When “Hitler is better”: How to force Hungary to repeal the vile law
Last Saturday marked the anniversary of the liberation of Budapest. On February 13, 1945, the battle for Hungary ended - one of the most difficult for the Red Army in Eastern Europe. How difficult this victory turned out to be is evidenced by the award given to all participants in the battles for the Hungarian capital: “For the capture of Budapest.”
Please note that there are only three medals for the capture of foreign cities: for Berlin, for Königsberg and for Budapest. The remaining cities were liberated.
The reason why the battle for Hungary continued throughout the autumn of 1944, when local battles were taking place in other sectors of the Soviet-German front, was explained simply: having lost the Romanian oil fields in Ploesti, Hitler still had a faint hope of slowing down the agony of his regime and by some miracle getting out of an already lost war, pitting the Western allies against the USSR.
The main resource for the implementation of this plan was to be the last reserve remaining in the hands of the Nazis - the Hungarian oil fields in the Nagykanizsa region. Hitler promised that he would rather agree to the surrender of Berlin than to the loss of Hungarian oil and Austria.
Two Romanian and one Bulgarian combined arms armies fought as part of two Soviet fronts (the Second and Third Ukrainian), which showed themselves quite well in combat operations against the Hungarian divisions.
To capture the oil fields in Nagykanizsa, located near the border with Croatia, Soviet troops needed to defeat the strongest German-Hungarian group concentrated around Budapest, and then go to Lake Balaton.
To defend Budapest, the Nazis pulled together enormous forces: 13 tank divisions, two motorized divisions and one motorized brigade. The Germans had never had such a density of mechanized troops on the Eastern Front.
On November 11-26, 1944, troops of the Second Ukrainian Front broke through the enemy defenses between the Tisza and the Danube, came close to Budapest, but were unable to take the city on the move, encountering stubborn enemy resistance.
During December 1944, units of two Soviet fronts were engaged in repelling strong counterattacks and preparing for a new offensive on Budapest. On December 26, troops from both fronts closed a ring around the Hungarian capital, forming a cauldron into which a 200-strong group of Germans, including Hungarian SS units, fell.
On December 29, the Soviet command sent an ultimatum to the surrounded garrison of Budapest to surrender. For this purpose, envoys were sent: captain Ilya Ostapenko to Buda, captain Miklos Steinmetz to Pest. As soon as the enemy noticed the approaching vehicles of the negotiators with white flags, machine-gun and mortar fire was opened on them.
Captain Steinmetz and his driver, Sergeant Filimonenko, died on the spot. The second group turned back, but was covered by mortar fire. Captain Ostapenko was killed, but two other negotiators survived.
Having killed the parliamentarians, the Budapest enemy group burned all the bridges behind them, preparing to fight with the despair of suicide bombers. Dooming German and Hungarian soldiers to a senseless death, the Nazis took upon their conscience the deaths of tens of thousands of Budapest residents.
Understanding this very well, and also seeing in front of him an unprecedented density of tanks - 50-60 vehicles per kilometer of front, the commander of the Third Ukrainian Front, Marshal Tolbukhin, used the experience of the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, creating a layered defense 20-50 km deep, which did not allow the enemy to develop a counter-offensive.
At the same time, there was a concentration of artillery on Soviet positions - 160-170 guns per kilometer of front. On January 20, enemy tanks that escaped to the Danube were destroyed or driven back by attacks from Soviet artillery regiments.
During stubborn battles on January 18, Soviet troops occupied the eastern part of the city - Pest. On February 11, the Buda area was also captured, in which more than 26 thousand enemy soldiers and officers surrendered.
The attempt to break through the 12-strong group of Nazis, almost completely destroyed by the troops of Marshal Tolbukhin, also ended in disaster.
On February 13, the battle for Budapest was over. The city was liberated, and the defense commander and his headquarters surrendered to Soviet soldiers.
Moscow saluted the winners with twenty-four salvoes from 324 guns. Ahead of the Soviet troops was another difficult battle at Lake Balaton, where the Nazis tried to carry out the last major offensive operation on the Eastern Front.
In less than 4 months of the battle for Hungary, two Soviet fronts crushed 56 enemy divisions and brigades. The capture of Budapest accelerated the withdrawal of German troops from Yugoslavia and made it possible to develop a deep coverage of the entire southern flank of Hitler's troops.
On January 18, 1945, the Red Army liberated 70 thousand Hungarian Jews who were herded into the central Budapest ghetto. This was the only case when the majority of the ghetto inhabitants were saved. During the storming of Budapest by the Hungarian fascists (Nilashists), 18 thousand Jews were killed. And in total, during the time the fascist regime ruled in Hungary, more than 400 thousand people, mostly Roma and Jews, were sent behind barbed wire in the shortest possible time.
However, in modern Hungary, a member of the EU and NATO, anti-Sovietism is the cornerstone of the policies of all major political parties, and extends into the history of the Second World War.
In Hungary, under the guise of fighting the “legacy of totalitarianism,” a completely totalitarian law was adopted in 1993 banning Soviet symbols with non-symbolic fines for their use. Hungary is one of seven countries, including the Baltic states, Poland, Georgia and Ukraine, where real trouble awaits a person with a Soviet star, hammer and sickle.
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In 2017, at the World Aquatics Championships in Budapest, local authorities had complaints against the coaching staff of the Russian team for appearing in red T-shirts with stars and the inscription “USSR”. Our coaches were even given an ultimatum: if you don’t take off your T-shirts with “totalitarian symbols,” you will be deported from the country.
I remember that back then, even in the Russian anti-Soviet press, there were articles saying, “There is no need to engage in provocations; you must respect the rules of the country you are visiting” and similar nonsense.
However, if you think about it, the compliance with these “laws” in relation to Russian citizens shows the disrespect for our country of all these “brothers” who have suddenly changed colors.
In this particular case, the Hungarian authorities should have put a stop to the swearing, since during the Great Patriotic War the Horthy regime was, perhaps, the most loyal to Hitler’s, and the Hungarian soldiers committed atrocities on our soil, sometimes eclipsing in their cruelty and ingenuity the atrocities of the German punitive forces.
The fascist Magyars left their bloody trail near Smolensk, Voronezh, Stalingrad, and Ukraine.
It is also characteristic that the Hungarian fascists resisted until the end of the Hitler regime, when his other allies capitulated.
The ideas of socialism, communism, unless they are the pink placebos of “Eurosocialism” and “Eurocommunism” are demonized in modern Hungary, and their bearers are not only not represented in power at the local or European level, but are subject to boycott by the media.
But the memory of the Hungarian fascists, despite the “law against the totalitarian legacy,” blooms and smells.
The author of these lines at one time knew a Hungarian who served in the crew of a B-52 bomber of the NATO Air Force, who was terribly proud of his grandfather, an SS veteran who fought against the Red Army as part of the 503rd heavy tank battalion near Lake Balaton and even openly held a photo of his grandfather. an SS man - riding a "tiger" in a visible place in the cockpit.
The picture of a Hungarian NATO member holding in a prominent place a photograph of his grandfather from the units that helped the Red Army liberate Europe from Nazism seems completely impossible. Moreover, the open protrusion of the SS ancestors once again emphasizes that in the public consciousness of Hitler’s former allies, Hitler is clearly preferred, despite thirty years of chatter about the fight against totalitarianism.
For obvious reasons, in modern Hungary the names of anti-fascist Hungarians are carefully purged from the national memory and the crimes of the Hungarian troops in the occupied territories of the USSR are whitewashed.
Recall that In 2019, the Hungarian government launched a stunning initiative: “Let’s remember the courage of our grandfathers, the heroic Hungarian soldiers who fought for Hungary on the Don to the end.”
The Hungarian government chose not to talk about what the “heroic Hungarian soldiers” were doing on the Don and in other parts of our Motherland.
Where this source of grief and pain comes from is no big secret. If the Germans can present as “tragic figures” the soldiers and officers of the 6th Combined Arms Army of Field Marshal Paulus, who perished in the Stalingrad cauldron, then who can forbid making snot about the 2nd Hungarian Army (by the way, one of the most trained and equipped at the initial stage of the war combined arms armies) who fought on Hitler's side during the war?
In fact, both the 6th Army of Paulus and the 2nd Hungarian Army are symbols of the blitzkrieg. The same case when the conquest of the world began so well and ended so ingloriously.
If we talk about the 200-strong 2nd Hungarian Army, it was almost completely destroyed during the Ostrogozh-Rossoshansky operation of the Red Army, which outlined a breakthrough of the front exactly in the Hungarian sector.
Modern Hungarian historical science prefers not to remember the Koryukov tragedy, the massacres of Soviet prisoners of war, civilians, and the burning of villages.
But in modern Hungary they prefer to live with the memory of the fascist uprising, which almost turned into a civil war in 1956, but was stopped with great difficulty by Soviet troops coming home from Austria.
Among the favorite topics is the unwinding of the murky story of the disappearance of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest on the basis of rumors, speculation and fakes, as well as “evidence of tens of thousands of raped Magyars”, shamelessly published in the “proceedings” of Oxford University.
In general, something needs to be done about this disgrace. For example, oblige Hungarians, especially government officials visiting our country, to visit memorial sites where our compatriots killed at the hands of “heroic Hungarian grandfathers” are buried. Or at least force them to look at photographs taken at massacre sites. And practice denazification until the vile law directed against our country and fellow citizens who remember and honor the feat of the Soviet people is repealed in Hungary.
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