The end of Operation Frühlingserwachen

On the afternoon of Friday 16 March 1945, after an hour-long artillery preparation, Soviet troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front struck Hungarian and German positions at the foot of the Vértes hills, north of Székesfehérvár. So began the Vienna offensive – and so came the final end of Operation Frühlingserwachen (Spring Awakening), the last great German offensive of the Second World War, launched ten days earlier at Lake Balaton. Its panzer divisions, which only the day before had been trying to break through to the Danube, were within a week forced to flee a pocket that threatened to close around them.

The statement that the German offensive “ended on 16 March” needs some precision. The German attack had already stalled on 15 March, and Soviet historiography takes that date as the close of the Balaton defensive operation (6–15 March). 16 March was therefore not the day on which the Germans broke off their attack, but the day on which the Red Army seized the initiative – and it was its counter-offensive that sealed the defeat.

The attack that stalled

The first days of the offensive brought the Germans advances of only a few kilometres in the waterlogged ground between Lake Balaton and Lake Velence. From 9 March the divisions of SS-Oberstgruppenführer Josef “Sepp” Dietrich’s 6th SS Panzer Army began to gnaw their way through successive belts of Soviet defences. I SS Panzer Corps, with the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler and Hitlerjugend divisions, broke through to the south-east and – according to German sources – on 11 March crossed the Sió (PL) canal, about 30 metres wide, near Simontornya, establishing small bridgeheads on the far bank. II SS Panzer Corps, east of the Sárvíz canal, got bogged down in marshy ground, while III Panzer Corps of General Hermann Balck’s 6th Army reached Gárdony, south of Lake Velence, and stopped there. Of the roughly 150 tanks with which it had started on 6 March, after a few days it had just over 60 serviceable tanks and assault guns.

On the other sectors things went even worse. South of Lake Balaton the 2nd Panzer Army had not even broken through the first belt of the Soviet 57th Army’s defences by 12 March, advancing less than 10 kilometres. On the Drava, troops of Army Group E held two cramped bridgeheads, but the Bulgarian First Army (PL) and the Yugoslav 3rd Army kept them away from Mohács, and after the failure of the main attack the Germans withdrew back across the river.

The troops of Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin fell back, but bled the enemy white on one line after another. Tolbukhin committed the front’s entire second echelon, the 27th Army, together with reserve corps, and from 10 March he was also supported by the 5th Air Army of the neighbouring 2nd Ukrainian Front. According to the memoirs of General Sergei Shtemenko of the Soviet General Staff, when the situation on the Sió was at its most difficult Tolbukhin asked for permission to use the 9th Guards Army, which was standing in reserve, but the Stavka refused: that army was to be kept intact for the advance on Vienna. By 14 March it was clear that the offensive had failed. General Otto Wöhler’s Army Group South had lost more than 15,000 killed, wounded and missing in the first eight days, and its panzer divisions had only a fraction of their establishment of equipment in the line. On 15 March the attack came to a stop. At their furthest point the Germans had advanced about 30 kilometres, without reaching the Danube.

The counter-offensive of 16 March

Since mid-February the Stavka had been preparing an advance on Bratislava and Vienna; the German offensive merely delayed it by a few days. On 16 March the right wing of the 3rd Ukrainian Front went into the attack: General Nikanor Zakhvatayev’s 4th Guards Army and General Vasily Glagolev’s 9th Guards Army, which had been spared during the defensive battle, supported by the aircraft of both Ukrainian fronts. They struck between Székesfehérvár and the Vértes hills, where the front was held by weak divisions of the German 6th Army and the Hungarian Third Army – in the rear of the SS divisions, which had pushed far to the south towards the Sió.

The thrust was aimed at the most sensitive point. Had the Soviets reached the northern shore of Lake Balaton, they would have cut off the entire grouping that had been attacking between the lakes since 6 March. Progress on the first day was slight, but by 18 March the defence had cracked along its whole width. On 19 March the 6th Guards Tank Army was committed to the breach and drove towards Várpalota and Veszprém. Dietrich pulled his panzer divisions back from the Sió and threw them northwards to hold open a corridor of retreat. On the night of 21–22 March – contrary to Hitler’s order to fight to the last man – the Germans abandoned Székesfehérvár, which had been fought over since December. Columns of the 6th SS Panzer Army and the 6th Army forced their way, under constant fire, through a corridor a few kilometres wide between the lake and the Soviet tanks. The Soviets came close to closing the pocket, but most of the troops got out – at the price of abandoning a large part of their tanks, guns and vehicles, many of them undamaged but out of fuel. The Hungarian Third Army largely disintegrated or was taken prisoner. At the end of March Soviet troops crossed the Austrian border.

The “armband order”

The news from Hungary infuriated Adolf Hitler. He decided that the SS divisions he regarded as his guard “had not fought as the situation demanded”, and in the second half of March he ordered the soldiers of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Das Reich, Hohenstaufen and Hitlerjugend divisions to remove from their sleeves the cuff titles bearing the names of their units. According to accounts from Dietrich’s circle, Heinrich Himmler, who had been told to deliver the order in person, merely sent it by telegram, and Dietrich did not pass it on. In any case the order was purely symbolic: the cuff titles had already been unpicked before the divisions arrived in Hungary, for reasons of secrecy. The anecdote found in the literature that SS officers sent their decorations back to Hitler in reply is regarded as a legend with no support in the sources. The episode nonetheless remained a telling sign of the collapse of trust between the dictator and his most loyal formations in the last weeks of the war.

Losses

Figures for the losses vary considerably. According to tables compiled by Russian military historians (Grigori Krivosheev), the 3rd Ukrainian Front lost 32,899 men in the Balaton defensive operation of 6–15 March, including 8,492 killed and missing. The Hungarian historian Krisztián Ungváry, drawing on German documents, gives for the same period about 12,400 killed, wounded and missing on the German side, and only 31 tanks permanently lost; other German reports speak of about 15,000 losses in Army Group South in the first eight days. Ungváry explains the low number of tanks lost by the fact that, because of the mud and difficulty of reaching the front, many of them never went into action at all, while damaged vehicles were evacuated to workshops. The Soviet side gave much higher figures – more than 27,000 enemy soldiers killed and wounded, and about 500 tanks and assault guns destroyed. The Germans paid the real price of the offensive, however, in the retreat after 16 March, when hundreds of abandoned vehicles were left on the roads of western Hungary.

The end of Hungarian oil

The offensive was meant to save for the Reich its last oilfields, in Hungary – and it hastened their loss. The refineries at Komárom and Pét, which were to supply petrol for the tanks, were bombed by Allied aircraft on 14 and 16 March. Soviet and Bulgarian troops advancing west of Lake Balaton took the Nagykanizsa area with its oilfields at the beginning of April, and in April the Austrian fields near Zistersdorf as well. The Germans were left with the remnants of their stocks and a few constantly bombed synthetic fuel plants. In Hungary the fighting was coming to an end: on 4 April – the date adopted in post-war Hungary – the last German troops were driven out of the country, and on 13 April the Red Army took Vienna. The inhabitants of western Hungary, over whom the front had rolled twice, paid a high price – in destruction, requisitions, deportations for forced labour in the USSR and violence by soldiers, especially against women.

Significance

The defeat at Lake Balaton closed the history of German offensives in the Second World War. The Reich’s last strong armoured force, which Hitler had withdrawn from the Ardennes in January, bled itself dry in the mud of Transdanubia for an unattainable goal instead of defending Berlin. When in mid-April the Red Army set off from the Oder towards the Reich capital, Dietrich’s divisions were already fighting in Austria, while the troops of Tolbukhin and Malinovsky, freed from the defence of Hungary, were able to strike at Vienna and Bratislava.

The battle also dispelled the last illusions about the potential of the Waffen-SS. Divisions that propaganda had presented as an elite failed to break through defences prepared in the space of two weeks. The Red Army of 1945 could now do what it had been learning at Kursk: absorb an armoured blow on a defence echeloned in depth, without committing the reserves earmarked for the offensive, and then go straight over to the counter-attack. Hungary, Hitler’s last important ally in Europe, came entirely under Soviet control, which in the years that followed decided its place on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain.