Siege of Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II

Review
“The Siege of Budapest is an important and exciting contribution to World War II history. The siege was a crucial event in the final year of the war. No other European capital--apart from Berlin and Warsaw--suffered a similar fate. It is a source of endless horror as well as fascination to read about how more than 800,000 civilians, including well over 100,000 Jews in a ghetto or in hiding, coped while German and Red Army soldiers engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the very buildings they inhabited.”--István Deák, Columbia University


Book Description
In the final six months of World War II, Germany and the Soviet Union focused on Hungary: Stalin demanded victory at all costs as a key to securing his European empire; Hitler ordered an unrelenting defense of Budapest in order to prolong his grip on Vienna and preserve the route to Berlin. Consequently, the siege of Budapest was one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the entire war.
Based on formerly inaccessible documents and several hundred interviews with Hungarian and German survivors, this is the first complete and unbiased account of the siege of Budapest. Street by street, day by day, Krisztián Ungváry describes the battle and its horrors in meticulous detail. One hundred and two days passed between the appearance of the first Soviet tank and the final capture of Buda Castle. More than 80,000 Soviet troops and 38,000 German and Hungarian soldiers were killed; about 38,000 Hungarian civilian lives were lost. Civilian casualties were extraordinarily high because the city’s 800,000 noncombatant residents were never evacuated. This book represents a massive effort of historical reconstruction, and a major contribution to the history of World War II.


About the Author
Krisztián Ungváry is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Ladislaus Löb is emeritus professor of German, University of Sussex.



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First published in Hungarian in 1998, Ungvary's account of the 100-day siege of Budapest is a gripping story of horror and courage. Though the daily news coverage of the war in Iraq and the street fighting in Baghdad show us the awfulness of urban warfare, it was during World War II in Budapest that modern warfare revealed just how terrible urban fighting could be. Stalin's and Hitler's armies met at the divided cities of Buda and Pest in December 1944 and dug in for a protracted and bitter struggle that would last until mid-February of the following year. When the city finally fell to the Soviet army, nearly 120,000 Soviet and German soldiers had died, along with 38,000 Hungarian civilians. Ungv ry (research fellow, Inst. for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution) has based his extraordinary tale on archival resources and hundreds of survivor interviews. This is the finest account of this most dreadful incident in a world war filled with dreadful incidents. Recommended for all collections.-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.


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