John Lukacs

The Battle of Budapest
Sixty Years After

 

...
I must therefore sum up Hungary's situation in 1944 and its then recent history briefly. After the First World War, for all kinds of reasons, most of them wrong, the Western allies and their newly attached "allies", Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, applied the dubious principle of national self-determination to amputate the historic Hungarian state, depriving it of two-thirds of its territory under the terms the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, and leaving more than three million Hungarians under foreign rule. Hungary at Trianon was punished more severely than was Germany at Versailles. This happened soon after a revolution in Hungary in late 1918 which then debouched into a short-lived Communist regime in 1919, followed by a nationalist counterrevolution. The traumas of revolutions, defeat and mutilation marked Hungarian politics during the next twenty years. Hungary was still a kingdom, but only in name: the head of state was a Regent, Miklós Horthy, a former admiral. During the 1920s Hungary recovered-somewhat. During the 1930s the German Reich rose again, led by Hitler; it rapidly became the principal power in Europe, discarding and tearing up the Versailles Treaty article by article. It was thus no wonder that the Third Reich had many admirers among Hungarians, especially among the military hierarchy. Hitler had no particular sympathies for Hungary; but because of the, hardly avoidable, alignment of Hungary with Germany from 1938 to 1941, some of the lost Hungarian lands were actually reassigned to Hungary.
But now Hungary's fate was already bound to the coming Second World War. When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, the giant Third Reich became Hungary's immediate neighbour. Gradually it was (or at least it should have been) evident that the principal problem for the Hungarian state was no longer the regaining of its lost lands; it was (or at least it should have been) the preservation, in one way or another, of Hungary's independence. This priority was neither acknowledged nor thought about by most of the governing classes, nor by many of the Hungarian population, and especially not by the Hungarian military. The latter were largely willing to accommodate themselves and their country to the political strategy of Hitler's Germany (believing that Germany was invincible). Anti-Jewish laws (about which more later) were instituted. In November 1940 Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact, the German-Italian-Japanese alliance. In April 1941 Hungary took part in Hitler's war against Yugoslavia, despite having signed an Eternal Friendship Pact with Yugoslavia but a few months earlier. (The conservative Prime Minister Count Pál Teleki shot himself in shame). In June 1941 Hungary joined in Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. In December 1941 Great Britain declared war on Hungary and Hungary declared war on the United States a few days later.
A Hungarian army fought alongside the Germans in Russia. But in 1942 and 1943 there were subtle changes. A few patriotic (rather than nationalist) conservatives and the Regent chose to reduce the Hungarian commitment to Hitler carefully and secretly. There was a new Prime Minister, Miklós Kállay. There were clandestine attempts to establish contact with British and American officials. In January-February 1943 Russian forces largely destroyed the 2d Hungarian Army. By tacit consent Hungary and Budapest were not bombed by the British and American air armadas crossing Hungarian airspace. (Budapest had undergone one minor Soviet air raid in September 1942.) Save for the tragedy of the Hungarian 2nd Army, Hungary and Budapest (including the Jewish population) lived largely, though not entirely, unscathed by the war, even as the advancing Russian armies were approaching Hungary from the northeast.
Hitler now had enough. He summoned the Regent on 18 March 1944. He ordered the latter to appoint a pro-German and pro-National Socialist government. The Regent thought he had no alternative but to comply. German divisions moved into Budapest and other cities the next day. Soon after that Budapest was bombed by British and American planes. The humiliation, persecution and suppression of Hungarian Jews was now merciless. On German directives, and with the compliance of many Hungarian military and civil authorities, about 400,000 Hungarian Jews were corralled in ghettoes and then deported, most of them to Auschwitz. The great majority of them did not survive the war. The last to be collected and deported were the Jews in Budapest, about 160,000 of them. In late June and early July the Regent emerged from his apathy. Spurred by messages from President Roosevelt, the King of Sweden and Pope Pius XII, he directed a halt to the deportation of Jews from Budapest. The first Russian troops entered Hungarian territory from the southwest. On 15 October the Regent, after woefully inadequate preparations, broadcast Hungary's offer of armistice and surrender to the Allies. Within hours he was arrested by the Germans, who installed a government formed by the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian National Socialist movement, whose composition included not only fanatics but also criminals. What followed in Budapest were months of terror and then the seven-week siege.

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When the siege of Budapest began, the people of Budapest were badly,
indeed tragically, divided. It is not possible to ascertain the extent of these divisions. There had been no opinion surveys (also no elections after May 1939). Divisions and contradictions frequently existed within the mind (and heart)
of a single individual. Here I must essay the approximate lineaments of that torn and racked population, in my capacity as a historian as well as a witness and participant in those memorable months.
I estimate that when the siege began, perhaps 15 per cent of the (non-Jewish) population of Budapest was willing to continue and support the war on the Germans' side. These people ranged from the fanatics of the Arrow Cross to many other men and women (not necessarily Arrow Cross) who were convinced that the arrival of the Red Army was the very worst prospect of all, one that had to be resisted. Another 15 per cent had arrived at the very opposite conclusion: that Hungary's alliance with Hitler's Reich was a political and moral disaster that had to be resisted and opposed in one way or another; that the Arrow Cross government consisted of criminals, and that therefore the sooner the Russians occupied Budapest the better. (Among this minority Communists and their sympathizers were a minuscule portion). The rest, perhaps 70 per cent of the population (please consider this as a merely approximate, indeed, arguable rule of one sensitive thumb) were numbed by their circumstances and by events, sometimes willing, sometimes unwilling to think much ahead; they were preoccupied with the existing and looming dangers for them and for their families, and had nothing like a clear idea of what the end of the siege would bring.
There was (and is) no sociographic explanation for these deep, and sometimes fatal, divisions. It may be interesting to note that the remnants of the Hungarian aristocracy were largely anti-Nazi (and therefore, at least temporarily, awaiting the Russians), even though it was they as a class who had the most to lose and fear from Russian and Communist rule; pro-German and National Socialist inclinations and even convictions were still widespread among the working classes. (So much for the theories of Marx et al.) The "Christian" (meaning, at that time, non-Jewish and non-socialist) middle classes were divided, probably reflecting the above mentioned 15-70-15 ratio. During the siege some of their preferences and opinions would change-because of their dreadful experiences, naturally.
And so did their memories, which, as I have already said, so many found it easier to suppress rather than to reconstruct and to rethink.

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There were many gradations among the Jews themselves. For one thing, it was (and it still is) impossible to ascertain their exact numbers-mostly because of the high rate of intermarriage with Christians and also because of the con-siderable number of Jewish Christians, that is, converts. Before the Second World War the assimilation of Hungarian Jews may be described as extraordinary. But then modern anti-Semitism was not religious but racial; it was a reaction and resentment against the most assimilated and most successful Hungarian Jews. Hungarian anti-Semitism, only sporadic before the First World War, was tremendously boosted by the national reaction against the short-lived Communist regime in 1919, in which at least two-thirds of the commissars had been Jews. The result was the anti-Semitism of the Horthy regime, and the anti-Jewish laws and regulations in 1938-1941, not always responses to German demands, made though they were. Twenty-five years of anti-Jewish education and propaganda had their effects on many. And now the fate of the Jews hung by a thread (or, more precisely, by a few frail and silken threads). Budapest was now ruled by a fanatical anti-Jewish Arrow Cross "government". But this was November 1944. There were, there could be, no more transports to Auschwitz. Jews of all ages and sexes were to be marched on foot, westward towards Austria and Germany, but most of these forced marches were then suspended, because they were impractical.
By early December, before the actual siege began, the situation of Jews in Budapest was as follows. (1) The government cordoned off a ghetto in the mostly Jewish-inhabited quarters of the city, to which most Jews were forced to transfer. Nobody was allowed to pass through their high wooden palisades, within which about 72,000 Jews were crowded under terrible conditions. Most of them survived the battle for Budapest. On 16-17 January the first Russian troops reached that part of the city. (2) Another 25,000 or 30,000 Jews dwelt in a scattering of apartment buildings in another part of Budapest. These "Jewish" houses (marked by a large yellow star on the portals from April on) were under some kind of "international" protection. The Swedish government, the Swiss, the Portuguese, the Spanish and the Vatican legations had declared that, temporarily, Hungarian Jews living in thus designated houses were under their protection. For the sake of maintaining their few existing diplomatic relations with such neutral states, the Arrow Cross Foreign Ministry accepted this. The criminal groups did not. Such gangs invaded these houses in which Jewish families were cowering, herded many of them into the wintry streets and marched them to the lower quays of the Danube, murdering them there and throwing their bodies into the icy waters. Still, most of the Jews in their "internationally" protected houses survived the siege. (Their brave protector Raoul Wallenberg, present all through the siege, disappeared thereafter, taken away by the Russians.) (3) Many other Jews-perhaps as many as 40,000-also survived, often furnished with false identity papers, hidden and harboured by their non-Jewish neighbours, friends, acquaintances, or harboured in convents, presbyteries, monasteries and other religious institutions before and during the siege. Within the Battle for Budapest, within the clash of armies, within a civil war in Budapest rending its people, within those who hoped for their "liberation" by a returning German or by an advancing Russian army, there was this other murderous struggle between those who were indifferent to the fate of the Jews of Budapest and those who were not. That alone renders the history of the Battle for Budapest so extraordinarily complex, much more than a chapter in general histories of the Second World War or of the Holocaust.

...
In August 1944 the Russian armies had reached the outskirts of Warsaw. Stalin halted their further advance westward. He decided on an advance into the Balkans, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and then on to Hungary. This choice was logical, strategic and geographic, but also political. The Germans were about to retreat from southeastern Europe (though not from Hungary). No British or American forces would be inserted there to fill a potential military and political vacuum. Churchill knew this. That was one of the two main reasons (the other was the future of Poland) that compelled him to fly to Moscow in October to reach some kind of an agreement with Stalin. They did. Stalin agreed to leave Greece to the British, in accord with an agreement on the relative percentages of British-American and Russian influence (hopefully, but only hopefully, temporary) in the Balkans and in Hungary. At first Churchill and Stalin agreed on a 50-50 ratio for Hungary; a few days later Molotov insisted and Eden agreed to revise that to 75-25 in Russia's favour. The Russians had already conquered much of southern and eastern Hungary* and were moving toward Budapest.
At the end of October Stalin ordered and urged Marshal Malinowski, the commander of one of the two Russian Fronts in Hungary, to take Budapest as soon as possible. The first Russian advance units reached the outskirts of the capital a few days later; but Malinowski was unable to penetrate the city. The real siege did not begin until Christmas, when the other Russian Front, commanded by Marshal Tolbuchin, had encircled it from the southwest. Here I must register a very slight) disagreement with Krisztián Ungváry. Of course Stalin wanted to advance westward as soon and as much as possible. But I do not think that this was his primary concern at that time. Of course he was not pleased with the delay in the capture of Budapest, with the duration of its siege. He was vexed but not particularly grieved by it. The relative slowness of the Russian conquest of Budapest is one indirect piece of evidence for that. Stalin wanted to make certain that Hungary and Budapest would come under his control. His minions knew that only too well. One example of their political determination was that they arrested Raoul Wallenberg and spirited him to Moscow a day or so after the Russian occupation of Budapest.
Perhaps more interesting were the purposes of Hitler. His principal desire was obvious. It was to halt and delay the Russian advance toward Vienna as much as possible. If that was to involve the destruction of Budapest, so be it. Here he was relatively successful: the siege of Budapest cost the Russians much time and many casualties. That is why Hitler forbade the breaking out of the garrison defending Buda even when two German counteroffensives came nearer to the city and when such a breakout was-perhaps-possible. Let Budapest (or at least Buda) remain a thorn in the Russians' flesh, compromising their progress to Vienna. Yet it is significant that the greatest German counteroffensive in western Hungary was mounted only after Budapest had fallen. After some initial breakthroughs that last German offensive on the eastern front (indeed the last in the entire war) also failed; but its significance resides in what it shows of Hitler's mind. His main (and only) hope, as it had been for years now, was to divide his enemies. To achieve that politically or diplomatically was well nigh impossible; but perhaps something could be achieved by a sudden great German victory in the field. This, and not something like the retaking of Paris, was Hitler's purpose for his attack in the Ardennes (the Battle of the Bulge); this was his purpose in trying to inflict a damning blow on the Russians in western Hungary in March 1945. He did not succeed-though he delayed the progress of the armies of his enemies somewhat.

 

John Lukacs
is a Budapest-born historian, living and teaching in the U.S. since 1946. His books include Budapest 1900 (1988), Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), The Duel (1990), The End of the Twentieth Century-The End of the Modern Age (1993) and A Thread of Years (1999).
This is a slightly modified and abridged version of the introduction written for the American edition of Krisztián Ungváry's The Battle of Budapest, to be published by Yale University Press in 2005.