Drama Between Budapest And Vienna The Final Battles of the 6. Panzer Armee in the East, 1945

by Georg Maier

2004 hard bound with illustrated color cover, 9x12, glossy page stock, 475+ pages, nearly 1,000 footnotes, 16 pages of photos, 124 appendices and a separate 32 page full color map book. Georg Maier, the former Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations of the 6. (SS)-Panzer-Armee, has written not only a monumental history of his former field army but a sweeping account of the little-known fighting on the southern portion of the Eastern Front in the final months of the war. Maier provides a truly objective overview of those operations by making use of primary sources documents, war diaries and surviving senior commanders to show the reader how decisions were made at senior levels of command and how certain post-war memoirs have only distorted the picture of what really happened in the final few months of the war. As such, it encompasses the operations of four different Waffen-SS corps and, by extension, nearly all of the name divisions of the Waffen-SS: The 1. SS-Panzer-Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the 2. SS-Panzer-Division Das Reich, the 3. SS-Panzer-Division Totenkopf, the 5. SS-Panzer-Division Wiking, the 9. SS-Panzer-Division Hohenstaufen and the 12. SS-Panzer-Division Hitlerjugend. In addition, many of the most-famous Army armored divisions were involved in this fighting: the 1. Panzer-Division, the 3. Panzer-Division, the 6. Panzer-Division and the 23. Panzer-Division. Maier starts his narrative with the brutal and ill-fated fighting to relieve the encircled city of Budapest and the IX. SS-Gebirgs-Korps by Armeegruppe Balck (primarily by the IV. SS-Panzer-Korps). This is followed by the ill-fated Lake Balaton offensive, where the 6. Panzer-Armee comprised of the I. SS-Panzer-Korps and the II. SS-Panzer-Korps, among other formations was bled white combating prepared Soviet defenses in terrain that was completely ill suited for armored warfare. He then chronicles all the fighting to the end in Vienna.

591 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[William Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviously, this book is for hard core military history buffs who want minute details on the actions Army Group South in 1945. The author was involved personally in much of the narrative, which makes this book invaluable to future historians, like me. His take on the famous 'cuff-band order', for example, is unique, because he was there.

However, his reason for writing it was in response to Hermann Balck's 'Order in Chaos', in which Balck thew anybody and everybody under the bus for his own failures. In particular, he blamed the Waffen SS for everything that went wrong anywhere. Maier's narrative, therefore, feels skewed at times when he bashes Balck in response to Balck bashing the SS.

Nevertheless, this volume is simply irreplaceable for the historian or history buff interested in the period. The graphs and appendices are worth the steep price by themselves, and the construction of the book is first-rate.