István Deák

Endgame in Budapest

Krisztián Ungváry: The Siege of Budapest: 100 Days in World War II. Translated from the Hungarian by Ladislaus Löb. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2005, 475 pp. (Original Hungarian language edition: Budapest ostroma. Budapest, Corvina, 1998) - Krisztián Ungváry: A magyar honvédség a második világháborúban (The Hungarian Armed Forces in the Second World War). Budapest, Osiris, 2005, 604 pp.

 

...
Hungary joined Operation Barbarossa on June 26, 1941, four days after the beginning of the German attack; as Ungváry points out, this was done in part so as not to enter the fray too late behind neighbouring Romania, Slovakia and Croatia, thereby showing insufficient gratitude to the Führer, who helped Hungary regain parts of the territories it had lost to Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia after 1918. The counter-revolutionary establishment's unrelenting anti-communism also played a role in that attack. Yet, as Ungváry rightly points out, the war was unpopular in Hungary, especially among the millions of poor people who had no fear of communism.
Following World War I, the victorious Entente allowed Hungary only a lightly equipped standing army of 35,000. The restrictions, forcibly incorporated into law, were respected only in their breach; still—as Ungváry well demonstrates— by 1941, Hungary was behind even its poorest neighbours in training, equipment and, as it soon turned out, command ability, as well as in the enthusiasm of the soldiers. Amply available, however, was the extraordinary conceit of the military commanders who demanded the creation of a fascist-type dictatorship, as well as the restoration of complete Hungarian territorial integrity. Never mind, Ungváry points out, that this would have made the Magyar-speakers a minority in their own country. The generals' insistence on a "Hungarian imperialist policy" was made even more ludicrous by their being, in their absolute majority, of German or Slavic origin, which was small wonder in view of their having come from a Habsburg multinational tradition.
In his two books, Ungváry demonstrates convincingly how ridiculously unprepared the country was for waging a major war. While those at home lived as in peacetime, the army moved to the front in miniature Italian tanks that a rifle bullet could pierce; in private automobiles and trucks confiscated from businesses; in peasant carts (which turned out to be useful at least in snow and mud), and on bicycles. The Hungarians had proportionally fewer weapons than any other army in the campaign, and it was not unusual to see units move up to the trenches without firearms in the hope of receiving the weapons of those they were about to replace. All this may be explained by the country's poverty, but then why go to war, especially as Germany did not at first ask for Hungarian participation?
The result of these shortcomings was a military defeat nearly unparalleled in the history of a country already rich in military defeats. In the winter of 1942-1943, the Hungarian Second Army—that is, the entire Hungarian force at the front—as destroyed at the same time as the Germans were surrendering at Stalingrad. The majority of the two hundred thousand or so Hungarian soldiers were killed in acction, or were taken prisoner, or succumbed to typhus, or froze to death. Sharing the fate of the soldiers were some forty thousand Jewish slave labourers who, if they were not murdered by their Hungarian guards or by the harsh Russian winter, were treated as poorly in Soviet captivity as the "Christian" soldiers. It remains a mystery, however, why the Germans entrusted a vital frontline on the Don to the Hungarians, who made up for the lack of men by renaming their brigades—each made up of two infantry regiments—"light divisions," thereby giving the impression of a serious armed force. As Ungváry and many memoirists have demonstrated, when the Soviets attacked, many Hungarians threw away their arms; the ensuing scramble resembled more a lost Polar expedition, with men crawling and dying in the snow, than an organised withdrawal. Meanwhile, the better trained and equipped Germans mistreated the Hungarians, throwing them out at night of the few peasant huts still standing.
Ungváry seems to be the first historian to show that several Hungarian units at the front contained an absolute majority of Romanians, Slovaks and Ruthenes (or Carpatho-Ukrainians) who had even less incentive to fight than the Magyarspeaking peasant recruits. Interestingly, under direct Soviet attack some Jewish forced labourers picked up castaway weapons in order to stop the attackers. After all, as Ungváry writes, the Jews, too, preferred Hungarian oppression to Soviet prison camps. Other writers, both Jewish and anti-Semitic, have claimed that Jews picked up weapons in order to fight as anti-Nazi partisans. Some of them later returned to Hungary as Communist liberators. The Jewish slave labourers, too, had varied political convictions.

Following the annihilation of Hungary's Second Army at the Don River, the government began cautiously to explore the possibility of surrendering to the Western allies, who were nowhere to be seen. By late 1943, Hungary was in many ways a neutral country; this caused Hitler to lose patience and, on March 19, 1944, to send his troops into the country. The Germans' goal was to keep Hungary in the war and, simultaneously, to solve the "Jewish Question". Despite all the anti- Semitic legislation, as well as the constant anti-Semitic agitation in the press, and despite the murder by the Hungarian army of thousands upon thousands of Hungarian Jews in the Ukraine and Serbia, there were still nearly eight hundred thousand persons in the country whom the law regarded as Jews. Most people within this number, which was then the largest surviving Jewish community in Hitler's Europe, lived a fairly normal life, sometimes even a prosperous one. Not only was there no resistance in Hungary to the German occupation but, under Nazi pressure, Regent Miklós Horthy, the uncrowned semi-constitutional ruler of Hungary, appointed a pro-Nazi cabinet, which did its utmost to mobilize the population and the economy for war. It also began deporting the Jews to German-held lands. Between May and July 1944, Adolf Eichmann and the Hungarian authorities expedited some 437,000 Jews to Auschwitz. But early in July, Horthy at last drew the line, forbidding the deportation of 200,000 Budapest Jews. A large part of the latter were still alive in December 1944, when the city's siege began.
Throughout 1943 and 1944, the Red Army kept getting closer to the borders of Hungary, and after Romania changed sides, on August 23, 1944, Soviet and Romanian troops suddenly appeared in the then Hungarian-ruled northern part of Transylvania. As a member of a labour company, I was in the region at that time and was treated to the hitherto unimaginable spectacle of a fleeing German army: dirty and ragged infantrymen, airmen, sailors, East European auxiliaries, Romanian and Soviet POWs. Whether walking or crammed into boxcars, they rushed into the fields to chew sunflower seeds at every opportunity. Now, finally, the Hungarians began to think of surrendering even to the hated Bolshevik enemy. The attempt failed, because on October 16, SS soldiers and paratroopers arrested the Regent and replaced him with Ferenc Szálasi, the unbalanced leader of the fascist Arrow Cross Party. As "Leader of the Nation", he filled the entire first session of the "Crown Council", on November 2, 1944, with a rant about Hungarian-Japanese relations and the need for Germany, Japan and Hungary to divide the Asiatic sphere.
When Szálasi came to power as the Germans' very last resort, the Red Army was already deep in Hungary, winning a crucial tank battle some one hundred miles east of the Hungarian capital. Early in The Siege of Budapest, Ungváry provides a transcript of a telephone conversation on October 28, 1944 between Stalin and Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, a vast group of armies. Stalin ordered Malinovsky to seize Budapest in five days, an impossible task, as Ungváry convincingly demonstrates. The main reason for the Soviet dictator's impatience was his desire to demonstrate to the Western allies that Hungary was within his sphere of interest. This haste resulted in enormous losses on the Soviet side, and in Stalin's decision to move another group of armies, Marshal Fedor Tolbukhin's third Ukrainian front, from Serbia to Hungary. This latter group of armies then crossed the Danube far to the south of Budapest, and while Malinovsky's forces were trying to cross the same river immediately to the south of Budapest, Tolbukhin's soldiers moved up in Transdanubia from the southwest, almost without meeting any resistance. On December 24, they suddenly encircled the city.
If Stalin saw the capture of Budapest as a political necessity, Hitler saw its defence with similar political urgency. Besides, there was the need to protect the Hungarian oil fields in the southwestern part of the country: they were the Third Reich's last natural fuel source. Thus it came about that, while the Soviet army was poised in central Poland for an attack on Warsaw, Hitler withdrew the crack IV. SS Panzer Corps from that front and threw it into the battle in Hungary. Now half the German tanks in the East were engaged in Hungary, which had become Hitler's favourite battlefield. In order to re-conquer Budapest, the Führer later also transferred his best force in the West, the sixth SS Panzer Army, to Hungary.

...

At Christmas-time in 1944, with Budapest surrounded, a few trams were still able to cross the frontlines with people returning home from holiday shopping. Family members called each other with the news that "Ivan is here", and when the Hungarian central military command telephoned some local military and police stations, it was often a Russian voice that answered. Yet this somewhat romantic and colourful stage of the siege soon gave way to terrible fighting and a breakdown of all public and private services. First the trams stopped running; then shops closed (except for some bakeries that persevered for an astonishingly long time); later electricity, gas and the telephone became unavailable; and finally, water no longer came through the taps, except in a few places in the city—all this, with nearly 80,000 German and Hungarian soldiers and well over 800,000 civilians trapped within the city. Ungváry takes some pride in demonstrating that in Leningrad, where there were more civilians and where the siege lasted 900 days, the fighting was not within the city, unlike in Budapest; and in Stalingrad, most of the civilians had been evacuated before the arrival of the Germans, unlike in Budapest; and the sieges of Berlin and Vienna were shorter; and finally Rome, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Oslo, Copenhagen, Athens, Sofia, Bucharest and Belgrade all fell with little or no fighting. Among the capital cities, only the fate of Warsaw was more tragic than the fate of Budapest.
To make matters worse, there was not even a semblance of a central authority in the besieged city. After the Arrow Cross government had fled to the West, district party and militia units were vying for power with the remnants of the state and municipal authorities, with the police, and with the commanders of the Hungarian and German military. Oddly, the one Arrow Cross newspaper left in the besieged part of the city admonished the block administrators, as late as February 9, in the midst of complete chaos, to remit rents instantly to the City Council. One wonders how well this order was obeyed, considering that mortar shells and bombs were raining down incessantly. Yet Soviet bombers did not wreak as much damage in Budapest as Anglo-American bombers did in Berlin, Hamburg or Dresden. When it was all over, it turned out that the great majority of Budapest dwellings were still habitable—if one can call it habitation when a part of an apartment is missing (ours), or a huge unexploded bomb is sitting in the bathtub (as happened in the house of a friend of mine), or the building is nearly intact, but inside the furniture is smashed and excrement piles up in the grand piano, compliment of the liberators.
As Ungváry carefully explains, nearly 40,000 civilians died unnatural deaths during the siege. But how did so many survive? The answer is that Budapest was in many ways still an old-fashioned place where wells could be re-opened and where several artesian springs spewed hot and cold water. In both the grand apartment houses and the proletarian tenements, there existed large cellars where each tenant had his little compartment and where coal, firewood and food could be kept. There were also the horses of the military, some thirty thousand of them, who roamed the streets gnawing on park benches and tree barks until hungry neighbours set upon them with axes and kitchen knives. Life in the cellars could certainly be horrifying, but occasionally also quite jolly, as many memoirs attest. Light was provided by pieces of string planted in shoe wax, just enough illumination for the happy initiation of many a teenage boy and girl into the mysteries of love.
The fighting was excruciatingly slow and difficult, as it always seems to be in urban areas. Hitler had declared Budapest a fortress, but there was nothing fortress-like in this huge urban sprawl, half of which, the Buda side, was mostly verdant hills. Ungváry explains how cosmopolitan the fighting forces were: on the Soviet side, nearly all the nationalities of the Soviet Union, including such Balts, Ukrainians and Poles whom the Red Army had picked up in liberated territory, many of whom had been POWs or nationalist anti-Soviet partisans. There was also an entire Romanian army corps on the Soviet side that fought bravely, but whose commander (as well as some of its officers and soldiers) later landed in Soviet jails or concentration camps. On the other side, one found, besides the Hungarians and the Germans from the Reich, many Austrians and ethnic Germans from the region who had been drafted into the SS and often spoke no German or only a dialect that a German from the Reich could not understand. In addition, there were the volunteers, recruited into the SS from among the peoples of the Soviet Union, as well as Alsatians, Frenchmen, Serbs, Slovaks, Spanish volunteers, Scandinavians and others.
The quality of troops varied enormously. A large part of the Soviet force seems to have been leaderless drifters or outright deserters who obeyed no one. Not that the regular Soviet soldiers often obeyed their officers. The most common scene in Budapest was the sight of drunken soldiers exchanging fisticuffs with their officers, or yelling at each other without distinction of rank. Had it not been for the elite Guards units and other shock troops, it is hard to see how the Red Army could have made any progress at all. On the German side, quality also varied from the utter dedication of the Reich German Waffen SS to the relative unreliability of the locally recruited Waffen SS units. What drove all the Germans, though, was the realisation that surrender would, in all likelihood, bring an immediate or a slow death.
The quality of the Hungarian troops varied from bad to terrible, at least if we are to believe the German commanders who competed with each other, after the war, in blaming Hitler and the Hungarians for the disaster at Budapest. It is true that, as Ungváry well shows, most Hungarian regulars had only one desire— namely, to find civilian clothes and then to melt into the population. The sorriest spectacle of all must have been presented by the postmen, streetcar conductors and policemen whom the Arrow Cross leaders threw into battle without any training or useable weapons. In fact, some police battalions were destroyed only after the Soviet commanders had first ascertained the nationality of these strange opponents in blue uniforms, wearing French-type helmets. The only dedicated fighters among the Hungarians seemed to have been some young volunteers, mostly high school and university students assembled into ad hoc battalions. Why these youngsters considered the ruin of the capital and their own untimely death a worthwhile goal remains a mystery.
The Red Army at first concentrated on Pest, the eastern half of the city, moving gradually from the suburbs into the centre. As it must have happened in all great cities, some neighbourhoods saw little if any combat, and their inhabitants barely noticed that they had changed sides.
In eastern Pest, where I spent the last two weeks before liberation, the coming of the Red Army was marked only by the sudden disappearance of a German heavy mortar battery from the neighbouring building. Not that its servers had done much fighting; their ammunition allowed only for one or two launchings a day; the rest of the time these young boys from Cologne had spent trying to fraternise with some young women in my cellar who were all Jews in hiding.

The first wave of Soviet soldiers appeared markedly more mature than the Germans. They wore fur hats, greasy but highly utilitarian padded uniforms, a spoon stuck in a boot, and a small sack on their back that was fastened with a piece of string and that seemed to contain all their worldly possessions. Our liberators arrived in near silence and were friendly; the rabble came later as did the total chaos and the debilitating uncertainty regarding the soldiers' intentions. With the Germans and even with the Arrow Cross, things were relatively simple: either they accepted your forged papers or they did not accept them; only in the latter case were you in—mortal—trouble. The Red Army soldiers were more casual with your hastily fabricated new papers. In any case, how were you to decide in an instant, when escape was still conceivable, whether the malenkii robot, the "little work" that the soldiers had invited you to perform, would mean something like pushing a gun to another position or endless travel to Siberia with hardly a chance of return? Similarly, an invitation to the women in the cellar to help peel potatoes could mean precisely that or a horrifying night with a bunch of drunken and often infected soldiers. Meanwhile, the Nazi concierge, who had been hiding the Jewish women for money, now demanded with increasing exasperation that his former wards protect him and his family against Red Army depredations. "After all," he kept repeating, "it was you Jews who had called in the Russians."
The worst was the blatant contradiction between reality and the gaudy Soviet posters, executed in a socialist realist style, extolling the superiority of "Soviet Man". In many parts of Pest, there was bitter fighting, and the so-called Big Ghetto was liberated only on January 16, 1945, two days before the last German and Hungarians troops fled west, across the Danube to Buda.
The survival of at least 120,000 Jews in the Hungarian capital is a near-miraculous story, many times told, although barely known in the West. Suffice it to say here that even after the Arrow Cross had come to power and Eichmann had returned to Budapest to complete his work, there was to be no total annihilation of the Jews. It is true that some 50,000 were driven west, mostly on foot, to build fortifications on the Austrian border. (Auschwitz was already out of commission at that time.) It is also true that most of the deportees perished under the blows of Hungarian soldiers, Arrow Cross militia, and Austrian peasant youngsters.
However, the rest of the Budapest Jews were either driven into a newly created ghetto, the only such institution in Europe at the time, or were taken under the wing of neutral legations and assembled into so-called protected houses, which went by the name of Little or International Ghetto. That such ghettoes could be set up at all was due primarily to the Arrow Cross leadership's craving for recognition by the Vatican, Sweden, Switzerland and other neutral countries. To achieve such a lofty international status became for the government more important than even the total elimination of the Hungarian Jews.
In addition to the 70,000 Jews in the Big Ghetto and the 30,000 Jews in the International Ghetto, at least 20,000 Jews were hiding in the city, using forged papers and benefiting from the assistance of their non-Jewish neighbours. Now that nearly everybody was hiding for one reason or another, mostly so as to avoid military service or evacuation to the West, and now that the Red Army was approaching with the perceived threat of a terrible retribution, hiding one's Jewish acquaintances became a fairly common practice. Yet, for the first time in Hungarian history, hiding a Jew, or even the failure to denounce him, became a capital offense, and a few "Righteous Gentiles" did indeed make the supreme sacrifice.
Those in the International Ghetto fared perhaps the worst, because the generous protection extended by the likes of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swiss Consul Carl Lutz, the Papal Nuncio Angelo Rotta and others, could not include armed defence. This meant that armed hooligans from the Arrow Cross raided these houses almost nightly, dragging people to the Danube shore where they were shot and pushed into the river. Ungváry estimates that at least three thousand perished this way, mainly better-educated and wealthier Jews who had had the right connections to obtain genuine or forged letters of consular protection. Poorer Jews languished in the Big Ghetto where the walls surrounding the place, as well as some police patrols, were of some help. Also the municipality provided the Ghetto with some food as long as any food was available. Still, many died: those crowded into the Ghetto had no reserves of food, and Arrow Cross gangs were roaming the streets. Ungváry claims that an SS-Arrow Cross plan for the last minute extermination of all the inhabitants of the Big Ghetto was thwarted by the quick action of a renegade Arrow Cross leader and the Wehrmacht General Gerhard Schmidhuber (who was subsequently killed during the break-out). There doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence to prove that such a murderous plan ever existed.
Once liberated, the inhabitants of the Ghetto had to learn quickly that being a Jewish survivor did not endear one to many Soviet soldiers. Some of the liberated Jews were even grabbed and marched away to Siberia, in order to help make up a mysteriously set quota for prisoners of war. But generally life in Pest returned to something like normal at an astonishing speed: peasants began to bring in food, expecting to be paid in gold or family possessions, and while the fighting was still continuing in Buda, a movie house opened in central Pest. It showed the Soviet film, The Battle of Orel, in which the audience was treated to the double thrill of being able to watch Soviet airplanes machine-gun and bomb the enemy first on the screen and then outside the theatre. (I thought that only I recalled this extraordinary circumstance, but the very thorough Ungváry has found this story for his book, too.) Moreover, on February 4, 1945, with the war still raging in Buda, a revolutionary People's Court in Pest sentenced two war criminals to death. They were hanged in a public square, having been nearly lynched by Jewish survivors.

 

István Deák
is an American historian born in Hungary. He teaches modern Central and East European history at Columbia University. His books on Weimar Germany's left-wing intellectuals, the 1848 Revolution in Hungary and the officer corps of the Habsburg Monarchy have appeared in English, German, Italian and Hungarian.