Operation Frühlingserwachen begins

On Tuesday 6 March 1945, in western Hungary, on a plain sodden by the thaw between Lake Balaton and Lake Velence, the last great German offensive of the Second World War began. The operation was codenamed “Frühlingserwachen” (“Spring Awakening”); the Germans also called it the Plattensee offensive (Plattensee being the German name for Balaton), while the Soviet side called it the Balaton defensive operation. The main blow was struck by SS-Oberstgruppenführer Josef “Sepp” Dietrich’s 6th SS Panzer Army, brought to Hungary from the Ardennes, together with General Hermann Balck’s German Sixth Army. At the same time the 2nd Panzer Army attacked south of Balaton, and units of Army Group E attacked across the Drava from Croatian territory. The aim was to smash Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin’s Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front, reach the Danube and secure the last oilfields still available to the Third Reich.

The statement that the Germans attacked “the Soviet forces” needs to be filled out: alongside the Red Army, the front line in southern Hungary and on the Drava was held by the Bulgarian First Army (PL) – Bulgaria had been fighting on the Allied side since September 1944 – and by the Third Army of Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslav National Liberation Army. On the German side, for their part, fought the remnants of the Hungarian army, still obedient to the government of Ferenc Szálasi.

Hungary after the fall of Budapest

From the autumn of 1944 Hungary was one of the most important battlefields of the Eastern Front. In October the Red Army crossed the country’s eastern borders, and in December the forces of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front and Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front closed the ring around Budapest. Hitler declared the capital a fortress and forbade its abandonment. In January 1945 three German relief attempts – the Konrad operations – came within a few dozen kilometres or less of the city; during the last of them German panzer divisions broke through all the way to the Danube, and for a moment the Stavka considered withdrawing the Soviet forces to its eastern bank. The ring, however, was not broken. On 13 February the last units in Buda surrendered, and only a few hundred soldiers from the breakout of 11 February reached the German lines, bringing the siege of Budapest to an end.

After the fall of the capital, the front in Transdanubia (western Hungary) ran from the Danube south of Budapest past Lake Velence, Székesfehérvár and the northern tip of Balaton, then west of the lake towards the Drava. As early as 17 February the Stavka ordered the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts to prepare an offensive towards Bratislava and Vienna, planned for mid-March. Before it could begin, the Germans struck.

Why Hungary

The decision on how to use the Reich’s last strong armoured formation was taken personally by Adolf Hitler. After the failure of the Ardennes offensive and the start of the Soviet offensive on the Vistula on 12 January, he withdrew the 6th SS Panzer Army from the Western Front. Its divisions – the 1st SS Panzer Division “Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler”, the 2nd “Das Reich”, the 9th “Hohenstaufen” and the 12th “Hitlerjugend” – left the Ardennes in the last days of January. The Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, wanted to send them to the Oder, where Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s troops already stood less than 70 km from Berlin. Hitler decided otherwise: on 22 January he ruled that Dietrich’s army would go to Hungary.

The decisive argument was oil. After the loss of the oilfields of Romania, which the coup of August 1944 had taken out of the alliance with Germany, and then after the Allied raids on synthetic fuel plants, the Reich was suffering from an acute shortage of fuel. The deposits around Nagykanizsa, south-west of Balaton, and the Austrian oilfields around Zistersdorf were the last significant sources of crude oil within its reach – according to estimates presented at a conference with Hitler on 23 January, they accounted for about 80 per cent of remaining output. Hitler also considered the defence of Vienna and Austria more important than holding the front before Berlin. After the war Colonel General Alfred Jodl recalled the words with which Hitler ended his dispute with Guderian: “You want to attack without oil – very well, we shall see what comes of it.”

The plan

Preparations were carried out in the utmost secrecy. The trains carrying the 6th SS Panzer Army went first to the area of Zossen near Berlin, as if the army were bound for the Oder, and only from there were they routed through Vienna to the area of Győr. From February reconnaissance in the front line and radio traffic were forbidden, vehicle registration numbers and tactical signs were covered up, soldiers unpicked the cuff titles bearing their divisions’ names from their sleeves, and units were given code names; in orders Dietrich himself was referred to as the “Senior Engineer Commander Hungary”. The last of the divisions, “Hohenstaufen”, reached the Győr area only at the beginning of March.

Before the main offensive began, the Germans carried out a preliminary attack. From 17 to 24 February, in Operation Südwind, I SS Panzer Corps eliminated the Soviet bridgehead on the Hron (Hungarian: Garam) north of the Danube, which threatened the rear of the planned offensive. The operation succeeded – it is sometimes called the last successful German attack of the war – but at a high price: the Russians took prisoners from the SS divisions and learned that fresh armoured formations had arrived in Hungary from the West. The surprise on which the whole concept rested was largely lost.

On 25 February, at the Reich Chancellery, Hitler heard the commander of Army Group South, General Otto Wöhler, the commander of Army Group F, Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs, and Dietrich, and chose the most ambitious of the variants put to him. It provided for three attacks:

• “Frühlingserwachen” – the main thrust by the 6th SS Panzer Army and the Sixth Army (the so-called Armeegruppe Balck) from between Lakes Balaton and Velence south-eastwards towards the Danube. Once on the river, part of the force was to wheel north towards Budapest and part south along the Sió (PL) canal to meet the troops advancing from the Drava;
• “Eisbrecher” (“Icebreaker”) – an attack by General Maximilian de Angelis’s 2nd Panzer Army eastwards from near Nagybajom towards Kaposvár;
• “Waldteufel” (“Forest Devil”) – a crossing of the Drava by XCI Army Corps of Colonel General Alexander Löhr’s Army Group E and an advance northwards towards Mohács.

Had all three succeeded, the Soviet 26th and 57th Armies and the Bulgarian army would have been trapped in a pocket between Balaton, the Drava and the Danube; the Germans would have regained the line of the Danube, pushed the front away from Nagykanizsa and Vienna, and perhaps even returned to the outskirts of Budapest. It was a plan cut to the measure of the army of 1941, not that of 1945. From the outset the staff of Army Group E doubted whether its infantry, without tanks and in difficult terrain, could reach Mohács. The date of the attack, first set for 5 March, was in the end put back by one day.

The forces

Estimates of the strength of the two sides vary from source to source. According to Soviet figures, the Germans and Hungarians concentrated about 430,000 men across the whole sector, some 6,000 guns and mortars, about 850–880 tanks and assault guns, and some 850 aircraft of the Luftwaffe’s Luftflotte 4. German returns show less equipment serviceable at any given moment; according to some historians, however, about 30 per cent of all the tanks the Germans still had in the line were sent to Balaton, including new Tiger II heavy tanks and Panthers. The 6th SS Panzer Army comprised I SS Panzer Corps (the “Leibstandarte” and “Hitlerjugend” divisions) and SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps (“Das Reich” and “Hohenstaufen”), as well as a cavalry corps and Wehrmacht divisions; Balck’s forces included General Hermann Breith’s III Panzer Corps. They were supported by Hungarian divisions and units of the Hungarian Third Army, which covered the northern flank from Velence to the Danube.

The SS divisions were the same units that had fought in Normandy in the summer of 1944 in name only. After the defeats in the West and in the Ardennes they had been hastily brought back up to strength with young recruits and men from the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine; there was a shortage of experienced NCOs, fuel and ammunition. Even so, this was the strongest concentration of armour the Germans managed to assemble in the last year of the war.

Tolbukhin’s defence

The Soviet command detected the enemy’s preparations in time. By about 20 February, after the fighting on the Hron and the interrogation of prisoners, it was already clear that the Germans were preparing a major armoured offensive in Hungary. The Stavka ordered the 3rd Ukrainian Front to go over to the defensive without, however, interrupting preparations for the Vienna offensive. Tolbukhin – who according to Soviet figures had about 400,000 men and some 6,800 guns and mortars, but only about 400 tanks and self-propelled guns – decided to repeat the pattern of the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943: to absorb the blow in a deeply echeloned anti-tank defence, bleed the German divisions white and only then go over to the attack.

By 3 March the troops of the front had built several belts of fortifications along the threatened axis. In the first echelon, between Velence and Balaton, stood the 4th Guards Army and the 26th Army, with the 27th Army in the second; west of Balaton the 57th Army held the line, and further south the Bulgarians and Yugoslavs. Hundreds of anti-tank mines were laid on every kilometre of front, and in the 26th Army’s sector – according to Soviet figures – as many as about 2,700. Dozens of anti-tank areas were created, with the guns sited so as to catch tanks in crossfire; on the most important sectors 60–70 guns and mortars were massed per kilometre. Supplies for the troops on the western side of the Danube were brought across by several pontoon bridges, by ferries and even by a cableway and a fuel pipeline laid across the river. Tolbukhin forbade costly tank counter-attacks. The Stavka set him one more condition: Colonel General Vasily Glagolev’s 9th Guards Army, held in reserve for the attack on Vienna, was not to be used in the defence.

6 March

The first blow came from the south. On the night of 5–6 March units of Army Group E crossed the Drava near Donji Miholjac and Valpovo and seized two bridgeheads, each a few kilometres wide. Bulgarian and Yugoslav troops, supported by Soviet aircraft and reserves of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, nevertheless halted them close to the river. Early in the morning the 2nd Panzer Army attacked south of Balaton; its main strength was the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division “Reichsführer-SS”, brought over from Italy. The attack towards Kaposvár stalled after only a few kilometres in the fortifications of the 57th Army, whose commander moved hundreds of guns to the threatened sector.

The main thrust between the lakes began in the morning after a short artillery preparation. Not all the divisions had managed to reach their start lines: the softened roads and fields had turned to mud, and II SS Panzer Corps went into action only in the evening. Tanks sank up to their axles, the infantry advanced through sleet, and the artillery could not keep up. On the first day the German forces penetrated the Soviet defences to a depth of only a few kilometres and took the fortified village of Seregélyes. They attacked in waves, several dozen tanks and assault guns at a time on a narrow sector, but behind every belt of fortifications another was waiting.

Over the following days the attack gathered strength. On 8 March Dietrich committed his main forces, and on 9 March the “Leibstandarte” and “Hitlerjugend” divisions broke through the positions of the Soviet 135th Rifle Corps and pushed towards the Sió canal. Tolbukhin threw reserves into the threatened sectors – a cavalry corps, self-propelled artillery regiments and finally the whole 27th Army – and from 10 March he was also supported by the 5th Air Army of the neighbouring front. The Germans no longer had the means to exploit their success: on 10 March, according to surviving reports, the 17 divisions fighting at Balaton had between them only about 230 serviceable tanks and some 170 assault guns.

The last offensive

Operation Frühlingserwachen lasted ten days. At best the German forces advanced about 30 km and crossed the Sió canal near Simontornya, but they never reached the Danube. On 15 March the attack petered out, and the very next day the Red Army went over to a counter-offensive which within a few weeks drove the Germans out of Hungary and brought Tolbukhin’s troops to Vienna.

The Balaton offensive was the last great offensive undertaking of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. It consumed the Reich’s last armoured reserves at a time when the Allies in the West were approaching the Rhine and the Red Army on the Oder was preparing to attack Berlin. For many historians it symbolises Hitler’s strategy in the last months of the war: putting economic and prestige objectives before the defence of the country’s heart, making plans far beyond the capabilities of an exhausted army, and believing that a single blow by elite divisions would turn the tide of the war. The 6th SS Panzer Army never returned to Berlin, which it might have defended – the remnants of its divisions surrendered to the Americans in Austria in May.