Hungarian units on the eastern front. Hungarian occupation forces in the USSR

A message on VO that the Hungarian Defense Minister was visiting Voronezh aroused interest. Some of the readers expressed surprise both at this fact and at the fact that there are burial places of Hungarian soldiers in the region.

We will tell you about one of these burials.

Actually, there was already a story about him, three years ago, but everything changes, people come, and it’s not always possible to keep up with everything. So let's repeat.

Already on June 27, 1941, Hungarian planes bombed Soviet border posts and the city of Stanislav. On July 1, 1941, units of the Carpathian group with a total number of more than 40,000 people crossed the border of the Soviet Union. The most combat-ready unit of the group was the Mobile Corps under the command of Major General Bela Danloki-Miklos.

The corps included two motorized and one cavalry brigades, support units (engineering, transport, communications, etc.). The armored units were armed with Italian Fiat-Ansaldo CV 33/35 tankettes, Toldi light tanks and Hungarian-made Csaba armored vehicles. The total strength of the Mobile Corps was about 25,000 soldiers and officers.

By July 9, 1941, the Hungarians, having overcome the resistance of the 12th Soviet Army, advanced 60-70 km deep into enemy territory. On the same day, the Carpathian group was disbanded. The mountain and border brigades, which could not keep up with the motorized units, were supposed to perform security functions in the occupied territories, and the Mobile Corps became subordinate to the commander of the German Army Group South, Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt.

On July 23, Hungarian motorized units launched an offensive in the Bershad-Gaivoron area in cooperation with the German 17th Army. In August, near Uman, a large group of Soviet troops was surrounded. The surrounded units were not going to give up and made desperate attempts to break through the encirclement. The Hungarians played almost the decisive role in the defeat of this group.

The Hungarian Mobile Corps continued its offensive along with the troops of the German 11th Army, participating in heavy fighting near Pervomaisk and Nikolaev. On September 2, German-Hungarian troops captured Dnepropetrovsk after fierce street fighting. Hot battles broke out in the south of Ukraine in Zaporozhye. Soviet troops repeatedly launched counterattacks. So, during the bloody battle on the island of Khortitsa, an entire Hungarian infantry regiment was completely destroyed.

Due to the increase in losses, the warlike fervor of the Hungarian command decreased. On September 5, 1941, General Henrik Werth was removed from his post as Chief of the General Staff. His place was taken by infantry general Ferenc Szombathely, who believed that it was time to curtail the active military operations of the Hungarian troops and withdraw them to protect the borders. But it was possible to achieve this from Hitler only by promising to allocate Hungarian units to guard supply lines and administrative centers in the rear of the German army.

Meanwhile, the Mobile Corps continued to fight at the front, and only on November 24, 1941 did its last units leave for Hungary. Corps losses on the Eastern Front amounted to 2,700 killed (including 200 officers), 7,500 wounded and 1,500 missing. In addition, all tankettes, 80% of light tanks, 90% of armored vehicles, more than 100 vehicles, about 30 guns and 30 aircraft were lost.

At the end of November, “light” Hungarian divisions began arriving in Ukraine to perform police functions in the occupied territories. The headquarters of the Hungarian “Occupation Group” was located in Kyiv. Already in December, the Hungarians began to be actively involved in anti-partisan operations. Sometimes such operations turned into military clashes that were quite serious in scale. An example of one such action is the defeat of the partisan detachment of General Orlenko on December 21, 1941. The Hungarians managed to surround and completely destroy the enemy base. According to Hungarian data, about 1,000 partisans were killed.

At the beginning of January 1942, Hitler demanded that Horthy increase the number of Hungarian units on the Eastern Front. Initially, it was planned to send at least two-thirds of the entire Hungarian army to the front, but after negotiations the Germans reduced their demands.

To be sent to Russia, the 2nd Hungarian Army was formed with a total strength of about 250,000 people under the command of Lieutenant General Gustav Jan. It included the 3rd, 4th and 7th Army Corps (each with three light infantry divisions, similar to 8 regular divisions), the 1st Tank Division (actually a brigade) and the 1st Air Force (actually a regiment ). On April 11, 1942, the first units of the 2nd Army departed for the Eastern Front.

On June 28, 1942, the German 4th Panzer and 2nd Field Armies went on the offensive. Their main goal was the city of Voronezh. The offensive included troops of the 2nd Hungarian Army - the 7th Army Corps.

On July 9, the Germans managed to break into Voronezh. The next day, south of the city, the Hungarians reached the Don and gained a foothold. During the battles, the 9th Light Division alone lost 50% of its personnel. The German command set the task for the 2nd Hungarian Army to liquidate three bridgeheads remaining in the hands of Soviet troops. The most serious threat was posed by the Uryvsky bridgehead. On July 28, the Hungarians made their first attempt to throw its defenders into the river, but all attacks were repulsed. Fierce and bloody battles broke out. On August 9, Soviet units launched a counterattack, pushing back the advanced units of the Hungarians and expanding the bridgehead near Uryv. On September 3, 1942, Hungarian-German troops managed to push the enemy back across the Don near the village of Korotoyak, but in the Uryv area the Soviet defense held out. After the main forces of the Wehrmacht were transferred to Stalingrad, the front here stabilized and the battles took on a positional character.

On January 13, 1943, the positions of the 2nd Hungarian Army and the Italian Alpine Corps were attacked by troops of the Voronezh Front with the support of the 13th Army of the Bryansk Front and the 6th Army of the Southwestern Front.

The very next day, the Hungarian defense was broken through, and panic gripped some units. Soviet tanks entered the operational space and destroyed headquarters, communications centers, ammunition and equipment warehouses. The introduction of the Hungarian 1st Panzer Division and elements of the German 24th Panzer Corps did not change the situation, although their actions slowed the pace of the Soviet advance. During the battles in January-February 1943, the 2nd Hungarian Army suffered catastrophic losses.

All tanks and armored vehicles were lost, in fact all artillery, the level of personnel losses reached 80%. If this is not a defeat, then it’s difficult to call it anything else.

The Hungarians have inherited a great legacy. To say that they were hated more than the Germans is to say nothing. The tale that General Vatutin (low bow to him and eternal memory) gave the order “not to take Hungarians prisoner” is absolutely not a fairy tale, but a historical fact.

Nikolai Fedorovich could not remain indifferent to the stories of the delegation of residents of the Ostrogozhsky region about the atrocities of the Hungarians, and, perhaps in his hearts, threw out this phrase.

However, the phrase spread piece by piece with lightning speed. Evidence of this is the stories of my grandfather, a soldier of the 41st joint venture of the 10th division of the NKVD, and after being wounded - 81st joint venture of the 25th Guards. division page. The fighters, being aware of what the Hungarians were doing, took this as a kind of indulgence. And they treated the Hungarians accordingly. That is, they were not taken prisoner.

Well, if, according to my grandfather, they were “especially smart,” then the conversation with them was also short. In the nearest ravine or forest. “We teased them... When they tried to escape.”

As a result of the battles on Voronezh land, the 2nd Hungarian Army lost about 150 thousand people, virtually all its equipment. What was left was already rolled out on the soil of Donbass.

Today, in the Voronezh region there are two mass graves of Hungarian soldiers and officers.

This is the village of Boldyrevka, Ostrogozhsky district, and the village of Rudkino, Khokholsky district.

More than 8 thousand Honved soldiers are buried in Boldyrevka. We haven’t been there, but we will definitely visit for the 75th anniversary of the Ostrogozh-Rossoshan operation. As well as the town of Korotoyak, the name of which is known to virtually every family in Hungary. As a symbol of grief.

But we stopped in Rudkino.

Some people find it unpleasant that cemeteries of Hungarians, Germans, and Italians exist like this. So well-groomed.

But: we Russians do not fight with the dead. The Hungarian government maintains (albeit with our own hands) the cemeteries of its soldiers. And there is nothing so shameful about this. All within the framework of a bilateral intergovernmental agreement on the maintenance and care of military graves.

So let the Hungarian warriors lie, under marble slabs, in a rather beautiful corner of the Don bend.

As an edification to those who suddenly think of utter stupidity.

Hungarian foot columns in the Don steppes, 1942

As soon as the Germans entered Voronezh (half of the city on the right bank), 2 divisions of Hungarians carried out a massacre of the population. What did the massacre mean in the literal sense: they cut off people’s heads, sawed people with saws, pierced their heads with crowbars, burned them, raped women and children. Captured Russian soldiers were subjected to terrible torture before death. Having learned about these atrocities, the Soviet command unofficially ordered the Magyars not to take prisoners.
After 212 days of fighting for Voronezh, Soviet troops liberated the city and captured 75,000 Nazis.
Of the two divisions consisting of Hungarians, there was not a single prisoner. There are 160,000 Hungarians left lying in the Voronezh land.

Complete collapse of the 2nd Hungarian Army under Admiral Horthy. 150 thousand Magyars died near Voronezh. Of these, 10 thousand are on the territory of the Storozhevsky bridgehead

After the war, during the creation of the Warsaw Pact, which included Hungary, the USSR quietly “silenced” those events and did not award the city the title of HERO. Only in 2008 was it awarded the honorary title “City of Military Glory”.

The fascists and Nazis lost 320,000 soldiers and officers in these battles. 26 German divisions, the 2nd Hungarian Army (entirely) and the 8th Italian Army, as well as Romanian units.

By the way, an interesting point: Hitler, in order to support the fighting troops, sent grenadiers from the regiment in which he fought in the First World War as reinforcements (these selected two-meter soldiers are often shown in ceremonial German films). So, the regiment that arrived at the front line two days later had only 8 people alive.

Hungarian cavalry

Voronezh disaster during World War II as the decline of Great Hungary

There is practically not a single family in Hungary that was not affected by the Voronezh tragedy, and this is understandable, since out of the entire 250 thousand-strong Hungarian army that fought on the Soviet-German front, according to various sources, from 120 to 148 thousand soldiers and officers died.
However, these loss figures are not complete, the real losses of the Magyars still remain unknown, not many of them were captured on the Don, only 26 thousand. It was they who managed to survive, as well as those few fugitive deserters who were able to secretly make their way back home on foot, mainly from them, most of the Hungarian population learned that Hungary no longer had an army.
The same army of which they were all proud and with the help of which they were going to restore the so-called “Great Hungary”.

What were they all missing? Why was it sent in the summer of 1942? such a huge number of their youth to certain death? Hungary is located almost in the very center of Europe, wonderful climate, beautiful nature, blooming orchards, wheat fields, satiety, comfort and prosperity reigned all around, why invade a foreign country?
The main reason for the growth of Hungarian revanchism at that time was that after the First World War, Hungary, as the defeated side, suffered significant territorial and economic losses; according to the so-called Treaty of Trianon, the country lost about two-thirds of its territory and population. The terms of this treaty also led to the fact that almost 3 million Hungarians became foreign nationals, that is, they found themselves outside their country.

At the end of the 30s, the Germans, taking advantage of the wounded national feelings of the Hungarians, promised the Horthy government to help increase the territory of Hungary in exchange for its accession to the Axis countries.
And they kept their word, as a result of the so-called infamous “Munich Agreement”, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, in the period from 1938 to 1940, Hungary received some territories that it lost as a result of the First World War, mainly from Czechoslovakia occupied by Nazi Germany , Yugoslavia and even Romania, without directly participating in military conflicts with these countries.

However, for all these territorial increments, Hungary had to pay and now pay with the lives of its citizens, as the saying goes, “free cheese only comes in a mousetrap.”
With the outbreak of World War II, it was no longer enough for the Germans to receive only raw materials and food from Hungary.
In the very first months of the attack on the USSR, the Germans demanded that Budapest allocate Hungarian national troops for the Eastern Front.

In July 1941 Horthy allocated a separate corps for the Wehrmacht or, as this group of Hungarian troops was also called, the Carpathian group with a total number of more than 40 thousand soldiers and officers.
During four months of fighting with Soviet troops, the corps lost over 26 thousand people. of which 4 thousand were killed, almost all of their tanks, 30 aircraft and more than 1000 vehicles.
In December 1941, the Hungarian “conquerors”, beaten and frostbitten, returned home; they were very lucky, almost half of them managed to survive. True, the desire to create a “Greater Hungary” has noticeably diminished among many of them.
However, Horthy was deeply mistaken in believing that it would be enough to get by with a one-time dispatch of troops to the Russian front; later Germany demanded from its ally more active actions to participate in the war, and now in the summer of 1942. Hungary sent the 2nd Hungarian Army to the Eastern Front.

The 2nd Army included 8 fully equipped divisions, in addition to the Hungarians, formations and units of the army were also staffed by peoples whose territories had previously been occupied and included in the “Greater Hungary”: Romanians from Transylvania, Slovaks from Southern Slovakia, Ukrainians from Transcarpathia and even Serbs from Vojvodina.
At the beginning, everything went well for them, they advanced in the wake of the Germans, and during short stops, snacking on palenki after a glass, they chose plots of land for their future estates, because the Germans promised every Hungarian soldier who distinguished himself at the front a large plot of land in the conquered territories of Russia and Ukraine.
True, they could not fight against the regular troops of the Red Army on their own, without the close support of the German army, so the Germans mainly used them in battles against partisans or as security units in the rear, here they were real masters, in the sense of mocking civilians and Soviet prisoners of war.

Cases of robberies and facts of violence against civilians, everything that they did in the territories of the Voronezh, Lugansk and Rostov regions, many elderly people cannot forget to this day.
The Honveds were especially cruel to the captured Red Army soldiers, the Germans were much more tolerant of the prisoners, where did the Modyar Honveds have such anger and hatred towards the captured Red Army soldiers?

This desire to mock defenseless, unarmed people, probably due to the fact that on the battlefield with weapons in their hands, these “heroes” simply had no chance of defeating their opponent in a real battle, since the Russians, and then the Soviets, always crushed them and have been put to flight since the First World War.

In the autumn of 1942, the rear walks for the entire Hungarian army ended, the Germans drove all the Hungarians into the trenches on the front line, before which the Germans also took away from their allies all the warm clothes that their compatriots had sent them from Hungary.
And only then did the Magyars finally understand that now they would have no time for jokes. That they would no longer face poorly armed partisans or defenseless prisoners of war.
Now ahead of many of them lay oppressive uncertainty and painful death from the cold and massive artillery fire of the advancing Red Army.

And soon on January 12, 1943, all their “conquests” ended ingloriously, this is when Soviet troops crossed the Don River across the ice and during the last phase of the Battle of Stalingrad in the Ostrogozh-Rossoshansk offensive operation, in the period from January 13 to 27, 1943, they completely destroyed and captured all the Hungarian and Italian troops allied to the Nazis on the upper Don.

All those who survived and escaped the cauldron rushed to the west. A disorderly retreat of the remnants of the Hungarian army began, which turned into a widespread and general, shameful flight.
True, it was very problematic to escape, all the transport was without fuel, the horses were all eaten, the conquerors walked, day and night, in the bitter cold, most of them died, the remains of the Hungarian soldiers were simply covered with snow, like a white shroud.

During their retreat to the west, the Hungarians lost most of their equipment and weapons.
The loss of life, for a country with a population of 10 million people, was truly catastrophic and irreparable.
Among the dead was the eldest son of the Kingdom's regent, Miklos Horthy. This was the largest defeat of the Hungarian army in the entire history of its existence; in just less than 15 days of fighting, Hungary lost half of its armed forces.
The defeat at Voronezh had even a much greater resonance and significance for Hungary than Stalingrad did for Germany.
Many of the then occupiers nevertheless received their plots of land in Russia as they were promised, but they received them only as their graves.
As a result of the Second World War, Hungary not only lost all the territories conquered with the help of Nazi Germany, but also lost part of those that it had before the war; the history of the Second World War once again showed what happens to those states that want to improve their position at the expense of their neighbors.

Three months after Germany’s attack on the USSR, the German military attaché in Hungary, Rabe von Pappenheim, in his letter addressed to Major General von Greiffenberg, expressed the following thought: “A German soldier in battle is a warrior, but not a gendarme. The Hungarians are more suitable for such “pacification tasks.” Soon this idea was realized.

Hungarians in the USSR, a brief history

Pappenheim was staring at it: already in the first months of the battles on the Eastern Front, the Hungarian ground units, which were used by the German command mainly to pursue the retreating troops of the Red Army, suffered significant losses. Only the Hungarian mobile corps, which included cavalry, motorized and tank formations, continued to participate in the battles. But parts of the so-called “Carpathian Corps”, which consisted of the 8th border and 1st mountain rifle brigades, were actively used by the Germans as occupation forces.

Hungarian soldiers capture Red Army soldiers, 1941

In the fall of 1941, the battered mobile corps was withdrawn from the front. The German command demanded that Hungary field a significant contingent of occupation troops as a replacement. To ensure occupation activities on the territory of the USSR, the political leadership of Hungary began to send rifle brigades that were stationed in two different regions. The 111th, 123rd and 124th brigades were stationed in Ukraine in the Poltava region, where it was relatively calm. But in the south of the Bryansk forests, where the 102nd, 105th and 108th infantry brigades were deployed, the picture was completely different - partisans were operating there.

By the beginning of 1942, these six brigades, as well as smaller units in the occupied Soviet territory, included a total of more than 40,000 Honved. On February 12, 1942, all Hungarian brigades were renamed light divisions, which were significantly weaker both in personnel and equipment compared to the German ones. This was done at the instigation of the Chief of the Hungarian General Staff, Lieutenant General Szombathelyi, who sought to successfully compete with Romania, at least in terms of the number of units participating in the occupation of the USSR. Hungary had special scores to settle with her: one of the most important factors that forced both the Hungarians and the Romanians to declare war on the USSR to please the Third Reich was their mutual territorial claims. However, already in mid-1942, Hungary significantly surpassed Romania both in the number of divisions and in the number of troops sent to the Eastern Front: the 206,000-strong 2nd Hungarian Army arrived to help the Germans. She took part in the summer-autumn battles in the bend of the Don, after which her task was to hold the line of defense along the western Don line.

And the Hungarian occupation group continued to remain on the territory of the USSR. Its command, which was first located in Vinnitsa and then in Kyiv, supervised the actions of all Hungarian occupation units. However, in fact, it was only involved in resolving issues related to supply and maintaining discipline, and in military-tactical terms, all Hungarian formations were subordinated on a territorial basis to the local German command. In the areas occupied by the Hungarians, there were also numerous auxiliary units formed from German units and police recruited from the local population.

Hungarian soldiers cleaning their weapons. Eastern Front, summer 1942

The Hungarian units, as well as the SD (German: Sicherheitsdienst - security service) and GUF (German: Geheime Feldpolizei - secret field police) formations responsible for this territory, had to closely cooperate with each other - until the summer of 1942, each Hungarian division was assigned a GUF group consisting of 50-60 people was seconded. These police groups were divided into 6-8 groups and distributed among the Hungarian battalions. Their task was to interrogate local residents and captured partisans, as well as to carry out military court sentences. Therefore, when considering the atrocities of the Hungarian occupation forces on the territory of the USSR, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the Hungarian occupation forces all the time acted either together with the Germans or under German control. However, the Hungarians themselves were zealous beyond all measures in their punitive actions against the civilian population.

This was especially evident in the actions of the divisions that found themselves near the border of the RSFSR and Belarus. For example, a multi-week military operation to clear the Bryansk forests of partisans by the forces of the 102nd and 105th light divisions, which ended on May 30, 1942, ended, according to Hungarian data, with the following results: 4375 “partisans and their accomplices” were destroyed, 135 were captured prisoners, and only 449 rifles, as well as 90 machine guns and machine guns, were captured. From this we can draw a definite conclusion - the vast majority of the liquidated “partisans” did not have any weapons.

The total losses of the “partisans” were almost nine times higher than the losses of the attackers, and from the indicated number of captured weapons it follows that at most 600-700 partisans could have died in the battles, the rest were civilians. Similar actions in 1941-1942. were carried out repeatedly. In total, the Hungarian occupation forces from November 1941 to August 1942, according to incomplete data, destroyed 25-30 thousand “partisans”, while it is obvious that the vast majority of them were civilians.

For an official photo with local residents, it was possible to create such an idyll

However, sometimes the Hungarian occupation units were forced to participate in hostilities against Soviet troops. For example, after long resistance by the Hungarian General Staff, the 108th Division was sent to the commander of the German 6th Army, Friedrich Paulus, and on March 19 entered into battle with Soviet troops near the village of Verkhniy Bishkin, Kharkov region. Wilhelm Adam describes further in his book “Memoirs of Adjutant Paulus”:

“What Paulus feared back on March 1st happened. The division retreated. The VIII Army Corps also had to be withdrawn ten kilometers back, since the Hungarian security brigade under the command of Major General Abt was unable to withstand the advancing enemy. Soviet tanks were stationed 20 kilometers from Kharkov.”

The Germans managed to turn the tide of the battle, but it became quite obvious to them that the Magyar light divisions, except for punitive actions, were no longer good for anything.

Soon the same thing became clear in relation to the field 2nd Hungarian Army, which in a matter of days in January 1943 was completely defeated during the Ostrogozh-Rossoshan offensive operation of the Soviet troops. Only about 60,000 Hungarian soldiers were able to escape from the encirclement alive. The surviving units of the 2nd Army returned to their homeland in the spring of 1943, but not all of them: some of them, after reorganization and replenishment, were moved to Ukraine and became part of the occupation forces that were still stationed in Ukraine (7th Corps) and in Belarus (8th building).

Cross, land, freedom... and many, many more crosses. A sign reminding ungrateful Russians of the happiness that befell them

Over time, the Germans realized that the Hungarian methods in no way contributed to the real fight against the partisans. Evidence of this can be found, for example, in the report of Lieutenant Colonel Kruvel:

“Taking into account the enemy’s propaganda, their (Hungarian) indiscipline and absolutely arbitrary behavior towards the local population could only bring harm to German interests. Robbery, rape and other crimes were common. Additional hostility of the local population was obviously caused by the fact that the Hungarian troops could not defeat the enemy in combat.”

Beginning in 1943, the Hungarian occupation forces carried out fewer and fewer major actions against the partisans. One of their main tasks was to ensure the safety of the railway: for this, the Hungarian connections stretched over thousands of kilometers. Due to the vast territory, the protection of the railway could only be solved with the help of fortified outposts, located several hundred meters from each other, which kept under control a strip cleared of vegetation on both sides of the railway embankment. However, the Hungarians, of course, did not forget about punitive actions against civilians.

The 90,000-strong Hungarian occupation contingent continued to do this until Soviet troops liberated Left Bank and then Right Bank Ukraine. When, as a result of the Proskurov-Chernivtsi operation in April 1944, the armies of the 1st Ukrainian Front crossed the Dniester and reached the foothills of the Carpathians, there was practically nothing for the Magyar occupation forces to occupy.

Directive No. 10 and other regulatory documents

The Hungarian and German occupiers carried out the most brutal repressions in areas where there was even a shadow of a partisan threat. What guided the Hungarian military leaders when pursuing their occupation policy? First of all, this is an analytical report of the 4th Department of the Hungarian Royal General Staff on the experience of fighting Soviet partisans, which was published in 1942 - more often it is simply called “directive No. 10”. He summarized information about the composition, structure, tasks and methods of combat by Soviet partisans and, most importantly, about the organization of counteraction to them by units of the Hungarian army.

It was not only the Germans who liked to take pictures with the executed. The Magyars and the “Jewish partisan” they hanged, 1942

For example, in the section “Types of partisan gangs. Their human material. Methods of recruiting them" described the methods by which partisan leaders recruited new members into their ranks:

“To involve them, organizational departments (teams) use the following methods; persons entrusted with recruitment usually visit the intended victim at the apartment at night, under the pretext of a friendly visit. Taking drinks with them, they make the person they are visiting on a “visit” drunk, and when he is already pretty drunk, they try to persuade him to join their ranks; if this does not produce results, they resort to violent means. First, they openly call for joining, and in case of refusal, threats, intimidation, night visits and insults will follow. Finally, those who refuse are forcibly taken away and also shot.”

Directive No. 10 recommended that particular caution and intransigence be shown towards young women and Jews:

“Russian people are not talkative by nature; whoever talks a lot and willingly is suspicious, a young woman is always suspicious, and if she is a stranger (not from these places), then she is definitely an agent of the partisans. Among the elders there are a lot of those who, out of fear, are for the partisans. But the partisans also have like-minded people among the Ukrainian auxiliary police. Jews, without exception, side with the partisans. Therefore, their complete neutralization is a top priority.”

The Ukrainian topic was not left without attention in the report:

“The Ukrainian people are not racially identical with the Russians, which means they cannot pursue the same policy as them. The Slavic blood of Ukrainians is heavily mixed with the blood of the Turanian and Germanic peoples. As a result, they (Ukrainians) are more intelligent, stronger, more dexterous and more resilient than Russians. Racially and due to their abilities, they stand much closer to Western cultural peoples than to Russians. Under the new European order, an important calling awaits Ukrainians. In contrast to this, the Russians, both under the Tsarist and Red regimes, for centuries only oppressed and exploited the Ukrainian people and did not give them the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations, as well as their aspirations for culture and civilization. They can find a better and happier future for themselves only on the side of the Axis powers."

However, the Hungarian Honvedians brought the “better and happier future” closer as best they could, punishing the disobedient with fire and sword, without discerning whether the person in front of them was Ukrainian or not. In the section “Techniques for fighting partisans,” the item called “Retribution” read:

“The defeat of the partisan detachments must be followed by the most inexorable and merciless retribution. There is no room for leniency. Unmerciful cruelty discourages anyone from joining or supporting the partisans in the future; The partisans themselves might mistake mercy and pity for weakness. The captured partisans, having been interrogated if necessary, must be finished off (shot) on the spot, or, for intimidation, publicly hanged somewhere in the nearest village. We must do the same with the exposed partisan assistants who have fallen into our hands. It is important that the widest possible strata of the population learn about retribution.”

In fact, “actions of retaliation among broad sections of the population” were most often carried out without “defeating partisan detachments.” Moreover, in addition to the Hungarian instructions and orders, there were also orders from the German occupation authorities. The commanders of the Magyar units were obliged to follow their instructions, and they were no less stringent than the measures provided for in Hungarian Directive No. 10. For example, in the addition to Directive No. 33 of the German High Command of July 23, 1941, it was stated:

“The troops allocated for security service in the occupied eastern regions will be sufficient to carry out the tasks only if all resistance is eliminated not by judicial punishment of the perpetrators, but by the spread of such fear and horror on the part of the occupation authorities that will discourage the population from any desire to to counteraction. Commanders must find means to ensure order in protected areas, not by requesting new security units, but by applying appropriate draconian measures.”

Everything is written very clearly and understandably: “fear and horror” and “draconian measures.” The implementation of the directives was appropriate.

War crimes of the Hungarians

The Hungarian occupation units diligently sowed fear and horror on the occupied land. Here are just a few examples. Peasant woman of the Sevsky district of the Bryansk region V.F. Mazerkova:

“When they saw the men from our village, they said that they were partisans. And the same number, i.e. On May 20, 1942, they seized my husband Mazerkov Sidor Borisovich, born in 1862, and my son Mazerkov Alexei Sidorovich, born in 1927, and tortured them, and after this torture they tied their hands and threw them into a pit, then they lit the straw and burned them in a potato house. pit. On the same day, they not only burned my husband and son, they also burned 67 men.”.

For some reason, the partisans captured by the Hungarians are very similar to ordinary people. 1942

Peasant woman from the same region, E. Vedeshina:

“It was in the month of May on the 28th day of 1942. I and almost all the residents went into the forest. These thugs also followed there. They are in our place, where we (inaudible) with our people, shot and tortured 350 people, including my children who were tortured: daughter Nina 11 years old, Tonya 8 years old, little son Vitya 1 year old and son Kolya 5 years old. I was left barely alive under the corpses of my children.".

Resident of the village of Karpilovka R.S. Troy:

“In our village of Karpilovka, only Hungarian units (Magyars) committed atrocities and atrocities, especially in the period May-August 1943 […] they ordered us to take shovels, gathered about 40 of us to the anti-tank ditch and ordered us to bury the anti-tank ditch with shot corpses. […] The ditch was approximately 30 meters long and 2 meters wide. The corpses lay in disarray, and it was difficult to establish traces of firearms, because it was a bloody mess of old men, old women and teenagers. It was a terrible picture, and I couldn’t look closely at where their wounds were and where they were shot.”.

The Honvéds also did not stand on ceremony in their treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. For example, during the retreat in 1943 from the Chernyansky district of the Kursk region, Hungarian military units took with them from the local concentration camp 200 Red Army prisoners of war and 160 civilians. Along the way, they were all locked in the school building, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Those who tried to escape were shot.

The caption to the original photo says that Hungarian soldiers are talking with an arrested Red Army soldier. Judging by his clothes, he could actually be anyone.

There are also memories of eyewitnesses. Former prisoner of war, military doctor of the 3rd rank Vasily Petrovich Mamchenko spoke about the regime in the Dulag-191 concentration camp, located in a brick factory:

“The prisoners were driven into sheds for drying bricks, where there were no windows or ceilings. They slept on bare ground. The sick and wounded were in the same conditions. There were no medications or dressings. The wounds of the patients festered, worms grew in them, gas gangrene developed, and there were often cases of tetanus. The camp regime was very cruel; prisoners worked 10-12 hours on earthworks. They were fed morning and evening gruel - warm water and flour, several spoons each. Occasionally, as a sop, they cooked rotten horse meat. The doctor of the Steinbach camp did not have the specialty of a surgeon, but he practiced operations on prisoners and killed many. When hungry soldiers on the way to work bent down to pick up a beet or potato dropped from a cart from the road, the Magyars escorts shot them on the spot.”

Military doctor 3rd rank Ivan Alekseevich Nochkin, who lived in captivity in this camp for six months, said that on September 17, 1942, when the prisoners of war were at work, the Nazis placed explosives in the stove of the barracks that housed 600 people. Returning from work in the evening, people lit the stove. A deafening explosion followed. Those who tried to run out through the doors were shot by the Hungarian guards. Corpses littered the entrance. The acrid smoke suffocated the people and they burned. 447 people died.

Graves of Hungarian soldiers in the village of Polnikovo, Ukolovsky district, Voronezh region (now Krasnensky district, Belgorod region). Two soldiers were killed on July 21, 1942 in a nearby forest. By whom and how is unknown, probably by Red Army soldiers emerging from encirclement, but local residents were accused of involvement in this. At the end of the 90s of the last century, the remains of the Hungarians were exhumed and reburied at the united Hungarian cemetery in the Voronezh region

Resident of the city of Ostrogozhsk, Voronezh region, Maria Kaydannikova:

“The fire was burning brightly there. Two Magyars held the prisoner by the shoulders and legs and slowly roasted his stomach and legs over the fire. They either raised him above the fire, or lowered him lower, and when he died down, the Magyars threw his body face down on the fire. Suddenly the prisoner began to twitch again. Then one of the Magyars thrust a bayonet into his back with a flourish.”

German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made a very remarkable assessment of the actions of the Hungarian troops against the Soviet population in his diary. Describing the situation in the Bryansk region in May 1942, he noted:

“To the south of this region, Hungarian formations are fighting. They need to occupy and pacify one village after another. When the Hungarians declare that they have pacified a particular village, this usually means that not a single inhabitant remains there.This, in turn, means for us that we will hardly be able to carry out any agricultural work in such an area.”

It was necessary to be able to make Goebbels regret the excessive sacrifices among the “Untermensch”. The Hungarians did it. It is not surprising that even in our time, elderly residents of the Kursk, Voronezh, and Belgorod regions, recalling the times of occupation, say that the Hungarians were worse than the Germans.

Residents of the village of Polnikovo, accused of the death of Hungarian soldiers, are digging their own grave. Pashkov Vasily Kondratievich, 54 years old, Polnikov Pakhom Platonovich, 52 years old, and Pashkov Grigory Kudinovich, 18 years old, who were driving for hay when the dead Hungarians were discovered, were arrested. They were hanged without any interrogation or analysis.

Participants in the events from the opposite side also left their written evidence. Here, for example, is a quote from the diary of Honved Ferenc Boldizhar (company 46/1.2., field post 115/20):

“When we entered the village, I set fire to the first three houses myself. We killed men, women, children, and burned the village. Let's move on... Our magnificent hussars set the village on fire, the third company set it on fire with rockets. From there we went further into reconnaissance. During the time we spent in reconnaissance, the hussars burned six villages..."

The concept of “intelligence” used by Boldizhar is hardly appropriate - rather, it is total extermination. And here is a quote from the report of Major General Karoly Bogani dated June 25, 1942, in which the concept of “extermination” is present in a very specific way:

“I got the impression that combing the forests extending west of Putivl did not bring results because some of the partisans live in the surrounding villages permanently, masquerading as civilians, or periodically escape there from the forest. Therefore, Yatsyno, Cherepovo, Ivanovskoye, Sesyulino and further surrounding villages, which must be identified by the 32nd Infantry Regiment, are subject to burning, and the entire male population from 15 to 60 years old is subject to extermination.”

Also interesting is an excerpt from the order of the division commander, Major General Otto Abt, dated January 13, 1942, in which a certain pride is evident:

“The performance of the Hungarian units had a great impact on the partisans. This is proven by a radiogram intercepted on the night of December 24-25, which says: “Partisans, be very careful where the Hungarians are, because the Hungarians are even more cruel than the Germans.”

The modern Hungarian historian Tamás Kraus summarizes in his article “War - massacres in the mirror of documents”:

“According to a summary judicial source based on an investigation by an emergency state commission, German and Hungarian military authorities and military units in the Chernigov region alone killed about 100,000 Soviet civilians, and also killed “thousands of Soviet prisoners of war.” In one city of Kobrin, Brest region, 7,000 people were killed, and several tens of thousands more people were deported to work in Germany. The documents especially often refer to the atrocities of the 105th and 201st Hungarian Infantry Divisions. Numerous documents and eyewitness accounts of the events tell with stunning force about numerous murders committed in the Kursk region, along the banks of the Oskol River, in Novy and Stary Oskol and their environs, about mass night executions and torture of the civilian population.”

Modern Hungarian historiography

However, the aforementioned Tamás Kraus, and even Eva-Maria Varga, are essentially the only Hungarian historians today who do not hesitate to talk about the atrocities that Hungarian soldiers committed on Soviet soil. In their joint work “Hungarian troops and Nazi extermination policy on the territory of the Soviet Union” they write:

“In modern “mainstream” historical literature one cannot find a single word about the “exploits” of our soldiers in the USSR. For example, after leafing through the most significant books of academician Ignac Romsic, the reader will find practically no data about this. […] Peter Szabó, in his also repeatedly republished book “The Bend of the Don,” which captured the memory of the bravery of the soldiers of the 2nd Hungarian Army, essentially passed over in silence the crimes of the Hungarian soldiers committed in the Don region, although it can be assumed that in the archive and handwritten The department of the Institute and Museum of Military History stores a lot of materials on this topic.”

The famous Hungarian historian Peter Szabó, mentioned in the quote, opposes Kraus in his interview with the Hungarian newspaper Flag, reproaching him for excessive use of information from Russian archives:

“In the collection of Tamás Kraus and Eva Maria Varga one can find numerous protocols of witness interviews collected by Soviet territorial commissions. Among the witnesses interviewed mainly in 1943, there were many illiterate or semi-literate people, whose contradictory testimony could easily be distorted or exaggerated by the commission staff.”

It's hard to understand what Szabo is trying to prove with these words. Witnesses interviewed by the commission saw with their own eyes the death of relatives and fellow villagers. It is unclear what their literacy level has to do with this. In the same interview, Szabo describes the actions of the partisans - apparently wanting to equate the killing of civilians committed by the Magyars with military operations against an armed enemy:

“The partisans’ methods of warfare were extremely brutal. First of all, they relied on surprise raids and ambushes, often wearing Hungarian or German uniforms. The prisoners were not left alive. For example, they lured the machine gun company of battalion 38/1 of the 2nd Hungarian Army into a trap in the forests in the vicinity of Dubrovichi. They surrounded the Honveds in a forest clearing and shot them with machine guns. After this they were stripped naked, as they needed uniforms. Only one or two soldiers survived the massacre.".

At the same time, Sabo himself does not deny the facts of the Honved massacre of civilians:

“In 2012, I also published a study about the unfortunate incident that happened on December 21, 1941 in the Ukrainian Reimentarivka. […] In the material published in Military Historical Documents, I described the chronology of the unsuccessful anti-partisan operation, during which the partisans managed to escape from encirclement. After the Honveds suspected the help of the villagers in this, they committed a bloody massacre. The Royal Hungarian Army from time to time held trials against the perpetrators of such unacceptable incidents, but this did not happen here.”

Alas, Szabo did not give a single example of “trials held from time to time” - perhaps there were none at all. Like Szabo, other modern Hungarian historians simply ignore the “exploits” of Hungarian soldiers in the USSR. Kraus and Varga are regularly accused in the Hungarian media that the FSB is behind them, that the sources of archival documents they used are unreliable and written under pressure, etc.

Hungarians armed with Soviet SVT self-loading rifles and local residents driven into a pit. Execution? An act of intimidation?

It is not surprising that the vast majority of Hungarian readers commenting on the cited works consider Tamás Kraus and Eva Maria Varga to be traitors and are outraged by such desecration of the memory of their soldiers. In a recent radio interview, Tamás Kraus openly spoke about how he was ostracized by Hungarian society at all levels, accusing him of lying and slandering his own people.

Reasons for the cruelty of the Hungarians

Reading about the atrocities of the Magyars and their reprisals against civilians and prisoners of war, one cannot help but wonder: what is the reason for such bestial cruelty? After all, there was no Nazi regime in Horthy Hungary; Hungary remained the only country that joined Germany whose political structure remained unchanged during the war, right up to the German occupation. There was a legal leftist and liberal opposition in the country, albeit very limited. The same Kraus and Varga, in their work “Hungarian troops and Nazi extermination policy on the territory of the Soviet Union,” tried to give the following explanation for the cruelty of the Hungarian troops:

“How can one explain the massive and frequent burning alive of adults and children, the mass rape of women followed by brutal beatings or murders? Why was it necessary to destroy everyone who remained alive after the burning of populated areas? Here we need to talk about a complex chain of reasons. Firstly. The authoritarian regime, fraught with fascism, played a decisive role in this, giving the Hungarian soldiers a moral, spiritual and cultural “education.” […] From the first minute the predatory, immoral nature of the war was obvious. From the memoirs of Hungarian soldiers, it turns out that under the influence of the defeat on the Don, many of them began to doubt: for what purpose are they located almost two thousand kilometers from their homeland, in a foreign country, not understanding either the language or the feelings of the local residents? […] Secondly. One can rightfully assume that the reasons include the feeling that has gradually gripped everyone, connected with the hopelessness of the war, with the inexorable approach of death, with the meaninglessness of what is happening, with the “inaccessibility” and “incomprehensibility” of the enemy, the strangeness of his habits, with pangs of conscience, fear criminals who committed atrocities, with the desire to destroy witnesses to these atrocities. To this we must add greed, the possibility of free robbery, the consciousness of impunity, and moreover, the desire to present intimidation, terrorizing the population in the form of a heroic myth that helped justify all punitive actions. […] Third. Feeling of revenge. Many documents say that bloody massacres and atrocities became especially frequent after major defeats. This refers not only to the losses incurred in the fight against the partisans, but primarily in the offensive of the Red Army at the turn of 1942-1943, about the breakthroughs at Stalingrad and the Don.”

Simply put, it turns out that the Hungarian Honveds, unexpectedly finding themselves 2,000 kilometers from their homeland, not understanding “neither the language nor the feelings of the local residents” and experiencing “greed, the possibility of free robbery, a consciousness of impunity,” as well as “a sense of revenge after large defeats,” they decided to destroy as many of these same local residents as possible, and at the same time unarmed prisoners of war from the very army that inflicted these major defeats on them.

However, I repeat: Tamás Kraus and Eva-Maria Varga are proponents of an objective approach to the history of the presence of Hungarian troops on the territory of the USSR. But in modern Hungary, a different approach prevails. State funds are used to glorify the armies that took part in the attack on the USSR and the robbery and physical destruction of civilians that lasted for almost three years.

Three Hungarian soldiers, ethnic Serbs and a Slovak, surrender. The Hungarians were taken prisoner very reluctantly, but apparently not in this case. Summer 1942

In confirmation of the above, we can recall that back on August 23, 2011, in Warsaw, the ministers of justice of the EU member states signed a declaration on the occasion of the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes. The declaration states, among other things: “...their suffering will not be lost in obscurity, their rights will be recognized, and the perpetrators will be brought to justice.”. On this wave, an attempt was made in Hungary to investigate war crimes committed by the Soviet army at the end of World War II. The National Investigation Department announced that it is currently investigating one fact: the execution on March 22, 1945 of 32 residents of the village of Olasfalu, located in the Transdanubian region. They were boys and men aged 16 to 30 years, some of them were ethnic Germans. The reasons are unknown: either the Red Army soldiers suspected the local residents were Hungarian partisans, or it was punishment for the brutal murder of wounded Red Army soldiers and nurses from the medical battalion in the city of Szekesfehérvár by the SS.

“Representatives of many European nations fought against the USSR - Italians, French, Spaniards, Romanians, Belgians... But the Germans and Hungarians were particularly cruel. Against this background, Hungary’s claims against Russia will look ridiculous. This is equivalent to the fact that Mongolia will demand compensation from Russia for the fact that the residents of Kozelsk burned Batu’s ambassadors.”

Nevertheless, the efforts of modern Hungarian official circles aimed at whitewashing the historical role of the Horthy occupation forces continue. For example, in the article “Sleep, Silent Army,” dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the defeat of the 2nd Hungarian Army and published in the Magyar Hírlap magazine (one of the most loyal Hungarian pro-government publications), author Zoltan Babuch writes:

“For decades, they have been hammering into us, the “sinned nation,” that in 1943, soldiers of the 2nd Hungarian Army were sacrificed to German interests, that our Honveds fought and froze in the endless steppe for unjust goals, or rather, for nothing. […] The piles of regimental newspapers that have reached us prove that the Honveds had a fairly good idea of ​​what they were looking for far from their homeland. Corporal of the 7th Infantry Regiment Laszlo Niri, for example, sent home the following lines in the fall of 1942: “I would sincerely like to convey my personal feelings about the lack of culture of the Russians, which reduced them to an animal state [...] one can clearly feel the incredible poverty that seemed to our eyes. Every soldier compares this terror-controlled paradise with disgust to our beautiful Motherland. I don’t even know what would happen if these people could look around us. Then he would have the right to say that he visited the tabernacles of paradise, because our Motherland, compared to their country, is a real paradise, if we describe it even without any bias.” […] But it is clear that we are a “sinned nation”, since to this day we pay some for the war traumas that befell their families, but those whose father or close relative gave their lives for their Motherland are not worth words of gratitude. In the winter of 1943, not only tens of thousands of Honveds and employees remained on the Don, but our honor also remained there.”

Perhaps we can agree with the author on this: indeed, not only Hungarian soldiers remained on Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian lands, but also their honor, shame and conscience, which they lost during their lifetime, committing their bloody atrocities.

Literature:

1. Abbasov A.M. Voronezh Front: chronicle of events - Voronezh, 2010
2. Analytical review of the 4th Department of the Hungarian Royal General Staff on the experience of fighting with partisans, April 1942, Budapest (Publication prepared by E.-M. Varga, N.M. Peremyshlennikova, D.Yu. Khokhlov)
3. The Great Patriotic War, 1942: Research, documents, comments / Rep. ed. V.S. Khristoforov - M.: Publishing house of the Main Archival Department of Moscow, 2012
4. Kraus Tamás, Eva Maria Varga. Hungarian troops and Nazi extermination policy on the territory of the Soviet Union - Journal of Russian and East European Historical Research, No. 1(6), 2015
5. Filonenko N.V. The history of military operations of Soviet troops against the armed forces of Horthy Hungary on the territory of the USSR. Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences - Voronezh, 2017
6. Filonenko S.I., Filonenko N.V. The collapse of the fascist new order on the Upper Don (July 1942 - February 1943) - Voronezh, 2005
7. Filonenko S.I. Battles on Voronezh soil through the eyes of Russians and occupiers. 1942-1943 – Voronezh, “Kvarta”, 2012
8. http://perevodika.ru
9. http://www.runivers.ru
10. http://svpressa.ru
11. http://all-decoded.livejournal.com
12. http://istvan-kovacs.livejournal.com
13. http://www.honvedelem.hu
14. http://magyarhirlap.hu

On February 13, 1945, Budapest was liberated by Soviet troops. Today the seventieth anniversary of this event is celebrated. Among Hitler's allies, Hungary resisted the Soviet Union the longest - until March 1945 inclusive. This does not mean that the Hungarian leadership did not try to get out of the war following the example of Romania and Bulgaria; on the contrary, it began secret negotiations with the West in the spring of 1944. When Hitler found out about this, he severely reprimanded the Hungarian dictator Admiral Horthy and sent German troops into Hungary, ostensibly to help the Hungarians.

However, on August 29, under the influence of the Romanian events, the government of General G. Lakotos openly declared the need to negotiate not only with the British and Americans, but also with the Soviet Union. The Germans reacted instantly, and several more German divisions were introduced into Hungarian territory. And, however, Horthy continued separate negotiations, offering the United States and Great Britain a truce on the terms of preventing Soviet troops stationed on the country’s border from entering Hungary. Having received a refusal, he is forced to enter into negotiations with Stalin, who demanded that he enter the war on the side of the anti-Hitler coalition. As a result, on October 15, 1944, the Horthy government announced a truce with the USSR.

However, Admiral Horthy, unlike King Mihai of Romania, failed to bring his country out of the war. A German-backed coup d'etat took place in Budapest, and Horthy's son was kidnapped by an SS detachment led by the famous saboteur Otto Skorzeny and taken hostage, then Skorzeny captured the admiral himself. Under the threat of shooting his son and his own destruction, a few days later the admiral transferred power to the leader of the pro-German Arrow Cross party, Ferenc Szalasi, and was taken to Germany.

After Szálasi came to power, mass actions began to exterminate hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews and Gypsies and deport them to Germany; As Soviet troops approached, prisoners were taken from the camps and driven inland to the German border (the so-called death march), which resulted in the death of approximately 70,000 Jews. The massacres in Hungary are considered one of the last episodes of the Holocaust. In the wake of violence and genocide, Szalasi called on the Hungarians to resist the “Russian invasion” and, unfortunately, the Hungarian people en masse responded to this call, as well as to participation in the genocide of Jews and Gypsies.

For many years, for the sake of the imaginary “friendship of peoples” and the preservation of the socialist camp, we were bashfully silent about this. Meanwhile, the fierceness of the Hungarian resistance was not inferior to the German one in the defense of East Prussia and Berlin. Here is a fragment of General Pliev’s memories of the storming of Debrecen:

“The Berettio Canal became an obstacle in front of them, where the enemy met our units with a furious barrage of fire. I had to lie down. Our artillery and Katyusha rockets fell on enemy positions. It seemed that the entire opposite bank of the canal was plowed with fire and metal, all centers of resistance were suppressed. But as soon as our troops tried to cross the canal, the enemy bank again bristled with fire.”

What could have caused such fierce resistance? On the one hand - Slavic-Hungarian antagonism, on the other - the complicity of Hungarians in Nazi crimes and fear of revenge, especially on Hungarian territory. Indeed, on the Eastern Front, the Hungarians often behaved even worse than even the Germans. These factors, coupled with Szálasi's intense propaganda and the threat of reprisals against deserters and their families, led to fierce Hungarian resistance. Yes, six thousand Hungarians fought on our side, and 22 divisions, more than three hundred thousand people, fought against us. Hungarians began to surrender en masse to Soviet troops only in March 1945. The liberation of Hungary was joyfully welcomed by Orthodox minorities - Romanians, Serbs, Rusyns, as they expected relief from Hungarian heterodox and foreign-language oppression.

The Hungarian operation turned out to be the bloodiest, merciless, difficult and lengthy among all the operations of 1944, since it went into 1945 and lasted until the end of March. The Germans and Hungarians not only defended themselves, but also went on the offensive; at times the situation was reminiscent of the failures of 1941-1942. At first this was not obvious and the operation was entrusted to the 2nd Ukrainian Front alone. Later, the 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Front, allied Romanian, Bulgarian and Yugoslav divisions had to be involved.

The single operation was divided into two large strategic operations - Debrecen and Budapest. At first, the 2nd Ukrainian Front of Marshal R.Ya. participated in the Debrecen operation. Malinovsky. The front numbered more than 300 thousand people, 10,200 guns and mortars, 750 tanks and self-propelled guns, 1,100 aircraft. He was opposed by Army Group “South” of Field Marshal G. Frisner, consisting of the 8th and repeatedly beaten 6th German armies, the 2nd and 3rd Hungarian armies and three divisions of Army Group “F”, numbering just over 200 thousand .men, 3,500 guns and mortars and about 500 tanks and 850 aircraft. Our troops did not have an overwhelming superiority in men and equipment.

On the morning of October 6, after a short artillery and air preparation, the strike force of the 2nd Ukrainian Front went on the offensive. Noticeable success was seen only in the sector of the 53rd Army, which immediately broke through the enemy’s defenses and, in stubborn battles, defeated the main forces of the 3rd Hungarian Army, advancing 80-100 km. to the Kartsaga region. The troops of the right wing of the front met fierce resistance in the Cluj area, the attack of the 6th Guards Tank Army of Kravchenko and the cavalry-mechanized group of Pliev was stuck in the focal defense. This is how General Pliev later recalled the German defense:

“The defense in the group’s offensive sector was a well-developed system of engineering structures, consisting of three defensive lines equipped with trenches, wire barriers, and minefields; bridges, roads and other objects were also mined. The second defensive line rested on the Berettio Canal, ran at a distance of six to ten kilometers from the first line and was a tough nut to crack. The settlements of Sharkad, Gyula, Bekeschaba, Keresh-Tarcha, Seghalom and others were turned into powerful centers of resistance.”

During the offensive, the Germans and Hungarians put up fierce resistance, destroying the tanks of Kravchenko’s 6th Army. Only the introduction of the 7th Guards Army corrected the situation. On October 20, with flank attacks, the 6th Army and Pliev’s group captured Debrecen, and the 7th Guards Army reached the Tisza River in the Szolnok area. In response, there was a powerful German counterattack by two German tank corps and one Hungarian one near Szolnok. Fierce oncoming battles began that lasted a whole week. In the end, our troops managed to break through to Tisza. As a result of the Debrecen operation, our troops advanced 135-270 km, defeated 10 divisions, captured 42 thousand enemy soldiers and officers, destroyed 915 tanks, hundreds of guns and aircraft. But success came at a high price - the loss of 20,000 killed and half of the tanks (350 tanks),

Nevertheless, without a pause, already on October 29, the Headquarters began the famous Budapest operation, which ended only on February 13, 1945. By the beginning of the operation, the 2nd Ukrainian Front had 7 combined arms, 1 tank and 1 air armies, 3 tank and 3 mechanized corps, which ensured superiority over the enemy in manpower - 2 times, in artillery - 4 times, tanks and self-propelled guns - 2 times, aircraft - 2.6 times. This seemed to promise rapid success of the operation. The German command had at its disposal a total of 190 thousand soldiers and officers, a heavily fortified large city and three lines of defense, which rested their flanks on the Danube. On the very first day of 46, the army broke through the enemy’s defenses and by November 2 reached the approaches from the south to Budapest, but the Germans immediately transferred three tank and one motorized divisions here, launched a counterattack and stopped our troops. The losses of our troops approached the daily losses on the Kursk Bulge, and then the troops of four more armies of the front were involved, which launched an offensive from the east and northeast, covering Budapest from the north. The 4th Guards Army with the 18th Tank and 5th Cavalry Guards Corps began to fight its way between Lake Balaton and Budapest through the Margarita line of fortifications. On November 11-26, the front troops broke through the enemy defenses between the Tisza and the Danube and, having advanced in a northwestern direction up to 100 km, approached the outer defensive perimeter of Budapest, but this time they were unable to capture the city. Faced with stubborn enemy resistance, Soviet troops suspended their attacks. Heavy battles, often escalating into oncoming battles, lasted for a whole month.

At the beginning of December, an attack on Budapest was again launched by the forces of the center and southern wing of the 2nd Ukrainian Front. As a result, Soviet troops reached the Danube north and north-west of Budapest, cutting off the Budapest enemy group’s retreat to the north on December 5. The troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front (3 Soviet and 1 Bulgarian combined arms and 1 air army - 1 tank and 2 mechanized corps) by this time crossed the Danube, reached the northeast of Lake Balaton and created conditions for joint actions with the 2nd Ukrainian Front. The Germans, having transferred reserves, tried to counterattack on December 7 and launched strong counterattacks, which were successfully parried by the 46th Army. The 57th Army left south of Lake Balaton, the 4th Guards Army joined the 46th Army. The Budapest enemy group was enveloped by Soviet troops from the north and southwest.

On December 20, a new offensive of the Soviet troops began, which faced two German counterattacks, under which the 6th Tank Army fell. They managed to push back the formations of the 7th Guards Army and, by the end of December 22, reached the rear of our tankers. The most difficult defensive battles ensued, which our units had already begun to forget about. But Soviet aviation dominated the air, and heavy artillery was also at its best. As soon as the German tank wedges came under powerful bombing and artillery strikes, the enemy’s entire plan collapsed. It took two days, from December 24 to 26, for our two fronts to push back the counterattacking Germans and close a ring around the Budapest group in the Esztergom area. At the same time, it was possible to pin down and cut off from Budapest a powerful group under the command of SS Obergruppenführer K. Pfeff-Wilden-Bruch numbering 188 thousand people, which they began to methodically destroy with artillery and aviation fire.

To the Budapest garrison on December 29, front commanders Marshals of the Soviet Union R.Ya. Malinovsky and F.I. Tolbukhin was presented with an ultimatum. The Germans committed a serious war crime by ordering the shooting of our envoys - Captain M. Steinmetz, who was shot at the front line, and Captain I. Ostapenko, who was killed by a machine-gun burst in the back. This is how P.F. talks about it in his memoirs. Plyachenko: “At the appointed time, the fire from our side stopped. Everyone fixed their eyes on the place from where the car with the envoys was supposed to appear. Here it is. To the right of the NP on the road Vecses - Budapest, Captain Steinmetz was driving in a small open car with a white flag with with their comrades. They waved their hands to someone and slowly moved away towards the front edge. But as soon as the car approached the enemy trenches, a rifle shot was heard. Shot at point-blank range. The car burst into flames. Mines exploded near the burning car. Captain Steinmetz stood up to his full height, raised white flag and waved it over his head. And then an enemy fragment struck him to death. Sergeant Filimonenko was also killed. Only the seriously wounded Lieutenant Kuznetsov was saved. Everyone at the observation post looked with bated breath at the suddenly unfolding tragedy, not believing their eyes: it was so it seemed incredible, monstrous. Shoot the envoys! The Nazis once again showed their bestial insides. Pavlenko squeezed the steel of the machine gun until it hurt. The heart imperiously demanded revenge on the enemy...

At the same time, on the opposite bank of the Danube, the Soviet envoy Captain I. A. Ostapenko crossed the front line. With him followed the chief of staff of the first battalion of the 1077th rifle regiment, senior lieutenant N.F. Orlov and the foreman of the commandant company of the headquarters of the 23rd rifle corps, E.T. Gorbatyuk. A group of Nazis met them at the enemy positions and, blindfolding them, took them to their headquarters. On the way back, when the envoys passed the last line of the ring of fire, the Nazis hit them in the back. Ilya Ostapenko was killed. By luck, Orlov and Gorbatyuk survived. After the tragic death of the envoys, Soviet troops began the assault on Budapest, where the evil enemy was holed up. From now on, responsibility for the destruction of the city fell on the Nazi command."

The assault began, which ended the victorious year of 1944. It took a whole month and a half to finally take Budapest. Pest fell on January 18, Buda on February 13. It should be noted that, despite the atrocities of the Nazis, the Soviet command ordered our artillery and aviation to destroy only military installations of the Nazis and Salashis in Budapest and on its outskirts, and to protect in every possible way industrial enterprises, residential areas, scientific, historical and other values ​​from destruction. This order was carried out scrupulously.

The inevitable destruction and casualties among the civilian population are entirely on the conscience of the German and Hungarian command. Troops of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts liberated the central regions of Hungary and its capital, Budapest, encircled and destroyed a 188,000-strong enemy force, Hungary was withdrawn from the war

The successful completion of the Budapest operation dramatically changed the entire strategic situation on the southern wing of the Soviet-German front and made it possible to develop deep coverage of the entire southern flank of German troops.

It should be noted that the liberation of Hungary had favorable consequences for it. On December 21-22, 1944, the first session of the Provisional National Assembly took place in liberated Debrecen, which formed the Provisional National Government. It included such figures as Laszlo Rajk, K. Kiss (what is his name?), and then Janos Kadar. In general, the government was formed on a coalition basis, since in addition to the communists it included representatives of the Social Democratic, Democratic, and National Peasant Parties.

On January 20, 1945, the new government concluded an armistice agreement with the USSR and then declared war on Germany. As a result, two divisions were created, which subsequently formed the basis of the Hungarian People's Army and came under the operational subordination of the 3rd Ukrainian Front. Together with Soviet troops, they liberated Hungary from Nazism. Thanks to the liberation by the Red Army, Hungary was saved from fascism and freed from indemnities and reparations. Unfortunately, this was not appreciated, neither in 1956 nor after 1990. However, there are many people in Hungary who are grateful to Russia for the liberation from fascism, and I am sure that descendants will preserve this memory.

The capture of Budapest was reflected in the memory of the Russian people with the song “Enemies burned their home” (words by M. Isakovsky, music by M. Blanter).

The soldier got drunk, a tear rolled down,

A tear of unfulfilled hopes,

And there was a glow on his chest

Medal for the city of Budapest.

About 14,000 Soviet soldiers and officers died for the liberation of Hungary. Eternal memory to them!

Deacon Vladimir Vasilik, Candidate of Philological Sciences, Candidate of Theology, Associate Professor of the Faculty of History of St. Petersburg State University, member of the Synodal Liturgical Commission

The other day, the Hungarian authorities honored the memory of “the heroes who fought for Hungary on the Don in World War II”

The government’s website urges: “Remember the victory of our grandfathers, those heroic soldiers.” In fact, there was no victory. On January 12, 1943, Soviet soldiers completely defeated the 200,000-strong 2nd Hungarian Army, destroying 120,000 invaders in the Don steppes. Now Magyar politicians are trying to glorify this shameful page of history, when their compatriots fought on the side of Nazi Germany. But how did the Fuhrer's Hungarians actually behave?

The Magyars announced their support Adolf Hitler long before 1941. Formally, Hungary was not occupied by the Nazis, although the Germans secretly ruled the country and turned it into their colony. On November 20, 1940, Budapest, under pressure from Berlin, signed the Tripartite Pact, thereby joining the military alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan. Hungarian industry began to fulfill German military orders, the Magyars produced small arms for Nazi Germany and supplied food. Therefore, when on June 22 at exactly four in the morning the Nazis treacherously attacked the USSR, the Fuhrer’s six also declared war on us. The motto of the Royal Hungarian Army was: “The price of Hungarian life is Soviet death.”

The Germans promised the Hungarians part of our territory, so the warriors sought to completely clear it of the Slavs. All the charm of European power was first experienced by Ukraine, then by the Voronezh, Kursk, Bryansk and Rostov regions. Unprecedented atrocities befell civilians. They were shot, hanged, tortured. Magyars were burned alive only on suspicion of sympathy for the partisans.

I report on the facts of atrocities committed by the Hungarian occupiers against Soviet citizens. After the liberation of the village of Shchuchye, traces of monstrous massacres were discovered there. Lieutenant Vladimir Salogub, being wounded, was captured and brutally tortured. More than 20 stab wounds were found on his body. At the political instructor's Fedora Bolshakova there were stars carved into his arms and several stab wounds on his back. A peasant was shot Kuzmenko for the fact that only four cartridges were found in his hut. Many residents had their belongings and livestock taken away. “Many women were raped,” wrote the head of the political department of the Voronezh Front, Lieutenant General, on August 31, 1942 Sergey Shatilov.

While monuments to Soviet soldiers-liberators are being demolished in Hungary, a huge memorial cemetery for soldiers of the 2nd Hungarian Army was built in the Voronezh region, which suffered the most from the atrocities of the Magyar occupiers. What does it mean? Photo: © RIA Novosti

In our village, several old people, women and children were brutally killed by the Hungarians. Houses were burned, livestock was stolen. The pits in which our things were buried were dug up. There was nothing left in the village except black bricks, recalled a resident of Svetlovo Natalya Aldushina.

In 1943, when retreating from the Chernyansky district of the Kursk region, the Magyars took with them 200 prisoners of war of the Red Army and another 160 civilians held in a concentration camp. On the way, the barbarians locked all 360 people in the school, doused the building with gasoline and burned the people alive.

In July 1942, in the village of Kharkeevka, Shatalovsky district, Kursk region, soldiers of the 33rd Hungarian Infantry Division captured four Red Army soldiers. One of them, senior lieutenant Peter Danilov, gouged out his eyes, gave him several bayonet blows in the back, and then buried him in an unconscious state. Three other Red Army soldiers were shot.

The Magyars were considered the most inveterate monsters among Soviet soldiers. And they were hated much more than the Germans. General Nikolay Vatutin after all the evidence of the crimes of Hitler’s lackeys, he gave the order: “Do not take the Magyars prisoner.”

Soon the Hungarians paid for everything in full. During the counter-offensive of the Soviet troops during the Battle of Stalingrad, their army was destroyed. After such an inglorious end, Adolf Hitler stopped placing Magyar troops on the front line; now the Hungarians played the role of servants in the rear.

There were a huge number of war crimes committed by Hungarian units in the Great Patriotic War. Therefore, the perpetrators were sought and tried even in the 50s of the last century. It is not clear for what reasons, after such wild atrocities, the Russian authorities allowed in 2003 to erect a huge memorial in the Voronezh region in honor of the Magyar soldiers who died here.

Romanian occupiers

Recently, the Ambassador of Romania to Russia Vasile Soare had the audacity to say: “We must not forget the atrocities of the Red Army during the Second World War.” Although it was the Romanians who became famous for the murders, rapes and robberies of civilians. During the Great Patriotic War they kept up with the Hungarian sixes of the Third Reich. They were also promised a lot of Soviet land. Immediately after the occupation of Odessa and other cities of Ukraine and Moldova, mass robberies and murders began there. Local residents recalled this incident with horror: “A Romanian soldier entered the house and, in front of the whole family, for no reason at all, inflicted several wounds on the owner with a dagger, after which he raped his wife and minor daughter.”

The atrocities were not isolated, but widespread. For example, only in early April 1944, a few days before the liberation of Tiraspol by the Red Army, two thousand people were shot by Romanian soldiers in the garden of the educational farm of the Agricultural Institute.

The Romanian secret police of Siguranza had the same instruments of torture as the German Gestapo, confirms a political scientist and resident of Odessa Anatoly Wasserman.

During the occupation, the Romanians established laws that were supposed to cleanse everything Russian from Odessa and other populated areas. All books in Slavic languages ​​were confiscated from the city's libraries and private collections, which were later burned at a huge bonfire. A strict decree was issued prohibiting the use of the Russian language by civilians. “Speaking the language of the enemy in a public place” was punishable by a large fine or three years in prison. First and last names were changed; Ivans, for example, became Ionnas. Many people were shot without trial or investigation right on the streets. The warriors from Romania became so insolent that the local residents remaining in the occupied territory even complained to the Germans about them.

Hot Finnish guys

The Finns, to whom Hitler promised all of Karelia, the Kola Peninsula and the Arkhangelsk region, were also not distinguished by their nobility. There remains plenty of evidence of the atrocities of the Finnish military. The command provoked them to commit crimes against the Russian population:

“Having captured Soviet military personnel, immediately separate the command staff from the rank and file, as well as the Karelians from the Russians. The Russian population is detained and sent to concentration camps. Russian-speaking persons of Finnish and Karelian origin who wish to join the Karelian population are not classified as Russians,” said the secret order of the Finnish general Gustav Mannerheim. This is the same Russophobe to whom the authorities of St. Petersburg several years ago allowed to open a memorial plaque in the city. Only after it was doused with paint several times did officials realize their mistake and remove this shameful memorial sign.

People suspected of sympathizing with the partisans were burned at the stake by the Finns. Private escaped from Finnish captivity Sergey Terentyev spoke about the suffering of our soldiers sitting in a concentration camp near the Karelian town of Pitkäranta:

Wounded Red Army soldiers are kept in this camp. They are not provided with medical care at all. For food, we were given a mug of flour soup per day. The Finnish executioners came up with a terrible torture for us: they girdled the prisoner with barbed wire and dragged him along the ground.

On the Karelian Front, during the advance of the Red Army, our military discovered dozens of corpses of tortured Red Army soldiers tortured by the Finnish fascists. Yes, the private Sataeva The Finns cut off their lips and tore out their tongues. The Red Army soldier Grebennikova They cut off the ear, gouged out the eyes and inserted empty cartridges into them. Military Lazarenko after much torture, the Finns crushed the skull and stuffed it with crackers, drove cartridges into the nostrils, and burned a five-pointed star on the chest.

Finnish executioners also subjected peaceful Soviet people to incredible torture. Resident of Petrozavodsk Boris Novikov was an eyewitness to how the Finns captured 30 people. They burned their heels with a hot iron, beat them with rubber sticks, and then shot them.

Samurai camps

The atrocities in Japanese concentration camps sometimes exceeded even the German “death factories.” Thousands of our compatriots were tortured there. After the Japanese occupied Harbin and Shanghai in 1939 - centers of Russian emigration - former White Guards began to be sent there, who, ironically, were declared spies of the Bolsheviks. Soviet soldiers who were captured during the clashes at Khalkhin Gol in 1939 were also sent to death camps. Many of our people there were beaten with sticks every day, and also tortured by piercing their bodies with needles and using electric shock.

“Detachment 731” gained terrible fame, in which they tested chemical and biological weapons, and also carried out cruel experiments.

Test subjects were injected with plague, anthrax and other diseases, and the survival rate of the human body was also tested by placing prisoners in boiling water. The degree of cynicism of the camp staff is evidenced by the fact that they called the prisoners logs. Japanese “doctors” specifically performed operations without anesthesia, opened the human body and removed all the organs from it, right down to the brain, testing the person’s capabilities.

Russians made up half of the subjects - once they even tried to start a riot in the camp. The names of most of the heroes have not been preserved, but there is information about the Soviet soldier Demchenko, who commanded the uprising. At the Khabarovsk trial of Japanese war criminals in 1949, 12 members of Unit 731 were sentenced to long prison terms. And now the Japanese still have the audacity to demand the Kuril Islands from Russia!

Today it seems to us that after so many years, civilized Europeans and cultured Japanese treat us differently. But no, they hate Russians just as much as their ancestors did.