“Were you looking forward to the arrival of the Russians?”
“Yes, as if they had been our own family. Rafi, for example,
ran to meet them like a madman and embraced the first Russian in tears.
The Russian said: Here, Jew, give me your leather coat.”
FROM ISTVÁN BENEDEK AND GYÖRGY VÁMOS, TÉPD LE A SÁRGA CSILLAGOT
My neighbor—not long ago a keen Nazi supporter—
invited a Russian officer to dinner. During the main course, my neighbor
asked the Russian what the Bolsheviks thought of the Jews.
The officer shrugged. “Send them to work, with everybody,” he said.
I realized, then, that the remnant of Hungary's Jewry, those poor,
suffering souls in the capital, would not see a restitution of their losses—
the fact that they are no longer singled out would have to suffice.
SÁNDOR MÁRAI, AMI A NAPLÓMBÓL KIMARADT
BY NOVEMBER 1944, the German and Hungarian forces were severely outnumbered by the Soviets, seven divisions facing twelve. There was little communication between these increasingly desperate allies, mainly because they did not trust each other. The Germans were convinced that their brothers-in-arms would, given the chance, cheerfully defect to the enemy;1 the Hungarians not only resented their German commanders but realized that their own units were generally ill-equipped, disorganized, and untrained. They knew that it was pointless to try to defend Budapest, the symbol of Hungarian national pride.
Szálasi therefore asked Veesenmayer whether Budapest could be declared a “free city,” sparing it the destruction of street-to-street battles. But the Reich plenipotentiary told him that Germany did not give a fig whether Budapest and all its people were destroyed, so long as the Russians stayed pinned down in the east. Veesenmayer took his direction from the Führer, and he was still convinced that Hitler would launch a decisive counteroffensive and that, given time, the British and the Americans would come to their senses and realize that Soviet Russia was the real enemy. They would make peace with Germany in the west and focus, instead, on the common enemy of Bolshevik Russia in the east.
Even if Himmler was wrong about the Allies’ interest in offering acceptable terms, Veesenmayer was determined to save Vienna. It was not a personal mission—Veesenmayer had only contempt for the Viennese—but he had to follow Hitler's orders to preserve the capital city of his native land. To do that, it was crucial to keep the Soviet army totally occupied with Hungary. On November 23 Hitler himself had issued a directive to his chief of staff in Hungary: the Wehrmacht was to hold its position to the last man. Every house in Budapest was to be defended, regardless of civilian casualties. For as long as he was Reich plenipotentiary, Veesen-mayer would do just that.
On December 1 Hitler appointed Lieutenant-General Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch of the Waffen-SS to the post of defending Budapest. Otto Winkelmann, the SS commander in chief of both the German and the Hungarian forces in Budapest, had resigned his post, convinced that the city could not be successfully defended. By this time, the oil fields in eastern Hungary were the only source of fuel for the German forces. The once proud panzer divisions were frequently idle because there was not enough gasoline, and the armaments industry had slowed to a near standstill for lack of fuel and workers. In Hitler's mind, Hungary had to become the main theater of war in the east.
First, though, the Sonderkommando would leave Budapest. As he was packing, Eichmann ordered the execution of all members of the Jewish Council. In the general confusion, the order was not carried out, but Samuel Stern and his fellow councillors recognized that they were now marked men.
For most Hungarians, welcoming the Soviet army was a terrible prospect. Historically, the Russians had been among their most bitter and most feared enemies. It was the last-minute intervention by the Russians that had crushed the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848–49. Now, however, a dishonorable surrender to their historic foe was preferable to the destruction of their city. A truce would end the bombardments and the killings.
The Soviet troops who pushed into Hungary with overwhelming force had surprisingly low morale. They had been fighting for months; their food rations were poor; and the Tatars, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians among them had been pressed into service against their will. To keep some semblance of order, many of their commanders ordered the laggards in their units to be executed in front of their comrades for cowardice or sentenced to years of hard labor in Siberia. Others tried to cheer up their men by distributing vast quantities of low-grade vodka and encouraging them to gather up to ten pounds of gifts each week from the local population. They were allowed to send war booty to their families. This combination of drinking and looting drove many men to commit horrific acts. Some women were raped so often that they died; others had their backs broken. Some girls as young as ten were raped by whole platoons while their fathers watched, tied up with rope, and their mothers waited their turn.
On December 24 the first Soviet units reached the outskirts of Buda. A woman cooking Christmas dinner saw Russian soldiers with submachine guns hurrying past her kitchen window. At the Number 81 streetcar terminus, a few Russian soldiers distributed loaves of black army bread. While Verdi's Aida played at the baroque Opera House to a packed audience determined to ignore the fall of their city, Soviet bombs rained down on Pest, and antiaircraft guns and air-raid sirens bellowed in protest. Among the ruins, families prepared for the traditional Christmas celebrations.
Ági Lantos had prepared for the festivities by making sure her parents were safe in their Buda hiding place with their Christian documents and sufficient food for a couple of weeks.2 She had long since taken off the yellow star, acquired Christian papers, and lived with a family who gave her a back room in exchange for her services as a dressmaker. She was sewing a festive outfit for one of the children when the sirens started. They rarely stopped again until the city was taken.
Young István Weiszlovits saw his first Soviet soldier on Christmas Eve, and Christmas is still his favorite holiday. He was the only one among the 150 children and 30 adults in the home who could speak with the Russians. In short order, he became an interpreter for both the Russians and the Hungarians. Major Maslov, the local commander, took István with him when he and his senior staff were hosted by Cardinal Serédi in Esztergom's Catholic basilica to a fantastic meal of salami, ham, fresh vegetables, white bread, and cheeses.
Hansi Brand, although she was a frequent visitor at the Red Cross children's homes, had not taken her own two children to one of them. Her instinct told her that no one would be able to control the Arrow Cross gangs. Even when the government had wanted to cooperate with the Swedes and the Swiss, it had little influence on the mobs that ran the streets. Only six years old at that time, Dani Brand remembers hiding in the basement of a Christian woman's apartment building, having to pretend he and his brother were gentiles. He knew that if they were betrayed, they might die. Their mother had bought a single cot for them both to share underground. Sometimes the bombardments would go on for hours while the two boys slept head-to-toe. There was always a crowd in the basement; the family had taken down chairs and blankets, but not everyone had a bed.
One evening an older man demanded their cot and Hansi's blanket. “Why should the Jews always get the comfort?” he asked.
“Then a bomb fell right through the ceiling one night and landed on what used to be our cot,” Dani remembers. “Both the man and his wife died.”3
By Christmas Day, Budapest was encircled by Soviet heavy armor. Remnants of the German army were trapped in the capital and still not allowed to withdraw. Crazed Arrow Cross gangs continued to murder Jews in the streets. Bodies were hanging from lampposts, lying in gutters, drifting down the Danube. Corpses were left where they fell. Throughout the ceaseless bombardments, as buildings collapsed around them, the Arrow Cross continued their frantic rampage. When they tried to remove the remaining children from the Red Cross orphanages to the ghetto, they were stopped by Friedrich Born. Throughout the city, posters warned that the punishment for helping Jews was summary execution. To ensure that the message was heard, the Arrow Cross killed a few sample Christians—nuns on Swabian Hill, building superintendents who had not reported Jews in hiding, and the managing director of the Bauxit Company together with his pregnant wife and two small children.4
The former American embassy building and the Glass House on Vadász Street were filled with Jews. Every space was occupied, with people sleeping on the stairs, in the closets, in the bathrooms. A unit of German soldiers had taken over the upper floors of the Glass House to shoot at the Soviet planes, and the responding fire shattered the massive glass walls and thick window panels. Bombs broke through the roof of the embassy. Still, no one left the buildings.
A group of midteen Arrow Cross boys, led by an older, leather-jacketed Nazi enthusiast, blew up the gates of the Glass House with a shower of hand grenades. Waving their machine guns at the cowering people inside, they shouted for everyone to leave the building. Mihály Salamon remembered how scared he was when a hysterical boy of about fourteen pointed his gun at the small children in the upstairs “display” room; Salamon feared that the shaking weapon would go off accidentally. By the time Arthur Weisz, the former owner of the Glass House, arrived in the courtyard, dozens of Swiss consul Carl Lutz's protected charges had been shot, and the Arrow Cross boys were eagerly rummaging through abandoned belongings in search of valuables. Weisz stepped up to the gang's leader and tried to explain that the house was under the protection of the Swiss government. When that failed to impress, he demanded that he be allowed to make a phone call to the city's commander in chief. That worked, but only temporarily. The refugees were allowed to return to what was left of the once spectacular building. Weisz, however, paid for his intervention with his life.5
Samuel Stern had taken refuge with a former Nazi extremist and Hungarian journalist, who continued to file stories for an Arrow Cross newspaper to preserve his image. He assumed, rightly, that Stern would one day be his alibi. André Biss and his wife checked into the Hotel Pannonia, where the Hungarian government was guarding the now enemy Romanian diplomats who had not been able to leave the city. Biss thought that this building would be a safer refuge than his bombed-out apartment.
On December 28 two police officers went to Ottó Komoly's Mérleg Street office and politely asked that he go with them to a meeting to discuss the future of the ghetto. He escaped through the back entrance and checked into the Ritz Hotel under another name, but he was recognized by someone in the foyer, reported, and taken to the Arrow Cross headquarters on Városház Street. The drains in the building were clogged with blood. The few prisoners still alive after the beatings stood in two feet of fetid, bloody water, waiting for someone to kill them. And it was probably there that Ottó Komoly, too, was murdered.
More than 800,000 civilians lived underground in dank cellars, occasionally venturing out to search for food or for loved ones. Whenever a warehouse or a truck was shelled, people emerged from their bunkers to look for cans or boxes of food that were meant for the army. Farmers could no longer take their wagons into the city, so there was nothing left to eat. Dying horses wandering through the streets were hacked to pieces by men and women using scissors and kitchen knives. It was only because some 30,000 horses had been brought to the city and abandoned without food or shelter that the citizens of Budapest had any food at all, though a bakery near Rákóczy Avenue continued to bake bread with its rapidly diminishing supplies and sawdust-mixed flour. The army itself began to run out of food by January. Entire city blocks collapsed under the constant bombardment, trapping the inhabitants under the rubble. Some 60,000 German and Hungarian soldiers fought against 180,000 Soviet and Romanian troops in house-to-house combat, and the streets were covered in broken glass and bits of brick. Dead bodies were no longer collected, and scavenging civilians competed to take the shoes, coats, and sweaters off the corpses.
No one without a special permit had been allowed into the ghetto since December 10. The gates were locked and guarded, and food deliveries had all but halted. Dead bodies were piled up in the former garden of the synagogue. Most had been stripped of their clothes. Frozen in the sudden December cold, they lay exposed to the dazed indifference of the living. It was a miracle that Miksa Domonkos of the Jewish Council still managed to commandeer a few meager supplies, but there was never enough. Wearing his army captain's uniform, he acted with such authority that he was able to redirect a couple of lorries with flour through the guarded gates. He continued to fake Ferenczy's name on transfer certificates to rescue other Jews from the Arrow Cross.
The patients, doctors, and nurses of the two remaining Jewish hospitals, both under the protection of the Red Cross, were massacred by the Arrow Cross. Only the hospital under the protection of SS officer Ara Jerezien remained safe. More than four hundred Jews, including Eva Zahler and her mother and grandfather, survived the war because of him. All that Jerezien demanded in exchange was a certificate, signed by all forty doctors, testifying to his good deed in saving their lives. This they did gladly.6
In their efforts to commandeer vehicles, Arrow Cross gangs frequently shot Hungarian officers and randomly selected civilians who they imagined might be hiding something valuable or whose appearance they simply disliked. They loathed all class distinctions, which they claimed had denied them their rightful share of wealth. In the last days of the war, Arrow Cross mobs clashed with Hungarian soldiers and police officers.
The streets were covered with mountains of rubble, glass shards, streetcar cables, buckled tracks, broken lampposts, and mutilated horses. The stench of burning buildings, refuse, and decomposing bodies was overwhelming. Congested with rubble and parts of bridges that had fallen, the Danube swelled and began to flood the northern parts of the city.
On New Year's Eve, units of the Soviet army overran Hungarian army positions around Pest. House-to-house fighting now extended into the working quarters of the city, and Soviet soldiers penetrated the culverts of the inner district. Often the two sides were separated by only one street or one house. Aircraft squadrons continued to drop bombs, and fighter planes strafed streets that were deemed to be in enemy hands, though sometimes they were shooting at their own men. On January 5, following direct orders from the government, police and Arrow Cross irregulars began emptying out the “international houses,” those under the protection of various neutral governments. When the news reached Raoul Wallenberg, he offered a bribe of food and medications to leave his charges where they were.
The main military hospital received a direct hit on January 14. Dying soldiers were left in destroyed buildings. The wounded piled up in makeshift hospitals, without medicine or nurses. They lay in the cold cellars of the burned-out Parliament Building and the Museum of Military History. A retreating German army unit blew up the Horthy (later Petőfi) Bridge, the first of Budapest's bridges to be destroyed by their command. An Arrow Cross group advanced into the ghetto and murdered several people they encountered before being routed by Domonkos and a couple of policemen.
In the streets, the advancing Soviet soldiers used captured civilians to shield them from enemy fire. In short order, the German military also adopted this tactic, but the strategy was ineffectual for both armies. Hansi Brand and her two children survived the siege, underground. When a Soviet soldier entered their cellar, Dani told his mother to hide behind him in the corner. The Russians ordered the women to come and help “peel potatoes.” The other women went, but Hansi stayed hidden in the corner by her two little boys.7 She wondered how Dani knew what to do but later realized bitterly that “he had seen so much already, his childhood was lost.”
The German military command in Budapest asked for reinforcements. Hitler had no one to spare. Ignoring advice from his generals, he had thrown eight divisions into a last, desperate attack on the advancing British, American, and Canadian forces in the Saar region. In his deteriorating mind, success in retaking the strategically important Ardennes borderlands to the northwest would prove that Germany was still worthy of its Führer. The attack, as predicted by the generals, was a disaster, with a loss of 120,000 men, 600 tanks, 1,600 planes, and 6,000 trucks.8 When Hitler finally decided to send a panzer division to Hungary, it was too late.
There was one final attempt on January 15 to blow up the Budapest ghetto. It failed. Major-General Gerhard Schmidthuber, the last of a series of German commanders of Budapest, claimed later that he forbade the destruction of the ghetto and ensured that his order was followed by posting Wehrmacht soldiers outside the wooden walls.9 Kasztner, in contrast, said that the destruction had been prevented by General Winkelmann, acting on direct orders from Kurt Becher.10 Kasztner was actually in Vienna during the siege of Budapest, but he wrote: “When I gave him [Becher] Krell's receipt for the 20 million francs from the Joint, Becher called SS General Winkelmann, who forbade the Arrow Cross government's action. The Germans told Kovarcz, the Arrow Cross minister, that emptying the ghetto could seriously endanger Germany's interests.”11 At Nuremberg, Becher, too, suddenly recalled that he had given such orders—though by then there were many who claimed credit for heroism in the dying days of the Reich.12
On January 18 the ghetto was liberated by the Soviet army.
Hansi remembered that it had been snowing the night before and, when she finally looked outside, the smell of fresh snow seemed stronger than the stench of corpses and smoke. And she recalled the few moments of quiet after Pest fell.
In front of the Glass House, the young halutzim ran out to hug and kiss the first Soviet soldiers they saw. Their enthusiasm was so great that some of the Russians grabbed their guns to free themselves.13
Along the Danube, the hotels, the restaurants, and the entire Corso were on fire. Retreating Germans tried to blow up all the bridges between Buda and Pest. Remnants of the German and Hungarian armies crossed over the badly damaged Chain Bridge into the ruins of the old Castle District just before the bridge was destroyed. There were thousands of casualties. The narrow streets and burning buildings made it difficult to reach the bridgehead, and the bridge itself was continually bombarded.
Buda came under heavy attacks both from the air and by advancing Soviet troops from the west. Still, the German command deemed that the hills were defendable. Both sides suffered enormous losses. Of the 30,000 German soldiers who eventually tried to break out of Budapest, against the Führer's orders, only 624 reached the German lines.14
On February 11, Soviet soldiers approaching Gellért Hill saw a white flag raised on what was left of the roof of the Gellért Hotel. Colonel József Kozma, the man in command of the Hungarian 102nd Antiaircraft Detachment, had decided to surrender.
All the while, both German and Soviet soldiers and the Arrow Cross gangs continued to loot anything of value they could find. Soviet officers actively encouraged their men to take works of art, and many of those paintings and other objects can still be viewed today in Russian museums and galleries.
Pest was taken by the Soviets between January 17 and 18, and Buda on February 13. The siege of Budapest had lasted one hundred days. The combined Soviet and Romanian losses in Budapest totaled more than 70,000 men; the Hungarian army lost 16,500; the German army, 30,000.15 More than 40,000 civilians had been killed, including some 7,000 Jews. About 40,000 Hungarian soldiers were taken prisoner by the Soviets. To round out the numbers, they took 50,000 civilians as well. Everyone in uniform, even firefighters and postmen, were taken prisoner, as were men lining up for bread or going in search of water. Around one-third of the soldiers and civilians were returned to Hungary after a few years of forced labor in the Soviet Union.
Of the 50,000 Jews “lent” to the Reich to build fortifications around Vienna, only about 6,000 were still alive in April 1945. Fewer than one-tenth of the men in the Jewish labor brigades survived the war.
ON FEBRUARY 13, crouched over the radio in the remnants of an old apartment building, Hansi Brand and Peretz Révész screamed with delight when they heard the news of Dresden's demise: 529 Lancaster aircraft had dropped thousands of high-explosive blockbuster and incendiary cluster bombs on one of Germany's proudest and oldest cities. Dresden had been consumed by a firestorm. The city, and almost everyone in it, was dead. The Abteilung Tote, or Death Bureau, later reported that 120,000 to 150,000 people had died there.16
When Rezső Kasztner heard of the bombing, he said that God—if there was a God, which he doubted—had perhaps been thinking about the burning of all of Dresden's Jews in 1349 on massive pyres in the Old City Square. That, too, had happened on a February 13. Still, God would have a lot of other reasons to set fire to Dresden and several other German cities. There had been many more pyres of burning bodies in the past few years than even God should have tolerated.
On the day Dresden was destroyed, Kasztner was again at the Saint Margarethen Bridge with Saly Mayer, Kurt Becher, Mayer's lawyer, and Becher's adjutant, Erich Krell. Saly Mayer showed Becher a letter confirming that 20 million Swiss francs had at last been deposited in a Swiss bank account for him and Roswell McClelland to use at their discretion.17 At Mayer's insistence, the Joint had transferred an additional $5 million to his account as “show money.” Becher immediately demanded that the money be transferred into an account in his name only, but Mayer refused. The Swiss would never agree, he said. They were jealous of their neutrality, and Becher was a high-ranking SS officer.18
Becher asked to see McClelland again. That, too, was agreed. Becher then accepted Mayer's request that the Red Cross be allowed to deliver food and medications to the concentration camps. What caused the most difficulties was Mayer's demand for an estimate of the number of Jews still alive in German hands.
AFTER BUDAPEST was lost, Hitler's Sixth SS Panzer Division still tried to hold out west of Lake Balaton against the combined Ukrainian and Russian assault. At the same time that the main Soviet offensive under General Zhukov was only fifty miles from Berlin, the remaining few of the July 20 conspirators were executed by an SS firing squad. They were fortunate that there simply wasn’t enough time for Hitler's entourage to stage another exhibition of degrading deaths.
When the Soviet army arrived in Vienna, more than eight thousand Strasshof Jews remained scattered throughout the city. They were cold, hungry, and terrified, but they were alive.