The end of the siege of Budapest

On Tuesday 13 February 1945 the last groups of defenders of the Hungarian capital laid down their arms in the ruins of Buda. That evening Moscow celebrated the capture of Budapest with an artillery salute, and a communiqué from the Soviet high command announced the end of the fighting for a city the Red Army had encircled seven weeks earlier. The defence had in fact ended two days before: on the evening of 11 February the remnants of the garrison, defying Hitler’s ban, set out from Castle Hill in a desperate breakout. Most of the roughly 28,000 soldiers who took part were killed during the first night and the days that followed, and – according to the Hungarian historian Krisztián Ungváry – only some 600–700 men reached the German lines.

Budapest was not, however, held by the Germans alone. German and Hungarian troops defended the city together: of the roughly 79,000 soldiers of the encircled garrison, almost half were Hungarians from General Iván Hindy’s I Corps, from gendarmerie and police units, and from Arrow Cross volunteer formations. On the attacking side the Romanian 7th Army Corps fought alongside the Red Army, and from the turn of January and February so did the volunteer “Buda” regiment, made up of Hungarian prisoners of war and deserters. Budapest was therefore not only a German–Soviet battlefield but also a place where Hungarians fought on both sides.

Buda’s last weeks

The siege had begun on 29 December 1944 with a Soviet ultimatum and the deaths of two envoys. On 18 January 1945 flat Pest, on the left bank, fell. As they withdrew across the Danube, the Germans blew up the bridges. That day saw the collapse of what remained of the Margaret Bridge, three of whose piers on the Pest side had already fallen on 4 November 1944 in an unexplained explosion, and of the Chain Bridge, a symbol of the city since the mid-19th century. From then on the garrison held out only in Buda, in the hills on the right bank of the river.

Three German relief attempts, Operations Konrad I–III, launched in January between the Danube and Lake Balaton, got to within a dozen or a few dozen kilometres of the city but failed to break the ring; the last of them collapsed at the end of January. The assault on Buda was conducted by the so-called Budapest Group, which, after General Ivan Afonin was wounded, was commanded from the end of January by General Ivan Managarov; formally it was subordinate to Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front. Every street was fought for, as were the Farkasrét cemetery, the Southern Railway Station, Gellért Hill with its citadel and finally Castle Hill. Both sides made use of the sewers, cellars and caves beneath the hills.

The defenders’ position grew worse by the day. Air drops delivered only a fraction of the ammunition and food they needed, and once the last landing grounds were lost the gliders stopped flying. Thousands of wounded lay without medicines or dressings in hospitals set up in the cellars and tunnels beneath Castle Hill. Several hundred thousand civilians in Buda lived in shelters without electricity, gas or water, which had to be drawn from the Danube under fire. Artillery fire and bombs destroyed one district after another; the Royal Palace burned down. On 10 February Soviet troops broke onto Castle Hill, and on 11 February Gellért Hill fell. The defenders were left with a scrap of the city of less than two square kilometres.

The decision to break out

Hitler, who had declared Budapest a fortress, consistently forbade the garrison to leave the city, even once it was clear that no relief would come. The commander of the defence, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, at the head of the IX SS Mountain Corps, finally decided to act on his own initiative. On 11 February he informed his superiors that he was breaking out and cut communications without waiting for a reply. This time he brought General Hindy, who had often been bypassed in earlier decisions, into the planning.

The plan was to break out from Castle Hill to the north-west, through the densely built-up districts of Buda and the wooded Buda Hills, towards the German lines some 25–40 km away. The breakout was to be made in three waves. Thousands of civilians joined the soldiers, among them family members, officials and Arrow Cross men who feared falling into Soviet hands. The seriously wounded were left behind in the cellars and tunnels beneath the hill.

The breakout coincided with the last day of the Yalta Conference, at which the leaders of the Big Three were settling the post-war order in Europe. Hungary’s fate was not formally decided there, but in practice it was determined by the presence of the Red Army, which was just completing the capture of its capital.

The night of 11–12 February

The breakout began on the evening of 11 February. The first wave, helped by fog and surprise, broke through the first Soviet positions. The Soviets, however, very probably knew of the preparations – deserters’ testimony, among other things, pointed to them – and the following waves ran into fire from artillery, rocket launchers and machine guns positioned along the streets leading down from the hill, especially around Széll Kálmán Square. According to participants’ accounts, the streets of Buda were strewn with thousands of dead soldiers and civilians.

Ungváry estimates that 5,000–10,000 people got through to the wooded hills north-west of the city. Over the following days most of them were rounded up or killed in the forests and villages through which they tried to pass, exhausted, without food and with little ammunition. In the end only some 600–700 soldiers reached the German lines; the exact number cannot be established. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch himself and General Hindy, who had left the hill through an underground sewer, were taken prisoner in a Buda suburb within the first hours of the breakout.

The surrender of 13 February

On 12 and 13 February Soviet troops mopped up the last pockets of resistance in Buda and on Castle Hill. Isolated groups that had not taken part in the breakout or had turned back surrendered; on 13 February organised resistance ceased. That day came to be regarded as the end of the siege, both in the Soviet communiqué and in later historiography. The wounded left in the hospitals beneath the hill were also taken prisoner. According to eyewitness accounts cited by Ungváry, some of them died in fires or were killed after the Soviet troops entered; the scale of these events cannot now be established precisely.

The Soviets announced the capture of some 110,000 enemy soldiers. The figure was inflated: according to Ungváry it also included detained civilians. A medal “For the Capture of Budapest” was instituted for those who had taken part in the fighting. In April 1945 Malinovsky received the Order of Victory, partly for the fighting in Hungary.

The toll of the siege

From the closing of the ring on 26 December the siege lasted seven weeks, and the fighting in the city itself, which according to Ungváry began on 24 December, lasted 51 days. It was one of the longest and bloodiest battles for a major city in the entire war. By Ungváry’s estimates, of the garrison’s roughly 79,000 soldiers some 30,000 Germans and some 9,000 Hungarians were killed – most of them during the breakout – while some 11,000 Germans and some 29,000 Hungarians were taken prisoner. Among the formations destroyed were the 8th and 22nd SS Cavalry Divisions, the 13th Panzer Division, the Feldherrnhalle Panzer Division and the Hungarian I Corps.

Soviet losses in the siege itself are not known precisely. According to the figures compiled by Grigoriy Krivosheev, in the Budapest operation as a whole, counted from 29 October 1944 to 13 February 1945 and thus including the fighting outside the city, the Red Army lost some 80,000 killed and missing and some 240,000 wounded and sick.

The civilian population paid the highest price. Budapest had not been evacuated: some 800,000 inhabitants were trapped in the encirclement. According to Ungváry, some 38,000 of them died – about 13,000 as a result of the fighting and about 25,000 from hunger, disease and cold, and in executions. The latter included Jews murdered by Arrow Cross militias on the banks of the Danube; the victims of these killings are estimated at some 10,000–15,000. The party had seized power in October 1944 in a coup that brought Ferenc Szálasi to power and overthrew the regent, Miklós Horthy. Szálasi himself and his government had left the capital before the ring closed.

The city after the siege

Budapest, before the war one of the most beautiful capitals in Europe, lay in ruins. According to Ungváry, more than 80 per cent of its buildings were destroyed or damaged. Every bridge over the Danube lay in the river, the Royal Palace was a burnt-out shell, and the Parliament building, churches and the historic quarters of Buda had all suffered. Thousands of unburied human and horse corpses lay in the streets, and water, electricity and food remained scarce until the spring.

The Red Army’s arrival was accompanied by looting and mass rape. Estimates of the number of women raped vary widely, from several thousand to some 200,000; a frequently cited figure is around 50,000. The Soviet command issued orders forbidding violence against the population but did not enforce them in practice. Thousands of civilian men were seized in the streets and deported, together with prisoners of war, to labour camps in the USSR; Hungarians called these round-ups by the Russian phrase malenkiy robot (“a little work”), because those detained were often told that they were needed briefly to clear rubble. According to Ungváry, some of the arrests were meant to make up the numbers in earlier inflated reports of prisoners taken. Hungarian historians, among them Tamás Stark, estimate that several hundred thousand people from all over Hungary were deported to the USSR as prisoners of war and civilian forced labourers, many of whom never returned.

Soviet power also claimed the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who in 1944 had issued protective passports to Budapest’s Jews and maintained houses under the Swedish flag. Thanks to the efforts of Wallenberg, the Swiss vice-consul Carl Lutz, the Apostolic Nunciature, the Red Cross and others, and also to the rapid capture of Pest by the Red Army, some 100,000 Jews survived in the city – the ghetto was liberated on 18 January. The day before, on 17 January, Wallenberg went under Soviet escort to Malinovsky’s headquarters, it is believed in order to present a plan of aid for the survivors, and was arrested by Soviet counter-intelligence. He disappeared in NKVD prisons; the Soviet authorities later claimed that he had died in 1947, but his fate has never been fully explained.

Political authority over the captured city passed to the provisional government of General Béla Miklós, formed in Debrecen in December 1944. This government had declared war on Germany, and on 20 January 1945 it signed an armistice with the Allies in Moscow. Real power, however, lay with the Soviet-run Allied Control Commission, and the communists, though few in number, held key posts in the new institutions, particularly in the police.

Place in the war

The fall of Budapest brought to a close one of the longest urban battles of the war and opened the Red Army’s road to Austria. The stubborn defence and the Konrad operations had, however, tied down large German forces in Hungary – including panzer corps transferred from other sectors of the front – at the very moment when the fate of the Eastern Front was being decided on the Vistula and the Oder, and they delayed the Soviet advance on Vienna. Hitler did not give up on Hungary, which held some of the last oil deposits still available to the Reich: on 6 March 1945 the 6th SS Panzer Army and other German forces attacked at Lake Balaton in Operation Frühlingserwachen (Spring Awakening), the last great German offensive of the war. It collapsed after a few days, and on 16 March Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front launched the Vienna offensive. On 4 April – the date adopted in post-war Hungary – the last German troops were driven out of the country, and on 13 April, exactly two months after the fall of Budapest, the Red Army took Vienna.

Pfeffer-Wildenbruch spent ten years in Soviet captivity and died in West Germany in 1971. Iván Hindy was sentenced to death by a Hungarian people’s tribunal in 1946 and executed; Ferenc Szálasi went to the gallows the same year. In 1947 the Liberty Statue was erected on Gellért Hill, commemorating – in the official version – the liberation of the city by the Red Army. Memory of the siege remains divided in Hungary: for some, 13 February marks the end of Arrow Cross rule and the salvation of Budapest’s Jews; for others, the beginning of Soviet occupation, violence and deportations. The anniversary of the breakout on 11 February has for years been marked by far-right groups, which provokes protests and disputes over how to commemorate soldiers who fought alongside the Germans.