German Perspective: Urban Combat Battle of Budapest (1944-45)
In this video we look at a German experience report on the Battle of Budapest (1944-1945) about urban combat. It covers preparation, defensive lines, counterattack, logistics, wounded, civilians, Soviet tactics, houses, weapons, air supply and various other points.
Some cover design: Image generated by OpenAI's DALL-E. (with wrong T.34/85 gun barrel etc.)
» Stukabook - Doctrine of the German Dive-Bomber - stukabook.com
» The Assault Platoon of the Grenadier-Company November 1944 (StG 44) - sturmzug.com
» Panzer: Army Regulation Medium Panzer Company 1941 - www.hdv470-7.com
» IS-2 Stalin's Warhammer - www.is-2tank.com
» StuG: Ausbildung, Einsatz und Führung der StuG Batterie - stug-hdv.de
» Achtung Panzer? Zur Panzerwaffe der Wehrmacht - panzerkonferenz.de
» Panzerkonferenz Video - pzkonf.de
Battle of Berlin - 16 Days in Berlin: nebula.tv/16daysinberlin
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»» SOURCES ««
Generalstab des Heeres, Ausbildungs-Abteilung (Chef): Kampfführung in Großstädten (Erfahrungen aus Budapest). H.Qu. OKH, 22.2.1945.
Frieser, Karl-Heinz u. a.: Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg 8: Die Ostfront 1943/44. Der Krieg im Osten und an den Nebenfronten. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt: München, Germany, 2011.
Tessin: Band 14.
Kast, Bernhard/Bergs, Christoph: Sturmzug. Tactics of the German Assault Platoon 44. Military History Group: London, UK, 2022.
Wettstein, Adrian E.: Die Wehrmacht im Stadtkampf 1939-1942. Ferdinand Schöningh: Paderborn, Germany, 2014.
Ungváry, Krisztián: Battle for Budapest: 100 days in World War II. I.B. Tauris: London, UK, 2011.
Glantz, David et al.: Slaugtherhouse: The Encyclopedia of the Eastern Front. Military Book Club: USA, 2002.
Stahel, David: Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2011 (2009).
#BattleOfBudapest,#GermanPerspective,#urbancombat
00:00 Intro
00:19 Context Siege of Budapest
01:02 The Source
02:05 Experience Report
02:13 Preparation
06:27 Military History Group
07:26 Combat Procedures
14:35 Final Remark
» Stukabook - Doctrine of the German Dive-Bomber - stukabook.com » The Assault Platoon of the Grenadier-Company November 1944 (StG 44) - sturmzug.com » Panzer: Army Regulation Medium Panzer Company 1941 - www.hdv470-7.com » IS-2 Stalin's Warhammer - www.is-2tank.com » StuG: Ausbildung, Einsatz und Führung der StuG Batterie - stug-hdv.de » Achtung Panzer? Zur Panzerwaffe der Wehrmacht - panzerkonferenz.de » Battle of Berlin - 16 Days in Berlin: nebula.tv/16daysinberlin » Panzerkonferenz Video - pzkonf.de
At 4:50 it can be interesting, that the basements in Budapest were connected to the neigboring houses with emergency tunnels, that were sealed only with one layer of brick, so in the case of collapse the people in the air raid shelters could use it for evacuation. During the siege the defenders used these tunnels , but later the soviets figured it out also.
"only with one layer of brick" Try to explain that to a 'Murican, who sees this.
@@LV-nb9cs The tunnels were built from 1937 to connect the houses in case of emergency. So one reason that in peacetime you don't want anybody to access your cellar or buildign from a neigbouring house. The main reason that this one layer of brick was also plastered, so the cellar was gastight, like the rest of the air raid shelter. The shelters built under old houses in the majority of the cases were not bombproof, but gasproof , so you had to make it gastight. the one layer could be demolished with a simple hammer , if the building collapsed and there was no otherway out. In such cases if they can't get out the people in the shelter would suffocate. (the shelters also prowinded protection against splinters and rubble)
CoH dudes are taking notes.
nah men of war and gates of hell dudes are taking noted
I didnt play CoH for a while, and then I listen to this and was all like "hmm yeah makes sense, machine guns are pretty shit compared to flamethrowers on city maps"
Company of heroes?
@@hanz1620these are lessons men of war dudes are well aquatinted with
@@CrackzTV i know
Interesting that the Manual calls for "Sadism" in mining the houses infront of the defence Line. Good Video. Never thought about how much preparation goes into defending a city.
As always you're preperation and documentation are superb. Thank you for publishing this sort of thing for the general English speaking public. You make available to a vast audience a great deal of information that isn't generally availble. Thank you sir.
Agreed and seconded. Well said.
When I read Adrian Wettstein's excellent 'Die Wehrmacht im Stadtkampf' a few years ago I remember being slightly disappointed that he didn't cover this report in more detail. (Understandable because the focus of his work is on the early years of the war after all). I'm therefore very glad that you found it in the archives and shared it with us. Thank you!
Interesting, didn't even know he covered that report since it is so outside the scope.
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized It's only briefly noted in the final chapter if I recall correctly. He mentions the 'Verminungen mit allem Sadismus', so when you covered that at 5:57 it came back to me. I hope Wettstein expands upon his excellent work with a second volume covering the later years. He stopped just short of the period I was investigating at the time.
@@DigitalBattlefieldTours BTW, excuse me for asking but are you German? Its quite rare seeing an English speaking person reading German academic works...
@@33z6i6 I'm Dutch and can read German (with the help of a dictionary from time to time).
Budapest was formed by the unification of three cities: Buda, Óbuda, and Pest
Very beautiful city. I wasn't there but my son visited Budapest
At 7:10 two roads were planned to be prepared for gliders and light aircraft, Andrássy road and Műegyetem rakpart, but nieder were done. There is one event that a fieseler Storch landed in margit körút, but this could have been an emergency landing.
Wasn’t there only 800 people who made it back to axis lines after the breakout? Guy was lucky to make it
There is footage of those who broke out. Hungarian and SS troops in a half-track.
Yeah they broke out to the IV SS-Pz.Korps lines
8:13 I'm surprised to see the Panzerfaust mentioned here as commonly used in urban fights along with all this other anti-infantry weaponry. The seeming implication is that it was not uncommon to use a Panzerfaust against infantry in urban terrain, which seems odd considering that it's a shaped charge.
Something that goes boom is still something that goes boom, sure it might be a shaped charge, but if it goes off in an enclosed area I would imagine the blast effect is still plenty sufficient to kill.
It is light to carry and easy to use It can hit targets behind cover/house walls do to the shaped charge The famous RPG, a more modern Panzerfaust, is used in city combat all over the planet for decades by this point despite mainly having a shaped charge as well. It gives the average infantery soldier something to blow a hole into a fortified enemy and it is easy to carry. Also if tanks are appearing you have somethibg on hand to deal with it.
Much easier to get a chance to get close enough to a tank in street fighting than in an open field. Also, probably pretty good against soldiers taking cover behind walls, sandbags, etc
You must take the emotional effect into account. There is not a lot of arguing with someone holding a panzerfaust to your face. Also, they are really good at punching holes through the buildings which can later be enlarged to infil or exfil.
Would be good against an enemy in the next building or room. Shooting through a wall and having the blast combined with the blown bricks as a type of shrapnel. Even possibly causing a partial collapse of the structure itself. If nothing else, to use a Panzerfaust to blast an escape route if cornered.
Re loopsholes in basements, at least in Germany Luftschutzkeller always were intended to have a point of failure (Sollbruchstelle) for the occupants of adjacent buildings to be able to come to the rescue of their neighbours with nothing more than Sledgehammers. In fact this is how the owner of the house where I grew up in were rescued by their neighbours when the water main was hit and they were drowning in the air raid shelter.
Very interesting and comprehensive. I haven’t really paid much attention to the Battles in Hungary in 1945 but this video really gave me some great info.
Keep it up chief, great to know someone out there is doing diligent research on WWII!
I guess at 12:34 "zerlegte Pak" should be translated as "disassembled" ATG not "dismounted".
yeah, oversight, read it several times, but missed that now that you mention it, it is obvious.
The work this guy making for a pop military history is priceless!
More Dr Töpple please? Great content as always 👍
37mm Pak with the big HEAT round ws probably pretty dangerous in urban combat. If firing from inside buildings, probably quite hard to spot and hit.
And probably the only situation where that round would be useful.
The Historigraph video on the battle is fantastic
Very good video again.
Can you please do a video on tank turrets positions,
Interesting as always.
Just so bizarre that in Feb 45 they are writing after action reports as if their whole world isn’t coming down around their heads.
Sehr interessant! Gibt es diese Schriften denn irgendwo im Internet einzusehen, als PDF etc?
Interested to note that the Soviet artillery was rarely used in urban combat. This comes as a contrary to what is generally (but unprecisely) mentionned about Soviets or Russians fighting in cities. It would be interesteing to know if that was the same for the battle in Berlin?
A lot of commonly held stereotypes about how each side fought in WW2 seem wrong, like how the Germans were in reality not very motorised and relied so much on horses. I wonder if a lot of these ideas (especially about the Soviets/Russians) were from cold-war propaganda.
Interesting thing to me is this could be a primer on how to fight in built up areas to this very day. Changed to modern equipment of course.
One of the main differences to me (not an expert) seems to be how common small AT guns / field guns were then and how there aren't many now. Wouldn't something like a towed 30mm that can be pulled along by a few guys or a car or something, or assembled at a buildings' upper window, still be pretty versatile or useful in urban combat? Do we just have much better things to do the same job now like ATGMs/RPGs and mortars? Still wondering where the infantry's direct-fire anti-infantry/anti-fortification/"light artillery" role comes from.
7:53 interesting: No Sub-Machine guns (Maschinenpistole) mentioned? Or did they group them into "assault rifles"? I find it hard to believe that the ordinary soldier found a long bolt action rifle better/more popular than a SMG.
> 7:53 interesting: No Sub-Machine guns (Maschinenpistole) mentioned? Or did they group them into "assault rifles"? was surprised myself, hard to tell, since the MP44 had recently been renamed into the StG, so your assumption is probably correct.
3:10 i find this statement interesting as there are others who would claim differently: a MG can fulfill its area of effect much better horizontally.
Thanks for the video. Really interesting to hear about someone's (at that time) recent experience and thoughts on urban combat. It's one part of my own brief bit of military training that I remember somewhat. Like always use something like a Carl Gustav to make the entry point in a building you are assaulting. Not the actual entryways. Part of me wants to know if this Lieutenant Colonel (if I remember his rank) survived the war.
Thank you. Good video. Nice to have it straight from a combat experience report instead of a manual.
One thing is to report about anthore is to practical implement it. As you mention could be interresting if the battle of Berlin used this report. Looking at something that is happening now the battle of Bakhmut it is funny to read comments about how important artillery is when this report mention clearly that cellars allmost nullify their effectivness.
7:15 Mistranslation, typo? What are "landing fires" & "drop fires" in this context? Flights landing with stores & flights air-dropping stores is my guess. :)
I have a more general question regarding the battle of Budapest. Did IV SS Panzer Korps has any realistic change of breaking the siege and linked up with German forces inside the city?
so in a nutshell the siege of budapest was kinda a stalingrad lite
M.H.V. made a video about my country's capital. Made my day better, thanks
Its funny they were still making reports like this late in the war.
'Be Aware' that one of your Videos is a Great Way to end a long and tiresome day...Thank you!
what's the name of the scanner that appeared at the beginning? Did you buy it or it was property of the archive?
Are the books in ebook format? I travel a lot so that would be a bonus.
no
8:00 The part where they say MGs are less useful is interesting. You'd think machineguns would be vital in urban warfare, together with snipers and assault infantry with automatic weapons and lots of grenades.
The Video is really great as always but i am slightly confused. Which german infantry manual do you mean at 11:07 ? You are quoting your own book and that is fine but you claim its from a german regulation so which one is it? I have acces to a scanned copie of "Der Sturmzug der Gerenadier-Kompanie" from 1945 and i didnt find a fitting paragraph to the quote from your book thats at 11:07. Its entirely possible that i overread something but i didnt find anything similar in the defensiv section of the manual. So what other source is it from? Is it a different german regulation? Or did you combine information from multiple sources in that paragraph from your book? (I hope my point is understandable im a native german so english is just my second language)
The quote is from our book's glossary, in which we used a 1945 manual quote, a different one not the Sturmzug one.
‘Battle of Budapest: German experience’ ‘Fortress orders are not fun’
I'm not sure if you said that Oberstleutant Wolf was commander of all German forces in Budapest? Wikipedia (yeah yeah😁) says that General Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch was in charge, and General Gerhard Schmidhuber was in charge of all German forces in Hungary, and he was present and died during the battle.
No, division commander.
recommended: Krisztián Ungváry: Die Belagerung Budapest. Herbig, München, first edition: October 1999, second edition: January 2001. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krisztián_Ungváry)
I know its a German report, but was there much reference to the Hungarian forces along side them?
Nope.
"Fortify windows". LOL.
If I remember correctly, you're Dutch . . . but your German sounds excellent!
Austrian lol 😂
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized Ach so! Jetzt komm ich mir aber wirklich bloed vor! haha
lol :)
Did you know the Hungarian were given tiger 1s in fact some eastern countries were given tiger tanks from Germany but were used ones
They had a bit of experience at that time
The renamed FHH division hated the renaming most kept there previous name s.pz.abt 503 and jagdpanzer abt 39(?)
romanis did really changed the shoes in the air
Advanced Squad Leader's best scenario was set in Budapest.
Food that was "plundered by civilians" was food denied to civilians.
Budapest is not a pest. It's a common mistake, but in hungarian the "s" is a "sh" while the "s" (ß) is noted with "sz".
Thx in Polish is Budapeszt pronounced Budapesht
It is how we pronounce it.
No worries, just a hungarian wanting the whole universe to speak hungarian.
@@pavolp.6527 every name should be pronounced correctly, regardless of nation.
Budapest is an international word. In german it is prunounced with "s" in hungarian with "sh".
It's over Anakin - I hold the high ground.
Interesting that it sais nothing about the submachinegun .
we
@MHV I saw once a film on siège de Budapest when fully equipped Germans go throughout caves and commander of squad of Hungarians says you're Hungarians you have knives then fight!
@MHV what's weird the Poles made 1944 Warsaw uprising against Germans, Russians to Polish we don't like you very much. Hungarians defended Budapest with Germans against Russians in 1945. Russians still: we like you Hungarians.
Have you seen Russo polish relations? The Russians literally stole half their country in collaboration with the Nazis and kept them post war as the western half of Belarus and western third of Ukraine
@Lost_Achaean Stalins early reputation was blemished as his command was pinned down and unable to come to the assistance of red forces in the battle known as "The Miracle of the Vistula", he formed a VERY personal grudge against the Poles there after.
I'm not sure the Soviets actually liked the Hungarians. There's a reason why they rose up in revolt in 1956 after all, and look at how brutal the Soviets repressed it. Stalin just wanted to completely submit Poland and getting rid of the Home Army was paramount to that goal. Hungary was treated just like Poland after the war, but the Soviets didn't need to eliminate a large local resistance movement that could be a threat to them. Although resistance movements against the Soviets did exist in probably every East-European country the Soviets occupied and either annexed or turned into Soviet satellite states.
The poles did not care to inform the soviets or even the british (who were sheltering the polish government in exile) about plans to revolt, and while the soviets were relatively close to Warsaw during the uprising, they had also recently advanced the front by a really large distance meaning that their own divisions would be battered and out of supply after a massive offensive... It made both political and strategic sense for the soviets to not help because it would have most likely costed them dearly in terms of men and materiel due to having to force even more attacks with depleted forces and give up a prime opportunity to shore up their positions in other parts of the frontline. (at the same time as they would have been getting themselves dug right into city fighting, Germany was busy rushing in every single division they could to oppose the soviets from attacking further, which could have possibly even led to a military disaster to end off the previously successful soviet offensive if their streched lines got broken and they failed to secure any good positions for follow on offensives) The fact that Stalin got to fuck over the polish government in exile was just icing on the cake for him, pretty much Basically a huge case of the Home army thinking it could liberate itself against the germans so soviets wouldnt get to take over warsaw, but only running into the reality that they needed outside help - which due to their own haste in literally not talking to the people who could help them - was practically non-existent
@@domaxltv From what ive read and heard, they did know due to pro Russian polish communists. However, they allowed the revolt to take place unsupported to allow for more pro saboteurs to take power once they rolled in.
my father was wounded in this battle, aged 18 and survived, unlike most of his unit glad to know that German leutenant colonels did send teenagers to die in a structured and organized way that could be taught to later generations I'm a concencious objector
Officers always send teenagers out to die. Just look at how the Ukrainian army (and probably the Russian army too) are rounding up every able bodied men to go to the meatgrinder. And when push comes to shove you can find out how much they will care about you being a conscientious objector. Not trying to insult you but n the last months of the war German trees and lantern posts throughout Germany were decorated by the SS with the bodies of those men unwilling to fight or caught behind the lines without a permit. When governments are that desperate and in need of every warm body they will stop caring about your rights.
Panzerdivision Feldherrnhalle klingt wie ein von KI erzeugter Name.
Nein
Dann informiere dich mal über die Geschichte der Feldherrnhalle...
fortify windows hhhhhhhhh
Its pronounced Pescht.
Ah yes, the meat grinder so traumatizing that it made the Soviets demand the fire bombing of Dresden from the Americans.
*1st!!!*
Goddamn, you austrian 😂, after 300 years of common history you should know better: it's BudaPESCHT if you would be so kind and do not butcher the name of the most beautiful city in Europe... Unglaublich. Nach 300 Jahren gemeinsam, das müsste doch möglich sein😅, kostet kein Arm und Bein
Never heard anyone in Austria or the English speaking world say it that way. I don't even know when I was the last time in Hungary, probably before 2000 or something.
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized 😀 ach the good old K.u.K. Zeiten 😉
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized your replies are so arrogant. take tips either with silence or with a "thanks". You just show how close minded you are with these replies. It's like you don't want to evolve and increase your professionalism.
We learned nothing. 99 GER bombed Serbia 3rd time in < 100 years, sends tanks towards RU again. The people that take this lightly, what will be their last tought? The ones that bashed Russia, called them Orcs [RU had the first man in space]. What will be their last thought when night becoms day and he has seconds before being ripped apart. "Will my child feel pain?" "Was Zelensky worth the death of humanity?".
Still seething that "mighty Russia" got stuck 50km from its border? Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
I wish Germany didn’t lose against communists
Germany and Hungary invaded Soviet Union, not the other way around. You can hate Stalin and his regime and be russophobia, but plz don’t be a POS
@@aps125 Soviet Union deserves no sovereignty, Germany was correct in backstabbing the commies.
@@aps125 Soviet union was planning to invade all of Europe
Gotta love to see neo-nazis seething that Russians, Belarussians and Ukrainians would rather choose the great terrible oppressive Red Army rather than the wholesome chungus 100 "war-crime free" Wehrmacht """liberators""". I wonder why on Earth would that happen.
Did you make a video about the Soviet perspective or will you make it in the future? I really don't give a flying fuck about any kraut or its perspective
No, because I don't read/speak Russian.
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized you don't reckon you could try with translated or English sources? You make quite good stuff, I'd love to see one from the other perspective
@@vanjat2850 I could, but my strength is with German sources. The information in that video likely was never translated into English before.