From the Realm of a Dying Sun: Volume III - IV. SS-Panzerkorps from Budapest to Vienna, February–May 1945

"The scholarship that went into these books is impeccable, with the author deftly weaving primary and secondary sources to form an excellent and thought provoking picture of this period in the Second World War."Globe at War In the closing months of World War II, with Budapest’s fall on 12 February 1945 and the breakout attempt by the IX SS-Gebirgskorps having failed, the only thing the IV. SS-Panzerkorps could do was fall back to a more defensible line and fortify the key city of Stuhlweissenburg. Exhausted after three relief attempts in January 1945 and outnumbered by the ever-increasing power of Marshal Tolbukhin’s Third Ukrainian Front, SS-Obergruppenführer Gille’s veterans dug in for a lengthy period of defensive warfare. However, Adolf Hitler had not forgotten about the Hungarian theater of operations nor the country’s rich oilfields and was sending help. To the detriment of the defense of Berlin, SS-Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich’s legendary 6. Panzerarmee was on its way, not to retake Budapest, but to encircle and destroy Tolbukhin’s forces and completely reverse the situation in south-eastern Europe in Hitler’s favor. This overly ambitious offensive, known as Frühlingserwachen (Spring Awakening), was soon bogged down in the face of resolute Soviet defenses aided by the springtime thaw. Heralded as Nazi Germany’s last great offensive of World War II, it resulted in great losses to Hitler’s last armored reserve in exchange for only minor gains. Though it played a supporting role during the battle, the IV. SS-Panzerkorps was soon caught up in its aftermath, after the Red Army launched its Vienna Operation that nearly swept the armies of Heeresgruppe Süd from the battlefield. Withdrawing into Austria, Gille’s battered corps attempted to bar the route into Germany, while the Red Army bore down on Vienna. Forced to endure relentless Soviet attacks as well as the caustic leadership of the 6. Armee commander, General Hermann Balck, the men of the IV. SS-Panzerkorps fought their way through Austria to reach the safety of the demarcation line where it finally surrendered to U.S. forces on 9 May 1945 after nearly a year of relentless campaigning. Table of Contents Introduction List of Maps List of Figures Illustrations Chapter 1: A South Wind Brings Hope Chapter 2: Operation Spring Awakening Chapter 3: The Defense of Stuhlweissenburg Chapter 4: Withdrawal to the Reichsschutzstellung Chapter 5: Defending the Reich Chapter 6: War’s End Appendices Endnotes Bibliography Index "On Christmas Eve 1944, the men of the IV SS-Panzerkorps were preparing to celebrate the occasion as best they could. Taking advantage of the pause in the fighting around Warsaw, they looked forward to partaking in that most German of holidays, including the finest Christmas dinner their field kitchens could still prepare in this fifth year of the war. They had earned it too; after five months of unrelenting combat and the loss of many of their friends, troops from the corps headquarters, headquarters troops, and its two divisions - the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf and the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking - were eagerly anticipating what the holiday would bring, including presents from home and perhaps sharing a bottle of schnapps or wine with their comrades. This was not to be, for that very evening, the corps commander, SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Herbert Otto Gille, received a telephone call notifying him that the 35,000 men of his corps would begin boarding express trains the following day that would take them from the relative quiet of the Vistula Front to the front lines in Hungary, hundreds of kilometers away. Their mission: Relieve Budapest! Thus would begin the final round in the saga of the IV SS-Panzerkorps. In Hungary, it would play a key role in the three attempts to raise the siege of that fateful city. Threatened as much by their high command as by the forces of the Soviet Union, Gille and his troops overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their attempts to rescue the city's garrison, only to have their final attack called off at the last minute. At that moment, they were only a few kilometers away from the objective towards which they had striven for nearly a month. After the relief attempt's failure sealed the fate of hundreds of thousands of Hungarians and Germans, the only course of action remaining was to dig in and protect the Hungarian oilfields as long as possible." During World War II, the armed or Waffen-SS branch of the Third Reich's dreaded security service expanded from two divisions in 1940 to 38 divisions by the end of the war, eventually growing to a force of over 900,000 men. Not satisfied with allowing his nascent force to be commanded in combat by army headquarters of the Wehrmacht, Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, began to create his own SS corps and army headquarters beginning with the SS-Panzerkorps in July 1942. As the number of Waffen-SS divisions increased, so did the number of corps headquarters, with 18 corps and two armies being planned or activated by the war's end. The histories of the first three SS corps are well known--the actions of I., II., and III. (Germanic) SS-Panzerkorps and their subordinate divisions, including the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Das Reich, Hitlerjugend, Hohenstaufen, Frundsberg and Nordland divisions, have been thoroughly documented. Overlooked in this pantheon is another SS corps that never fought in the west or in Berlin but did participate in many of the key battles on the Eastern Front during the last year of the war--the IV. SS-Panzerkorps. Activated during the initial stages of the defense of Warsaw in late July 1944, IV. SS-Panzerkorps, consisting of both the 3. SS-Panzer Division Totenkopf and 5. SS-Panzer Division Wiking, was born in battle and spent the last ten months of the war in combat. It was renowned for its tenacity, high morale and, above all, its lethality, whether conducting a hard-hitting counterattack or a stubborn defense even when outnumbered. The corps commander, Herbert Otto Gille, was often embroiled in heated disputes with the corps' immediate Wehrmacht higher headquarters over his seemingly cavalier conduct of operations, but his corps remained to the bitter end one of the Third Reich's most reliable and formidable field formations The concluding part of Doug Nash's magisterial history of IV. SS-Panzerkorps, covering their actions as they retreated from Budapest to Vienna in the final months of the war.