Inferno - Max Hastings [378]
A Hungarian gunner officer, Capt. Sandor Hanak, awaited attack on 7 January behind the wooden fence of the city racecourse. “The Russkis … were coming across the open track, singing and arm in arm … presumably in an alcoholic state. Kicking the fence down, we fired fragmentation grenades and machine-gun bursts into the mass. They ran to the stands, where there was a terrible bloodbath when the assault guns fired at one row of seats after another. The Germans reported about eight hundred of them dead.” When at last the Pest bridgehead was lost and the Danube bridges blown, in Buda the garrison fought street by street, house by house. In some places the Russians drove prisoners in front of them, who shouted despairingly, “We are Hungarians!” before both sides’ fire tore into them. Bizarrely, a group of seventy Russians defected to the defenders, asserting that they were more afraid of retreating—to face the NKVD’s machine gunners behind their own front—than of coming forward to surrender. Stalin’s unwilling allies suffered heavily: on 16 January a Romanian corps reported that since October it had lost 23,000 men dead, wounded and missing—more than 60 percent of its strength.
The Russians conscripted hapless civilians to bring forward ammunition under fire. They advanced steadily through the streets, but suffered checks and slaughter wherever they were forced to cross open spaces swept by German and Hungarian guns. The plight of the defenders was worse, however: Pvt. Dénes Vass climbed over civilian and military wounded laid out along the corridors of his unit’s command post. A hand reached up and tugged his coat. “It was a girl of about 18–20 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.”
Hunger gnawed every man, woman and child. The garrison’s 25,000 horses were eaten. Only 14 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 it was 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 sustained 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