The much smaller Buda sector, covered in snow blackened from the fires across the river, was easier to defend. Soviet attacks up its steep hills were repulsed with heavy casualties inflicted by German MG-42 machine guns concentrated at key points. Along with regular units, such as the 8th SS Cavalry and the remnants of the Feldherrnhalle, there were the local volunteers, such as the Vannay Battalion and the University Assault Battalion, who knew the terrain better than anyone. The Danube Embankment below Castle Hill was protected by the survivors of the 1st Hungarian Armoured Division, who did not expect the Soviets to attack across the thin ice pockmarked with shellholes. But soon harder frosts made it passable, at least for small groups of Hungarian deserters from Buda fleeing in the other direction to surrender to the Soviets in Pest.
In late January Soviet attacks increased, with flamethrowing tanks and assault squads. German and Hungarian losses mounted critically, and the wounded were packed into improvised hospitals where conditions were appalling. Some were even dumped in the corridors of command posts. A young soldier walking down one to deliver a report felt his coat seized by a hand. He looked down. ‘It was a girl of about 18 to 20 with fair hair and a beautiful face. She begged me in a whisper: “Take your pistol and shoot me.” I looked at her more closely and realised with horror… both her legs were missing.’
Even after the failure of the relief attempts, Hitler continued to forbid any talk of a breakout. Budapest still had to be defended to the end. Army Group South, like Manstein after the failure to relieve Stalingrad, knew that Budapest was doomed. Right up to 5 February, German gliders piloted by teenage volunteers of the NSFK (National Socialist Flying Corps), were crash-landing on Vérmez Meadow, delivering ammunition, fuel and some food. But it was not enough. Soviet tanks were soon crushing artillery guns which had run out of ammunition under their tracks. With all the refugees, some 300,000 people were packed into the last bastion of Castle Hill. All the cavalry horses had been eaten, and starvation was universal. So were lice, and the first outbreak of typhus caused deep alarm. On 3 February, after a plea from the papal nuncio to end the suffering, Obergruppenführer Pfeffer-Wildenbruch signalled Führer headquarters for permission to break out. It was refused again, and once more two days later.
Soviet troops, guided by Hungarian defectors or members of the resistance, began clearing some of the trapped garrisons and Castle Hill. On 11 February, white flags began to appear. In some places Hungarian troops disarmed the Germans who wanted to fight on. By the evening resistance appeared to have ceased. But Pfeffer-Wildenbruch had decided to break out in defiance of Hitler’s orders. With the remnants of the 13th Panzer Division and the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer in the first wave and the Feldherrnhalle and 22nd SS Cavalry in the second, they would try to break through that night towards the north-west with their remaining vehicles. He radioed Army Group South requesting an attack in their direction. But Red Army commanders had expected such an attempt and guessed the route they were likely to follow. It turned into the most terrible massacre of troops and civilians. In the chaos several thousand managed to escape into the hills north of the city, but most were rounded up. Soviet troops usually shot the Germans and spared the Hungarians. Some 28,000 soldiers had taken part in the breakout from Buda. Just over 700 reached German lines.
On 12 February a deathly hush came over the city, punctuated by odd shots and bursts of fire. The writer Sándor Márai emerged to wander round Buda, and was shaken by the sights. ‘Some streets must be guessed at,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘This was the corner house with the Flórián Café, this is the street where I once lived–no trace of the building–this pile of rubble at the corner of Statisztika Street and Margit Boulevard was a five-storey block with many flats and a café a few days ago.’
In the aftermath of the battle, Red Army soldiers shot German wounded–some were dragged out and crushed under tanks–also all members of the SS and any Hiwi auxiliaries, who were wrongly categorized as vlasovtsy. Anyone in German uniform who did not reply in German was also likely to be killed. Few Hungarian combatants were shot. Almost all the men, even Communists who had fought with the resistance against the Arrow Cross, were rounded up for forced labour. Prince Pál Esterházy was put to work burying dead horses in Pest.
The NKVD and SMERSh displayed full Stalinist paranoia, suspecting anyone with foreign contacts of being a spy, including Zionists. Raoul Wallenberg was arrested on 19 January along with the forensic patholo-gist Ferenc Orsós, who had been one of the international observers with the Germans when they dug up the Polish corpses in Katy forest. It is assumed that Wallenberg had also seen the Katy report, and that he was suspected of having close contacts with the British, American and other intelligence services. He was arrested by SMERSh, and executed in July 1947.
Looting took place on an epic scale, both individual and state sponsored. Art collections were seized, including the most prominent ones owned by Jews. Even neutral embassies were ransacked and their safes blasted open. Civilians in the street were stopped at gunpoint and relieved of their watches, wallets and documents. Any surviving Jews were robbed just like gentiles. Some soldiers pulled their loot around with them in prams.
Although Soviet troops were more forgiving towards Hungarian soldiers than towards Germans, they showed no pity to Hungarian women when Malinovsky gave them a free run of the capital in celebration of the victory. ‘In many places they are raping women,’ a fifteen-year-old boy wrote in his diary. ‘Women are being hidden everywhere.’ Nurses in the improvised hospitals were raped and stabbed afterwards. Students at the university were among the first victims. According to some accounts, the most attractive women were held for up to two weeks and forced to act as prostitutes. Bishop József Grsz heard that ‘70 percent of women, from girls of twelve to mothers in the ninth month of pregnancy, [were] raped.’ Other more reliable reports put the proportion at 10 per cent.
Hungarian Communists addressed an appeal to the Red Army, describing the ‘rampant, demented hatred’, which even their own comrades had suffered. ‘Mothers were raped by drunken soldiers in front of their own children and husbands. Girls as young as 12 were dragged from their fathers and mothers to be violated by 10–15 soldiers and often infected with venereal diseases. After the first group, others came who followed their example… Several comrades lost their lives trying to protect their wives and daughters.’ Even Mátyás Rákosi, the secretary-general of the Hungarian Communist Party, appealed to the Soviet authorities but without success. But not all Red Army soldiers were rapists. Some treated families, and especially children, with great kindness.
Almost every town suffered, even if not on the same scale as Budapest. In the 9th Guards Army, soldiers complained that their axis of advance offered ‘no women and no booty’, recorded a mortar officer, who described their men as ‘incredibly brave guys, but also incredible scoundrels’. ‘A solution was quickly found,’ he wrote. ‘In turns a quarter of the soldiers were sent to Mór where they seized houses and the women there who had failed to flee or hide. They were given one hour for that. And then the next group followed. They would use women from the ages of fourteen to fifty. They would carry out a complete pogrom in the houses, threw everything on the floor, broke it and crushed it, and looked for pocket or wrist watches. If they came across wine they of course would drink it. There had been many wine cellars in Mór, but when we entered the town they had all been emptied, the barrels smashed and the wine emptied on to the floor. It was there that we came across two soldiers who had drowned in wine.’
Feasting also took place at a more rarefied level. Field Marshal Alexander, who had flown to Belgrade for discussions with Tito, went on to Hungary to meet Marshal Tolbukhin, the commander of the 3rd Ukrainian Front. The large and elderly Tolbukhin received him with a lavish banquet, and had even provided a Red Army nurse to sleep in his room. Alexander, however, ‘didn’t think that was quite the thing, and she spent the night outside my door’. Just before dinner, when Alex
ander and Tolbukhin were alone, the old marshal examined Alexander’s decorations. Among them, he spotted the Tsarist order of St Anne with crossed swords, awarded to Alexander when he had served as a liaison officer on the eastern front in the First World War. ‘I have that too,’ Tolbukhin sighed as he touched it, ‘but I’m not allowed to wear it.’
Tolbukhin was remarkably relaxed, considering that the Sixth SS Panzer Army, transferred from the Ardennes, had just reached Hungary. It had arrived too late to help the defenders of Budapest, but Hitler still ordered it into action on 13 February 1945, in Operation Frühlingserwachen, or Spring Awakening. He had never intended to save the garrison, only to reinforce it and to defend the Hungarian oilfields near Lake Balaton. The counter-attack was a failure. When Hitler heard that Waffen-SS divisions had retreated without orders, he was so angry that he sent Himmler down to strip them of their divisional armband titles, even including the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. It was a humiliating punishment. ‘This mission of his to Hungary’, Guderian observed with schadenfreude, ‘did not win him much affection from his Waffen-SS.’
Himmler had been one of those in the Führer’s entourage who had dismissed Guderian’s warnings of a massive Soviet offensive in Poland as ‘an enormous bluff’. The chief of the general staff’s prediction proved correct in the second week of January. Stalin pretended to the Allies that he had moved forward the date to help extricate the Americans from their problems in the Ardennes, but this was not true. The fighting there had turned decisively in the Allies’ favour around Christmas. Stalin had more practical reasons. The Red Army needed the ground frozen hard for its tank formations, and Soviet meteorologists warned the Stavka that there would be ‘heavy rain and wet snow’ later in January. Stalin also had a more sinister reason for advancing the date. He wanted to be in complete control of Poland before the Allies met at Yalta at the beginning of February, just over three weeks later.
Along the Vistula ready to strike west were the 1st Belorussian Front now commanded by Marshal Zhukov, and the 1st Ukrainian Front commanded by Marshal Konev. Rokossovsky had been angered when he was replaced by Zhukov, but Stalin did not want Rokossovsky, a Pole, to have the glory of taking Berlin. Rokossovsky was given the 2nd Belorussian Front instead to attack East Prussia from the south while General Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front would invade from the eastern flank.
On 12 January Konev’s massed artillery, with 300 guns per kilometre, opened a shattering bombardment. His 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies, with T-34s and heavy Stalin tanks, advanced out of the Sandomierz bridgehead west of the Oder, and headed for Kraków and Breslau on the Oder. Stalin had made clear to Konev that he wanted Silesia captured without heavy destruction to its industry and mines. On 13 January Chernyakhovsky launched his assault on East Prussia. Rokossovsky followed the next day, advancing from the bridgeheads north of the River Narew. Zhukov’s attack also began on 14 January.
Once through the German front line, the main barrier ahead of Zhukov’s forces was the River Pilica. Every commander knew that speed was essential to give the Germans no chance to recover. A colonel commanding a Guards tank brigade refused to wait for bridging equipment to come up. Guessing that the river was not deep at the spot, he simply ordered his tanks to smash the ice with gunfire and drive across the river bed, a truly terrifying experience for the drivers. On Zhukov’s right, the 47th Army encircled the ruins of Warsaw while the 1st Polish Army entered the suburbs.
Hitler was beside himself with rage when the weak German garrison surrendered. He saw it as yet more evidence of treason within the general staff, and three officers were taken to Gestapo headquarters. Even Guderian had to submit to interrogations from Kaltenbrunner. Hitler returned to Berlin from Führer headquarters at Ziegenberg to direct his armies, with predictably disastrous results. He would never allow a general to withdraw, and because of the speed of the Soviet advance and the collapse in German communications, any information on which he based his decisions was no longer accurate. By the time his orders reached the front, they were usually twenty-four hours out of date.
Hitler also interfered without informing Guderian. He decided to transfer the Grossdeutschland Corps from East Prussia to shore up the Vistula front, but the time it took to redeploy meant that this powerful formation was out of the battle for several vital days. To Guderian’s frustration, Hitler still refused to bring out the divisions trapped on the Courland Peninsula to reinforce the Reich. The same applied to troops from the un-necessarily large German force in Norway. Worst of all, from Guderian’s point of view, was Hitler’s decision to transfer the Sixth SS Panzer Army to the Hungarian front.
Chernyakhovsky found that German defences on the Insterburg Line in East Prussia were much stronger than expected. So, in a clever move, he withdrew the 11th Guards Army, swung it round behind the other three armies, and sent it in on their northern flank which was less well defended. Combined with an attack by the 43rd Army across the River Niemen near Tilsit, this breakthrough caused panic in the German rear.
Rokossovsky’s armies coming from the south aimed for the mouth of the Vistula to cut off East Prussia completely. On 20 January, the Stavka suddenly ordered Rokossovsky to attack towards the north-east as well, to help Chernyakhovsky. Less than two days later his 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps on the right flank entered the town of Allenstein and the following day the leading armoured troops of Colonel General Vasily Volsky’s 5th Guards Tank Army bypassed Elbing and reached the shore of the Frisches Haff, the long frozen lagoon separated by a sandbar from the Baltic. East Prussia was almost completely cut off. Just to the west of the Vistula estuary lay the concentration camp of Stutthof. Camp guards, terrified by the approach of the Red Army, killed 3,000 Jewish women either by shooting or by forcing them out on to the thin ice so that they would fall through into the freezing water.
Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, still refused to allow the evacuation of civilians. They had heard the artillery barrages in the distance when the Soviet offensive began, but requests to leave were denied by local Nazi Party bosses. In most cases these officials slipped away, abandoning the population to its fate. Retreating German soldiers would warn farms and villages, urging everyone to get out as fast as they could. Some, especially the very old who could not face leaving their homes, decided to stay. Since almost all men had been dragooned into the Volkssturm, mothers had to harness farm-carts, perhaps aided by a French prisoner of war who had been working for them, and load it with blankets and food for themselves and their children. The ‘treks’ as they were called had begun across the snow-covered countryside, in temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees Centigrade.
Refugees from the capital of Königsberg thought that they had escaped safely by train, but when they reached Allenstein they were pulled from the carriages by soldiers from the 3rd Guards Cavalry, delighted to find such a source of plunder and women. Most of those attempting to flee by road were overtaken by Soviet troops. Some were simply crushed in their carts under the tracks of Soviet tanks. Others suffered an even worse fate.
Leonid Rabichev, a signals lieutenant with the 31st Army, described the scenes beyond Goldap. ‘All the roads were filled with old people, women and children, large families moving slowly on carts, on vehicles or on foot towards the west. Our tank troops, infantry, artillery, signals caught up with them and cleared the way for themselves by pushing their horses and carts and belongings into the ditches on either side of the road. Then thousands of them forced the old women and children aside. Forgetting their honour and duty and forgetting about the retreating German units, they pounced on the women and girls.
‘Women, mothers and their daughters, lie to the right and the left of the highway and in front of each one stands a laughing gang of men with their trousers down. Those already covered in blood and losing consciousness are dragged to the side. Children trying to help them have been shot. There is laughter and roaring and jeering, screams and moans. And the soldiers’ commanders–majors and
lieutenant colonels–are standing there on the highway. Some are laughing, but some are also conducting the event so that all their soldiers without exception could take part. This is not an initiation rite, and it has nothing to do with revenge against the accursed occupiers, this is just hellish diabolical group sex. This represents a complete lack of control and the brutal logic of a crowd gone mad. I was sitting in the cabin of our one-and-a-half-ton truck, shaken, while my driver Demidov was standing in one of the queues. I was thinking of Flau-bert’s Carthage. The colonel, who had only just been conducting proceedings, could not resist the temptation and joined one of the queues, while the major was shooting the witnesses, the children and old men who were having hysterics.’
At last the soldiers were told to finish quickly and get back on their vehicles, because another unit was blocked behind them. Later, when they overtook another refugee column, Rabichev saw similar scenes repeated. ‘As far as the eye can see, there are corpses of women, old people and children, among piles of clothing and overturned carts… It becomes dark. We are ordered to find a place to spend the night in one of the German villages off the highway. I took my platoon to a hamlet two kilometres from the highway. In all the rooms are corpses of children, old people and women who have been raped and shot. We are so tired that we don’t pay attention to them. We are so tired that we lie down among the corpses and fall asleep.’
‘Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty,’ observed the Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse, a close friend of Sakharov. ‘It was an army of rapists. Not only because they were crazed with lust, this was also a form of vengeance.’
It is far too sweeping to ascribe this pitiless behaviour simply to lust or vengeance. For a start, there were many officers and soldiers who did not take part in the rapes and were horrified by the actions of their comrades. Devoted Communists were shocked by the disorder, and the controlled nature of Soviet society made such indiscipline hard to imagine. But the extreme harshness of life at the front had created a different community, and many became surprisingly outspoken in their hatred of the collective farms and the oppression which had dominated their lives. Soldiers bitterly resented the pointless sacrifice caused by so many futile attacks as well as the demeaning treatment which they had to endure. Men were sent into no-man’s-land to strip the uniforms and even underwear from dead comrades to clothe new conscripts. So, although a strong desire for revenge existed against the Germans who had violated the Motherland and killed their families, there was also a strong element of the same knock-on theory of oppression which had conditioned Japanese troops. The temptation to work off past humiliations and suffering which they had endured was overwhelming, and now it was worked off on the vulnerable women of their enemies.
The Second World War Page 94