Operation Konrad III, 1945: the last drive to relieve Budapest

On the morning of 19 January 1945 German tanks rolled into Dunapentele, a small town on the west bank of the Danube. In little more than a day the IV SS Panzer Corps had driven from the shores of Lake Balaton to the great river and split the Soviet front in Transdanubia in two. Upriver, inside encircled Budapest, the garrison had just abandoned Pest and blown the bridges behind it. For a few days it looked as though the panzers might reach them.²

Who won Operation Konrad III and why?

The Soviets won what mattered: Budapest was not relieved, and the city fell in February. The Germans won ground, reaching the Danube and retaking Székesfehérvár, but their armored divisions attacked without enough infantry, fuel or reserves, and the Soviet command kept feeding in fresh corps until the drive stalled at the Váli stream, short of the city.³

Background: a capital under siege

By Christmas 1944 the Red Army had encircled Budapest, trapping the German IX SS Mountain Corps and its Hungarian allies inside. Hitler forbade any breakout. Hungary mattered to him more than its capital did: by then, as the Institute of History in Budapest notes, the Third Reich got its oil essentially only from the Zala fields in western Hungary, and the US Army historian Earl Ziemke records that Hitler ranked the Hungarian oil fields as the most vital area on the whole Eastern Front. He sent every reserve he could find to Hungary.⁴

To Ziemke, nothing since Stalingrad compared in sheer horror with the siege that followed. The city's inhabitants were trapped with the garrison, supply by air dwindled to a trickle in the winter weather, and the defenders were pushed back house by house. Ziemke draws the comparison with the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad more than once.⁵ › Battle of Stalingrad, 1942

Konrad I and II

The first relief attempt, Konrad, opened on New Year's Day 1945 from the Tata and Komárom area west of the city, while bridgeheads on the far bank of the Danube covered its northern flank. The army group had picked the shortest road to Budapest, accepting that much of it ran through hills that were poor ground for tanks, to save time and fuel; the Institute of History counts that terrain among the reasons the attack bogged down. The IV SS Panzer Corps fought its way forward village by village, and on 6 January German infantry retook Esztergom on the Danube. But the Soviet commanders, Marshals Tolbukhin and Malinovsky, kept feeding in fresh units, and the attack was stopped around Bicske and Zsámbék.⁶

Konrad II followed from the Esztergom area on 9 or 10 January, with a thrust through the Pilis hills toward the northern edge of the capital. The SS men of the Wiking division got within 17 to 21 kilometers of Budapest, depending on the source: 17 by the Institute's count, 21 by Számvéber's. Once again the German command asked Hitler to let the garrison break out. He refused and ordered a bigger blow from the south instead, and over the next days the IV SS Panzer Corps was shifted south toward Lake Balaton.⁷

Armies and commanders

The attack was run by Army Group Balck, under General Hermann Balck, with Herbert Gille's IV SS Panzer Corps as its spearhead and Hungarian troops in support. Facing it was Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin's 3rd Ukrainian Front, which held a wide bridgehead west of the Danube between the river and the Vértes hills. The Hungarian historian Norbert Számvéber, whose study of the operation draws on Hungarian and German military archives, stresses an unusual feature: the first blow was made only by armored divisions and a cavalry brigade, with no infantry division at all.⁸

Konrad III also came at a bad moment for Berlin. The Red Army had just opened its great winter offensive on the Vistula, and the German front in Poland was collapsing. Guderian, the chief of the army general staff, was worried about having to divert still more forces to the south, Ziemke notes.⁹

The commanders' decisions

On the German side the aims were not the same. For the army group, Ziemke writes, getting a relief column into Budapest came first; Hitler's primary, perhaps only, concern was to push the front back to the Danube, with the oil fields of western Hungary in mind. By 22 January he had decided to send the Sixth SS Panzer Army to Hungary as well, a decision that both Ziemke and Számvéber place at that date.¹⁰

Hitler's choice of a blow from the south also cost time. The IV SS Panzer Corps had to be pulled out of the fighting near Esztergom and moved round to the northern end of Lake Balaton before it could attack again, while the garrison in Budapest held on.¹¹

The battle in phases

Breakthrough to the Danube

The panzers attacked on 18 January between Lake Balaton and Székesfehérvár. Surprise was complete. By the next day the leading battle group stood on the Danube at Dunapentele, today Dunaújváros, and the 3rd Ukrainian Front's defenses were cut in two. Without infantry, though, the Germans could not hold the Soviet forces they had bypassed and broken up; many of them escaped.¹²

Székesfehérvár and the Váli stream

The corps then turned north toward Budapest. On 22 January German troops, with Hungarian help, retook Székesfehérvár, one of the main transport hubs of Transdanubia, and the armored spearheads reached the Váli stream southwest of the capital. By then they had lost much of their early momentum. Over the next days they ground down the Soviet reserves thrown in against them, but at heavy cost in men of their own.¹³

Both Ziemke and Számvéber describe a command that did not work well. Ziemke writes that Balck and the army group commander, Otto Wöhler, came to see Gille's corps headquarters as unfit to run a large offensive, so that Balck had to go forward and take matters in hand himself; Számvéber names the personal rivalry between Balck and Gille as one of the things that made command harder.¹⁴

Turning point

The decisive days were 25 to 27 January. On 26 January Wöhler reported, according to Ziemke, that a fast breakthrough to Budapest was impossible because the Soviets had reinforced every likely point of attack. Számvéber reads the same moment differently: by 26 January, he argues, the 3rd Ukrainian Front could no longer stop the Germans by itself, and without the 23rd Tank Corps and the 104th Rifle Corps sent from the neighboring 2nd Ukrainian Front the panzers would probably have reached the inner ring around Budapest. Whether they could have broken through it is another question. He doubts that worn-out armored divisions, almost without infantry, could have fought their way through Soviet riflemen defending the suburbs.¹⁵

On 27 January Tolbukhin struck back against the side of the German salient, with the fresh corps now in line. When the first reports came in that afternoon, Hitler ordered the Budapest relief stopped. Számvéber judges that Balck had been right to deal first with the Soviet forces on his flank rather than dash for the city, and he sums up the failure in two words: weakness and delay. The attack started with too little force, above all too little seasoned infantry; it had poor air support; there were no reserves to exploit success; and supply of fuel, ammunition and food faltered from the first days.¹⁶

The two accounts describe the counterblow in slightly different terms. Ziemke has about a dozen Soviet rifle divisions, with strong armor behind them, striking the southeastern face of the German salient between the Danube and the Sárvíz canal. Számvéber splits it into two groups: in the south the 18th Tank Corps and six rifle divisions, in the north the 23rd Tank Corps with the 104th Rifle Corps, attacking on a broad front.¹⁷

Aftermath

The Soviet counteroffensive won back most of the ground the Germans had taken by early February, but not all of it. The Germans kept the stretch of the Margit Line between Székesfehérvár and Lake Balaton, the springboard from which they launched their last great offensive of the war in March 1945, with Sixth SS Panzer Army brought in from the Ardennes.¹⁸ › Battle of the Bulge

Hitler's order of 27 January told the garrison to hold Budapest until the hour of relief came; that hour, Számvéber writes, never came. The defenders were squeezed into an ever smaller pocket in Buda, crowded with wounded: about 10,000 at the end of January by the army group's count that Ziemke reports, about 11,000 by Számvéber's.¹⁹

Budapest was left to its fate. Hitler again refused a breakout, and only when the garrison was down to its last ammunition and food, split into two small pockets in Buda, did its commander order one. The attempt on the night of 11 February failed, and the battle for the city ended within days.²⁰

Krisztián Ungváry and Márton Ványai describe the breakout not as a planned operation but as an improvised, panicked flight straight into Soviet machine guns and artillery, made against Hitler's order to defend the city to the last round. Ziemke records that many men were killed coming out of the castle gates and that few got even as far as the suburbs.²¹

Legacy and memory

Számvéber's verdict on Konrad III is an operational draw. The Soviets prevented the relief of Budapest and, after hard fighting, took the Hungarian capital, which he counts as more of a political than a military success; the Germans had so weakened the 3rd Ukrainian Front that for a time it could only defend. In his reading that draw was, at this late stage of the war, something of a success for the Germans, who kept the initiative in Hungary.²²

Ungváry and Ványai judge the whole effort more harshly. After three relief attempts had failed, they argue, the defenders had no realistic chance even of partial success, and every week the fighting dragged on only lengthened the suffering and terror for soldiers and civilians alike.²³

It is a verdict that depends on where one stands. For the soldiers and civilians trapped in Budapest, the battles west of the city meant only that the siege went on. Ziemke's account, built on the German army group's war diaries, puts it in one flat sentence: the Budapest relief had failed. Hungarian historians have since rebuilt the battle from both sides' records, and the Institute of History in Budapest publishes maps of all three Konrad operations.²⁴ › The greatest battles of the Eastern Front