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, the commander of the IX Waffen SS Alpine Corps, was put in charge of the city's defences. В боях рожденная... — М.: Воениздат, 1982. They wore fur coats and built barricades under the orders of the SS. The Soviet offensive began in the eastern suburbs, advancing through Pest, making good use of the large central avenues to speed-up their progress. Peter Zwack, Sr., recalled: It was a God-awful time. Both sides recognized that the Battle of Budapest was developing into the bloodiest and most sustained siege since Stalingrad. This was the same general route used by the largest group of German survivors, several hundred Feldherrnhalle troopers led by Oberstleutnant (Lt. Col.) Helmut Wolff, who managed to reach German lines on the 14th. Of the approximately thirty thousand souls participating in the breakout only 785 German and Hungarian soldiers managed to evade the relentless Soviet pursuit and reach German lines. Although strategically the war was clearly lost, January 1945 would be the last month of the war during which the Germans fought the Soviets with some possibility of securing any sort of tactical victory. Near the Janos Hospital a company of the untrained Hungarian University Storm Battalion scrambled to stop the early Russian probe. Budapest lay in ruins. In desperation, Pfeffer-Wildenbruch decided to lead the remnants of his troops out of Budapest. Nevertheless, food shortages were more and more common and soldiers had to rely on finding their own sources of sustenance, some even resorting to eating their own horses. On February 10, the Soviets’ Eighty-third Marine Brigade stormed the heights, managing to carve out a foothold near the summit in the area of the Japanese and Swiss residences. ‘Potato-peeling’ – The Mass Rapine of the Red Army: Above: Two Red Army soldiers during the Battle of Budapest in the early weeks of 1945. Two rifle corps slated for the final reduction of Buda were hurriedly redirected south. Ricard was hit in the head. Pan round to another street with Russian tanks and wrecked vehicle in foreground. My mother, high strung at the best of times, suffered near nervous breakdowns when the heavy ‘ack-ack’ just above us in the Citadel opened up on the Soviet bombers, which hit us several times daily. In Budapest, hopes of relief ran high.  • Ichi-Go  • Hungary All traces of zither and Gypsy have been blown from the ‘Broadaxe,’ filled now by shadows and stench alone. — М.: Наука, 1980. The siege further depleted the Wehrmacht and especially the Waffen-SS. This used to be the bridge. On one occasion Vannay members infiltrated Soviet lines near Janos Hospital and carved up several Hungarian defectors, who were broadcasting propaganda over Soviet-provided loudspeakers. I was a young teenager at the time and remember spending most of the siege deep in our cellar lit by candles amid food stocks and coal while the city shook itself apart. You rode out here in full moon. Approaching the grounds of the imposing Janos Hospital, they were surprised by a hail of small-arms fire. After all what could Panzers, anti-tank and cavalry units do in a labyrinth of houses? More than ten thousand of them somehow found their way out of Buda’s charnel house. The German battle group defending Csepel Island, Budapest’s industrial heart, was forced out after a bloody fight through its many factories and machine shops. The Hungarian police were the first units to raise the alarm. Budapest was isolated in December, and after a devastating siege … We began at Slavutych. An estimated 50,000 women and girls were raped,[4]:348–350[20][notes 1] although estimates vary from 5,000 to 200,000. But the glider flights (DFS 230) bringing in supplies had ended a few days earlier and parachute drops had also been discontinued.  • Borneo He therefore ordered General Rodion Malinovsky to seize the city without delay.[5]. Consequently, on January 17 the Chain and Elizabeth bridges into Buda were jammed. During this intense bombardment, General Afonyin, the Soviet group commander, was severely wounded.  • Comparative military ranks Included in the latter figure are about 15,000 Jews, largely victims of executions by Hungarian Arrow Cross Party militia. By January 8, the attack had stalled in Komárom’s outskirts, much as Gille’s panzer corps was blocked at the Bicske road junction. In retrospect I guess we were rather lucky as we lived with two unexploded bombs in the house, which my aunt nicknamed Rosza and Zizi. Pinball Games: Arts of Survival in Nazi and Communist Eras,[26] written by George F. Eber, a richly detailed account of a 20-year-old Hungarian and his family living through the siege, was published posthumously in 2010. The Third Ukrainian Front, about 450,000 strong and spread from Yugoslavia to south of Budapest, then attacked from a Danube bridgehead near Lake Balaton with twice the forces the Germans had anticipated. By January 20, in the last great German panzer raid of the war, lead elements of the Third Panzer Division pushed almost seventy miles into the Soviet rear, reaching the Danube near Dunapentele, where they shot up enemy river traffic. Triumf v nastuplenii i v oborone: ot Vislo-Oderskoy do Balatona/1945th. On December 29, Marshal Malinovsky, impatient to complete the capture of Budapest and continue his drive on Vienna, sent two officers, Miklos Steinmetz and Ilya Ostapenko, to offer surrender terms. Their stripped carcasses littered the streets. Battle of Budapest is a scenario in Panzer Corps. We lost track of time. Budapest, Hungary. Formations that actually took part in the fighting appear to have included the 53rd Army, 7th Guards Army, portions of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, including the 46th Army, and the Romanian 7th Army Corps.[4]. More sinister activity, however, was taking place throughout the city. Trucks patrolled the edge of the Buda hills, offering safe conduct to those who surrendered. Ellen Goodman, Pultizer Prize-winning columnist. Then so many suicidal leant against the railings. The Hungarian units generally fared better than the Germans, as the populace gave them what support they could.  • Indonesian National Revolution, Budapest assault group (January 21, 1945), Romanian military actions in World War II, The start of the siege and the first German offensive, The third German offensive, breakout and surrender, "The worst suffering of the Hungarian population is due to the rape of women. For two days, heavy fighting raged around the Southern Railway Station, the last major structure in front of Castle Hill itself. In turn, the German-Hungarian forces narrowly avoided the Soviets occupying all the tactically significant high ground of Buda behind the bulk of the Axis troops deployed east of the Danube in the Pest lowlands.  • Crete There is an epilogue to Budapest’s fall. I will not keep your decorations nor will any of my soldiers because we are Guards soldiers, the Russian Waffen SS! This was the last serious Soviet military crisis of the war. More than 1,000,000 men, split into two operating maneuver groups, advanced.  • Manhattan Project On 10 February, after a violent assault, Soviet marines established a bridgehead on Castle Hill, while almost cutting the remaining garrison in half.