The Last Days of Budapest Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940–1945

Budapest, September 1944. The Hungarian capital lies in the eye of the storm. Three months after D-Day, the Allies are making significant strides through Europe. For Stalin, Budapest is Moscow’s gateway to the West. For Hitler, the city is a crucial bastion where the Russian’s advance must be stopped. Squeezed between the two sides, with the Red Army advancing, Budapest and its inhabitants will soon pay a terrible price. Large parts of the city’s Jewish population has already been deported to Auschwitz by the chillingly efficient Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann.This is the climax of Adam LeBor’s epic history of Budapest during the war, the story of an authoritarian regime allied with Hitler that also tried to keep in for as long as possible with the Allies. It is a tale full of spies like the British agent Basil Davidson, of brave Hungarian aristocrats smuggling people and information out of Nazi-occupied Poland, of bureaucrats having it both ways and getting sucked into the disaster of the German invasion of Russia. From then until the apocalyptic end game, Budapest became a more and more dangerous place for Jews, anti-fascists and ordinary people. The events culminate in the Siege of Budapest, the 50-day battle in which 38,000 civilians and 100,000 Soviet troops were killed. Even as the battle rages Hungarian fascists are slaughtering Jews. Soon after the siege the heroic Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who has worked to save Jewish lives, is kidnapped and murdered by the Soviets.The story is told through the lives of a core cast of characters, including a glamorous aristocrat, a Special Operations agent, a German SS officer, a Jewish housewife who negotiated with Adolf Eichmann and a Hungarian woman trying to keep her family alive.Drawing on original research in Hungarian, German and English, and first-hand accounts, diaries, interviews and archives, The Last Days of Budapest is a vivid, dramatic and moving account of the slow death of a cosmopolitan and beautiful European city and its eventual liberation. Adam LeBor brings the skills of a thriller writer to this spellbinding work of narrative history.