Siege of Budapest

• 1. Introduction

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  The Siege of Budapest lasted exactly fifty days. When it ended on the 13th of February 1945, more than eighty percent of the city's buildings had been destroyed or damaged, all seven bridges spanning the Danube had been blown apart, and roughly 38,000 civilians had died within the encircled capital. What began as a strategic maneuver on a map became one of the bloodiest urban battles of the entire war. How did Hungary, a country that had already suffered nearly 200,000 deaths fighting alongside Germany, end up defended to the last man by soldiers eating their own horses? Who ordered the killing of Soviet emissaries who came under white flags to negotiate? And how did a small group of survivors escape through snow and ice with prams and families in tow, only to find Soviet troops waiting for them in the dark?

• 2. Hungary's Impossible Position

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  By early 1944, Hungary had lost close to 200,000 soldiers fighting the Soviet Union over three years. Political forces inside the country were pushing hard to exit the war before the front lines reached Hungarian cities. Germany saw this coming. On the 19th of March 1944, Berlin launched Operation Margarethe and sent troops across the Hungarian border before any peace deal could be struck.

  Regent Miklós Horthy tried again in October 1944, after Allied victories at Normandy and Falaise and the devastating success of the Soviet summer offensive known as Operation Bagration had made the Eastern Front collapse. He opened back-channel negotiations with the Allies. Hitler's response was Operation Panzerfaust, a plot to remove Horthy from power. Horthy was forced to abdicate and was replaced by Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the far-right National Socialist Arrow Cross Party, who called himself a "Hungarist." As the new government took over, Germany reinforced Budapest with the IX SS Mountain Corps, consisting of two Waffen-SS divisions, to help build the city's defenses. Szálasi himself did not stay to see those defenses tested. He fled the city on the 9th of December 1944, more than two weeks before the Soviet encirclement was complete.

• 3. The Ring Closes

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  The Red Army launched its assault on the city's outer ring on the 29th of October 1944. More than one million men, split into two maneuver groups, pushed toward the Hungarian capital. On the 7th of November, Soviet and Romanian troops entered the eastern suburbs, already within twenty kilometers of the old town center.

  After a pause, the offensive resumed on the 19th of December. Just one week later, on the 26th of December, Soviet troops seized the road linking Budapest to Vienna, completing the encirclement. Trapped inside were nearly 33,000 German soldiers, roughly 37,000 Hungarian troops, and more than 800,000 civilians. Adolf Hitler declared Budapest a fortress city, Festung Budapest, and forbade any withdrawal. Waffen SS General Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch was placed in charge of the defense. Joseph Stalin, for his part, had a political as well as military reason to take the city fast: the Yalta Conference was approaching, and he wanted to demonstrate the full strength of Soviet arms to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He ordered General Rodion Malinovsky to seize Budapest without delay.

  On the night of the 28th of December 1944, Soviet forces broadcast surrender terms by radio and loudspeaker. They promised humane treatment, promised their emissaries would come unarmed, in cars flying white flags. Two groups appeared the next morning. The first arrived at ten in the morning in the Budafok sector and was taken to Pfeffer-Wildenbruch's headquarters. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch rejected the terms and sent the emissaries away. On their way back, the Germans opened fire. Captain I. A. Ostapenko was killed. Two of his companions jumped into a trench and survived. Ostapenko's body could not be recovered until the night of the 29th. He was buried at Budafok with full military honors. The second group arrived at eleven in the morning in the Kispest sector. Captain Miklós Steinmetz called for negotiations. The German garrison shot the car. Steinmetz and both his subordinates were killed.

• 4. Relief Attempts and Urban Combat

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  In January 1945, Germany launched a three-part counter-offensive called Operation Konrad to break the encirclement from outside. Operation Konrad I began on the 1st of January, with the IV SS Panzer Corps attacking from Tata through hill country northwest of the city. Soviet command responded by sending four additional divisions to block the advance, and recalled Romanian divisions on the 15th of January after judging them ineffective. The German push was stopped near Bicske, less than twenty kilometers from Budapest, and the corps was forced back on the 12th of January. Operation Konrad II, launched on the 7th of January, sent the same corps toward Budapest Airport with the aim of supplying the city by air. That thrust was also halted near the airport.

  Inside the pocket, supply was already in crisis. The Ferihegy airport had been lost on the 27th of December 1944, just before the siege formally began. Until the 9th of January 1945, aircraft and gliders still managed to land in the main avenues and in the park next to Buda Castle, though under constant artillery fire. Barges moved some supplies on the Danube at night, under fog. When those routes closed, soldiers foraged on their own. Some ate their horses. Extreme cold added to the misery on both sides.

  Fighting descended into the sewers, where both armies used underground tunnels for troop movements. Six Soviet marines managed to reach Castle Hill entirely underground, capture a German officer, and return to their own lines without surfacing. In mid-January, Csepel Island fell to the Soviets, including its military factories, which had been producing Panzerfausts and artillery shells even under fire. On the 17th of January, Hitler finally authorized the withdrawal of the remaining Pest garrison to Buda. All five Danube bridges were clogged with soldiers and civilians evacuating. German troops destroyed those bridges on the 18th of January, over the protests of Hungarian officers. Among them was the Chain Bridge, built in 1849.

  Operation Konrad III began on the 18th of January. The IV SS Panzer Corps reached the Danube at Dunapentele in two days, briefly tearing the Soviet front open. By the 26th of January the column was roughly twenty-five kilometers from the encirclement ring. Stalin ordered his troops to hold at all costs and shifted army corps south of the city to stop the advance. The Germans got within less than twenty kilometers but stalled from fatigue and lack of supply. Hitler refused a breakout request from the defenders. The corps withdrew on the 28th of January.

• 5. The Fall of Buda

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  Buda sits on hills, unlike the flat terrain of Pest. That geography gave the defenders a real advantage: they could site artillery and fortifications looking down on the Soviet attackers. The main citadel on Gellért Hill was held by Waffen-SS troops who beat back several assaults. Nearby, fighting raged for days among the shell-opened tombs of the city cemetery. On Margaret Island, in the middle of the Danube, the battle was especially brutal. The island was still connected to the rest of the city by the surviving half of the Margaret Bridge and served as a parachute drop zone. The 25th Guards Rifle Division fought on the island from the Soviet side.

  By early February, the Axis forces had been compressed into less than two square kilometers, suffering from malnutrition and disease. Some captured Hungarian soldiers changed sides and joined the Soviets, forming a unit called the Volunteer Regiment of Buda. Soviet troops took the southern railway station in two days of close-quarters fighting, then pressed toward Castle Hill. On the 10th of February, Soviet marines established a bridgehead on Castle Hill, effectively cutting the remaining garrison nearly in half. Gellért Hill finally fell on the 11th of February 1945, after six weeks of fighting, when the Soviets launched a simultaneous assault from three directions and Soviet artillery gained the ability to shell every corner of the remaining Axis positions.

• 6. Breakout and Surrender

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  Pfeffer-Wildenbruch's supply flights by glider had stopped a few days before the 11th of February. Parachute drops had also ended. With no order from Hitler authorizing a withdrawal, Pfeffer-Wildenbruch made a decision he did not usually share with his Hungarian counterparts: he told General Iván Hindy the garrison was breaking out.

  On the night of the 11th of February, some 28,000 German and Hungarian troops moved northwest from Castle Hill in three waves. Civilians moved with each wave, including entire families pushing prams through snow and ice. They aimed for the wooded hills northwest of the city and hoped to reach Vienna. The Soviets were waiting for them around the Széll Kálmán tér area, dug into prepared positions.

  Heavy fog helped the first wave. Their numbers surprised the Soviet soldiers and some broke through. The second and third waves were caught by Soviet artillery and rocket batteries, which bracketed the escape route with devastating effect. Five to ten thousand people made it into the hills outside the city. Of those, only 600-700 German and Hungarian soldiers ever reached the main German lines. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch and Hindy were both captured as they emerged from a tunnel running under the Castle District.

  The last defenders surrendered on the 13th of February 1945. Among the German formations entirely or mostly destroyed were the 13th Panzer Division, the 60th Panzergrenadier Division Feldherrnhalle, the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer, and the 22nd SS Volunteer Cavalry Division Maria Theresa. The Hungarian I Corps was virtually annihilated, along with the 10th and 12th Infantry Divisions and the 1st Armored Division. Soviet casualties ran between 100,000 and 160,000.

• 7. Civilians in the Ruins

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  Historian Krisztián Ungváry calculated that about 38,000 civilians died during the siege: roughly 13,000 from direct military action, and 25,000 from starvation, disease, and related causes. Within that total, 15,000 were Jews killed in mass executions carried out by the Arrow Cross Party.

  Raoul Wallenberg, Sweden's special envoy in Budapest from July to December 1944, had worked to block some of those killings. He issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings designated as Swedish territory, saving tens of thousands of lives. On the 17th of January 1945, Soviet authorities detained him along with his Hungarian driver, Vilmos Langfelder, and took both men to Moscow. Wallenberg disappeared into the Soviet system and his fate has never been established.

  After the fighting stopped, Soviet troops forcibly conscripted all able-bodied Hungarian men and youth to build pontoon bridges across the Danube. For weeks after the surrender, particularly after the spring thaw, bloated bodies accumulated against the pontoons and bridge pylons. In January 1945, before the siege ended, 32,000 ethnic Germans from within Hungary had already been arrested and sent to the Soviet Union as forced laborers. In some villages every adult was taken. More than 500,000 Hungarians in total were transported to Soviet labor camps, including between 100,000 and 170,000 ethnic Germans. Many died in the Donets Basin camps from hardship and ill-treatment.

  What surviving accounts make plain is how ordinary life bent rather than broke in the rubble. Joseph Szentkiralyi, who had been deported to Hungary from the United States as an enemy alien, hid on the upper floors of bombed buildings to avoid Hungarian army officers hunting for him. He and others risked leaving their shelters at night to butcher frozen horse carcasses in the street. By the end, daily rations amounted to melted snow, horse meat, and 150 grams of bread.

• 8. Testimony and Aftermath

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  A handful of diaries and memoirs survived to carry individual voices out of the wreckage. László Dezső, a fifteen-year-old living at 32 Mészáros Street, kept a diary throughout the battle. His neighborhood was heavily targeted because of its proximity to the Southern Railway Station and the strategic value of the surrounding hill. Charles Farkas, born in 1926, described his experience in Vanished by the Danube: Peace, War, Revolution, and Flight to the West. Ervin Y. Galantay, a fourteen-year-old dispatch runner attached to the Vannay Volunteer Battalion, wrote day-by-day accounts of survival for both soldiers and civilians; his diary was published in English in Budapest in 2005 under the title Boy Soldier. George F. Eber was twenty years old during the siege; his memoir, Pinball Games: Arts of Survival in Nazi and Communist Eras, was published posthumously in 2010 and included his own architectural sketches, one of which shows a Soviet soldier silhouetted against a Budapest wall on the first night the Germans were driven from his neighborhood.

  The military consequences spread outward from Budapest in both directions. The siege depleted the Wehrmacht and especially the Waffen-SS at a critical moment. For the Soviet side, it served as a final rehearsal before the Battle of Berlin and opened the path to the Vienna Offensive. On the 13th of April 1945, exactly two months after Budapest's surrender, Vienna fell.