DISASTER IN BUDAPEST

By Nino Oktorino

1944. Hitler’s once mighty empire crumbles on every front. On the West, Wehrmacht could not stop the Allied while in the East the Red Army moved without stopping to the eastern border of the Reich and plunged into the Balkan. In August, the Soviet offensive forced Romania and then Bulgaria to switch from Germany to supporting the Soviet Union. This event made a third door to the Reich lay open and a new front had to be created in Hungary and Croatia by German divisions. The situation gave the SS an opportunity to grab the last power for them as Hitler’s praetorian guards. But in the end, they must pay it with the greatest defeat for the Waffen SS.

Coup d’etat in Budapest

Disaster that struck German in Balkan in 1944 made Hungary tottering too. It didn’t a surprise: since Stalingrad, the Hungarians had been withdraw theirs troops from the front line and practically  become a neutral country in the rear of the German front, a land of night-clubs and white bread, where the privileged could live without rationing or conscription. As a pragmatic people, the Hungarians aware that the Allied will be won. So, in October 1944 the Hungarian government of Admiral Horthy attempted to follow Romania and Bulgaria examples to leave the sinking ships.

Unfortunately, Hitler had been prepared for such treachery and there were sufficient German units in Hungary to prevent a disaster. Hitler’s distrust to his Balkan allies made him decided that as far as possible the Hungarian and the Romanian divisions must replaced by the Volksdeutsche (the racial Germans) of those countries, who had been conscripted into the Waffen SS. This gave the SS a far more important role than they had fulfilled on the eastern and western fronts.

While the Red Army only less than 100 miles from Budapest, Horthy figured it was of last time to surrender in payment for political considerations. To stop this treachery, Hitler sent a well-known SS-Sturmbannfuehrer Otto Skorzenny and a special parachute-battalion to Budapest to bring Hungarian leaders back in line.

Skorzenny moved quickly. He kidnapped Horthy’s son who tried to make agreement with Tito’s Yugoslavian partisan and sends an ultimatum to his father to surrender. Meanwhile, SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Dr. Winkelmann, the HSSPF Hungary, had taken control of Budapest. To threatening rumble of 40 German tanks, SS-Untersturmfuehrer Kernmayr occupied the Budapest radio station and proclaimed the new pro-Nazi regime. Skorzenny also alerted 22.Freiwilligen-Kavalleriedivision der SS ‘Maria Theresa’ which cordoned off all approaches to the Burgberg, Horthy’s fortress and then attacked that place. Horthy surrenders and offered his abdication. Ferenc Szalasi, the leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross party, replaced him.

The Unternehmen Panzerfaust—as  the coup d’etat operation named—raise the Waffen-SS prestige in Hitler’s eyes. But the victory was a short live. The sequel to the operation was a Stalingrad for them.

The Birth of the Disaster

On October 20, 1944 the Red Army under Marshal Malinovsky captured Debrecen in eastern Hungary, but the Russian advance in Hungary, though rapid at first, was then slowed down by very stiff German and Hungarian resistance, especially as the Russian approached Budapest in November.

To stop the Red Army advance, ‘Maria Theresa’ Division was sending to southeastern of Budapest defense ring at Dunaharztil and Taksony. On November 5, they were attacked by Soviets at "Karola Positions". The division throws back the attackers and then mounted counterattack.

Another Waffen-SS division was sending to defend the Budapest, 8.SS Kavelleriedivision ‘Florian Geyer’. The division was a veteran of many combat missions on the Eastern Front. On November 1944, they were assigned as part of Budapest garrison. When Soviets reach Ocsa on November 3, the Germans forced back due to Hungarian units routing on their flanks. ‘Florian Geyer’ was send to counterattacks and succeeded to recaptures Vesces and Ullo.

But the Waffen SS divisions success was a short live. On November 20, Soviets force a breach between the ‘Maria Theresa’ and the 1st Honved Cavalry Division, which endangers the Budapest suburbs. ‘Maria Theresa’ losses was great and on December 1944, the division strength only 8,000 men. All divisional units sent to Budapest to act in the city's defense, leaving their horses behind.

To defend the Hungarian capital, Hitler send the IX.Waffen-Gebirgs-Korps der SS under SS-Oberstgruppenfuehrer Karl von Pffefer-Wildenbruch. This corps included ‘Maria Theresa’ and ‘Florian Geyer’; another five supporting battalions from Waffen SS; a regiment SS-Police; two panzer divisions from German army, with another supported battalion; plus remnants of several Hungarian divisions.

Hitler and Szalasi decided at their meeting early in December to hold Budapest at “any cost.” Why? Because the Hungarian capital was an important point to defend Austria’s frontiers. Beside, for Hitler personally, Budapest still has a large Jewish community and he eager to exterminate all of them for his Final Solution.

On 14 December, the Red Army had begun a terrible pounding of German positions in Budapest on both sides of the Danube. That very night twelve thousands guns angled at forty-five degrees and amassed all round the Hungarian capital, were fired simultaneously.

The darkness dissolved in apocalyptic flashes as the twelve thousands guns began to pulverize the city in a deluge of steel.

Then at dawn on 22 December, the Cossack cavalry struck. Three thousand heavy tanks and fifteen infantry divisions hurled themselves at Budapest.

On Christmas Eve, 1944, Russian tanks burst into the suburbs of Buda—on the west side of the Danube; Pest was on the east. These were from the spearheaded of Marshal  Tolbulkhin’s Third Ukrainian Front, which had pushed across the Danube below the Budapest. Although the German’s Tiger tanks succeeded to stop them, Tolbulkhin increased the pressure from the south while Malinovsky’s Second Ukrainian Front was crossing the Danube above Budapest. On December 27 the two great forces met in Esztergom in west of the city. The Germans had therefore lost the defense line of the Danube and the IX.Waffen-Gebirgs-Korps der SS  were encircled, together with 800,000 civilians.

The Failed Counter-attack

The Germans faced the Red Army attack with a grim determination. To prevent their encirclement a bitter battle was fought south and west of the city shortly before Christmas. Each district, street and building were fought for beneath a shower of high explosives and incendiaries. Fruitless opposition was waged from a succession of ruined houses.

Soviet troops enjoyed a numerical superiority fifteen to one. Wave after wave of Sturmovik assault aircraft all but scraped the rooftops.

To save his troops in Budapest, Hitler, without consulting his Chief of Staff, ordered SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Herbert Gille’s IV.SS-Panzer-Korps to leave the severely threatened Warsaw front and move four or five hundred miles south to Lake Balaton.  

The counter-attack began on New Year’s day. A drive from Komarno towards Ezstergom and along the railways to Buda developed, led by  Gille’s ‘Totenkopf’ and ‘Wiking’ panzer divisions, supported by an infantry division. They made attack after attack in effort to find a weak spot in the Soviet defenses.

By January 7 Tolbulkhin was forced to evacuate Ezstergom. On January 11, 1945 Gille’s force had reached Budapest airport and the rescue of forty-five thousands German soldiers, half of them fellow SS men, seemed assured.

But General Balck of the Fourth Army hoped to surround ten Russian divisions north of the lake and Gille’s corps was withdrawn to his sector. It was a tactical error, for Russian resistance stiffened and by the end of January the attack had to be called off. The fate of Budapest garrisons itself had been sealed off.

To the Bitter End

On January 10, Malinovsky continued his advance on Pest and cleared eight city districts with the help of Rumanians who had switched sides. This was achieved mainly by hand-to-hand fighting because the Red Army did not want to endanger the city’s waterworks with all-out bombing or artillery barrage.

Early in the morning of January 17 the defenders of Pest retreated into Buda across the Danube. The Hungarian soldiers refused to blow up their historic bridges; they said that the ice over the Danube was thick enough to hold tanks, anyway. The Germans replied that it was no time for history and blew up the bridges themselves.

By February 11, the battle for the west side of the river had turned into a bitter siege. Securely entrenched in Buda’s hills, German-Hungarian troops shelled any attempts to cross the ice-covered Danube. But the 70,000 defenders were trapped on a pocket roughly one kilometer long and one kilometer deep; other Russian forces were closing in from the west.

Explosive bullets and phosporus tumbled onto the defenders, who refused even to contemplate defeat. The Russians eventually had little to do but mop up the bodies.

The German commander in Buda, Pfeffer von Wildenbruch, ordered his men to try and break through the Soviet ring in three separate groups. It was obvious that there was almost no chance of escaping, but few objected. It was better to die fighting than to be exterminated. The odds for escape were even slimmer than imagined. The Red Army commander knew all about the breakout and was already covertly withdrawing his men from the first buildings surrounding the German-Hungarian troops.

As the three groups were about to move off in different directions, Russian rockets began blasting the recently evacuated buildings. Nevertheless, they surged out of their hiding places armed only with machine pistols and met a withering wall of rocket and artillery fire. Most of them were cut down in the first few minutes. The others kept coming, desperately trying to break through. Those surviving the rockets and artillery were met by such masses of Russian infantrymen that it seemed impossible for single man to survive, let alone escape; but in the darkness and confusion almost 5000 German-Hungarians filtered through.

The SS members were among the most desperately men to escape. The Russian especially hates them and didn’t have any doubt to kill the SS men on the spot. Hungarian lieutenant Gyula Litterati told after the war how four of his SS friends that captured by Russians were forced to naked before a line of Red Army soldiers who laughing at some jokes. Then, almost casually, the Russians fired theirs SS prisoners.

Of Pfeffer-Wildenbruch’s 70,000 men, little more than 700 escaped to the German lines. They included 170 men of the ‘Florian Geyer’ Division, whose commander, the thirty-four-year-old Joachim Rumohr committed suicide during the sortie after he had been wounded. Most of the rest were killed in battle or murdered, including SS-Brigadefuehrer August Zehender, the commander of ‘Maria Theresa’ Division.

On 13 February all resistance in Buda ceased with the surrender of SS-Oberstgruppenfuehrer Pfeffer-Wildenbruch. During the siege, which had last seven weeks, some 50,000 German-Hungarian troops had been killed and a few thousands made prisoners. Three Waffen SS divisions—‘Florian Geyer’, ‘Maria Theresa’, and a new Hungarian’s cavalry division, the 33.Waffen-Kavalleriedivision der SS (ungarische Nr. 3)—plus some supporting units destroyed. The IX.Waffen-Gebirgs-Korps der SS was written off from the SS units’ list. Budapest had become a Stalingrad for the Waffen SS. 

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