The Second World War (131 page)

On 30 December, after Soviet attempts to obtain a surrender were rejected, Malinovsky’s offensive against Budapest began in earnest with a three-day artillery barrage and heavy bombing. In the cellars of the city, packed with civilians, condensation dripped from the ceilings and ran down the walls.
Pfeffer-Wildenbruch rejected appeals for their evacuation in buses. Over the next two weeks the Soviet troops forced the German and Hungarian defenders, who were running out of ammunition, back towards the Danube through sheer force of numbers. IX SS Mountain Corps headquarters in the castle on Buda sent increasingly urgent messages demanding supplies, but parachute containers often fell outside their lines. Those bearing food were seized by starving civilians despite threats of instant execution.

Malinovsky, seeing that Pest would be occupied within a matter of days, sent the Romanian 7th Army Corps away to the northern Hungarian front. He wanted the capture of Budapest to be a uniquely Soviet victory. On 17 January, he launched his final drive to the Danube bank. Soon much of western Pest along the Danube was in flames, with heat blasting out from the buildings, searing those who escaped through the streets. Most Hungarian units were reluctant to pull back across the river to die in the defence of Buda, so more and more soldiers began to hide in the few places not ablaze in order to surrender to the Red Army. Even officers disobeyed orders.

Soviet Shturmoviks strafed the confused withdrawal across the remains of the Chain Bridge and the Erzsébet Bridge. ‘
The bridges remained constantly
under massive fire,’ an SS cavalryman recorded, ‘but people were surging ahead regardless. A tangled mass of cars and trucks, peasant carts covered by tarpaulins, frightened horses, civilian refugees, wailing women, mothers with crying children and many, very many wounded were hurrying towards Buda.’ Civilians still on the bridges were killed when they were blown up as the Soviet troops approached them. So was a member of the Hungarian resistance who was trying to remove the demolition charges on the Erzsébet Bridge.

By the end of December, IV SS Panzer Corps was ready to deploy on the Danube front. Its sudden attack on New Year’s Day hit the 4th Guards Army and nearly broke through. Another attack to the south was launched a week later by III Panzer Corps. This was renewed on 18 January, with IV SS Panzer Corps, which had disengaged to the north of Budapest to join III Panzer Corps. German tanks experimented with infra-red sights for the first time. But again, after a striking initial success, the panzer advance was blocked when Malinovsky rapidly moved six of his own corps from the 2nd Ukrainian Front to face them.

The much smaller Buda sector, covered in snow blackened from the fires across the river, was easier to defend. Soviet attacks up its steep hills were repulsed with heavy casualties inflicted by German MG-42 machine guns concentrated at key points. Along with regular units, such as the 8th SS Cavalry and the remnants of the
Feldherrnhalle
, there were the local volunteers, such as the Vannay Battalion and the University Assault
Battalion, who knew the terrain better than anyone. The Danube Embankment below Castle Hill was protected by the survivors of the 1st Hungarian Armoured Division, who did not expect the Soviets to attack across the thin ice pockmarked with shellholes. But soon harder frosts made it passable, at least for small groups of Hungarian deserters from Buda fleeing in the other direction to surrender to the Soviets in Pest.

In late January Soviet attacks increased, with flamethrowing tanks and assault squads. German and Hungarian losses mounted critically, and the wounded were packed into improvised hospitals where conditions were appalling. Some were even dumped in the corridors of command posts. A young soldier walking down one to deliver a report felt his coat seized by a hand. He looked down. ‘
It was a girl
of about 18 to 20 with fair hair and a beautiful face. She begged me in a whisper: “Take your pistol and shoot me.” I looked at her more closely and realised with horror… both her legs were missing.’

Even after the failure of the relief attempts, Hitler continued to forbid any talk of a breakout. Budapest still had to be defended to the end. Army Group South, like Manstein after the failure to relieve Stalingrad, knew that Budapest was doomed. Right up to 5 February, German gliders piloted by teenage volunteers of the NSFK (National Socialist Flying Corps), were crash-landing on Vérmez
Meadow, delivering ammunition, fuel and some food. But it was not enough. Soviet tanks were soon crushing artillery guns which had run out of ammunition under their tracks. With all the refugees, some 300,000 people were packed into the last bastion of Castle Hill. All the cavalry horses had been eaten, and starvation was universal. So were lice, and the first outbreak of typhus caused deep alarm. On 3 February, after a plea from the papal nuncio to end the suffering, Obergruppenführer Pfeffer-Wildenbruch signalled Führer headquarters for permission to break out. It was refused again, and once more two days later.

Soviet troops, guided by Hungarian defectors or members of the resistance, began clearing some of the trapped garrisons and Castle Hill. On 11 February, white flags began to appear. In some places Hungarian troops disarmed the Germans who wanted to fight on. By the evening resistance appeared to have ceased. But Pfeffer-Wildenbruch had decided to break out in defiance of Hitler’s orders. With the remnants of the 13th Panzer Division and the 8th SS Cavalry Division
Florian Geyer
in the first wave and the
Feldherrnhalle
and 22nd SS Cavalry in the second, they would try to break through that night towards the north-west with their remaining vehicles. He radioed Army Group South requesting an attack in their direction. But Red Army commanders had expected such an attempt and guessed the route they were likely to follow. It turned into the most terrible
massacre of troops and civilians. In the chaos several thousand managed to escape into the hills north of the city, but most were rounded up. Soviet troops usually shot the Germans and spared the Hungarians. Some 28,000 soldiers had taken part in the breakout from Buda. Just over 700 reached German lines.

On 12 February a deathly hush came over the city, punctuated by odd shots and bursts of fire. The writer Sándor Márai emerged to wander round Buda, and was shaken by the sights. ‘
Some streets must be guessed at
,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘This was the corner house with the Flórián Café, this is the street where I once lived–no trace of the building–this pile of rubble at the corner of Statisztika Street and Margit Boulevard was a five-storey block with many flats and a café a few days ago.’

In the aftermath of the battle, Red Army soldiers shot German wounded–some were dragged out and crushed under tanks–also all members of the SS and any Hiwi auxiliaries, who were wrongly categorized as
vlasovtsy
. Anyone in German uniform who did not reply in German was also likely to be killed. Few Hungarian combatants were shot. Almost all the men, even Communists who had fought with the resistance against the Arrow Cross, were rounded up for forced labour. Prince Pál Esterházy was put to work burying dead horses in Pest.

The NKVD and SMERSh displayed full Stalinist paranoia, suspecting anyone with foreign contacts of being a spy, including Zionists. Raoul Wallenberg was arrested on 19 January along with the forensic patholo-gist Ferenc Orsós, who had been one of the international observers with the Germans when they dug up the Polish corpses in Katy
forest. It is assumed that Wallenberg had also seen the Katy
report, and that he was suspected of having close contacts with the British, American and other intelligence services. He was arrested by SMERSh, and executed in July 1947.

Looting took place on an epic scale, both individual and state sponsored. Art collections were seized, including the most prominent ones owned by Jews. Even neutral embassies were ransacked and their safes blasted open. Civilians in the street were stopped at gunpoint and relieved of their watches, wallets and documents. Any surviving Jews were robbed just like gentiles. Some soldiers pulled their loot around with them in prams.

Although Soviet troops were more forgiving towards Hungarian soldiers than towards Germans, they showed no pity to Hungarian women when Malinovsky gave them a free run of the capital in celebration of the victory.
‘In many places they are raping women
,’ a fifteen-year-old boy wrote in his diary. ‘Women are being hidden everywhere.’ Nurses in the improvised hospitals were raped and stabbed afterwards. Students at the university were among the first victims. According to some accounts, the
most attractive women were held for up to two weeks and forced to act as prostitutes. Bishop József Gr
sz heard that ‘
70 percent of women
, from girls of twelve to mothers in the ninth month of pregnancy, [were] raped.’ Other more reliable reports put the proportion at 10 per cent.

Hungarian Communists addressed an appeal to the Red Army, describing the ‘
rampant, demented hatred
’, which even their own comrades had suffered. ‘Mothers were raped by drunken soldiers in front of their own children and husbands. Girls as young as 12 were dragged from their fathers and mothers to be violated by 10–15 soldiers and often infected with venereal diseases. After the first group, others came who followed their example… Several comrades lost their lives trying to protect their wives and daughters.’ Even Mátyás Rákosi, the secretary-general of the Hungarian Communist Party, appealed to the Soviet authorities but without success. But not all Red Army soldiers were rapists. Some treated families, and especially children, with great kindness.

Almost every town suffered, even if not on the same scale as Budapest. In the 9th Guards Army, soldiers complained that their axis of advance offered ‘
no women and no booty
’, recorded a mortar officer, who described their men as ‘incredibly brave guys, but also incredible scoundrels’. ‘A solution was quickly found,’ he wrote. ‘In turns a quarter of the soldiers were sent to Mór where they seized houses and the women there who had failed to flee or hide. They were given one hour for that. And then the next group followed. They would use women from the ages of fourteen to fifty. They would carry out a complete pogrom in the houses, threw everything on the floor, broke it and crushed it, and looked for pocket or wrist watches. If they came across wine they of course would drink it. There had been many wine cellars in Mór, but when we entered the town they had all been emptied, the barrels smashed and the wine emptied on to the floor. It was there that we came across two soldiers who had drowned in wine.’