Péter Gosztonyi
Fortress Budapest
Krisztián Ungváry: Budapest ostroma (The Siege of Budapest). Corvina, 1998. 330 pp. Portraits, photographs, maps, tables, drawings
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Péter Gosztonyi,
a historian and 1956 exile, lives in Switzerland. He is the author of many books and a recognized authority on
foreign satellite armies which fought as Hitler's allies in the East.
