• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1255 0

in a dozen parts of the city simultaneously. Buildings changed hands several times amid attacks and counter-attacks. Hungarian soldiers who deserted in growing numbers to the Russians were offered an abrupt choice: they might join the Red Army to fight their former comrades, or face transportation to Siberia. Those who chose the former were provided with identifying red cap ribbons, cut from parachute silk, and immediately thrown back into the battle. The Russians treated such renegades with surprising comradeliness: one rifle corps’ commander, for instance, invited Hungarian officers to dinner. After the war, it was found that the death rate had been similar among those who chose captivity and those who joined the Red Army. In a chaos of loyalties, Hungarian communist resistance groups sought to aid the Soviets, and especially to kill Arrow Cross leaders and militiamen. In late January, scores of imprisoned dissidents were shot by their fellow countrymen on the terrace of the Royal Palace, most of them after torture.

On 11 February 1945, resistance collapsed in Buda. The commander of the Hungarian anti-aircraft artillery disarmed Germans in his headquarters at the Gellert Hotel, raised a white flag, and had his men shoot those who defied him and sought to prolong resistance. That night, the remains of the garrison and its senior officers attempted to break out, some in small groups, others in crowds. Most were mown down by Soviet fire, so that the dead lay heaped in open spaces. The commander of an SS cavalry division and three of his officers chose suicide when it became plain they could not escape. Another twenty-six SS men likewise shot themselves in the garden of a house in Diósárok Street. A panzer division commander was killed by Soviet machine-gun fire. Old Colonel János Vértessy, a Hungarian, tripped and fell on his face as he hurried along a street, breaking his last remaining tooth. ‘It’s not my day,’ he said ruefully, recalling that exactly thirty years earlier he had been shot down and captured as a pilot in the First World War. Shortly afterwards, he was caught and summarily executed by the Red Army.

Two thousand wounded men lay in the cellars of the Royal Palace. In the words of a witness who came upon them, ‘Pus, blood, gangrene, excrement, sweat, urine, tobacco smoke and gunpowder mingle in a dense stench.’ Panic and factional strife overtook the doomed garrison. Two soldiers burst in on surgeons who had just opened a wounded man’s stomach, and began shooting at each other across the operating table. Soon afterwards fire engulfed the building, killing almost all the casualties. In the headquarters of Gen. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a young NCO donned his commander’s abandoned uniform – and was promptly shot dead by a crazed soldier. Stragglers roamed the city’s public buildings among slashed paintings, shattered porcelain, broken furniture and abandoned personal possessions. Fires raged everywhere unchecked.

Some defenders sought to escape along the sewers by candlelight, wading through filth that sometimes rose to their waists, while the sounds of desperate fighting echoed down from the street above. They came upon the body of a handsome woman, elegantly clad in fur coat and silk stockings, still clinging to her handbag, and speculated about her identity. After advancing several hundred yards, the water level rose too high for passage. Most, including Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, were obliged to ascend through manholes into the street, where they were soon captured by the Soviets. An estimated 16,000 people, soldiers and civilians, escaped to the surrounding hills, where they roamed or lay in hiding. Some captured a Soviet bread wagon, precipitating a gunfight among themselves for its contents. Others who trudged on westwards found themselves emerging from woodland into the open ground of the Zsámbék basin. Here Soviet snipers and machine-gunners shot them down in hundreds, exposed against the snow. Throngs of desperate men were also killed in the city. A Soviet officer wrote, ‘The Hitlerists continued their advance