Triple-Edged Crisis

The Germans had written off Budapest. Last week the queen city of the Danube was just something to be destroyed so that Vienna, 115 miles upriver, might be saved. The crisis of Budapest had become the crisis of the southeastern approaches to Germany itself.

Beleaguered Budapest was already nearly two-thirds surrounded by the plodding, artillery-heavy Red Army. But into the city at that late hour the Germans poured several SS divisions, reportedly some others from the Italian front. Their orders: fight in every room of every house--Budapest must disappear from the face of the earth before Russian troops may have it. Ruling the ancient city's defenders was one of the grimmest, most corrupt of Nazis: Palestine-born, Hebrew-speaking SS Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Eichmann, who had made an enormous racket out of Hungary's anti-Semitic campaign. (He hired out the healthy, executed the aged and halt, opened escape routes to the wealthy.)

Colonel General Heinz Guderian had willed Budapest's doom for a reason that was obvious: he wanted to gain time for the defense of Austria. Out of Vienna moved a horde of old and young to dig trenches along the old Austro-Czechoslovak border. The Germans were reportedly moving what they could of Vienna's big war plants.

The stiffened German resistance slowed the crunching Russians around Budapest, but they seized some of the city's chief forts in its suburbs, gained in bitter battles into which the Germans poured thrice as many men and tanks as they had previously used on those sectors.

Hurry to the North. The Russians appeared to be in no hurry to destroy Budapest (but many of its famed landmarks were in the center of raging fires). But stubby, square-faced Marshal Rodion Y. Malinovsky did appear to be in a hurry to get over the fringe of mountains north of the city and on to the plain that led to both Bratislava (Slovakia's capital) and Vienna. Sweeping around Budapest, he made swift progress, cut over the Slovak border into Ipolysag (Sahy), only some 80 miles from Bratislava. To the northeast, more of Malinovsky's men advanced in hard fighting through the last gaps of the Buekk Mountains, occupied most of Hungary's remaining mining and factory areas.

The Russian assault pivoted on Budapest had become a triple threat: 1) the reinforced city garrisons were in danger of complete encirclement, with retreat to Vienna's defense cut off; 2) Malinovsky's center and right wing were arching in a 50-mile-wide pincers movement for another possible entrapment; 3) Marshal Fedor I. Tolbukhin's big force southwest of Budapest was in position to swing north in a separate drive on Vienna.

The German command had still another worry. Last week it told of a Red Army thrust toward Cracow on the long-dormant southern Poland front that points to the Reich's industries-rich Silesia, feared it might be the start of a winter offensive. As usual, the Russians gave no hints.

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