Hitler ultimately treated most of his Axis allies with contempt. While he courted Antonescu and Horthy until the end, he never really trusted Mussolini and his inept military. By the end of May 1941, talks with the General Staffs of Finland, Hungary and Romania ensured that they were fully committed to supporting Barbarossa.
In contrast, Hitler chose to keep his principal ally, Mussolini, in the dark. The Italian government did not learn of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union until thirty minutes after it had begun. His message to the Italian leader said Libya was out of danger until the autumn and that he had been distracted from the war with England because ‘all available Russian forces are at our border’.1 He also said he would not need Italian troops in the Soviet Union. Neither of which was true.
Furthermore, Hitler deluded himself and the Italian dictator that it would be a short and manageable war. ‘Even if I should be obliged at the end of the year to leave sixty or seventy divisions in Russia,’ he said, ‘that is only a fraction of the forces I am now continually using on the Eastern Front.’2 Ironically, Mussolini’s support for Hitler was to vastly outweigh the help he gained in Albania, Libya and Sicily.
After the Wehrmacht suffered its series of defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk, Hitler began to fret about the loyalty of his exhausted Axis allies. He was particularly furious at the collapse of his inadequate allies at Stalingrad and lost all confidence in their fighting capabilities. The average citizen in the East European capitals had no idea what was happening at the front as Hitler controlled the news. In Bucharest, an intrigued Iosif Hechter noted on 22 December 1942:
The official German communiqué issued yesterday evening contains an unusual passage: On the middle Don, the enemy has been attacking for several days with a very powerful concentration of armour, and has managed to penetrate the local defensive front. This breakthrough cost huge Bolshevik casualties. […] German combat divisions took up prepared positions to their rear.3
Although the report implied some sort of retreat, it gave no impression of the scale of the Red Army’s advances or the implications. While the Romanian and Italian military enjoyed reasonably good relations with their German counterparts, understandably they felt they had been abandoned by Hitler at Stalingrad. He left two whole Romanian armies out on a limb and had done nothing to save them from destruction.
Reporter Henry Shapiro wrote:
Except for small groups of [Fascist] Iron Guard men, who here and there, put up a stiff fight, the Romanian soldiers were sick and tired of the war; the prisoners I saw all said roughly the same thing – that this was Hitler’s war, and that the Romanians had nothing to do on the Don.4
All trust with the Wehrmacht had been lost at Stalingrad. The German Army now considered the Romanians cowards. One German staff officer said, ‘[They] want only to save their own lives. Nothing else means a thing.’5 Another recorded:
They all had an expression of horror which seemed to be frozen on their faces. You would have thought the very devil was snapping at their heels. They had thrown everything away as they made their escape. And as they ran for it they added to the number of withdrawing troops, which was huge enough without them.6
In turn, Antonescu, Horthy and Mussolini held the Führer increasingly responsible for their losses. German intelligence collection was far more sophisticated than their modest efforts so they were reliant on Hitler for the bigger picture. Horthy had presided over the worst military disaster ever inflicted upon the Hungarian Army and was swift to accuse Hitler of abandoning his men to their fate. The admiral ordered the remains of the 2nd Army home in March; both Romanian armies were also taken out of the line. Eventually, to shore up his defence in the Balkans and on the Eastern Front Hitler was obliged to first occupy northern Italy and then Hungary as they sought to defect.
The Germans were not happy with Horthy’s actions. ‘After the withdrawal of their army from the battlefront,’ complained von Manstein, ‘the Hungarians had left only a few divisions behind in the Ukraine. It was expressly laid down that these forces should not become involved in any fighting with the Soviets.’7 Only Tiso’s Slovak Mobile Division performed well, helping cover the German withdrawal from the Caucasus.
Antonescu was much more accommodating. His forces which were with the German 17th Army in the Kuban bridgehead remained put and other forces were made available for coastal defence on the Sea of Azov. The remnants of the Romanian 1st Tank Division and their cavalry divisions were regrouped for refitting. To make good Antonescu’s losses, Hitler sent just eighty-five panzers and assault guns. First to arrive were elderly Czech light tanks, which were delivered in March 1943 and used to re-equip the 1st Tank Regiment.
Throughout 1942, Bulgaria’s King Boris was thoroughly alarmed by Hitler’s weapons deliveries to neutral Turkey, so as a counterweight Hitler agreed to equip ten Bulgarian infantry divisions, one cavalry division and two armoured brigades. Hitler supplied Boris with panzers and assault guns in July 1943, a move he was later to regret.
While Antonescu, Horthy, Mussolini and Tiso all provided troops, to Hitler’s displeasure Boris stubbornly continued to refuse to declare war on Stalin or send any help. As a result, Boris was summoned to see Hitler at Rastenburg in August 1943; but he did not give in, citing his country’s historic friendship with Russia and the threat posed by neutral Turkey. Shortly afterwards, Boris died of an apparent heart attack. Some muttered that he was poisoned on Hitler’s instructions. Successive prime ministers now tried desperately to extricate Bulgaria from its corrosive relationship with Hitler.
The Bulgarians officially designated their fledgling armoured regiment the 1st Armoured Brigade in October 1943. Some armour was despatched to support the army in central Bulgaria, fighting the growing Bulgarian partisan movement, and a few others were assigned to the Bulgarian formations in Serbia to help fight the troublesome Yugoslav partisans.
By the spring of 1943, after the defeat of the Axis forces in Tunisia, Mussolini was facing further disaster with the Allies poised to attack Sicily. At this stage, Mussolini was incapable of defending his homeland, let alone Sicily; he had lost 200,000 men killed or captured in North Africa and his quarter of a million-strong force on the Eastern Front had disintegrated. He had another half a million men bogged down in the Balkans fruitlessly fighting Albanian and Yugoslav partisans. By the summer, a thoroughly dispirited Mussolini withdrew the remnants of his ill-advised expedition to the Soviet Union. Hitler was not sorry to see them go, nor were his generals.
The Allied invasion of Sicily triggered Mussolini’s fall from power and the Italian armistice on 9 September 1943 resulted in Hitler seizing control of his former ally. After being rescued from house arrest, the disillusioned Mussolini became the puppet ruler of his German-occupied homeland. His remaining armed forces totalled just over half a million men and were only ever employed against the Italian resistance; the German Army successfully shouldered the burden of resisting the Allies’ advance in Italy.
In mid-1943, Horthy reconstituted his battered Hungarian 1st Armoured Division and created a second. Both were organised along German lines, but equipped with Hungarian-built medium tanks. In addition, eight assault artillery battalions were also created, which were to have been equipped with Hungarian assault guns. However, there were only enough of these to arm two battalions, so the rest employed German-built assault guns. Between 1942–44 Hitler was obliged to supply Horthy with almost 400 German-built tanks to try and prop up his army.
Sensing that Horthy was losing the stomach for the fight, on 19 March 1944 Hitler occupied another former ally. He initially proposed garrisoning Budapest with Romanian and Slovak troops, but such nonsense would have created immediate internecine war amongst the Axis allies. German troops drove from Vienna, and Budapest’s surrounding airfields were seized by German paratroops. Publicly Horthy remained compliant, while privately trying to distance himself from Hitler.
By then, von Manstein was lamenting that ‘the scale and quality of the Hungarians weapons did not meet the requirements of warfare against Soviet armoured units’.8 He was horrified that, by this stage of the war, the Hungarian chief of staff and commander of the Hungarian 1st Army had the cheek to complain about their lack of preparedness and lack of anti-tank weapons. Von Manstein wanted to know just how they had been spending their time!
While planning for Operation Bagration, Stalin had kept the pressure up on Hitler’s wavering allies. In April 1944, the war came to the streets of Bucharest, Hechter remembered:
Four days after the bombing, the city is in the grip of madness. […] Everyone is fleeing or wants to flee. […] Half the city is without electricity. There is no water supply. The radiators do not work. […] The number of dead is not known. […] Rosetti said 4,200 – but that isn’t certain either.9
Only now did Hitler despatch any significant numbers of tanks to Antonescu’s army, consisting of several hundred panzers and assault guns. Although Antonescu remained committed to the Führer’s cause, reorganising and re-equipping the Romanian Army was a painfully slow process. The Romanian 1st Tank Division was re-established along German panzer division lines in April; equipped with German tanks, it returned to the Eastern Front and continued to resist the Red Army. It had been intended that the Romanian 8th Cavalry Division become a motorised unit, but in July 1944 it was decided to use it to create Romania’s 2nd Armoured Division, but this was not completed before Romania defected to Stalin.
Antonescu was loyal to Hitler to the last and refused to believe that the days of his regime were numbered. He met with Hitler, Keitel and Guderian at the Wolfsschanze at Rastenburg on 5 August 1944. ‘Antonescu had appeared to us quite au fait with the information from the front,’ noted Guderian’s adjutant, Major von Loringhoven, ‘but he was deluding himself in his evaluation of the situation inside Romania when he assured us of the unconditional loyalty of his people, and of his own army to the German Reich.’10
King Michael and the Romanian Army had other ideas when it came to safeguarding their country. Several weeks later, King Michael, sick of the war, had Antonescu arrested and his entire government dismissed. Within a few weeks an armistice was signed with Stalin. The German instructors training the Romanian 4th Armoured Regiment seized the panzers supplied by Hitler and used them to help cover their withdrawal from Romania. Even before the fall of Antonescu, once-loyal Romanian troops blocked the Danube bridges to Hitler. Almost all of the resurrected German 6th Army and part of the 8th, some sixteen divisions in total, were forced to surrender to the Soviets. The rest fled over the Carpathians to fight on in Hungary. Bucharest lay open, as did the rear of Hitler’s Balkan front.
General Guderian and his colleagues were dismayed at Romania’s actions:
On 20 August 1944, the Russians launched their attack against Army Group South Ukraine. This was successful against those sectors that were held by Romanian troops. But that was not all; the Romanians deserted in large numbers to the enemy and turned their guns against their allies of yesterday. Neither the German troops nor their leaders had reckoned on such treachery.11
Once the Romanians had closed the Danube, thousands of Germans were trapped. ‘These German soldiers,’ adds Guderian, ‘fought valiantly and to the bitter end; their military honour unsullied. They were in no way responsible for their sad fate.’12
In Bucharest, Iosif Hechter recorded in his journal, on 21 August, with some apprehension:
The Soviet offensive in Moldavia and Bessarabia has been underway for two days. Apparently Iaşi has fallen.
The war is coming toward us. It is not the war that has weighed us down for five years like a moral drama, now it is a physical war. Great turnarounds can occur at any hour or minute. Again our lives are on the line.13
He worried that Hitler might seek to occupy Romania, ‘Capitulation means (who knows!) a repressive German response, in the style of northern Italy.’14 Hitler did not have the manpower or the time for such an enterprise.
During 20–29 August, the Red Army thrust into eastern Romania, with the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts’ Jassy–Kishinev Offensive. The denuded Army Group South Ukraine only had three armoured units consisting of the 13th Panzer and 10th Panzergrenadier Divisions and the Romanian 1st Armoured Division. Within three days, 13th Panzer had all but collapsed. Army Group South Ukraine was overwhelmed and the German 6th Army was surrounded; losses amounted to about 200,000 men, eighty-three tanks and assault guns, 108 guns and 111 aircraft.
The revitalised Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies’ loyally fighting alongside the Germans suffered 8,305 killed, 24,989 wounded and 153,883 missing and captured (up to 40,000 of whom died while held in Moldava). The Red Army lost 13,197 killed and 53,933 sick and wounded. With the Red Army deep inside their country, the Romanians had little choice but change sides. The Romanian Army attacked Hitler’s units guarding the important Ploesti oilfields and in total took 50,000 German prisoners, who were handed over to the Red Army. The fall of Antonescu and the loss of Romania was a serious blow to Hitler, particularly access to its vital oilfields.
In the west, things had gone just as badly for Hitler following the Allies’ liberation of France. By the end of August 1944 his armies had lost forty-three divisions (thirty-five infantry and eight panzer divisions), sustaining a total loss of 450,000 men, as well as most of their equipment consisting of 1,500 tanks, 3,500 pieces of artillery and 20,000 vehicles. Only in Italy were his armed forces keeping the Allies at bay following the landings there in 1943, although this secondary theatre of operations was a constant drain on his resources. The loss of Rome in June had cost Hitler about 30,000 troops.
Hungary was not to be spared by Stalin either. After Friessner’s Army Group South Ukraine blunted Stalin’s Belgrade Strategic Offensive Operation, the Red Army turned its attentions toward Budapest by striking from the Arad area. In the meantime, Hechter recorded on 29 August, ‘How shall I begin? Where shall I begin? The Russians are in Bucharest.’15 Two days later, he noted:
A parade of Soviet heavy tanks on Bulevardul Carol, beneath the windows of the house where we have taken refuge. It is an imposing sight. Those tired, dusty, rather badly dressed men are conquering the world. They’re not much to look at – but they are conquering the world.
Afterwards a long column of trucks full of Romanian soldiers: former prisoners of war in Russia, now armed and equipped and fighting in the Red Army. They are young and happy, with excellent equipment. You can see they are not coming from battle. They are a parade unit, probably kept in waiting for the entry into Bucharest.16
Inspired by the Romanians, the Slovaks were premature in trying to throw off Hitler on 23 August. Despite being loyal allies on the Eastern Front, the Slovaks, under Defence Minister General Catlos, and part of the Slovak Army, under General Golian, rebelled at Neusohl in the Carpathians against Premier Tiso and Hitler. For the Führer, this was another potential disaster as it not only threatened the vital tank factories in neighbouring Bohemia and Moravia, but also blocked the retreat of the defeated German 8th Army.
Hitler had no troops available and an improvised armoured unit had to be cobbled together from the various SS training schools in Bohemia and Moravia. The unfortunate Slovaks had no tanks or anti-tank guns with which to resist the panzers, as their remaining armour had been lost with the Slovak Mobile Division on the Eastern Front. Hitler moved quickly to disarm the Slovak Army’s two regular army infantry divisions and many Slovak soldiers fled to central Slovakia to join the partisans. Czechoslovak airborne forces flown in by Stalin also joined them. Unfortunately, Neusohl (the centre of the rising) could not be held without heavy weapons and fell by the end of the month to the German armour. The arrival of elements of two SS divisions sealed the fate of the remaining rebels. The Slovak people would have to wait until the spring for the arrival of the Red Army before they would taste freedom.
When Romania swapped sides, Bulgaria was already secretly negotiating with Stalin. In addition to its commitments in Greece and Yugoslavia, the Bulgarian Army found itself countering a growing partisan movement at home.
As Bulgarian loyalty was suspect, Hitler switched further shipments of panzers en route to German troops in Yugoslavia. He also secretly planned to disable Bulgaria’s existing panzers and assault guns. At the end of August 1944 Guderian, accompanied by Loringhoven, flew to Budapest with a letter from Hitler to Admiral Horthy. ‘The admiral had received him courteously,’ recalled Loringhoven, ‘but had given him the impression of being on the verge of terminating his alliance with Germany.’17 General Vörös, Chief of the Hungarian Staff, was especially friendly and assured them of the Hungarian Army’s loyalty while secretly planning his defection to Stalin.
Romania’s defection had exposed Hungary’s southern frontier. Desperately trying to stem the Soviet and Romanian forces pushing from the east, the Hungarians succeeded in briefly giving the Soviets a bloody nose at Arad on the River Lipova. The Battle of Arad, fought in September 1944, was the last independent action of the war by the battered Hungarian Army and one of the very few successes achieved by its limited armoured forces. The Hungarian 4th Corps, spearheaded by its 1st Armoured Division and supporting a German offensive, had attacked the Romanian town. Ironically, this fighting took place against one of Hitler’s former Axis allies.
Although Arad fell on 13 September, the Hungarians soon found themselves caught up in a violent six-day battle with the Romanian Army, which enjoyed significant air support and succeeded in destroying twenty-three Hungarian tanks. After the arrival of Stalin’s Red Army, a joint Soviet-Romanian counter-attack was launched, throwing the invaders out.
The outclassed Hungarians, lacking air support, were forced to evacuate Arad just a week after capturing it. They claimed to have destroyed sixty-seven Soviet tanks at the cost of eight German-supplied assault guns and a further twenty-two damaged. German-supplied panzers of the Romanian 2nd Armoured Regiment then fought alongside the Red Army in Hungary and ended up in Czechoslovakia. By the end of 1944, the Hungarian 1st Army had withdrawn into Slovakia and the 2nd Army had been disbanded.
In the meantime, Stalin declared war on Bulgaria on 5 September and commenced hostilities three days later. The Bulgarians sought to save themselves by declaring war on Germany, but pushing through Romania, the Red Army thrust into Bulgaria north of Varna and veered west. The Soviet motorised columns outstripped their infantry and met no resistance, arriving in Sofia on 15 September. Hitler acted quickly to deal with his turncoat allies deployed in Serbia and Macedonia, ordering the disarming of the Bulgarian 1st Army. Only their 5th Army offered short-lived resistance. German instructors from the combat school at Niš in Serbia were put on alert to move to the German training camp at Plovdiv in Bulgaria, from where they would act against the Bulgarian panzers.
Instead, a column consisting of sixty-two panzers and other armoured fighting vehicles from the Bulgarian 1st Armoured Brigade, moved to block the Sofia–Niš road, outside Sofia, and local German forces were arrested. Bulgarian troops were then withdrawn from Greece ready for an inevitable Soviet attack on Hitler’s forces in Yugoslavia. At the same time, Hitler’s forces in Yugoslavia found themselves attacked by panzers manned by German-trained Bulgarian tank crews. Supporting the Red Army, the 1st, 2nd and 4th Bulgarian Armies were launched into Yugoslavia on 28 September 1944.
The Bulgarian 1st Armoured Brigade went into action against its former allies on 8 October, when sixty tanks were thrown against Hitler’s occupation forces. Twenty-one Bulgarian tanks recaptured Vlasotince, driving the German defenders out. At Bela Palanka the Germans found themselves under attack by panzers on 12 October, but the Bulgarians ran into well-prepared defences, including 88mm anti-aircraft guns, and lost five.
It was clear that Hitler’s East European allies were abandoning him like rats from a sinking ship. At the end of November, the Bulgarian panzers were in Pristina and Kosovska Mitrovica marking the end of operations in Yugoslavia. Elements of the brigade subsequently fought with the Bulgarian 1st Army and the Soviets in Hungary.
On 6 October 1944, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front set about the remains of Friessner’s Army Group South Ukraine, attacking General Maximilian Fretter-Pico’s German 6th Army and the Hungarian 7th Corps. His target was Debrecen and the Tisza in Hungary. Within four days Malinovsky was over the river and within 45 miles of Budapest.
Friessner was instructed to smash the 27th Army and Soviet 6th Guards Tank Army and to retake two vital passes in the southern Carpathians to cut Malinovsky’s lines of communication. Hungarian counter-attacks against the Mindszent bridgehead required the Soviets to rely on Romanian reinforcements, which came under attack from Hungarian and German troops. The Romanian 4th Division was surrounded and forced to surrender on the 20 October and the 2nd Romanian Division was driven back across the river.
The bridgehead at Alpar, however, was not dislodged. On 11 October, the 4th Guards Cavalry Corps, part of Cavalry Mechanised Group Pliyev, had reached Debrecen, and nine days later Romanian troops captured the town. However, on 23 October a German counter-attack striking east and west surrounded Pliyev, forcing his men to abandon all their weapons and flee to Soviet lines five days later.
Having blunted the Soviet advance, the Germans and Hungarians lost up to 35,000 killed or missing as well as 500 tanks and 1,656 guns and mortars. Some 20,000–40,000 Axis troops were captured. The Red Army sustained 11,900 dead and 6,662 missing, as well as 358 tanks knocked out.
On 15 October Hungarian radio announced Horthy had requested an armistice with the Soviet Union, Britain and America. Fortunately for Hitler, Major General Iván Hindy, commander of the Hungarian Army 1st Corps, ensued that Budapest was not immediately lost to the Axis cause. Hindy was alarmed at the prospect of the Soviets capturing the capital and took matters into his own hands. When his commander, Lieutenant General Aggteleky, ordered him to stop German units from occupying the citadel and Sashegy Hill in Buda, he promptly arrested Aggteleky.
Hindy gathered his officers and made his allegiance clear:
A conspiracy against our German comrades is being prepared here. […] Unfortunately the Regent is being influenced by cliques of Jewish agents and defeatists and is not prepared to dissociate himself from these criminal cliques. The radio proclamation is treason. It is possible the regent doesn’t even know about it, otherwise it would have been read out by him and not by a common newsreader. To prevent this treason I had to take over the command. I expect the officers of the army corps to support me.18
The following day, Hitler carried out Operation Panzerfaust. German troops seized Buda Castle in Budapest and Horthy was kidnapped. General Béla Miklós von Dalnoki, commander of the Hungarian 1st Army, after telling his countrymen to treat the Germans as foes, defected to the Soviets. Colonel General Lajos Verres, commander of the Hungarian 2nd Army, was arrested by the Germans before he could act. Hindy’s actions enabled Hitler to take control of some 55,000 loyalist Hungarian troops in the Budapest area, although only about 15,000 of these were deployable as infantry.
The 2nd Ukrainian Front renewed its attempt on Budapest on 29 October and had secured the southern approaches to the city by 2 November, but could get no further. A frontal attack on the city from the east was also fended off. The Soviets launched a fresh assault on 5 December aiming to trap the city in a pincher movement. The Soviet 7th Guards and 6th Guards Tank Armies and Pliyev’s mechanised cavalry group struck from the north-east while the 46th Army attacked from the south-west. Four days later, they had got as far as Šahy and the Danube to the north of the city. While the 46th got across the river, it was at great cost and it could still not get through the defences to the south-west.
On 12 December 1944, the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts were instructed to take Budapest. The 2nd Ukrainian Front on the left was to attack from Šahy, southward to the Danube north of Esztergom, which would cut off any German retreat to the north-west. The 3rd Ukrainian Front was directed to move northward from Lake Velencei and link up with the 2nd Ukrainian Front near Esztergom. This offensive commenced on 20 December and within six days the two fronts had met, encircling the Hungarian capital. Hitler’s last ally was now knocked out of the war. The Wehrmacht was on its own.