230. The Siege of Budapest
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Hello and welcome to Battleground 44 with me, Patrick Bishop.

Today we're going to be looking at a grim event that is all but absent from the Western European memory of the Second World War, a victim perhaps of the historiographical process that tends to see the story, or has tended to see the story, through the eyes of the Western armies overlooking seismic events in the East. Our subject is the Battle of Budapest, which raged from late October 1944 and lasted for 50 days.

until the Red Army finally captured the Hungarian capital. By that time, three-quarters of this beautiful city was in ruins and hundreds of thousands were dead. The casualties included 38,000 civilians, among them 15,000 Jews, murdered not by the Germans, but mainly by the Hungarian homegrown Nazis of the Arrow Cross.

With me to talk about all this is Adam Lipp-Boer, a historian, novelist and journalist who's married to a Hungarian and who knows the city intimately, having lived there for many years. His latest book is The Last Days of Budapest, Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940-1945. As the title suggests, it's not just about the battle and the siege, but it's a holistic account of the city's wartime experience. For

full of fascinating characters and extraordinary events, and told with the verve and piercing insight of a fine writer. It's out early next year, so a bit late for Christmas, but do go and get it. It's a fabulous read. Adam, welcome to the podcast. Well, we could devote a whole series to wartime Budapest, but today we're going to focus on the siege which began in late 1850.

1944. But before we start on that, could you sketch out for us Hungary's progress during the war? Hungary and Germany were allies, but the autocratic

longtime ruler of Hungary, Admiral Horthy, was by no means an enthusiastic Nazi, was he? And by the spring of 1944, he's trying to break free of Hitler's embrace. Yes, Hungary's story during the Second World War is one of ambivalence and wasted and lost opportunities, which ended, as you say, in the terrible climax of the siege and the savage brutality that erupted around that. But

But it's a much more complex story than most people realize. We, Britain, actually had a functioning embassy in Hungary until April 1941. I don't know where else we had an embassy with a country that was actually a fully paid up member of the Axis. Hungary joined the Axis with Italy, Germany and Japan in November 1940. Yet it always wanted to keep diplomatic relations with the West.

because its rulers, like 40, were quite Anglophile. And the whole, the ruling elite and much of the aristocracy was very Anglophile. And they always looked to England, to Britain, but unfortunately, their neighbors were Germany and Austria, so their neighbors were the Third Reich. So until that time, it's a story of

ambivalence. For example, at that time Hungary had a border with Poland and a lot of Polish soldiers, tens of thousands actually of Polish soldiers and refugees including thousands of Jewish refugees

came from Poland into Hungary. Some of the Polish soldiers stayed. Many of them were taken to the Yugoslav border and smuggled across the border and then went on to France and other countries to join the Free Polish Forces. All of this was happening with the knowledge of the Hungarians. They didn't stop it. Sometimes they impeded it. It drove the Germans berserk. The Poles, for example, long after Poland had fallen in September 1936,

In autumn 1939, the Poles had an embassy and a huge Polish organization in Budapest. And the Germans were always saying, arrest them, shut them down. You've got to stop this. But the Hungarians refused to do that. But then the key turning point was in April 1941, when the Germans invaded Yugoslavia from the north and Hungary allowed them to pass through, or rather Admiral Horthy

whose Hungary's ruler allowed the Germans to pass through to Yugoslavia, at which point the Hungarian Prime Minister, Pál Teleki, shot himself in the head, committed suicide, saying that they had betrayed Yugoslavia as they had, because only a few months earlier they'd signed a treaty of eternal friendship with Yugoslavia. So this isn't really anyone's idea of eternal friendship, that you allow the Germans to pass through your territory and invade them.

But it's really fascinating when we look at the British ambassador at the time called Owen O'Malley. He wrote a very detailed memoir about this period. And it's fascinating because on the day that the Germans came through, you know, they realized, OK, now the Brits, we can no longer have an embassy in a country that's

actively aiding the German, the Nazis, because before that, Hungary was not engaged and didn't actually enter the war properly until the summer of 1941 when it joined the invasion of the Soviet Union. Can we just fast forward a bit to the early spring of 1944?

Horthy is quite a far-sighted interpreter of events, isn't he? And he knows by this stage that the war is pretty much lost from the German point of view. And so he starts reaching out to the Allies, trying to get a separate peace or a separate agreement at least with them, which will, he hopes, spare Hungary from the vengeance of the eventually victorious West.

Yes, he has. And 1944 is a key moment because it's in March that the Nazis invade. But one reason that they invade is because all through 1943, he's been doing this secret diplomacy, much of it conducted through a British SOE, the Special Operations Executive, in Istanbul. It was a British SOE operation in Budapest.

run by a man called Basil Davidson, who was a former journalist for The Economist and other newspapers. They relocated to Istanbul, and Istanbul was the site, was the place where the Houthi government sent a diplomat called Laszlo Veres to try and negotiate a separate peace.

So all through the summer of 1943 and the autumn of 1944, these strange negotiations are going on, on the boat of the British ambassador. The Hungarian diplomat was actually ferried out to the boat at night with a couple of SOE officers. And it's really like a scene from a thriller to thrash out the terms of Hungary changing sides. And the terms were actually agreed.

that Hungary would change sides, that it would go over to the Allies essentially. But Horthy could not make the jump. He refused to make the jump to actually change sides, which was a catastrophe really because there was

There's a catastrophe for Hungary, and it's especially a catastrophe for Hungary's Jews because it had a substantial Jewish population, the last surviving substantial Jewish population in Europe. Depending on where you draw the borders, between half a million and six or seven hundred thousand Hungarian Jews are still alive at this point.

We'll come on to that in a moment, but eventually, I mean, the Javis know about this, and in October, their patience starts to run out, and basically, they overthrow Horthy and install their own man. That's Ferenc Chalassin, who's the leader of the Arrow Cross. Now, the Arrow Cross being a sort of

Hungarian wannabe Nazi outfit. They share all the basic same characteristics. They're totally pro-German, of course. They're very happy to see the Germans ruling Hungary. So they're not nationalists in that sense. And they're deeply, deeply anti-Semitic. So with their arrival, you start seeing what you describe in your book as a kind of reign of terror.

Yes. I mean, so what happened was, just to quickly loop back, Rift Court refused to change sides. The Germans knew all about it. And in March 1944, they invade because Horty's general staff, a lot of these senior officers...

were veterans from the First World War when they fought in the Austro-Hungarian army. They're very pro-German. They're feeding everything back to Germany. So Hitler knew everything about Hungary's attempts to change sides. And he said, right, that's not going to happen. We're going to invade. So they invade in March 1944. And then all through the summer, through the summer of 1944, half a million Hungarian Jews are sent to Auschwitz, most of whom are killed on arrival. And

And then Horthy stops the deportations because he's threatened by Roosevelt and others that essentially if you carry on with this, then we will charge you as a war criminal after the Second World War. So the Jews of Budapest are saved. They're still in the summer of 1944. There's still 200,000 Jews left.

And then exactly as you say, around October, in early October, Porti tries to change sides again, fails again, and the Arrowcross is installed. And then the real horror begins.

So this is a full-blooded murderous campaign, but it's not identical, is it, to the German industrial killing of the Holocaust. It's done in a more disorganized way. Well, it's two things go on. I mean, firstly, the deportations

restart from Budapest to Auschwitz and to other camps like Mauthausen. Many Hungarians were sent to Mauthausen, both involved in the whole panoply of the Nazi extermination and concentration camps. So the deportations restart towards the end of the year. At the same time, the Arrow Cross just have a reign of terror in Budapest. So anyone Jewish is liable to be, because of course all the Jewish people by then are

living in special houses they've all been relocated to special houses called yellow star houses where you know it's like a not exactly a ghetto they're not fully ghettoized yet in the in the autumn but they're all in special houses so the arrow cross knew where all the jews were and there's this long list of houses a couple of thousand houses that they that they're put into and

So they're just shooting people on sight or taking them off to be tortured to death in their cellars. And that carries on, and basically until the Russians arrive in January 1945. But it's also directed at Roma and Sinti people, and of course, any communists that they can find. Absolutely. But I think anyone who's been to Budapest, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners will have visited that city, will have walked along the Danube, and on the pest side of the river,

You see this incredibly moving and powerful composition called Shoes on the Danube Bank, which is 60 odd pairs of shoes of the time of the period cast in iron. And this is a memorial to the many, I think the figure is 3,500 that's often mentioned, who were shot on the banks of the Danube by the Arabians.

arrow cross and toppled into the river in that very, very cold winter of 1944 to 1945. So there's something particularly horrible and something particularly sadistic about the methods used by these arrow crossers.

cross terrorists yes they were sadistic and it's it's interesting it's sort of very macabrely if i'm not sure that interesting is the word but it's macabrely noticeable that in all the countries that were occupied by the nazis it was the local auxiliaries like the arrow cross in hungary or the local militias in lithuania and latvia in those places who were often much more sadistic

than the Nazis. In a way, for the Nazis, the Jews were regarded as intermentions, subhumans, they had to be exterminated or deported, meet a terrible fate. But it was kind of business-like for them, if business is the word. It wasn't so personal. But for the Arrow Cross, like the Latvian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliaries, they were much more sadistic because

They felt a fury and a hatred for the Jews that they dared to exist, basically, in their country. And this wasn't just a political thing, was it? You get a religious element to it as well, and that's personified by the grotesque

figure of Father Andras Kun, who's actually blessing these murderers as they go about their business. Yes, yeah, Father Andras Kun. He was a priest or a former priest, depending on your definition. He was one of the worst death squad leaders. And he used to say, in the name of Christ, fire before shooting at the Jews. But what you mentioned, the monument along the Danube,

It's a place of mourning and of great tragedy because that's exactly, it's there because that's one of the places where the Jews were shot into the river. There was other places near the Margaret Bridge, near the Chain Bridge, but that's one of the main places. And they have the shoes there because they were forced to take their shoes off because...

During the war, shoes had value. So the shoes would then be sold on the black market or even on the open market. If you were a market trader and someone turned up with a bag full of shoes to give you, you knew precisely where they had come from. And the way that they did it was very sadistic as well because they would

bind three people together and then shoot one in the back of the head and push them into the river so they would all get dragged down except occasionally people escaped not everyone that was forced into the river most of them but some people did survive you know the ropes broke or they swam free or sometimes people jumped in early because they knew that were going to happen and it's actually quite hard at night to hit a moving target in water

So a few people did survive. But it was horrific. It was, as you say, sadistic.

There are a few bright gleams of humanity in this very dark story. I'm thinking about the ordinary folk, non-Jews, who sheltered Jews either out of just their good nature or perhaps because they were getting some insurance against the day when the Allies arrived, the war clearly being lost at this point. But there are also two figures who really stand out as going to extraordinary lengths to give some explanation

assistance to the Jewish population. I think we all remember or know about Raoul Wallenberg, who was the Swedish special envoy in Budapest in July, who saved thousands of Jews, but also a much lesser known figure, Giorgio Palasco, who was an Italian official who also acted as Spanish consul there in Budapest. Tell us a bit about both of those, but particularly Palasco, who's a really fascinating and contradictory figure in many ways.

Yes, Wallenberg is reasonably well known to anyone that knows about the Second World War and the Holocaust. And of course, if they know anything about wartime Budapest, they've heard of him. Raoul Wallenberg was the scion

of the wallenberg family a very powerful banking dynasty who ran enskilde bank in sweden and skilled a bank was absolutely key to the to the german war effort because it was and skilled to help to arrange the sale of steel and other vital things that the germans needed but at the same time they were also doing exactly the same for the allies so as one american diplomat said i'm

of Enskilde Bank, they are hedging their pets very effectively. But Raoul Wallenberg came from that family. He knew Budapest. He'd been to Budapest before the war. And he was sent by the war refugee board to try and organize a rescue operation. He was an extremely courageous man. And he set up this whole operation where thousands of people were put under Swedish protection with what was called a Schutzpass. So the pass said that they were essentially a Swedish citizen and they were under Swedish protection.

I mean, it was all, in a way, it was a giant contract because there was no sort of real legal basis for this. But because the Arrow Cross government wanted to be recognized, it was very important for it that it was recognized by other countries. I don't think any other country actually recognized it other than Germany, perhaps, and one or two of its allies.

but it wanted to be recognized by the neutral countries. So there was this sort of paper game going on. Sometimes the Schutzpasses worked, sometimes they didn't. There was a Swiss diplomat called Karl Lutz who was doing exactly the same thing.

Karl Lütz was already in place in Hungary and then was very, very involved in the rescue operation, working very closely with the Jewish and the Zionist underground organizations to try and save people. And not as well known as Wallenberg, but should be. So Wallenberg was the key figure. He had the biggest operation. But as you rightly say, perhaps an even more fascinating figure was a man called Giorgio Polaska. Polaska.

was an Italian government official who was in Budapest and roaming around the Balkans to arrange food supplies for Italy. And he had actually fought with Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He was a fascist.

But people forget that there was a difference between the fascists and the Nazis, at least especially in the earlier years, in the 20s and the early 30s. Many Italian, even some conservative people, even some Jewish people in Italy were initially sympathetic to the fascists because they thought they were the way that it would help stop the Bolsheviks. And the fascists actually

at that stage didn't believe it wasn't based around blood. It was based around nation. So there were some Jewish fascists, there were some conservative-minded fascists. I mean, very small numbers. But because he'd been a fascist fighting with Franco,

He was nonetheless horrified at what he saw happening because he wasn't a Nazi. He was horrified at the anti-Semitism. It seems a bit contradictory, but it's a bit more complex, as I've tried to briefly lay out, than many people think. They weren't exactly the same thing.

So, after Italy changed sides in 1943, he was initially interned in Hungary as an enemy alien. Then he was released. And then he went to the Spanish embassy because Hungary said to him, you've got to leave. Hungary's on the side of the Germans and you're on the Italian side, so you're on the other side. We've interned you. You've got to get out. He had some protections. He was a government official. So, he went to the Spaniards and he said...

I fought with Franco. Give me a Spanish passport. And they said, sure. Okay, we'll get you a Spanish passport. So eventually he got his Spanish passport. And then what he did was he saw what was happening and he was so horrified that he also set up a protection organization

like Wallenberg and Karl Lux, and started issuing papers saying people were Spanish citizens. I mean, they were not Spanish citizens. Most of them had no connection to Spain whatsoever. It was all a giant bluff, but it worked. You know, what he realized was that in these extreme situations, you must act with supreme confidence. You must believe that you are representing the Spanish government.

And after a while, he was because the Spanish consul left, went to Vienna and then went back to Spain and said to him, I'll come to Vienna. I'll get you a visa to go back to Spain. He says, I'm not going anywhere. Giorgio Polasca said, I'm staying here. So he stayed there. He said, I am the consul general now. I started issuing more protection papers.

And in a way, it was bizarrely easier for him to negotiate with the Arrow Cross and build relationships with them because they thought Spain's fascists, are they going to be sympathetic to us? So Pulasco is going to get us recognized. Now, there was no chance of this whatsoever because even though Spain was fascist,

You know, Franco was not the same as the Arrow Cross. They weren't in Spain, you know, shooting Jews into the river and torturing them to death. So that was never going to happen. But it was all a bluff. And he did a very long interview with the Spielberg Shoah Foundation. And there's several instances in there where he just comes out with total bluffs like,

I've got several thousand Jews under Spanish protection. You don't touch them. Otherwise, all the Hungarians in Spain will be arrested. We know that there are as many Hungarians in Spain as there are Jews under Spanish protection in Budapest.

Now you protect them or they'll all be arrested in Spain. And then I'll do the same in South America. And then we'll tell all our South American neighbors to arrest all the Hungarians there. So the arrow crossed, you know, they weren't very smart people. They were savage, but they didn't really know anything about how many Hungarians there were in Spain or South America. They said, oh, all right then.

right then okay so it was just a complete bluff but it demanded incredible reserves of courage because you know you're going up against psychopaths with guns yes how interesting i presume there were only a couple of hundred hungarians if that in spain at the time yeah no it's all a giant bluff and he's facing these people down and what him and wallenberg and lutz used to do was when the trains uh in sort of november december when the deportations restarted

of the Budapest Jews, they would go down to the train station in their diplomatic cars and either hand out papers or find out who was on the list and grab them out. And there's a very vivid account

of Pulaska telling two kids, two children, one of these deportation things. You can imagine the screaming terror that's going on here with the SS and their barking dogs and the Arrow Cross gunmen and the sheer, you know, the mind-numbing, gut-wrenching fear of being put into that train. And he saw these two children and he told them, run over their children and get in that car, which is the Spanish diplomatic car.

And then a Nazi officer comes over and says, you know, get them out. They're coming with us. He says, no, they're not. Now they're on Spanish territory. You know, and Polaska was completely unarmed, just looking these people in the eye, saying, they're with me. And then Eichmann turned up, Eichmann himself, Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Hungarian Holocaust, the man who more than any other drove the extermination.

and saw what was happening and he just said, okay, leave it for now. We'll get them later. But can you imagine spending your days doing that? What you must feel when you go home in the evening?

after facing these murderers down with nothing, nothing, just your own self-confidence and bits of paper. Yes, I think the world ought to know more about Giorgio Polasco. Absolutely, yeah. And he was completely forgotten after the war. He went back to Italy and lived a quiet life. And then eventually, it's very moving actually, eventually in the 80s, because remember, Hungary was communist then. And under communism, you know, Hungary was communist from essentially 48 to 89. And under communism,

There was not really much discussion of the Holocaust as such. It was just kind of a Horthyite, a Nazi brutality, but you couldn't really discuss that much about what happened to the Jews specifically. And you didn't really want to start making a fuss about having foreign connections. But when things eased off in the 80s a bit, and everyone knew it was game over for communism, a group of Hungarian Jews eventually tracked him down. They found him in Sicily, and the story came out.

And he was given medals by the Italian government, and he was made a righteous among the nations, Yad Vashem. And, you know, he was quite

Quiet and unassuming man. Very few people have ever heard of him. We've heard of Wallenberg, rightly, but there was Wallenberg, there was Karl Lutz, there was Pulaska, there was others as well. There was Angelo Rotta, who was the papal nuncio, was a key figure in all of these rescue operations.

Virtually no one has ever heard of him. He was also extremely brave. He was kind of the leader of the neutral diplomats. And because he was the papal nuncio, representing the Pope, he could get to Horty quite easily. There was Portuguese diplomats. There was

people from the Red Cross as well. There's a whole story here of, as you say, among this terrible darkness, there was shards of light occasionally, beams of light sometimes. It's a relief to hear the Vatican was at least doing the right thing in this particular circumstance. I can say that as a Catholic who's often been appalled at the conduct of the church during the Second World War and after. It's a mixed picture, but it was

the vatican envoy but he wasn't disowned by the vatican you know they they didn't say stop but it was him as a person angelo rotter was was also a hero yeah okay we're going to take a break there we'll be back shortly to hear what else adam had to say

Okay, let's move on to the siege itself now. So at the end of October, the Red Army is at the gates of Budapest. The two commanders are Rodion Malinowski and Fyodor Tolbukhin. They fought all the way through the war up this point. They've

got amongst them an overwhelming force to carry out the siege. They've got about 180,000 troops against 80,000 on the German and Hungarian side who are defending Budapest, of course. And the quality of the defenders is pretty variable, to say the least. The Russians have got huge numbers of guns. They've got air superiority. But even so, it's not going to be an easy job, is it? This is going to be a major battle, particularly as in late November,

Hitler has ruled out any possibility of a withdrawal or a surrender. He's declared the city is going to be a festum, a fortress. So an epic battle is looming. Now, just on the geography of the place, anyone who's been to Budapest will have noticed that the east side is pretty flat. That's the pest side. But once you cross the Danube, you're in this...

kind of hilly knoll kind of stands up on the banks of the river, which could very easily become a very good defensible point. You're a commanding position. You can call down artillery fire or advancing enemy forces. This is the old city, and it's full of narrow winding streets, which could very easily get an infiltrating force bogged down. So tell us a little bit about how the battle developed.

Yeah, as you say, it's going to be very hard to capture Budapest for the reasons you outlined. There were quite a number of people in Hungary among the leadership that were thinking that they should surrender because they knew what was going to happen. But Hitler refused. He said, Budapest is a festung, it's a fortress city, and you will fight to the last man. So you've got the defenders are...

outnumbered by the Red Army and the Red Army is riding on its triumphs. I mean, it's swept through Eastern Europe, it's swept through Ukraine. They've got some Romanian soldiers with them as well. The defenders are completely outnumbered. But at the same time, Budapest, especially on the pest side, is very densely populated and it's very hard to capture that kind of territory. You know, it's street after street. There's apartment blocks with 50, 60 flats in each one sometimes. And

right next door to each other. There's a very high population density. So all of these apartment buildings, some of them are five or six stories high. So you can snipe down onto the advancing soldiers. You can fire artillery in, but to actually level the whole area would be incredibly difficult. And of course, the comparisons are drawn with Stalingrad as well. And some of the Soviet officers and generals had fought at Stalingrad.

But the sheer density of the urban terrain makes it very, very difficult to capture. And also, the Germans are fighting hard because a lot of them are in the SS and they know that what's going to happen to them if they get captured, they'll be shot. They won't be taken to prison of war camps. And anyway, being taken to prison of war camps, well, many POWs was a death sentence anyway. A lot of them didn't come back.

So they're fighting very, very hard. The Hungarians army is fighting with them. The Arrow Cross are not very much used. The Arrow Cross are mostly experienced in shooting people into the river. They're not so great at actually fighting in a real war. So it's

It's very dense and it's a very savage battle. I mean, there are days when they're fighting room by room, literally, you know, up and down a staircase. Buildings are in German hands one day, in Russian hands the next day, German hands again, moving backwards and forwards. And it's a very dirty war as well. People are being wounded, are being shot. Prisoners aren't always taken. The Soviets sacrifice a lot of their people. Someone who was a survivor recently,

of the war who was a teenage boy told me once that he was on the Buddhist side

And he looked over on the pest side and he could see the Russians. The river was frozen and the fire was coming into the Russians from the pest side, the Buddhist side across the river. So the Russians just pushed out a bunch of soldiers. He thought they were pretty drunk because they were staggering all over the place in their white uniforms, just essentially to see where the firing position was. They drew the fire. Half of them were killed. The rest staggered back. Then they put the artillery down on the river

German and Hungarian soldiers. I mean, the waste of life was just astonishing, especially on the Russian side. I mean, that's how the Red Army fought in the Second World War. Yes, indeed. And that's how the Russian still fight today, don't they? The descendants of the Red Army in the Donetsk area are doing exactly what their forebears did. Their commanders are sending them forward in the full knowledge that they're going to get annihilated.

But they'll be adding a little bit to the battle because they're drawing fire, which will identify the positions of the Ukrainians. So nothing has changed in that respect. Yeah, no, it's exactly the same thing.

And so it's, you know, it's savage. It's really savage fighting. And by Christmas time, the city is fully surrounded and fully under siege. There's shells raining in, mortars raining in, people basically living underground in the cellars. All the Jews by this time are in two ghettos. They're in the main ghetto around the big synagogue on Dohan Street.

where something like 80,000 people are crammed into less than half a square mile. There's almost nothing to eat. Everyone's suffering from what they call the Ukrainian disease, which is a particularly hideous form of dysentery. People are starving and freezing to death.

The other Jewish area is what they call the International Ghetto near the Margaret Bridge. These are the houses under Swiss and Swedish and Spanish protection. But by then, the Arrow Cross know that the game is up. So they're raiding these houses at night, dragging people out, still shooting them into the river. There's still about 100,000 Jewish people alive in the two ghettos and maybe 10,000 or 20,000 alive hidden in places or hiding under false papers.

But, you know, for the Hungarian citizens, the everyday Hungarian's life is horrific. There's nothing to eat. There's no heating. There's no electricity. People are basically surviving on whatever they've managed to stash before the real siege starts. Dead horses are all over the street, which are half frozen. People are hacking bits of meat off the dead horses, trying to cook that into some kind of soup.

I mean, it's really, it's a completely primeval situation. The whole city stinks of cordite and gunfire and gun smoke and the shells are raining in. It's, you know, if you step outside the front door, you've got no guarantee that you'll ever come back alive. And the Arrow Cross are raiding. They're dragging Jews and shooting them into the river. But also there was a small communist resistance movement.

and small left-wing resistance. Anyone caught by the Arrow Cross could expect to be savagely, savagely tortured. And I wouldn't even say what they were doing to the women. And then they just shot them outright. And also gypsies were being dragged off and deported as well. So it's hell. It's a

It must have occurred to you, Adam, as it occurred, I think, to all of us who are engaged in this kind of historical research, is what do you think was driving the Arrow Cross at this point? Because the game is up, isn't it? The war is only going to end one way, which is in history.

The defeat of the Germans and by extension, their defeat. So surely at this point, you think that your thirst for killing would actually be overshadowed by the desire to actually stay alive. Why weren't they just trying to stink away from the city any way they could?

It would have been possible. Any siege is never really complete, is it? We know this from our old days in Sarajevo. We were both there as reporters. I better just tell listeners that we're old mates. Adam and I, we go back a long way. And we were covering the Yugoslav wars together. So did you draw any conclusions when you were writing this book about that?

It's a mystery. And I think it's one of the great mysteries that historians have looked at, you know, like Christopher Browning with his book Ordinary Men, which showed how a fairly average German police battalion was enthusiastic participants in the Holocaust, you know, happily shooting Jews. Daniel Goldhagen's looked at this and Hitler's willing executioners. It's a great mystery. It's a philosophical question about the existence of evil. But it's the particular resonance that

for the siege of Budapest is that even after Pest has fallen and has been captured, liberated by the Russians, it's over. It's game over. It took another month or so for Buda to fall and to be captured. They're still after... The Red Army has captured Budapest

one side of the city, there's still Father Kuhn and his militias and others are going round to Jewish old people's homes and Jewish hospitals and dragging the people out and shooting them in the courtyard.

And these places still exist. The buildings are all there. And you go there, Patrick, and you see these memorials of these long lists of names. And you look at the dates, late January, early February. I mean, it's completely over. And they could not stop. They're still killing Jews.

I suppose it's a kind of bloodlust that just takes over. And also they know it's game up and they know that, you know, they're either going to die in the battle or, well, actually they didn't all die. Quite a lot of them managed to get away and go to South America or Munich or wherever. But they just could not stop. Yeah, I would say that there's a bit of a difference between what's going on there and what was happening with this notorious Hamburg attack.

police unit, these ordinary men who just switched from being policemen to being mass murderers, they would go about their work. There were no sanctions on them if they actually said, no, this is the astonishing thing. If you'd actually refused to go and shoot down these women, Jewish women and children into pre-dug graves, it turned out they wouldn't actually have been punished at all if they'd refused to carry out these orders.

They might have been humiliated. They might have been given some lowly task to do, like working in the kitchens or cleaning the latrines or whatever. But they wouldn't have been shot for disobeying this order or refusing to carry out this order. So I think there's a difference between just getting on with the business of murdering civilians without any huge enjoyment and just thinking, okay, that's what I've been told to do, so I'm going to do it.

And as you described so brilliantly here, the way the arrow cross operated. So even though the end is nigh, they know that they still find the energy and the enjoyment, I suppose, of tracking down Jews and killing them.

Yeah, I mean, that's the great mystery. I mean, it sort of renders me inarticulate because I don't really understand it. The other great question, of course, which I touch on, and I think it's something that other historians and writers could look at, is where was the army and where was the police and where was the gendarmerie? Because you had the regular army,

You had a police force and you had a gendarme, which was like the National Paramilitary Police Force. The gendarme was key in the Holocaust. They were basically rounding up the Jews and putting them in the ghetto and onto the trains. But you had other institutions in the country. And the Harrow Cross were quite small in number. There was a few thousand of them. Some of them were teenagers. They were literally these feral, murderous teenagers. It would have been quite easy to stop them, to just shoot them or deploy some army units to...

Okay, we'd better move on now to the end piece, if you like. So it's very urgent to get this thing over with, isn't it, from Stalin's perspective I'm talking about.

Yalta is coming up. This is a big conference which is going to sort out post-war Europe between the big three, between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. Obviously, Stalin wants Hungary to be in the Soviet sphere of influence, and that's more or less agreed in advance by the participants. And that indeed is how it turns out after the conference concludes in early February. So,

Just in time for the conference, the Red Army does eventually take the whole city. Can you tell us something about the aftermath of that? How many Germans get away? How does life under the Soviets differ from life under the Germans for the inhabitants?

Yes, well, the Germans attempted to have what they called a breakout, the Germans and the Hungarians, to come down from the castle, come down Castle Hill into a space called Sena Square. And in fact, the other day, I walked down that road where they had the breakout. All of these places are still there, trying to imagine what it must have been like. But of course, there's only one way for them to break out, and the Russians are waiting. So they just turn the street around.

which is now called Ostrom Street, Seed Street, goes down the hill from the castle, down to the flatter part of Buda, into a charnel house. They just, they mortar it, they shell it, they shoot them. Most of the people in the breakout were killed. Very few made it across the lines and to get out. Some of them, you know, many Germans were captured and then were subsequently sent to Siberia. Some came back, some didn't. But then what happened, of course,

And was the start of the communist takeover. So there was an election soon after the liberation, the capture of the city. And the biggest party was called the smallholders. And the smallholders won the election, but they weren't really allowed to take power. And behind the scenes, the communists are maneuvering. I mean, when you've been invaded by Russia, you know that essentially you're going to end up being a communist party.

And the Moscow, there'd been a lot of Hungarian communists in Moscow and they all came back. And there was a bit of a split actually because between what they called the national communists who wanted to make their own kind of Hungarian version of communism and the Moscow communists who were installed by Stalin. And of course, the Moscow communists won. There was no means for them to.

to, you know, if there's no means of stopping them, the first thing they do is they take over the interior ministry and the police force. And then, you know, soon after by sort of 1948 or so, hundreds of communist countries. So rather as in Poland, liberation doesn't really mean very much, does it? In terms of the survivors inheriting a new political situation where they might actually get the things that they were hoping for.

some degree of freedom and security and independence. All right, I think we should finish there. It's been lovely talking to you, Adam, and great hearing about the book. We've only just scratched the surface. So go out and get it when it appears at the end of January, I believe, The Last Days of Budapest, Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940 to 1945 by Adam Labor. Great having you on, Adam. Thank you. Thanks, Patrick.

Okay, great stuff. See you on Friday for another episode of Battleground Ukraine. And of course, we'll be back the following Wednesday with another episode of 44, looking back at the events of 80 years ago.