All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [376]
Hunger gnawed every man, woman and child. The garrison’s 25,000 horses were eaten. Only fourteen of 2,500 animals in the city’s zoo survived – the rest were killed by Soviet fire or slaughtered for meat; for weeks, a lion roamed the underground rail tunnels, until captured by a Soviet task force dispatched for the purpose. Following a headquarters conference on 26 January, a German officer wrote: ‘Leaving the room after the meeting, several commanders openly speak about Hitler’s pig-headedness. Even some of the SS are beginning to doubt his leadership.’ The senior Hungarian general reported to the Ministry of Defence on 1 February: ‘Supply situation intolerable. Menu for the next five days per head and day: 5 gr. lard, 1 slice bread and horsemeat … Lice infestation of the troops constantly increasing, in particular among the wounded. Already six cases of typhus.’ The Luftwaffe maintained meagre supply drops, many of which fell into the Russian lines. Starving civilians were shot out of hand for raiding parachuted containers in search of food. In the maternity ward of a hospital, nurses clutched motherless babies to their breasts to provide at least human warmth, as the starving infants drifted towards death.
Throughout the siege, the persecution and murder of Budapest’s Jews continued. On the morning of 24 December, Arrow Cross militia drove up to a Jewish children’s home in Munkácsy Mihály Street in Buda, and marched its inmates and their carers to the courtyard of the nearby Radetsky barracks, where they were lined up before a machine-gun. This group was saved by a sudden local Russian advance which caused their intending executioners to take flight, but their parents had already been deported and killed. Many other Jews were led out to be shot on the Danube embankment, where a handful escaped by leaping into the ice-filled river.
A Hungarian army officer rebuked an Arrow Cross teenager whom he saw beating an old woman in a column being herded towards their execution place: ‘Haven’t you got a mother, son? How can you do this?’ The boy answered carelessly, ‘She’s only a Jew, uncle …’ An estimated 105,453 Jews died in or disappeared from Budapest between mid-October 1944 and the fall of the city. Conditions among the survivors became horrific. A witness described a ghetto scene:
In narrow Kazinczy Street enfeebled men, drooping their heads, were pushing a wheelbarrow. On the rattling contraption naked human bodies as yellow as wax were jolted along and a stiff arm with black patches was dangling and knocking against the spokes of the wheel. They stopped in front of the Kazinczy baths … behind the weatherbeaten façade bodies were piled up, frozen stiff like pieces of wood … I crossed Klauzál Square. In the middle people were squatting or kneeling around a dead horse and hacking the meat off with knives. The yellow and blue intestines, jelly-like and with a cold sheen, were bursting out of the opened and mutilated body.
The Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who was among those trapped in Budapest, strove to check the Jewish massacres, warning German commanders that they would be held responsible. But killings continued, sometimes including Hungarian police officers sent to protect Jews. Wallenberg was eventually murdered by the Russians.
By the beginning of February, as German casualties mounted and supplies dwindled, much of Budapest was reduced to rubble. Fires blazed in a thousand places as palaces, houses, public buildings and blocks of flats progressively succumbed. Explosions and gunfire persisted around the clock. Soviet aircraft strafed and bombed at low level, causing wounded men to scream in despair as they lay incapable of movement beneath the attacks. The grotesque became commonplace, such as an anti-tank gun camouflaged with Persian carpets from the opera house’s props department. Terrified horses, sobbing women and children, despairing soldiers alternately stampeded and huddled for safety.
Mastery was contested