Who won the siege of Budapest?
The Soviet Union won. The Red Army's 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts, with Romanian troops, encircled Budapest on 26 December 1944 and took Pest in January. The German and Hungarian garrison, forbidden by Hitler to leave, tried to break out on 11 February 1945; the attempt failed, and the fighting ended on 13 February.1
For seven weeks in the winter of 1944 to 1945 a European capital of over a million people was a front line. Some 800,000 civilians were trapped in Budapest with a German and Hungarian garrison that Hitler would not let go, while Soviet and Romanian troops fought their way in street by street. Counted from the first Soviet attack at the end of October, the battle for the city lasted 108 days, which is why Krisztián Ungváry, whose history is the standard work, called it one hundred days. For the wider story, see the military history of Hungary and our guide to the Eastern Front of World War II.2
Why did the Red Army attack Budapest?
When Romania changed sides on 23 August 1944, the way into the Carpathian Basin opened to the Red Army. The Hungarian archivist Norbert Számvéber sums up the Soviet aims: to split Hungary from its German alliance, to deny Germany the raw materials and the staging area of the basin, and to threaten the southern part of the Reich directly. Stalin put it more bluntly in a cable to Churchill on 29 September: Hungary had to be knocked out of the war. The historian John Lukacs, who lived through the siege as a young man, adds the political goal behind it: Stalin meant Hungary and its capital to come under his control.3
Politics also set the pace. On the evening of 28 October Stalin ordered Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, to attack Budapest at once with the 46th Army. Malinovsky asked for five days to bring up a mechanized corps and was refused. The US Army historian Earl Ziemke quotes his message to his commanders, urging them to lay the Hungarian capital at the great Stalin's feet in time for the anniversary of the revolution on 7 November. The rush from the south reached the city's outer defenses in early November and stalled, short of ammunition and blocked by German armor brought in from the plains.4
Malinovsky concluded, Ziemke writes, that Budapest could not be taken head-on, and the Soviet high command switched to a wide envelopment from the north while Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin's 3rd Ukrainian Front came up from the Balkans and crossed the Danube south of the city.5
Why did Hitler insist on holding Budapest?
Hungary had tried to leave the war. On 15 October 1944 Budapest radio broadcast Regent Miklós Horthy's announcement that he had accepted Soviet armistice terms; within hours the Germans forced him out and installed Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the fascist Arrow Cross Party.6
Hitler's reasons for holding the city were partly military and partly symbolic. The German Historical Museum and Lukacs both stress the military one: a fortress on the Danube would tie down as many Soviet troops as possible and hold up their advance on Vienna. Számvéber adds the oil fields and the approaches to Austria behind the city. Ziemke records the rest: Hitler told his staff that losing Budapest would cut the effect of his Ardennes offensive in half, and the city became a symbol to him, as Stalingrad had been, that could not be given up.7
His own generals disagreed. Johannes Friessner, commanding Army Group South, wanted to give up the bridgehead east of the Danube and blow the bridges rather than fight house to house in a city of a million people, and the SS police general Otto Winkelmann, made commander of the fortress, proposed the same. Hitler refused. In late November he ordered Budapest held house by house, from 1 December it was officially a fortress, and on 5 December he gave command to SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, which left the Hungarian commander, Iván Hindy, with little real authority.8
The Hungarian leadership hesitated longer. On 30 October the heads of the two largest churches, the Catholic primate Jusztinián Serédi and the Reformed bishop László Ravasz, asked Szálasi to declare Budapest an open city, but after meeting Hitler he told Friessner on 10 December that he no longer objected to its use as a fortress. Ziemke notes that little was done for the city's people, who ignored his half-hearted evacuation orders.9
How was Budapest encircled?
The Soviet offensive that closed the ring began on 20 December, when Tolbukhin's armies broke through between Lake Velence and the Danube southwest of the city. Neither the German nor the Hungarian command had prepared to defend Budapest from the west, the historian Tamás Stark notes, and on Christmas Eve Soviet troops were already fighting in the outer districts of Buda while shoppers crossed to Pest to finish their Christmas errands.10
On 26 December the spearheads of the two fronts met at Esztergom on the Danube bend, northwest of the city, and the encirclement was complete. Inside the ring were some 800,000 civilians, by the counts of both the German Historical Museum and Radio Free Europe.11
The garrison was large but poorly supplied. The German Historical Museum counts about 33,000 Germans under Pfeffer-Wildenbruch and about 37,000 Hungarians under Hindy. Számvéber's table, built mainly on Ungváry's research, gives a ration strength of about 92,000 for the two together, and Stark puts the defenders at about 80,000 at the start of the siege. Facing them were roughly 156,000 to 157,000 Soviet and Romanian soldiers, including Hungarian volunteers who had gone over to the Soviet side, according to the museum and Számvéber.12
How did Pest fall?
The attack on Pest, the flat eastern half of the city, began on 25 December with Romanian troops fighting alongside the Soviets. After the defenders rejected a Soviet call to surrender, the main assault opened on 30 December. The Romanian 7th Corps fought on the Pest side, and on 14 January Soviet and Romanian divisions broke deep into the inner districts and took the Eastern Railway Station.13
Ziemke describes a fight in which the wounded could not be cared for, the fires put out or the dead buried. Supply from outside never worked. A German attempt to bring in about 200 tons of supplies by barge down the Danube in January failed, and winter weather, fuel shortages and the loss of landing grounds cut air supply to a trickle.14
On the night of 17 to 18 January the garrison abandoned Pest. Soldiers and civilians crowded onto the last two bridges, the Chain Bridge and the Elisabeth Bridge, under Soviet fire, and German engineers blew them while people were still crossing. A third, the Margaret Bridge, had already been wrecked on 4 November, when charges laid for its demolition went off by accident.15
Could Budapest have been relieved?
Three German relief attacks were made in January 1945, all named Konrad. The first, from 1 January, and the second, from about 9 January, came from the northwest and were stopped in the hills short of the city; the third, Operation Konrad III, struck from Lake Balaton on 18 January, reached the Danube the next day, and was halted southwest of Budapest. Each time German commanders asked to let the garrison break out to meet the relief; each time Hitler refused.16
Ziemke observes that the garrison's morale held up surprisingly well as long as relief seemed possible. Once it failed, the defenders of Buda were left in a shrinking pocket around Castle Hill, with the government buildings and the royal palace, protected on the east by the river. Their rations fell to almost nothing. Ziemke also notes that what disorder there was in the pocket came from armed Arrow Cross bands, who avoided combat and devoted themselves to murder and plunder.17
What happened in the breakout of 11 February 1945?
On the afternoon of 11 February Pfeffer-Wildenbruch radioed Army Group South that the food was gone and the last round was in the barrel; the choice was between surrender and the slaughter of the garrison without a fight. He would break out after dark with his last German units, Hungarian soldiers and Arrow Cross men. He counted 23,900 Germans, 9,600 of them wounded, and 20,000 Hungarians, 2,000 of them wounded, and estimated the civilians in the pocket at 80,000 to 100,000. Stark gives the same total: of about 80,000 defenders at the start, some 44,000 were left.18
The breakout that night was a massacre. Columns pushing out of the castle district through Soviet lines were cut down in the streets and in the wooded hills west of the city; the German Historical Museum notes that thousands died within a single day. Only a handful reached German lines: fewer than 700, Ziemke writes, and fewer than 800 by Stark's count, following Ungváry. The war diary of Army Group South recorded about 600 on 13 February. A Hungarian report printed in Számvéber's collection complains that the German garrison learned of the order at seven in the evening and the Hungarians only at eleven, which it blamed for the small number of Hungarian soldiers who took part.19
The last German units surrendered on 13 February 1945, and the Soviet Union announced the capture of Budapest.20
The Arrow Cross and the Jews of Budapest
By the autumn of 1944 Budapest held the last large Jewish community left in Hitler's Europe; the Jews of the Hungarian provinces had been deported to Auschwitz that summer. After the October coup the Arrow Cross began a reign of terror in the capital, and in November it ordered the remaining Jews without protective papers from a neutral power into a closed ghetto in Pest.21
As the siege closed in, Arrow Cross gangs took Jews from the ghetto and from protected houses, marched them to the lower quays of the Danube, shot them and threw their bodies into the river. Both Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimate that between December 1944 and the end of January 1945 they killed as many as 20,000 Jews this way.22
Others worked to save them. Diplomats of Sweden, Switzerland, the Vatican and other neutral states issued protective passports and set up safe houses, and Yad Vashem credits them with saving tens of thousands of lives. Raoul Wallenberg, who arrived at the Swedish legation on 9 July 1944, designated more than 30 safe houses that formed the core of the international ghetto. When the city fell more than 100,000 Jews were still alive in it, by the counts of both Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Wallenberg himself was last seen with Soviet officials on 17 January 1945; Lukacs writes that the Soviets arrested him a day or so after taking Pest and took him to Moscow, where he disappeared.23
Today sixty pairs of iron shoes stand on the Pest embankment near the Parliament, where the victims were made to take off their shoes before they were shot. The memorial, by the film director Can Togay and the sculptor Gyula Pauer, was unveiled in 2005.24
How did the siege affect civilians?
Most of the population spent the siege in cellars. Electricity, gas and water failed in most districts in the first days, Ziemke writes, and food ran out. When Soviet soldiers reached the shelters, Stark notes, they looked for enemies everywhere: a uniform, a cartridge case or a photograph could put a family in danger.25
The arrival of the Red Army brought looting and mass rape. Lukacs, who saw it, writes of Soviet soldiers raping thousands of women, and survivors interviewed for Radio Free Europe remembered soldiers taking every wristwatch they could find. The subject could only be whispered about in Hungary for decades, Stark notes, until the end of communist rule in 1989.26
Thousands of men were also rounded up for forced labor in the Soviet Union, the so-called malenkiy robot, or little work. Soviet communiqués claimed 110,000 to 138,000 prisoners taken in Budapest, far more than the garrison could have supplied. Stark reports that Ungváry estimates about 50,000 men were seized, while Zalán Bognár puts the civilians taken from Budapest and its suburbs at 88,000 to 98,000.27
How many people died in the siege of Budapest?
The losses were enormous, though historians count them differently. Ungváry's figures, as his publisher summarizes them, are about 80,000 Soviet soldiers, 38,000 German and Hungarian soldiers and 38,000 Hungarian civilians dead. The German Historical Museum gives about 30,000 German, more than 17,000 Hungarian and nearly 80,000 Soviet and Romanian soldiers killed and about 38,000 civilian dead, while Radio Free Europe counts 48,000 German and Hungarian and 70,000 Soviet and Romanian soldiers. Russian accounts of the whole 108-day Budapest operation put Soviet losses at more than 80,000.28
Who won the siege of Budapest, and why did it take so long?
The Soviet Union won, at a cost far higher than Stalin had expected in October. The siege lasted as long as it did because Hitler forbade every breakout and because the relief attacks kept the garrison fighting, but also, Számvéber argues, because of the way the Red Army fought: Soviet tank and mechanized units were bound to execute detailed orders whatever happened, and they lost hundreds of tanks around the city in November alone. Ziemke is harsher about Malinovsky's enveloping maneuvers, which he says could hardly have been more elaborate had they been designed to make the job look hard.29
Why was the siege of Budapest important?
For the Soviet Union, Budapest was the gateway to Vienna, and the siege held it up. Számvéber concludes that the German and Hungarian defense and the relief attacks stalled the Soviet advance in Hungary for about two and a half months, so that the Red Army reached the approaches to Vienna only in March 1945. Hitler threw his last great offensive of the war, Spring Awakening, into Hungary in March from the ground won by the Konrad attacks. Our guide to the end of World War II in Austria follows what came next.30
For Hungary, the siege left the capital in ruins and the country under Soviet control. The way it is remembered is still divided: Lukacs notes that some on the far right still celebrate the last defenders of Buda, while others recall the date, if at all, as the completion of their liberation, and Stark describes how the traumas of the Soviet occupation could only be whispered about for decades. Eleven years later Soviet tanks were back in the same streets, in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.31
Compare the other great sieges of the war on the Eastern Front: the siege of Leningrad, the Battle of Stalingrad to which Ziemke kept comparing Budapest, and the Battle of Berlin two months later, or the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, another capital fought over street by street. The ranking of the greatest battles of the Eastern Front places Budapest among them.
Where did the siege of Budapest take place?
In Budapest itself, on both banks of the Danube. Pest, on the flat east bank, fell first; the last stand was made around Castle Hill and the royal palace in hilly Buda, with the river covering the pocket on the east. The breakout of 11 February led west toward the Buda hills.32
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