Stephen Christian Werrbach

October 29, 1944. The Red Army launches its offensive to take Budapest. Stalin wanted the Hungarian capital captured within days, in time for the anniversary of the Russian Revolution on November 7. It took more than three months. Hitler declared Budapest a fortress city and ordered it held at all costs. By late December, the Soviets had surrounded it, trapping tens of thousands of German and Hungarian troops along with around 800,000 civilians. What followed was one of the longest and bloodiest city sieges of the war. Fighting raged house to house and street to street. People froze and starved in basements while artillery tore the city apart. Inside, the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross carried out a massacre of their own. They marched Jews to the banks of the Danube, ordered them to take off their shoes, and shot them so their bodies fell into the river. Today, sixty pairs of iron shoes sit on the riverbank as a memorial. One man stood in their way. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg handed out protective passports and set up safe houses, saving thousands of Jews from deportation and murder. The siege ended in February 1945. Tens of thousands of civilians were dead. Days after the Soviets arrived, Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet officials. He disappeared into the Soviet prison system and was never seen in freedom again.

German Attacks on the Krasny Oktyabr and Barrikady Gun Factories during the Battle of Stalingrad

He was the most famous tank commander of the war, a man whose name became legend for the number of enemy tanks he destroyed and for one astonishing ambush in which he tore apart a British column almost single-handedly. Michael Wittmann, commanding the heavy Tiger tank, wore the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords. Wittmann made his reputation on the Eastern Front. Commanding first assault guns and then the formidable Tiger, with its thick armor and its deadly eighty-eight-millimeter gun, he fought in the great battles in the Soviet Union, including the vast armored clash at Kursk in the summer of 1943, and he ran up a huge tally of kills against Soviet tanks and anti-tank guns. The Tiger was a fearsome machine, able to destroy most enemy tanks at long range while shrugging off hits that would kill a lesser vehicle, and in the hands of a skilled, aggressive commander like Wittmann it was murderous. His score climbed into the dozens and then well beyond, among the highest of any tank commander in the war. His single most famous action came in Normandy, in June 1944, shortly after the D-Day landings, near the town of Villers-Bocage. There, Wittmann, with a small number of Tigers and at the crucial moment largely on his own, caught a column of British tanks and vehicles strung out along a road and attacked it with stunning speed and aggression. In a matter of minutes he knocked out a long string of British tanks, armored vehicles, and transports, wrecking a significant part of an advancing British force almost by himself and throwing the whole British thrust in that sector into confusion. It was one of the most celebrated single tank actions of the war, and it made Wittmann, already decorated, into a national hero, his exploits trumpeted across Germany. His luck ran out later that summer. In the brutal attritional fighting in Normandy, as the Allied armies with their overwhelming numbers and total air supremacy ground down the German armor, Wittmann was killed in action in August 1944 when his Tiger was destroyed, almost certainly overwhelmed by multiple Allied tanks closing in from several directions, the usual fate of even the best German tanks once the enemy had the numbers to swarm them. His body and crew were lost with the tank and not identified for decades. Wittmann belongs to the story of the Tiger and the whole German experience of armored warfare in the second half of the war: machines and men that were often individually superior, tanks that could kill at ranges and survive hits their enemies could not match, aces who ran up extraordinary scores, and yet who were in the end simply overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of Allied and Soviet tanks and the command of the air. The Germans had the better tank and the famous ace; the Allies had the numbers, and the numbers won. Wittmann, the most renowned tank commander of them all, died proving it, swarmed under in a Normandy field in the summer of 1944.