Blood and Ice (12 page)

Schulze smothered a laugh. ‘All right,’ he said, eager to be away now, ‘I’ll come looking for you when the time is ripe, my little Yiddish Chocolate Drop.’

The old man departed in the direction of Buda without further ado, disappearing out of their lives as mysteriously as he had appeared. Schulze and Chink wasted no more time. Hurriedly they made their way to the frontline outpost.

‘
Wer da?
’ a voice rapped out suddenly, heavy with frightened surprise. ‘
Halt oder ich schiesse!
’

Slowly Schulze rose from the ground – he knew these trigger-happy young sentries – and lifted his arms into the air. ‘Take it easy now,’ he said softly. ‘You’ve just been rescued, soldier-boy, by the advance party of
SS Regiment Europa
.’

Two hours later in a brilliantly executed lightning attack,
Obersturmbannführer
Habicht forded the undefended river and with his monstrous
Royal Tigers
in the van, burst a quarter of a kilometre hole in the Russian front line. Taken completely by surprise, the Russian riflemen scrambled out of their holes and fled in terror, leaving the SS Regiment to file through the gap without a single casualty and pass into the lines of the hard-pressed
22nd SS Cavalry Division
to be fêted like heroes. They had reached Budapest at last.

At 5a.m. Friday, 18 January 1945, the new attack to break through to Budapest began in a snowstorm. From their new positions around Lake Balaton, the
4th SS Panzer Corps
, with the
3rd Panzer Division
to their right and the
1st Panzer Division
to their left, raced forward to overcome the surprised first-line Russian positions. The plan was for the SS panzer divisions in the middle to make the running, while the two Army panzers on the flanks contained any Russian attempt at a counter-attack. The SS panzers would have as their first objective the ford across the canal at Kaloz, which was the major physical barrier on the way to the River Danube, and their second objective the little town of Dunapentele south of Budapest.

The new plan, the result of Rudel’s conference with Hitler, worked like a charm. After a short preliminary artillery bombardment and led by Rudel’s
Immelmann Battle Wing
, the
Tigers
and
Panthers
of the
Viking
and the
Death’s Head
, followed by waves of panzer grenadiers in halftracks, burst through the Russians and disappeared into the snowstorm before the enemy had realized what had hit them. That first day, the SS panzers, their flanks barely defended by the more hesitant
Wehrmacht
divisions, pushed a wedge thirty kilometres deep into the Russian position.

But in the evening
Viking
ran into serious trouble. The Russians had not only mined the area to their front, they had also introduced a new obstacle – wire charged with high voltage electricity. Even the battle-hardened SS officers hesitated to send their young European volunteers and their German comrades against such defences. The
Viking
attack bogged down. General Gilles, commander of the
Fourth SS Panzer Corps
, made a personal appearance at the Division’s Command Post. The elderly, bespectacled, normally good-humoured Corps Commander was blazingly angry. He would tolerate no hesitancy from General Ullrich, the commander of the
Viking Division
.
Viking
would advance through the minefield and the electrically charged wire whatever the casualties.

‘Ullrich,’ Gilles barked, ‘you either attack or you name your successor!’

Ullrich was a proud man, who had fought a very hard, bitter war to become a divisional commander. He was not going to lose that command now. Heavy-hearted he summoned
Obersturmbannführer
Dorr, commander of the
SS Germania Regiment
, to his CP and ordered him to attack.

The big SS Colonel accepted the order without the slightest hesitation. That same evening he led his young volunteers into the minefields. They suffered terrible casualties, but Dorr allowed no retreat. He forced them forwards. They hit the electric wire barriers. The night was hideous with their screams as 20,000 volts racked the grenadiers’ wildly thrashing bodies. Suddenly the darkness was split by the dramatic blue light of short circuits and heavy with the stink of burned flesh. And then they were through and the Russians were running for their lives. Behind them charred bundles of rags and flesh hung everywhere on the wrecked wires.

That morning, covered by Rudel’s Me 262s flying at tree-top level, the Viking crossed the canal at Kaloz. Gilles at Corps HQ ordered a change of objective for the
4th SS
. Dunapentele would be left to the slower moving
3rd Panzer
on the right wing. The two SS armoured divisions would now make a bold dash for Budapest further up the river, with the Danube itself forming their right flank.
Viking
was commanded to drive for Ercsi, a matter of some twenty kilometres or so from the Hungarian capital. Now Gilles planned to seize Budapest in one bold stroke.

But by now Tolbuchin was reacting to the surprise attack. He threw in all his reserves, the best of the Guards divisions. The two forces met at the village of Sarosd. The point of the
Viking
was cut off within the shattered hamlet. The Division counter-attacked and freed the leading unit.

Hastily the regimental staff of the
Germania Regiment
which was leading the drive again, assembled to discuss the next move. But all Russian resistance in Sarosd was not yet crushed. Just as the officers were bending their shaven heads over the big maps, a lone Russian anti-tank gun, cunningly concealed in a shattered barn, opened up at pointblank range, blowing the Regiment’s key officers apart in a fury of fire.
Obersturmbannführer
Dorr fell with the rest, wounded for the sixteenth time in combat. This time it was to be his final wound. Now Germania was without its commander and all its senior officers.

Still Gilles was determined to push on. The first refugees from Budapest, German and Hungarian, were beginning to trickle into the SS positions, bringing with them horrific tales of the tortures and cruelties being inflicted on the defenders and the civilians in their charge when they fell into Russian hands. They told Gilles too that the defenders were on their last legs; ammunition and food for the 800,000 civilians was beginning to run out very rapidly.

On the Monday of the new week, after the disastrous events in Sarosd, the
4th SS Corps
attacked again. Everywhere the word was passed from mouth to mouth. ‘Today we reach Budapest!’ It acted like magic on the eager young volunteers. They went into battle singing. A row of small villages were taken in a rush and the point of the
Viking
reached Adony on the Danube.

Marshal Tolbuchin began to panic. He had thrown all his reserves in by now, but still he had not stopped the Fritzes. In fact they had broken his 3rd Ukrainian Front in two at Adony. He called Lt-General Scharochin, commander of the 57th Rifle Army, which now stood in the Germans’ path and warned him of the danger of his Army being encircled on the following day; would it not be better that he withdrew his Army across the Danube to the eastern bank?

Scharochin knew Tolbuchin of old. He recognized the suggestion of his Army Commander as a cunning device to exculpate himself. When the time came to analyse the causes of the disaster on that front, Tolbuchin would point the finger at him as the commander who had first ordered a major withdrawal. More scared of ‘Old Leather Face’, Stalin, in the far-off Kremlin than the enemy at his doorstep, Scharochin refused. He preferred to stand and fight on the next day. On 23 January, the point of the
Viking
attacked directly north on both sides of the River Danube. At first they made excellent progress, throwing back the 57th Rifle Army in confusion. Then a new enemy entered – the weather.

It started to snow, as if it would never cease again. In a matter of minutes, the roads and tracks that the tanks were using disappeared completely under the flying white deluge. Gunners and commanders were blinded. The massive 72-ton
Royal Tigers
, isolated in the whirling mass of snow, were easy meat for the Russian infantry, armed with their portable anti-tank weapons. The Germans began to suffer severe casualties, and their progress was charted in metres, not in the kilometres of the previous days.

Somewhere or other Scharochin found a whole tank corps. The tankers were young and armed with the old-fashioned T-34s instead of the new
Joseph Stalins
. But they were courageous.

To Scharochin’s relief, the snow turned to fog. It gave his inexperienced tankers more of a chance against the Fritzes. Dug in at the hulldown position, exposing only their thick glacis plates, the T-34s, massed in troops of six and seven, waited for the Germans to loom out of the mist. The
Tigers
slaughtered the T-34s. But there was always one surviving Russian tank which could place that shell between turret and hull, or in the tracks, or in the engine cowling to bring the Fritz colossus to a final halt.

On 29 January, Scharochin, now actively encouraged by Tolbuchin, launched what was left of the young tank corps, supported by massive air cover, into a major attack against the
4th SS Corps
at the village of Petend.

The SS fought back desperately, but there was no holding the Russians now. They had scented blood. Scharochin forgot Stalin. He thought only of victory.

He threw in all his last reserves. Full of a double ration of vodka and the promise of loot, leave and women, once Budapest had fallen, they charged into battle, arms linked, their bands playing the old Czarist marches. The Germans mowed them down by their hundreds but still they came on. The SS faltered and started to crumble.

Desperately Gilles tried to shore up his front but to no avail. The SS divisions were bled white. The ‘bodies’, as he was wont to call them to his staff, were no longer there. The pace of the withdrawal quickened.

One hundred and eighty Soviet tanks appeared on the SS Corps’ front to be opposed by exactly nine
Tigers
left to the
Death’s Head
and fourteen still running in the
Viking
. There was nothing the SS men could do, but retreat. The Russians were everywhere.

On 1 February, 1945, Gilles, Commander of the
Fourth SS Panzer Corps
, reported to his chief, General Balck, that his divisions were exhausted. They could do no more.

Balck, who hated the Armed SS, but who at the same time knew that if the Third Reich’s élite had failed to break through to the Hungarian capital there was no hope left, made his decision. It was very simple. Tolbuchin had won; he had lost. ‘Gilles,’ he ordered, ‘prepare to withdraw!’

That same evening, what was left of the
Viking
and
Death’s Head
began to move back from the Danube.

The last attempt to relieve Budapest had failed.

‘Gentlemen;’ SS
Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei und der Waffen SS
Pfeffer-Wildenbruch said with surprising formality in view of the fact that all the windows in his Buda HQ were long shattered and there was new snow drifting in through the shell-hole in the ceiling, ‘please, be seated.’

The assembled commanders, General Rumohr of the
8th SS Cavalry
, General Zehender of the
22nd SS Cavalry
, Colonel Habicht, and their staffs sat down at the long, blanket-covered table.

Pfeffer-Wildenbruch began. ‘The reason I have called you here today is to decide what we shall do next here in Buda. As you have all realized by now – even you must have Habicht – there will be no more attempts by our comrades to break through. We must assume that we have been written off by the High Command. In a way, that knowledge, gentlemen, is not as frightening as it sounds. For a change, we at the front can make our own decisions without reference to the Greatest Captain of all Times.’

The others laughed at the reference to Hitler, a bitter indication enough of just how much these powerful officers felt cut off from the Homeland.

‘So we have the freedom of choice. The question is – how shall we exercise it? As I see it, gentlemen, there are perhaps three courses of action open to us. Let me first suggest the worst one – we could surrender to the Soviets.’

There was a groan of dismay from most of the high-ranking officers and Habicht, his face flushed, cried hotly, ‘
Never!
’

Pfeffer-Wildenbruch held up his hands for peace and said, ‘I was merely playing the devil’s advocate, gentlemen. The second alternative is that we rally what forces we have left to us and using your armour, Habicht, attempt to fight our way out.’

‘May I say a word on that, Corps Commander?’ General Zehender asked. ‘In the cavalry divisions we probably have enough transport left and enough fuel to get most of the troopers out of Buda. However, what are we going to do about the auxiliaries? There are over two thousand of these females left in the city. Now I know what all you gentlemen think of these “field mattresses”. Probably some of my younger officers have had personal experience of their undoubted charms and toughness’ – he coughed suddenly – ‘in the horizontal position.’

There was a rumble of soft laughter from the others.

‘But when all that is said and done, they are German women and we cannot leave them behind to fall into Bolshevik hands. There again, I am not prepared to sacrifice valuable fighting manpower to find places in the vehicles for these non-productive females.’

‘That leaves us with the third alternative,’ Pfeffer-Wildenbruch intervened. ‘We stay and fight it out with the Russians here in Buda. The question is – how?’

Habicht sprang to his feet, his face flushed with both anger and excitement. ‘I shall tell you how, gentlemen,’ he cried.