The Germans had written off Budapest. Last week the queen city of the Danube was just something to be destroyed so that Vienna, 115 miles upriver, might be saved. The crisis of Budapest had become the crisis of the southeastern approaches to Germany itself.
Beleaguered Budapest was already nearly two-thirds surrounded by the plodding, artillery-heavy Red Army. But into the city at that late hour the Germans poured several SS divisions, reportedly some others from the Italian front. Their orders: fight in every room of every houseBudapest must disappear from the face of the earth before Russian troops may have...
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