Fortress Budapest 1944–1945
Despite its massive scale and brutality, the Siege of Budapest remains one of the most overlooked events of WWII
Serious shortcomings were obvious from much earlier. On the skies of Britain and outskirts of Moscow. But at Stalingrad, it became evident that the German war machinery is not the unstoppable force that it was thought to be. After months of fighting in rubles of the city on the Volga, the German VI Army was encircled, left without ammunition, starved, and finally annihilated. Although it was a crushing defeat in terms of arms and manpower, its psychological effect is something that the Wermacht never recovered from.
Here, at Stalingrad, Hitler promoted his disastrous strategy of not allowing the withdrawal of his troops even when defeat becomes a certainty. The strategy that he called Festung (Fortress). On the other hand, the Red Army applied its massively successful tactic of large-scale deception for the first time. In upcoming years, as the Soviets plowed their way through the steppes of the Eastern front, Hitler will, with little to no avail, declare dozens of cities and towns fortresses. One of the last such places was the Hungarian capital, Budapest.
