The last scholarly book on the 1944–1945 siege of Budapest, Budapest felszabadítása 1944–1945 (The Liberation of Budapest 1944–1945), Zrínyi Kiadó, was published in 1975. Sándor Tóth was the author, a military historian of unswerving loyalty to the regime, on the staff of the Military History Institute of the People’s Army. Although occasionally drawing on western sources, it by and large described a triumphant march on Budapest by the Red Army, along with the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts’ engagements around the city, and was desperately eager to avoid any issue that could be called delicate. So much so that, by the omission of important details he mutilated his work.
In the same period hardly anything appeared on the history of the Budapest siege in the West. For Western students of the history of the Second World War, Hungary was but a tiny speck on the map. The bombing of Dresden between February 11 and 14, 1945, which led to 80,000 dead and the destruction of “Florence on the Elbe” (the motives of which still puzzle historians), overshadowed the 51-day siege of Budapest.
Yet, the siege of Budapest was a chapter on its own in the history of the Great European War. Suffering was great and casualities were massive. There was considerable bombardment, both aerial and artillery. Red Army men referred to the siege as a “second Stalingrad”, and with good reason. During the fighting, the troops—both defenders and attackers—had to confront numerous problems, military, economic and social alike.
Even in early December 1944 the people of Budapest still could not believe that the city would be the scene of street fighting. An extraordinary mood, some sort of a faith in miracles, prevailed. Most hoped that one day the fighting would simply pass them by, with serious fighting taking place far from Budapest, somewhere in the vicinity of Hungary’s western borders.
However, on Hitler’s orders, the high command of the German Army Group South ordered, as early as November 23, 1944, that preparations for a house-to-house defence of Budapest be made, disregarding civilian casualties and the public buildings of Budapest. Since the German high command was worried about possible civilian unrest, SS Obergruppenführer Otto Winkelmann, who was experienced in policing and security matters, was entrusted with the defence of Budapest and came to be named as the commander of “Festung Budapest” on December 1, 1944. He had already arrived in Hungary in
late March, 1944. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, whose “empire” included the unified police system in Germany, appointed him to head all SS and German police forces in the country.
(In the mid-1970s, in a small town near Hanover, I had the opportunity to talk to Winkelmann. He mentioned that, being aware of the Lokalpatriotismus of Budapest citizens and of the overall military situation, he had his doubts from the start about being able to ensure the defence of Budapest against the Soviet offensive besides controlling civilian unrest—with no more than four or five German divisions at his disposal.)
On December 5, however, Winkelmann was replaced, presumably because the high command discovered his lack of front-line experience. He was replaced by SS Obergruppenführer Karl Pfeffer von Wildenbruch who, although himself transferred to the Waffen SS from the police forces, had been an army corps commander on the eastern front ever since the second half of 1943. Pfeffer von Wildenbruch was first posted to Budapest in the middle of September 1944, where he had been entrusted with setting up a Waffen SS mounted corps.
On the Soviet side, huge efforts were made to secure the swift taking of Budapest by the Red Army. The first wave of attacks was launched from the south-east, from the vicinity of Kecskemét, on October 30, 1944. This offensive, however, was halted by a successful German counter-attack with heavy Soviet losses, before it reached the southern and south-eastern suburbs of Budapest. Then followed a more cautious advance. In order to achieve this, the Headquarters of the Soviet Army moved the 3rd Ukrainian Front from Bulgaria to Transdanubia, also reinforcing Marshal Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front by rested divisions taken from the Russian-Finnish front. In the course of these multi-stage manoeuvers the Soviet troops reached, during November, 1944, the suburbs of Budapest from the southern and eastern directions. On December 9, the 7th Guards Army surged ahead in a bold move to take the city of Vác on the left bank of the Danube north of the capital, and thus
allowed Malinovsky to flank Pest on the left bank, too. In a simultaneous move, Marshal Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front reached the German-Hungarian fortified lines (the Margit Line), which stretched from Lake Balaton past Lake Velence to the Danube. All this had been achieved by December 1944.
These events were the preliminaries to the Siege of Budapest, a battle whose planning and operations were of a standard deserving of study in staff colleges.
A complex series of manoeuvers were conducted by the Germans and the Soviet Army in and around Budapest. There was fighting in the air, on the ground and on the Danube. In the streets of Budapest these units of the Soviet Army learned—at the price of massive casualties—how to fight in a Central European metropolis, for up to then they had fought on Soviet territory, mostly in rural areas amongst wretched timber buildings. When they entered Europe in the second half of August 1944, Bucharest and Sophia were taken without fighting. Even the four days of the fighting to take Belgrade in October 1944 involved only one Soviet army corps, supporting Tito’s forces.
There were added complications in the Siege of Budapest. Fighting took place in a city inhabited by civilians, with a concurrent terror being waged by the Arrow-Cross militia and sporadic anti-Nazi resistance; 100,000–120,000 helpless Jews were mostly concentrated in two separate ghettos; (the ghetto proper, enclosed and guarded, in an area containing a number of synagogues, an area of poor Jews, and
a congerie of “protected houses” in a
middle-class district in Pest, across the Danube from Margaret Island) the remainder, hiding elsewhere, were subjected to search and destroy raids by Arrow Cross detachments.
For the biassed history writing of “communist” times, all this was, of course, irrelevant. Indeed, they would have preferred to hush up the presence of 40,000 Hungarian soldiers in Budapest, too. More than fifty years had to pass before a young Hungarian historian—Krisztián Ungváry—told the story of these events, based on a wealth of sources and unique documentation, in a book which will no doubt become the authoritative text on the subject. Budapest ostroma was published by Corvina (in two printings in quick succession) in the first half of 1998, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the unification of Pest, Buda and Óbuda.

Ungváry has managed to avoid all the pitfalls associated with the subject, in spite of enjoying the support of men in his research who are known for their extreme political views. The history of the siege of Budapest poses a number of delicate problems. From March 19, 1944 Hungary was under German occupation, part of Hitler’s “new order” in Europe. Although Admiral Horthy was allowed to stay on as the country’s Regent, the man who was really in charge was a Nazi Party official, the Third Reich’s Minister to Hungary, Dr Edmund Veesenmayer. The series of defeats Germany suffered in the Balkans and on the Eastern Front during the summer of 1944 allowed Horthy—by deceiving Veesenmayer and also by obtaining his grudging consent—to introduce new men into the Hungarian government. On August 29, 1944, General Géza Lakatos, loyal to Horthy, was asked to form a government, putting control of the country, once again, in Horthy’s hands. Just as he had done between 1942 and 1944, the Regent again made overtures to the Allies in a last-minute bid to extricate Hungary from the Hitler camp and to spare the country from becoming a theatre of war. In late September 1944 he even sounded out Stalin in the interests of the future of the nation.
By then the political and military situation, coupled with the Western Allies’ indifference concerning the fate of the Danube Basin, condemned Horthy’s plans to failure from the start. The Regent’s attempt, in the hope of signing an armistice on October 15, 1944, proved unsuccessful for various reasons, one of them being treason within the gates. Horthy and Lakatos had to go, and the SS sent the government packing. Hungarian generals and staff officers did not do what was their duty in keeping with their oath of personal loyalty to Horthy as Supreme Commander. The majority feared for their personal safety in the event of a Soviet victory more than they cared for the country’s future. They hesitated at the critical moment, sitting on the fence until the last minute or trying to swim with the tide. On October 16, 1944 the Hungarian National Socialists (Arrow-Cross) formed a government, with a retired major of the General Staff, Ferenc Szálasi at its head. The Hungarian Arrow- Cross Party (or Hungarist Movement) was Berlin’s last political reserve. Even Veesenmayer himself described Szálasi’s appointment to form a government as “an ill-fated move” (personal communication to the present reviewer in Darmstadt in 1961), pointing out, however, that after Horthy’s arrest there was no real alternative.
That was true. Szálasi and the other
insignificant extreme-right-wing parties seized their chance, but no political party in its right mind would have assumed the responsibility of forming a government after October 15, 1944, with the Soviet Army poised to attack Budapest less than eighty kilometres away and the Hungarian Army’s high command entirely subordinated to the OKH (the German Supreme Army Command). Szálasi was willing, he had been preparing to seize power since 1938.
The “Hungarist” government totally submitted to the Germans. Events were entirely under the control of Hitler and the Nazi German government, and the Germans were in charge of the defence of Budapest. Holding Budapest would have been part of their overall interest. By 1944 it was clear that Hitler had lost the war. Fighting in and around Budapest only served to prolong the existence of the Third Reich, needlessly sacrificing Hungarian lives and property. This must be stressed. Without doing so, it is impossible to make sense of the siege of Budapest or to understand its political history.
This line of thought appears here and there in the book, but such ideas are soon lost in the detailed information that contributes to the narrative of the drama.
The book includes numerous personal accounts, as well as quotations from memoirs which had appeared in magazines or as books over the years. Ungváry started to search the libraries and archives and to pick the memories of survivors back in the late 1980s, when still attending university. It was not easy. Just about everyone of military rank or political office—that is presuming they survived the war—had died between 1980 and 1985. Only few left something in writing after them. For most such Germans the Budapest siege was no more than an episode
in six years of constant fighting. There were some men who could have provided valuable information, such as Waffen SS Ober- gruppenführer Gille, who responded to my request to write an account of the history of the Panzer Corps under his command during the first three months of 1945 in Hungary. However, he died of a heart attack in 1961. The commander of Fortress Budapest, SS Obergruppenführer Pfeffer von Wildenbruch, who returned to West Germany from a Soviet PoW camp in 1955 and whose two sons had been killed in battle, was a tired old man lacking the energy needed to write memoires. However, when I visited him, his face brightened and he gave detailed answers to my questions.
Personal accounts included in the book, be they contemporary with the events, or recorded in the 1990s, bring the siege closer to the reader. This is somewhat of an innovation in Hungary for which we must all be grateful to Ungváry.

The story can roughly be divided into four periods.
It all started with the October 1944 offensive, with Kecskemét as its starting point, by troops commanded by Malinovsky. In the following weeks the attack got properly on the way on several sections of the frontline and with various degrees of success, bringing the Soviet Army ultimately to the suburbs of Pest in the middle of December, 1944. The second stage of the drama began on December 20, 1944, culminating in the capture of the city of Esztergom, NW of Budapest, on the right bank of the Danube. The offensive in Transdanubia, commanded by Marshal Tolbukhin, resulted in the complete collapse of the undermanned Margit Line held by German and Hungarian troops. The line was a hastily improvised defence system, constructed on the orders of General Friessner, who commanded the German forces there at one time in 1944. The successful defence by the German 6th Army of the central parts of Transdanubia ended in a crisis. Although half-expecting the result, the commanding general was surprised by the swiftness of the Soviets’ success. He lacked either the manpower or the weapons to launch a counter-offensive. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the commander of the German forces in Transdanubia, General of Artillery Fretter-Pico, lost Hitler’s favour. He had advocated giving up Budapest without resistance. At the height of the crisis, he was replaced by General Hermann Balck, who had been transferred from the western front and was badly lacking in local information. Had Soviet Army intelligence been aware of this, the fighting around Budapest could have assumed
a different character. Then Tolbukhin’s armies, instead of swerving north and east after breaking through the Margit Line, could have turned west and pushed the offensive into Western Hungary. Short of reserves, the German 6th Army would have been powerless to prevent the Soviet Army’s penetration into the region.
However, neither Malinovsky nor Tolbukhin pushed for maximum success. All they wanted was to surround Budapest and, in this, they succeeded. By December 27, “Fortress Budapest” was a kind of frontier stronghold, a German-Hungarian island in the sea of the two Soviet armies. Unlike Ungváry, I am convinced that the encirclement took both Pfeffer von Wildenbruch and his subordinate, Lieutenant General Iván Hindy, the commander of the Hungarian troops in Buda, by surprise. They had not been prepared for it. Pfeffer von Wildenbruch’s chief of staff, a Wehrmacht officer named Usdau Lindenau, said as much in a taped interview made in Hamburg in the early 1970s: although “Fortress Budapest” was aware of the Soviets’ military objectives, it had great faith in the strength and endurance of the Margit Line. Ungváry puts the combined strength of the German and Hungarian defensive forces trapped in Budapest at 79,000. Pfeffer von Wildenbruch himself gave me a similar figure. Admittedly, he estimated the strength of the Hungarian defensive force at 7,000 men. It seems certain that the quoted figure of 79,000 refers to the ration rolls of the German and Hungarian forces and that only a fraction took part in the siege as fighting units.
The second stage of the siege was between December 24, 1944 and February 13, 1945. The accounts of these trying days cover the defence of Pest, the activities of the Hungarian resistance movement (with negligible effect on the outcome of the fighting), the numerous outrages committed by Arrow-Cross detachments, the story of Budapest Jewry herded in two ghettos, the various stages of rescue efforts and, last but not least, the first encounters of Budapest citizens with Soviet soldiers storming the German-Hungarian bridge-head in Pest.
The third chapter tells the story of the German offensives in Transdanubia that were meant to provide relief for the besieged. In Ungváry’s book, this stage receives rather curt treatment. The author did not know, and in fact could not have known, the background history of these offensives, undocumented both in memoirs and in the contemporary records.
During the 1960s, I had the chance to talk to or to exchange letters with a number of senior officers of the German 6th Army, including Generals Balck and Gaedcke. I was in a position to talk to Gille and Harteneck, the corps commanders in the 1945 January German offensives. I also contacted a number of senior Hungarian officers who had served in Transdanubia. Most importantly from the point of view of the present subject, in the early 1970s I met General Walther Wenck, in 1945 deputy to Colonel-General Guderian, Chief of Staff of the OKH. (He was a personal friend of both Generals Balck and Grollman, the latter chief of staff of Army Group South). From conversations with these German commanders I was able to establish that the ultimate objective of the three German offensives in January 1945 was not to rescue the Fortress Budapest garrison. Hitler wanted to hold Budapest at all costs, as a forward bastion. The objective of the German offensives was to establish a corridor between the German forces in Transdanubia and Budapest. In other words, had the German counter-offensive been successful, Budapest would have remained a battlefield for further weeks, perhaps even months.
As we all know, this did not happen. “Konrad III”, the German offensive, ground to a halt on January 26, west of the capital, near the villages of Baracska and Vál. A Soviet counter-attack forced General Balck to abandon the offensive, which had lost all its momentum at a distance of eighteen or twenty kilometres from the German fortified positions in Buda. Indeed, he had to withdraw his advanced units rapidly to their original positions in the days that followed, to avoid being trapped in a Kessel. With that, the fate of Fortress Budapest was sealed.
The fourth section of the book, about 32 pages, tells in great detail the attempted (and failed) breakout by the Budapest garrison, which took place between February 11 and 15, 1945. This is one of the book’s best documented parts. It includes a wealth of episodes which very nearly burst the bounds of the book. In describing the attempted breakout from Buda Castle, the author deals with a subject previously completely ignored by Hungarian historians of the Second World War. He provides us with an almost cinematic experience in his account of the desperate attempt by poorly organized and even more poorly directed, betrayed and deserted forces. Their sole motive was that even death was preferable to capture by the Red Army. Ungváry reckons that, on the day of the attempted breakout, there were 43,900 German and Hungarian soldiers in Buda (including 11,600 wounded). According to Ungváry, twenty-eight per cent of the troops that took part in the breakout, in other words 19,250 soldiers, were killed.
In the concluding chapter, Ungváry describes how the Soviet soldateska behaved in Budapest. In his representation and in his commentary to eye-witness accounts, he avoids the black-and-white pictures favoured by Marxist historians. There is ample documentation of the outrages committed by Soviet soldiers, but he also tells of encounters long-suffering Budapest citizens had with Soviet fighting troops who were kind, helpful and humane.
Recently I came across a memoir published in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1985, in Hungarian by Dr József Sági, the last
Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Pest-Pilis-
Solt-Kiskun County. In other words, something written by an official who was active in the Budapest region during the critical period of 1944–45. Arccal kelet felé (Facing East) is certainly not the work of a friend of the Soviet Union. The aged memorialist has much that is interesting to say about the 1944–45 years. He was certainly no Arrow-Cross man, on the contrary, he
despised the Arrow-Cross scum. As a conscientious civil servant he wished to serve his county in difficult times too. Let me quote:
In those critical days obtaining provisions posed a severe problem. The enemy’s greater numbers made their advance unstoppable and the civilian population of the occupied territories were left without food. However, the telephone lines to the villages and towns around Pest were still functioning. The officials in charge there reported that people were starving. They could not give their children milk or bread. The enemy’s command did not make provisions for the people. I ordered officials to find the Russian military commander and tell him that the workers were starving. The County’s central administration would send them food, if the commander gave written assurances that he was not going to confiscate it.
And so the incredible took place, whereby, holding Russian papers, the headmen of the villages of Pestszentimre, Vecsés, etc., arrived in Budapest, still unoccupied at the time, with Russian papers in their hands; then had the food issued by me loaded on carts and returned to the villages already taken by the enemy, distributing the food to the people there.
The Russian soldiers all respected the commander’s pass and never touched the food. This practice sadly changed after the siege of Budapest was over.
These improvised measures were all in the interest of the civilian population. Right to the end I was in touch with my people, doing everything I could to help them.

Did the Soviet Army liberate Budapest or did Stalin’s soldiers occupy and conquer it? For more than four decades, Marxist historians had been trying to brainwash Hungarians into believing that Budapest was liberated by the Great Soviet Union, a claim conceived by Rákosi’s propaganda and later readily repeated by Kádár. By way of contrast, at the end of the siege the Soviet Army commanders unequivocally described the fighting along the Danube—with its substantial losses in both time and men—in an order of the day issued in the Summer of 1945: Budapest was captured and conquered by the Soviet Army. The campaign medals—no fewer than 35,000—distributed to the Soviet soldiers taking part in the Budapest siege had inscriptions to the same effect. This would mean that during the whole period of the siege—in three and a half months of constant fighting—the Soviet Army had employed about 500,000 men in and around Budapest.
For serious historians things were always clear: the Soviet Army conquered Budapest and occupied it. The “liberation” lasted for a couple of hours, perhaps, while the Army coming from the East
was purging Budapest of the Nazi forces, of Szálasi’s followers and of the Arrow-Cross Party’s terror. But the soldiers’ conduct, as well as the events of the subsequent years, proved beyond doubt that Stalin’s army conquered Budapest for the Soviet Empire.
Ungváry’s book comes with the addition of several interesting—if not always entirely accurate—tables, photos and maps. The bibliography at the end of the book, along with the index of names and place-names is impressive. The production of the book is to the credit of the publishers. Ungváry has written a text which will provide guidance to future historians of the siege for many years to come. But most of the hard work is still ahead. Now that German and Hungarian libraries and archives have become accessible to historians, what we have to do next is to incorporate the material emerging from the archives of the former Soviet Union.

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The siege of Budapest lasted from the 24th of December 1944 to the 13th of February 1945. In June 1944 Budapest had a population of 1,200,000 (not counting military personnel). Due to air raids, artillery bombardment, fighting, deportations, voluntary flight and enforced evacuations, this figure had shrunk to 830,000. Neither of these figures include the outer suburbs which were only incorporated later. 12,000-13,000 people died during the siege as a result of the hostilities. Around 25,000 did so for other reasons. Total civilian losses during the siege: 38,000 to 40,000. The number of Jews within the total of civilian dead: 15,000. Victims of Arrow-Cross terror: 7,000. Around 50,000 civilian inhabitants of Budapest were employed in the building of the Margit defence line before Budapest was surrounded. Around 50,000 non-military personnel were taken as PoWs to the Soviet Union. Total civilian losses, including Jews: around 70,000. German and Hungarian soldiers killed in fighting around Budapest and during the siege: 17,000. Soviet casualties (2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Front) from the middle of November 1944 to the middle of February 1945, in and around Budapest: 71,950 dead, 240,056 wounded, 32,000 missing. 18,000 houses were completely destroyed, just about every building was damaged in some way, all the Danube bridges were blown up. Most factories were stripped of their equipment by the Germans. Bank vaults were opened and ransacked by the Soviets. The loss in public and private property is
inestimable.