by Leo Kessler
Schulze clambered up the bank and tugged Chink up with one heave of his powerful shoulders.
‘Right, you slant-eyed devil, as soon as those twin searchlights have moved on, I’m going to double for the wire. When I’m over it, you should hear a couple of shots. That’ll be me knocking out the lamps.’ Chink nodded. ‘Then you pull your yellow finger out of your yellow arse and run back like hell to fetch the Yid. Don’t forget to bring the radio with you when you come over the wire.’
‘Chink now savvy.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ Schulze said and directed his attention to the twin searchlights. Their beams did not always coordinate but he reckoned he might have fifteen seconds to double the hundred odd metres across the field and fling himself over the wire. It was not enough. Then he spotted a slight hollow runnel which led from the river to within about sixty metres of the wire before it petered out where the ground was completely exposed to the searchlights. There was his chance!
Suddenly he set off, crawling swiftly down the hollow. The twin lights caught him just as he reached the end. He lay stock still, face pressed tight to the cold snow. The yellow reflected light seemed to pin him there for an eternity. All his muscles were drawn painfully tight as he fought against the temptation to break and run before they saw him and the machine-guns tore his body to shreds. But no machine-guns opened up. A moment later the lights passed on and he was up and running madly for the wire.
Legs pumping, arms driving, the snow spurting up around his feet, he flung himself upwards and cleared the fence. His heart pounding furiously, he lay still as the lights swept the ground behind him yet once again, while he remained this time in complete darkness. Now for the second phase!
He could see the operators quite clearly, stark black silhouettes against the white glare of the light. They moved slowly and without much energy, in spite of the cold. There were four of them, but that did not worry Schulze. He could catch them completely unawares.
He glanced briefly at the second light. It was about two hundred metres away and the suspicions of the crew would probably not be aroused after the first one went out until a couple of minutes had elapsed. They must be used to technical flaws in such a climate. If he worked quickly, he could get them both.
He rose to his feet and almost casually began to walk towards the searchlight crew, the hoods in which they were huddled drowning the crisp noise his boots made on the frozen snow.
Schulze was only five metres away when the man next to the steadily throbbing generator spotted him. ‘Stoi?’ he demanded, obviously startled.
Schulze did not give him a chance to say any more. He belted him with his ‘Hamburg equaliser’, the set of brass knuckles he had always taken with him to the Hamburg whorehouses. The man slammed against the side of the mobile generator and slumped limp-headed to the ground, without a sound. Schulze advanced on the other men grouped around the light.
His big right arm reached out of the darkness and grabbed the nearest man, his hand over the man’s mouth stifling the instinctive cry of fear. He squeezed – very hard. The man sighed, as if tired and happy to go to sleep. He did. For good. Gently Schulze lowered him to the ground.
Something must have warned the survivors. They swung round and stared aghast at this gigantic shape emerging from the darkness. The nearest man opened his mouth to yell, but Schulze’s right boot thudded into his crotch. He went down gurgling vomit. The other man ran. Schulze dived forward. His ‘Hamburg equaliser’ clubbed down. The Russian jinked and the brutal set of brass knuckles hit him on the shoulder. For a moment the two men wrestled violently in front of the blazing light like actors in a Chinese shadow play, then Schulze’s knuckleduster connected. There was a sharp click. The Russian’s spine broke. He dropped helplessly to the snow. Schulze did not hesitate. He ground the nail-studded heel of his big jackboot into the helpless man’s face and churned it to a bloody lifeless pulp.
Blinded by the glare, Schulze fumbled in the red darkness behind the searchlight to find the switch. He snapped it off and at once the bright light died. Schulze sprinted towards the other one.
He ran until he was about twenty-five metres away from it. In a moment the other crew would swing their own light round to check the trouble. Carefully he raised his Schmeisser and took aim. At that range the long hard burst of fire was deadly accurate. There was a sound of splintering glass, curses, a long drawn-out scream of agony and abruptly the light went out. He had done it!
It was nearly dawn now. The little Jew led them unerringly through the kilometre-wide no-man’s land between the Russian and German positions. Across a silent, ice-covered canal. Through a frozen marsh, where the white reeds, heavy with hoar frost, cracked alarmingly when their boots brushed against them. Between two abandoned and ruined farmhouses, dead pigs lying everywhere like tethered barrage balloons.
Just before six, Janosz stopped them.
‘What is it?’ Schulze demanded..
‘We’re there,’ the Jew whispered. He pointed with a skinny finger. ‘Do you see that little height? It is the first German machine-gun position. It’s in what’s left of old Ferenc Kobol’s barn. I have slept there many a winter’s night on my travels.’ Janosz smiled warily. ‘This is where I leave you. I shall make my own way into Buda from here as I doubt if your fellow countrymen would welcome a Jew with open arms. But when yon need me, Sergeant-Major, you’ll find me or someone who’ll know where I am in the Kobanyai Street. It’s near Burgberg, the Citadel.’
‘And who do I ask for – Janosz the Pedlar?’
Suddenly the little man was embarrassed. ‘No,’ he said hesitantly. ‘In Buda, I have another name – Csoki. It means “Little Chocolate Drop”. Because that was what I peddled in Buda before the war – chocolate drops.’
Schulze smothered a laugh. ‘All right,’ he said, eager to be away now, ‘I’ll come looking for you when the time is ripe, my little Yiddish Chocolate Drop.’
The old man departed in the direction of Buda without further ado, disappearing out of their lives as mysteriously as he had appeared. Schulze and Chink wasted no more time. Hurriedly they made their way to the frontline outpost.
‘Wer da?’ a voice rapped out suddenly, heavy with frightened surprise. ‘Halt oder ich schiesse!’
Slowly Schulze rose from the ground – he knew these trigger-happy young sentries – and lifted his arms into the air. ‘Take it easy now,’ he said softly. ‘You’ve just been rescued, soldier-boy, by the advance party of SS Regiment Europa.’
Two hours later in a brilliantly executed lightning attack, Obersturmbannführer Habicht forded the undefended river and with his monstrous Royal Tigers in the van, burst a quarter of a kilometre hole in the Russian front line. Taken completely by surprise, the Russian riflemen scrambled out of their holes and fled in terror, leaving the SS Regiment to file through the gap without a single casualty and pass into the lines of the hard-pressed 22nd SS Cavalry Division to be fêted like heroes. They had reached Budapest at last.
SECTION FIVE:
BATTLE OF BUDAPEST
ONE
At 5a.m. Friday, 18 January 1945, the new attack to break through to Budapest began in a snowstorm. From their new positions around Lake Balaton, the 4th SS Panzer Corps, with the 3rd Panzer Division to their right and the 1st Panzer Division to their left, raced forward to overcome the surprised first-line Russian positions. The plan was for the SS panzer divisions in the middle to make the running, while the two Army panzers on the flanks contained any Russian attempt at a counter-attack. The SS panzers would have as their first objective the ford across the canal at Kaloz, which was the major physical barrier on the way to the River Danube, and their second objective the little town of Dunapentele south of Budapest.
The new plan, the result of Rudel’s conference with Hitler, worked like a charm. After a short preliminary artillery bombardment and led by Rudel’s Immelmann Battle Wing, the Tigers and Panthers of the Viking and the Death’s Head, followed by waves of
panzer grenadiers in halftracks, burst through the Russians and disappeared into the snowstorm before the enemy had realized what had hit them. That first day, the SS panzers, their flanks barely defended by the more hesitant Wehrmacht divisions, pushed a wedge thirty kilometres deep into the Russian position.
But in the evening Viking ran into serious trouble. The Russians had not only mined the area to their front, they had also introduced a new obstacle – wire charged with high voltage electricity. Even the battle-hardened SS officers hesitated to send their young European volunteers and their German comrades against such defences. The Viking attack bogged down. General Gilles, commander of the Fourth SS Panzer Corps, made a personal appearance at the Division’s Command Post. The elderly, bespectacled, normally good-humoured Corps Commander was blazingly angry. He would tolerate no hesitancy from General Ullrich, the commander of the Viking Division. Viking would advance through the minefield and the electrically charged wire whatever the casualties.
‘Ullrich,’ Gilles barked, ‘you either attack or you name your successor!’
Ullrich was a proud man, who had fought a very hard, bitter war to become a divisional commander. He was not going to lose that command now. Heavy-hearted he summoned Obersturmbannführer Dorr, commander of the SS Germania Regiment, to his CP and ordered him to attack.
The big SS Colonel accepted the order without the slightest hesitation. That same evening he led his young volunteers into the minefields. They suffered terrible casualties, but Dorr allowed no retreat. He forced them forwards. They hit the electric wire barriers. The night was hideous with their screams as 20,000 volts racked the grenadiers’ wildly thrashing bodies. Suddenly the darkness was split by the dramatic blue light of short circuits and heavy with the stink of burned flesh. And then they were through and the Russians were running for their lives. Behind them charred bundles of rags and flesh hung everywhere on the wrecked wires.
That morning, covered by Rudel’s Me 262s flying at tree-top level, the Viking crossed the canal at Kaloz. Gilles at Corps HQ ordered a change of objective for the 4th SS. Dunapentele would be left to the slower moving 3rd Panzer on the right wing. The two SS armoured divisions would now make a bold dash for Budapest further up the river, with the Danube itself forming their right flank. Viking was commanded to drive for Ercsi, a matter of some twenty kilometres or so from the Hungarian capital. Now Gilles planned to seize Budapest in one bold stroke.
But by now Tolbuchin was reacting to the surprise attack. He threw in all his reserves, the best of the Guards divisions. The two forces met at the village of Sarosd. The point of the Viking was cut off within the shattered hamlet. The Division counter-attacked and freed the leading unit.
Hastily the regimental staff of the Germania Regiment which was leading the drive again, assembled to discuss the next move. But all Russian resistance in Sarosd was not yet crushed. Just as the officers were bending their shaven heads over the big maps, a lone Russian anti-tank gun, cunningly concealed in a shattered barn, opened up at pointblank range, blowing the Regiment’s key officers apart in a fury of fire. Obersturmbannführer Dorr fell with the rest, wounded for the sixteenth time in combat. This time it was to be his final wound. Now Germania was without its commander and all its senior officers.
Still Gilles was determined to push on. The first refugees from Budapest, German and Hungarian, were beginning to trickle into the SS positions, bringing with them horrific tales of the tortures and cruelties being inflicted on the defenders and the civilians in their charge when they fell into Russian hands. They told Gilles too that the defenders were on their last legs; ammunition and food for the 800,000 civilians was beginning to run out very rapidly.
On the Monday of the new week, after the disastrous events in Sarosd, the 4th SS Corps attacked again. Everywhere the word was passed from mouth to mouth. ‘Today we reach Budapest!’ It acted like magic on the eager young volunteers. They went into battle singing. A row of small villages were taken in a rush and the point of the Viking reached Adony on the Danube.
Marshal Tolbuchin began to panic. He had thrown all his reserves in by now, but still he had not stopped the Fritzes. In fact they had broken his 3rd Ukrainian Front in two at Adony. He called Lt-General Scharochin, commander of the 57th Rifle Army, which now stood in the Germans’ path and warned him of the danger of his Army being encircled on the following day; would it not be better that he withdrew his Army across the Danube to the eastern bank?
Scharochin knew Tolbuchin of old. He recognized the suggestion of his Army Commander as a cunning device to exculpate himself. When the time came to analyse the causes of the disaster on that front, Tolbuchin would point the finger at him as the commander who had first ordered a major withdrawal. More scared of ‘Old Leather Face’, Stalin, in the far-off Kremlin than the enemy at his doorstep, Scharochin refused. He preferred to stand and fight on the next day. On 23 January, the point of the Viking attacked directly north on both sides of the River Danube. At first they made excellent progress, throwing back the 57th Rifle Army in confusion. Then a new enemy entered – the weather.
It started to snow, as if it would never cease again. In a matter of minutes, the roads and tracks that the tanks were using disappeared completely under the flying white deluge. Gunners and commanders were blinded. The massive 72-ton Royal Tigers, isolated in the whirling mass of snow, were easy meat for the Russian infantry, armed with their portable anti-tank weapons. The Germans began to suffer severe casualties, and their progress was charted in metres, not in the kilometres of the previous days.
Somewhere or other Scharochin found a whole tank corps. The tankers were young and armed with the old-fashioned T-34s instead of the new Joseph Stalins. But they were courageous.
To Scharochin’s relief, the snow turned to fog. It gave his inexperienced tankers more of a chance against the Fritzes. Dug in at the hulldown position, exposing only their thick glacis plates, the T-34s, massed in troops of six and seven, waited for the Germans to loom out of the mist. The Tigers slaughtered the T-34s. But there was always one surviving Russian tank which could place that shell between turret and hull, or in the tracks, or in the engine cowling to bring the Fritz colossus to a final halt.
On 29 January, Scharochin, now actively encouraged by Tolbuchin, launched what was left of the young tank corps, supported by massive air cover, into a major attack against the 4th SS Corps at the village of Petend.
The SS fought back desperately, but there was no holding the Russians now. They had scented blood. Scharochin forgot Stalin. He thought only of victory.
He threw in all his last reserves. Full of a double ration of vodka and the promise of loot, leave and women, once Budapest had fallen, they charged into battle, arms linked, their bands playing the old Czarist marches. The Germans mowed them down by their hundreds but still they came on. The SS faltered and started to crumble.
Desperately Gilles tried to shore up his front but to no avail. The SS divisions were bled white. The ‘bodies’, as he was wont to call them to his staff, were no longer there. The pace of the withdrawal quickened.
One hundred and eighty Soviet tanks appeared on the SS Corps’ front to be opposed by exactly nine Tigers left to the Death’s Head and fourteen still running in the Viking. There was nothing the SS men could do, but retreat. The Russians were everywhere.
On 1 February, 1945, Gilles, Commander of the Fourth SS Panzer Corps, reported to his chief, General Balck, that his divisions were exhausted. They could do no more.
Balck, who hated the Armed SS, but who at the same time knew that if the Third Reich’s élite had failed to break through to the Hungarian capital there was no hope left, made his decision. It was very simple. Tolbuchin had won; he had lost. ‘Gilles,’ he ordered, ‘prepare to withdraw!’
That same evening, what was left of the Viking and Death’s Head began to move back from the Danube.
The last attempt to relieve Budapest had failed.
TWO
‘Gentle
men;’ SS Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei und der Waffen SS Pfeffer-Wildenbruch said with surprising formality in view of the fact that all the windows in his Buda HQ were long shattered and there was new snow drifting in through the shell-hole in the ceiling, ‘please, be seated.’
The assembled commanders, General Rumohr of the 8th SS Cavalry, General Zehender of the 22nd SS Cavalry, Colonel Habicht, and their staffs sat down at the long, blanket-covered table.
Pfeffer-Wildenbruch began. ‘The reason I have called you here today is to decide what we shall do next here in Buda. As you have all realized by now – even you must have Habicht – there will be no more attempts by our comrades to break through. We must assume that we have been written off by the High Command. In a way, that knowledge, gentlemen, is not as frightening as it sounds. For a change, we at the front can make our own decisions without reference to the Greatest Captain of all Times.’
The others laughed at the reference to Hitler, a bitter indication enough of just how much these powerful officers felt cut off from the Homeland.
‘So we have the freedom of choice. The question is – how shall we exercise it? As I see it, gentlemen, there are perhaps three courses of action open to us. Let me first suggest the worst one – we could surrender to the Soviets.’
There was a groan of dismay from most of the high-ranking officers and Habicht, his face flushed, cried hotly, ‘Never!’
Pfeffer-Wildenbruch held up his hands for peace and said, ‘I was merely playing the devil’s advocate, gentlemen. The second alternative is that we rally what forces we have left to us and using your armour, Habicht, attempt to fight our way out.’
‘May I say a word on that, Corps Commander?’ General Zehender asked. ‘In the cavalry divisions we probably have enough transport left and enough fuel to get most of the troopers out of Buda. However, what are we going to do about the auxiliaries? There are over two thousand of these females left in the city. Now I know what all you gentlemen think of these “field mattresses”. Probably some of my younger officers have had personal experience of their undoubted charms and toughness’ – he coughed suddenly – ‘in the horizontal position.’
