In the summer of 1942, when German troops occupied the right-bank half of Voronezh, brutal actions began on the part of the Hungarian division. Soldiers killed people with axes and crowbars, burned and raped people. prisoners soviet soldiers were tortured before they died. The command of the Soviet troops made an unofficial order to their soldiers: "Do not take the Magyars prisoner."

The occupation continued until January 25, 1943. During this time, 160,000 Hungarians found their last refuge in Voronezh. There were no prisoners from the Hungarian division. The German army lost about 320 thousand soldiers in the battles for Voronezh.

Sunset of the Hungarian army

Most of today's Hungarians have a relative who took part in the "Voronezh tragedy". The Hungarian army at that time numbered about 250 thousand people, of which more than half died near Voronezh.

Only a few Hungarian soldiers were able to desert and walk to their native lands. It was this army that all the citizens of Hungary were proud of.

As a result of the First World War, Hungary lost, while losing territory and slowing down in economic growth. Two-thirds of the country and the population moved away from its composition. Several million Hungarian citizens became citizens of other states.

The German government took advantage of the depressing position of Hungary and made it a member of the Axis. With the successful operation of the German troops, Hungary would have received its lands back. It was this factor that influenced the decision of the ruler Miklós Horthy.

After the occupation of Czechoslovakia in the late 30s, some of its territories were ceded to Hungary.

They had to pay for these lands not only with food, but also with the blood of their own soldiers. In 1941, the Third Reich demanded the joining of the Hungarian troops to fight the USSR. The Hungarian leadership allocated a corps of 40,000 soldiers. Corps equipment was destroyed. A large number of soldiers were killed and wounded. At the end of that year, the corps was returned to its homeland.

Then Germany again demanded military support. In mid-1942, Hungary was forced to send the 2nd Hungarian Army, which consisted of eight divisions. In addition to the Hungarians, the division included representatives of the territories that were annexed to Hungary.

Successfully advancing along with the Germans, many soldiers chose their land allotments. The Germans had previously stated that any Hungarian soldier would be able to settle in the conquered territories after the end of the war. The Hungarian units were mainly used as guards in the rear. These soldiers stood out for their particular cruelty towards civilians and prisoners of war.

At the end of 1942, the German command decided on the active participation of Hungarian units in hostilities. So the "conquerors" found themselves at the forefront.

In January 1943, the Soviet units launched an active offensive. So the first Hungarian soldiers were captured. All the survivors tried in every possible way to desert and began to flee. But due to problems with transport, most of the soldiers had to go into the harsh winter on foot. Many of them died from the cold. During the retreat, almost all equipment and weapons were lost. For several weeks of active fighting, the Magyar army lost more than half of its soldiers.

The fighting in and around Voronezh continued for 212 days, but the Germans were never able to completely capture the city. Voronezh covered Moscow from the south, while pulling dozens of enemy divisions away from Stalingrad.

In January 2013, in Voronezh, which was celebrating the 70th anniversary of the liberation from German troops, a delegation from Hungary arrived, which included ministry employees, clergy and military personnel. The Hungarians visited the largest military burial outside the country, the place where the 2nd Hungarian army, numbering 203 thousand people, died.

In modern Hungary, Voronezh has the same symbolic sound as the Berezina River for the French - a disaster. Near Voronezh, the Hungarians who fought in the ranks of the Wehrmacht, according to eyewitnesses - soldiers of the Red Army and local residents, were distinguished not so much by fighting spirit as by brutal cruelty towards prisoners and the local population. When the Wehrmacht units captured half of the city on the right bank, 2 Hungarian divisions staged a massacre of the population, literally, cut off heads, sawed people with saws, pierced heads with crowbars, burned, raped women and children. Captured Russian soldiers were subjected to terrible torture before death.

The atrocities that the descendants of Attila committed on our land led to the fact that the Russian soldiers refused to take the Magyars prisoner, and destroyed them on the spot, like mad animals. The Soviet command unofficially supported the fighters, giving the command not to take the Magyars prisoner.

After 212 days of fighting for Voronezh, Soviet troops liberated the city, captured 75,000 Nazis. Of the two divisions consisting of Hungarians, not a single prisoner was taken. According to some reports, 160,000 Hungarians remained in the Voronezh land.

Our historical memory has many blank spots. After the war, during the creation of the Warsaw Pact, which included Hungary, the atrocities of the new allies were diligently hushed up in the USSR, and today we will rather recall the Hungarian uprising of 1956

which was suppressed by the Red Army.

The troops acted harshly, the rebellious Hungarians lost about 3,000 people killed. And today we have to justify ourselves for the suppression of the rights and freedoms of the unfortunate freedom-loving people by the USSR. But, in 1956, our wars still remembered the atrocities of the Magyars in the occupied territories of the USSR. It can be assumed that the rights and freedoms of the conquered new Huns were the least of their worries. And who will throw a stone at our fighters if he puts himself in their place?

Times are changing, and in 2013 a delegation of Hungarians arrived at the site of a national disaster with a peaceful mission. “Today we are gathered to mourn together. Let these memories become gratitude to those Russian families who saw in the retreating Hungarian soldier not only the one who attacked their house, but also saw in him the human dignity of the image of God. These Russian families sometimes shared the last piece of bread, saved the soldiers from the deadly frost, bandaged their wounds and buried, as it should be, these victims of the war. May our meeting today, our prayers deepen reconciliation between peoples,” said Bishop of the Hungarian army Laszlo Biro.

The complete collapse of the 2nd Hungarian army of Admiral Horthy. 150 thousand Magyars died near Voronezh. Of these, 10 thousand are located on the territory of the Storozhevsky bridgehead.

Three months after the German attack on the USSR, the German military attache in Hungary, Rabe von Pappenheim, in his letter addressed to Major General von Greiffenberg, expressed the following thought: “A German soldier in battle is a warrior, but not a gendarme. For such "tasks of appeasement" the Hungarians are more suitable. Soon this idea was realized.

Hungarians in the USSR, a brief history

Pappenheim looked into the water: already in the first months of the battles on the Eastern Front, the Hungarian ground units, which were used by the German command mainly to pursue the retreating troops of the Red Army, suffered significant losses. Participation in the battles continued only the Hungarian mobile corps, which included cavalry, motorized and tank formations. But parts of the so-called "Carpathian Corps", which consisted of the 8th border and 1st mountain rifle brigades, were actively used by the Germans as occupying troops.

Hungarian soldiers take prisoners of the Red Army, 1941

In the autumn of 1941, the battered mobile corps was withdrawn from the front. The German command demanded that Hungary put up a significant contingent of occupying forces as a replacement. The political leadership of Hungary began to send rifle brigades to ensure occupation activities on the territory of the USSR, which were deployed in two different regions. The 111th, 123rd and 124th brigades were deployed in Ukraine in the Poltava region, where it was relatively calm. But in the south of the Bryansk forests, where the 102nd, 105th and 108th infantry brigades were deployed, the picture was completely different - partisans were operating there.

By the beginning of 1942, these six brigades, as well as smaller units in the occupied Soviet territory, had a total of more than 40,000 Honvéds. On February 12, 1942, all Hungarian brigades were renamed light divisions, which were much weaker both in terms of personnel and equipment in comparison with the German ones. This was done at the suggestion of the chief of the Hungarian General Staff, Lieutenant General Szombathely, who sought to compete successfully with Romania at least in terms of the number of formations participating in the occupation of the USSR. Hungary had special scores with her: one of critical factors that forced both the Hungarians and the Romanians, for the sake of the Third Reich, to declare war on the USSR, were their mutual territorial claims. However, already in the middle of 1942, Hungary significantly surpassed Romania both in the number of divisions and in the number of troops sent to the Eastern Front: the 206,000th Hungarian 2nd Army arrived to help the Germans. She participated in the summer-autumn battles in the bend of the Don, after which her task was to hold the line of defense along the western Don line.

And the Hungarian occupation group continued to remain on the territory of the USSR. Its command, which was first located in Vinnitsa, and then in Kyiv, supervised the actions of all the Hungarian occupation units. However, in fact, it dealt only with resolving issues related to supply and maintaining discipline, and in military-tactical terms, all Hungarian formations were subordinated to the local German command on a territorial basis. In the areas occupied by the Hungarians, there were also numerous auxiliary units formed from German units and police recruited from the local population.

Hungarian soldiers for cleaning weapons. Eastern Front, summer 1942

The Hungarian units, as well as the SD (German: Sicherheitsdienst - security service) and the HFP (German: Geheime Feldpolizei - secret field police) units responsible for this territory, had to work closely with each other - until the summer of 1942, each Hungarian division had a GUF group consisting of 50-60 people was seconded. These police groups were divided into 6-8 groups and distributed among the Hungarian battalions. Their task was to interrogate local residents and captured partisans, as well as to carry out the sentences of the military court. Therefore, when considering the atrocities of the Hungarian occupying forces on the territory of the USSR, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the Hungarian occupying forces all the time acted either together with the Germans, or under German control. However, the Hungarians themselves in their punitive actions against the civilian population were zealous beyond all measures.

This was especially evident in the actions of the divisions that found themselves near the border of the RSFSR and Belarus. For example, a multi-week military operation to clear the Bryansk forests from partisans by the forces of the 102nd and 105th light divisions, which ended on May 30, 1942, ended, according to Hungarian data, with the following results: 4375 “partisans and their accomplices” were destroyed, 135 were taken prisoners, and only 449 rifles, as well as 90 machine guns and machine guns, were captured from weapons. From this we can draw a very definite conclusion - the vast majority of the liquidated "partisans" did not have any weapons.

The total losses of the “partisans” were almost nine times higher than the losses of the attackers, and from the indicated number of captured weapons it follows that at most 600-700 partisans could die in battles, the rest were civilians. Similar actions in 1941-1942. were carried out repeatedly. In total, the Hungarian occupation forces from November 1941 to August 1942, according to incomplete data, destroyed 25-30 thousand "partisans", while it is obvious that the vast majority of them were civilians.

For an official photo with local residents, one could create such an idyll

However, sometimes the Hungarian occupation units were forced to participate in hostilities against the Soviet troops. For example, after a long resistance from the Hungarian General Staff, the 108th division was sent to the command of the commander of the German 6th Army, Friedrich Paulus, and on March 19 entered into battle with the Soviet troops near the village of Verkhniy Bishkin, Kharkov region. Further describes in his book "Memoirs of Adjutant Paulus" Wilhelm Adam:

“What Paulus feared on March 1 happened. The division retreated. The VIII Army Corps also had to withdraw ten kilometers back, since the Hungarian security brigade under the command of Major General Abt was unable to resist the advancing enemy. Soviet tanks were stationed 20 kilometers from Kharkov.

The Germans managed to turn the tide of the battle, but it became quite obvious to them that the Magyar light divisions, except for punitive actions, were no longer good for anything.

Soon the same thing became clear in relation to the 2nd Hungarian field army, which in a matter of days of January 1943 was utterly defeated during the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh offensive operation of the Soviet troops. Only about 60,000 Hungarian soldiers were able to get out of the encirclement alive. The surviving units of the 2nd Army returned to their homeland in the spring of 1943, but not all of them: after reforming and replenishing with people, some of them were moved to Ukraine and became part of the occupation forces, which were still stationed in Ukraine (7th Corps) and in Belarus (8th Corps).

Cross, land, will... and many, many more crosses. A tablet reminding ungrateful Russians of their happiness

Over time, the Germans realized that the Hungarian methods in no way contributed to the real fight against the partisans. Evidence of this can serve, for example, the report of Lieutenant Colonel Kruvel:

“Given the propaganda of the enemy, their (Hungarian) indiscipline and absolutely arbitrary behavior towards the local population could only harm German interests. Robbery, rape and other crimes were commonplace. Additional hostility of the local population was obviously caused by the fact that the Hungarian troops could not defeat the enemy in combat operations.

Beginning in 1943, the Hungarian occupation troops carried out fewer and fewer major actions against the partisans. One of their main tasks was to ensure security railway: for this, the Hungarian formations stretched for thousands of kilometers. Due to the vast territory, the protection of the railway could only be solved with the help of fortified outposts, located several hundred meters from each other, which kept under control the strip cleared of vegetation on both sides of the railway embankment. However, the Hungarians, of course, did not forget about punitive actions against civilians.

The 90,000-strong Hungarian occupation contingent continued to do this until the Soviet troops liberated the Left-Bank and then the Right-Bank Ukraine. When, as a result of the Proskurov-Chernivtsi operation in April 1944, the armies of the 1st Ukrainian Front crossed the Dniester and reached the foothills of the Carpathians, there was practically nothing for the Magyar occupying forces to occupy.

Directive No. 10 and other regulatory documents

The most brutal repressions were carried out by the Hungarian and German invaders in areas where there was even a shadow of a partisan threat. What guided the Hungarian military leaders in carrying out their occupation policy? First of all, this is an analytical report of the 4th department of the Hungarian Royal General Staff on the experience of fighting Soviet partisans, which was published in 1942 - more often it is simply called "Directive No. 10". He summarized information about the composition, structure, tasks and methods of combat by Soviet partisans and, most importantly, about the organization of counteraction to them by units of the Hungarian army.

Not only the Germans liked to be photographed with the executed. The Magyars and the "Jewish partisan" hanged by them, 1942

For example, in the section “Types of partisan gangs. Their human material. Ways to staff them” described the methods by which partisan leaders recruited new members into their ranks:

“To involve their organizational departments (detachments) use the following methods; persons entrusted with recruitment, usually at night, under the pretext of a friendly visit, visit the intended victim at the apartment. Having taken drinks with them, they solder the given person, to whom they came with a “visit”, and, when he was already pretty drunk, they try to persuade him to join their ranks; if this fails, they resort to violent means. At first, they openly call for joining, and in case of refusal, threats, intimidation, night visits and insults will follow. Finally, those who refuse are forcibly taken away and also shot.”

Directive No. 10 recommended that young women and Jews be especially vigilant and uncompromising:

“A Russian person is not talkative by nature; whoever talks a lot and willingly is suspicious, a young woman is always suspicious, and if she is a stranger (not from these places), then she is definitely an agent of the partisans. Among the elders there are a lot of those who, out of fear, are for the partisans. But the partisans also have like-minded people among the Ukrainian auxiliary police. The Jews, without exception, are on the side of the partisans. Therefore, their complete neutralization is a paramount task.”

The Ukrainian topic was not left without attention in the report:

“The Ukrainian people are not racially identical with the Russian people, which means that they cannot pursue the same policy as them. The Slavic blood of the Ukrainians is strongly mixed with the blood of the Turanian and Germanic peoples. As a result, they (Ukrainians) are more intelligent, stronger, dexterous and viable than Russians. In racial terms and because of their abilities, they are much closer to the Western cultured peoples than to the Russian. Under the new European order, Ukrainians have an important calling. In contrast, the Russians, equally under the tsarist and red regimes, for centuries only oppressed and exploited the Ukrainian people and did not give them the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations, as well as aspirations for culture and civilization. They can only find a better and happier future for themselves on the side of the Axis Powers.”

However, the “better and happier future” of the Hungarian Honvéds brought them as close as they could, punishing the recalcitrant with fire and sword, without making out whether the Ukrainian was in front of them or not. In the section "Techniques for Fighting Partisans", a paragraph titled "Retaliation" read:

“Following the defeat of the partisan detachments, the most inexorable and ruthless retribution must follow. There is no room for indulgence. Unmerciful cruelty deprives everyone of the desire to continue to join the partisans or support them; the partisans themselves might mistake mercy and pity for weakness. The captured partisans, subjected, in case of need, to an interrogation, immediately on the spot must be finished off (shot), or, for intimidation, hanged publicly somewhere in the nearest village. We must also deal with the exposed, fallen into our hands, helpers of the partisans. It is important that the widest possible strata of the population learn about retribution.”

In fact, "actions for retaliation among the general population" were most often carried out without "defeating partisan detachments." Moreover, in addition to the Hungarian instructions and orders, there were also orders from the German occupation authorities. The commanders of the Magyar units were also obliged to comply with their instructions, and they were no less stringent than the measures provided for in Hungarian Directive No. 10. For example, in addition to Directive No. 33 of the German High Command of July 23, 1941, it was said:

“The troops assigned to carry out security service in the occupied eastern regions will be enough to complete the tasks only if all resistance is eliminated not by judicial punishment of the guilty, but by spreading such fear and horror on the part of the occupying authorities that will discourage the population from any desire to opposition. Commanders must find means to maintain order in protected areas, not by requesting new security units, but by applying appropriate draconian measures.

Everything is written very clearly and understandably: “fear and horror” and “draconian measures”. The implementation of the directives was appropriate.

War crimes of the Hungarians

The Hungarian occupation units diligently sowed fear and horror on the occupied land. Here are just a few examples. Peasant woman of the Sevsky district of the Bryansk region V.F. Mazerkova:

“When they saw the men of our village, they said that they were partisans. And the same number, i.e. On May 20, 1942, they seized my husband Mazerkov Sidor Borisovich, born in 1862, and my son Mazerkov Alexei Sidorovich, born in 1927, and tortured them, and after these torments they tied their hands and threw them into a pit, then set fire to straw and burned them in a potato pit. On the same day, they not only burned my husband and son, they also burned 67 men.”.

The partisans captured by the Hungarians, for some reason, are very similar to ordinary inhabitants. 1942

Peasant woman of the same district E. Vedeshina:

“It was in May on the 28th day of 1942. I and almost all the inhabitants went into the forest. Those thugs followed. They are in our place, where we (inaudible) with our people, shot and tortured 350 people, including my children were tortured: daughter Nina, 11 years old, Tonya, 8 years old, little son Vitya 1 year old and son Kolya 5 years old. I was barely alive under the corpses of my children.”.

A resident of the village of Karpilovka R.S. Troy:

“In our village of Karpilovka, exclusively Hungarian units (Magyars) committed atrocities and atrocities, especially in the period May-August 1943 […] they ordered us to take shovels, gathered us to the anti-tank ditch, about 40 people and ordered to bury the anti-tank ditch with shot corpses. […] The ditch was approximately 30 meters long and 2 meters wide, the corpses lay in disorder, and it was difficult to establish traces of firearms, because it was a bloody mess of old men, old women and teenagers. There was a terrible picture, and I could not look closely where their wounds were and where they were shot at ”.

In their treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, the Honveds also did not stand on ceremony. For example, during the retreat in 1943 from the Chernyansky district of the Kursk region, the Hungarian military units stole 200 Red Army prisoners of war and 160 civilians from the local concentration camp. On the way, all of them were closed in the school building, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Those who tried to escape were shot.

Signature to original photo says that Hungarian soldiers are talking with an arrested Red Army soldier. Judging by the clothes, in fact, he could be anyone

There are eyewitness accounts as well. Former prisoner of war, military doctor of the 3rd rank Vasily Petrovich Mamchenko spoke about the regime in the Dulag-191 concentration camp, located at a brick factory:

“The prisoners were herded into brick-drying sheds, where there were no windows or ceilings. They slept on bare ground. In the same conditions were the sick and wounded. There were no medicines or dressings. The wounds of the patients festered, worms started up in them, gas gangrene developed, and there were often cases of tetanus. The camp regime was very cruel; prisoners worked for 10-12 hours at earthworks. They fed them in the morning and in the evening with gruel - warm water and flour, several spoons each. Occasionally, in the form of handouts, they boiled rotten horse meat. The doctor of the Steinbach camp did not have the specialty of a surgeon, but he practiced operations on prisoners and killed many. When hungry fighters bent down on their way to work to pick up beets or potatoes dropped from the cart, the Magyar escorts shot them on the spot.

Military doctor of the 3rd rank Ivan Alekseevich Nochkin, who lived in captivity in this camp for six months, said that on September 17, 1942, when the prisoners of war were at work, the Nazis placed explosives in the stove of the barracks, which housed 600 people. Returning from work in the evening, people flooded the stove. A deafening explosion followed. Those who tried to run out through the doors were shot by the Hungarian guards. Corpses blocked the entrance. The acrid smoke suffocated the people and they burned to death. 447 people died.

Graves of Hungarian soldiers in the village of Polnikovo, Ukolovsky district Voronezh region(now the Krasnensky district of the Belgorod region). Two soldiers were killed on July 21, 1942 in a nearby forest. By whom and how - it is not known, probably by the Red Army soldiers leaving the encirclement, but local residents were accused of involvement in this. In the late 90s of the last century, the remains of the Hungarians were exhumed and reburied at the united Hungarian cemetery in the Voronezh region

A resident of the city of Ostrogozhsk, Voronezh Region, Maria Kaidannikova:

“There was a fire burning brightly. Two Magyars held the prisoner by the shoulders and legs and slowly roasted his stomach and legs on fire. They either raised him above the fire, then lowered him lower, and when he calmed down, the Magyars threw his body face down on the fire. Suddenly the prisoner twitched again. Then one of the Magyars thrust a bayonet into his back with a flourish.

A very remarkable assessment of the actions of the Hungarian troops against the Soviet population was made in his diary by German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Describing the situation in the Bryansk region in May 1942, he noted:

“South of this region, Hungarian formations are fighting. They need to occupy and pacify one village after another. When the Hungarians declare that they have pacified a particular village, this usually means that there is not a single inhabitant left there.This, in turn, means for us that we will hardly be able to carry out any agricultural work in such an area.

To make Goebbels regret the excessive sacrifices among the "Untermensch" - this had to be managed. The Hungarians did it. It is not surprising that in our time, elderly residents of the Kursk, Voronezh, Belgorod regions, recalling the times of occupation, say that the Hungarians were worse than the Germans.

Residents of the village of Polnikovo, accused of the death of Hungarian soldiers, are digging their own grave. Pashkov Vasily Kondratievich, 54 years old, Polnikov Pakhom Platonovich, 52 years old, and Pashkov Grigory Kudinovich, 18 years old, were arrested, who at the time of the discovery of the dead Hungarians went for hay. Without any interrogation and analysis they were hanged

Left their written testimonies and participants in the events with opposite side. Here, for example, is a quote from the diary of the Honved Ferenc Boldijar (company 46/1.2., field mail 115/20):

“When we entered the village, I set fire to the first three houses myself. We killed men, women, children, burned the village. Let's go further ... Our magnificent hussars set fire to the village, the third company set it on fire with rockets. From there, we continued to explore. During the time we spent in reconnaissance, the hussars burned six villages ... "

The concept of "intelligence" used by Boldizhar is hardly appropriate - rather, it is total extermination. And here is a quote from the report of Major General Karoy Bogani dated June 25, 1942, in which the concept of "extermination" is present in a very definite way:

“I got the impression that combing the forests stretching west of Putivl did not bring results because some of the partisans live in the surrounding villages constantly, disguised as civilians, or periodically run away from the forest there. Therefore, Yatsyno, Cherepovo, Ivanovskoye, Sesyulino and further surrounding villages, which the 32nd Infantry Regiment should determine, are to be burned, and the entire male population from 15 to 60 years old is to be exterminated.

An excerpt from the order of the division commander, Major General Otto Abt, dated January 13, 1942, is also interesting, in which a certain pride comes through:

“The performance of the Hungarian units had big impact to the partisans. This is proved by a radiogram intercepted on the night of December 24-25, which says: "Partisans, be very careful where the Hungarians are, because the Hungarians are even more cruel than the Germans."

The contemporary Hungarian historian Tamas Kraus summarizes in his article "War - Massacres in the Mirror of Documents":

“According to a summarizing judicial source based on an investigation by an emergency state commission, German and Hungarian military bodies and military units in the Chernihiv region alone killed about 100,000 Soviet civilians, and also killed “thousands of Soviet prisoners of war.” In one city of Kobrin, Brest region, 7,000 people were killed, and several tens of thousands more were deported to work in Germany. The documents especially often refer to the atrocities of the 105th and 201st Hungarian infantry divisions. Numerous documents and testimonies of eyewitnesses of the events with amazing force tell about the numerous murders committed in the Kursk region, along the banks of the Oskol River, in Novy and Stary Oskol and their environs, about mass night executions and torture of the civilian population.

Contemporary Hungarian historiography

However, the aforementioned Tamas Kraus, and even Eva-Maria Varga, are, in fact, the only Hungarian historians today who do not hesitate to talk about the atrocities that Hungarian soldiers committed on Soviet soil. In his joint work"Hungarian Troops and the Nazi Extermination Policy on the Territory of the Soviet Union" they write:

“In the modern “mainstream” historical literature, one cannot find a single word about the “exploits” of our soldiers in the USSR. For example, leafing through the most significant books of Academician Ignaz Romsic, the reader will not find practically any data on this. […] Peter Szabo, in his also repeatedly reprinted book “The Bend of the Don”, which captured the memory of the bravery of the soldiers of the 2nd Hungarian Army, essentially passed over in silence the crimes of the Hungarian soldiers committed in the Don region, although it can be assumed that in the archive and handwritten Department of the Institute and Museum military history there is a lot of material on this topic.

The well-known Hungarian historian Peter Sabo, mentioned in the quote, opposes Kraus in his interview to the Hungarian newspaper Flag, reproaching him for excessive use of information from Russian archives:

“In the collection of Tamas Kraus and Eva-Maria Varga, one can find numerous protocols of interviews of witnesses collected by the Soviet territorial commissions. Among the witnesses interviewed, mainly in 1943, there are many illiterate or semi-literate people whose contradictory testimonies could easily be distorted or exaggerated by the commission staff.

It is difficult to understand what Szabo is trying to prove with these words. Witnesses interviewed by the commission saw with their own eyes the death of relatives and fellow villagers. What does this have to do with the level of their literacy - is unclear. In the same interview, Szabo describes the actions of the partisans - apparently wanting to equate the murders of civilians committed by the Magyars with each other, and fighting against an armed enemy:

“The methods of warfare of the partisans were exceptionally cruel. First of all, they relied on sudden raids, ambushes, often wearing Hungarian or German uniforms. The prisoners were not left alive. For example, they lured the machine-gun company of the battalion 38/1 of the 2nd Hungarian army into a trap in the forests near Dubrovichi. They surrounded the Honveds in a forest clearing and machine-gunned them. After that, they were stripped naked, as they needed uniforms. Only one or two soldiers survived the massacre.".

At the same time, Szabo himself does not deny the facts of the massacre of the Honveds with the civilian population:

“In 2012, I also published a study about the unfortunate incident that happened on December 21, 1941 in the Ukrainian Reymentarovka. […] In the material published in Military Historical Documents, I described the chronology of an unsuccessful anti-partisan operation, during which the partisans managed to get out of the encirclement. After the Honveds suspected the help of the villagers in this, they carried out a bloody massacre. The Hungarian Royal Army has from time to time carried out legal proceedings against the perpetrators of such unacceptable incidents, but this did not happen here.

Alas, Szabo did not give a single example of "litigation conducted from time to time" - perhaps there were none at all. Like Szabo, other modern Hungarian historians simply ignore the "exploits" of the Hungarian soldiers in the USSR. Kraus and Varga are regularly accused in the Hungarian media of having the FSB behind their backs, that the sources of archival documents they used are unreliable and written under pressure, etc.

Hungarians armed with Soviet self-loading SVT rifles, and local residents driven into a pit. Execution? An act of intimidation?

One should not be surprised that the overwhelming majority of Hungarian readers who comment on the works cited consider Tamas Kraus and Eva Maria Varga to be traitors and are outraged by such desecration of the memory of their soldiers. In a recent radio interview, Tamas Kraus spoke frankly about how he was ostracized by Hungarian society at all levels, accusing him of lying and slandering his own people.

Reasons for the cruelty of the Hungarians

Reading about the atrocities of the Magyars and their reprisals against the civilian population and prisoners of war, one cannot help but wonder: what is the reason for such bestial cruelty? After all, there was no Nazi regime in Horthy Hungary, Hungary remained the only country that joined Germany, whose political structure remained unchanged during the war, right up to the German occupation. In the country there was, although very limited, but legal left and liberal opposition. All the same Kraus and Varga in their work "Hungarian troops and the Nazi extermination policy on the territory of the Soviet Union" tried to give the following explanation of the brutality of the Hungarian troops:

“How can one explain the massive and frequent burning alive of adults and children, mass rape women with their subsequent brutal beating or murder? Why was it necessary to destroy all those who remained alive after burning settlements? Here we need to talk about a complex chain of causes. First of all. The decisive role in this was played by the authoritarian regime fraught with fascism, which gave the Hungarian soldiers moral, spiritual and cultural "education". […] From the first minute the predatory, immoral nature of the war was obvious. From the memoirs of Hungarian soldiers, it turns out that under the influence of the defeat on the Don, many of them had a doubt: for what purpose are they almost two thousand kilometers from their homeland, in a foreign country, not understanding either the language or the feelings of the locals? […] Secondly. It can be rightfully assumed that among the reasons is also the feeling that gradually seized everyone associated with the hopelessness of war, with the inexorable approach of death, with the meaninglessness of what is happening, with the "inaccessibility" and "incomprehensibility" of the enemy, the strangeness of his habits, with the pangs of conscience, fear criminals who committed atrocities, with the desire to destroy the witnesses of these atrocities. To this we must add greed, the possibility of free robbery, the consciousness of impunity, moreover, the desire to present intimidation, terrorization of the population in the form of a heroic myth that helped to justify all punitive actions. […] Thirdly. Feeling of revenge. Many documents say that massacres and atrocities became especially frequent after major defeats. This refers not only to the losses suffered in the fight against the partisans, but above all in the offensive of the Red Army at the turn of 1942-1943, about breakthroughs at Stalingrad and the Don.

Simply put, it turns out that the Hungarian Honvéds, unexpectedly finding themselves 2,000 kilometers from their homeland, not understanding “neither the language nor the feelings of the locals” and experiencing “greed, the possibility of free robbery, a sense of impunity”, as well as “a sense of revenge after major defeats”, decided to destroy as many of these very local residents as possible, and at the same time unarmed prisoners of war from the very army that inflicted these major defeats on them.

However, I repeat: Tamas Kraus and Eva-Maria Varga are supporters of an objective approach to the history of the presence of Hungarian troops on the territory of the USSR. But in contemporary Hungary, a different approach prevails. State funds are used to glorify the armies that took part in the attack on the USSR and the robbery and physical destruction of civilians that lasted almost three years.

Three Hungarian soldiers, ethnic Serbs and Slovaks, surrender. The Hungarians were taken prisoner very reluctantly, but, apparently, not in this case. Summer 1942

In support of the above, we can also recall that on August 23, 2011 in Warsaw, the Ministers of Justice of the EU member states signed a declaration on the occasion of the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Totalitarian Regimes. The declaration says, among other things: “…their suffering will not disappear into obscurity, their rights will be recognized, and the perpetrators will be brought to justice”. On this wave, an attempt was made in Hungary to investigate war crimes committed by the Soviet army at the end of World War II. The National Investigation Department announced that one fact is still being investigated: the execution on March 22, 1945 of 32 residents of the village of Olasfalu, located in the Transdanubian region. They were boys and men aged 16 to 30, some of them were ethnic Germans. The reasons are unknown: either the Red Army suspected the local residents of the Hungarian partisans, or it was a punishment for the brutal murder of wounded Red Army soldiers and nurses from the medical battalion in the city of Szekesfehervar by the SS.

“Representatives of many European nations fought against the USSR - Italians, French, Spaniards, Romanians, Belgians ... But the Germans and Hungarians were especially cruel. Against this background, Hungary's claims to Russia will look ridiculous. This is tantamount to the fact that Mongolia will demand compensation from Russia for the fact that the inhabitants of Kozelsk burned the ambassadors of Batu.

Nevertheless, the efforts of modern Hungarian official circles aimed at whitewashing the historical role of the Horthy occupation troops continue. For example, in the article “Sleep, mute army”, dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the defeat of the 2nd Hungarian army and published in the magazine “Magyar Hírlap” (one of the most loyal Hungarian pro-government publications), the author Zoltan Babuch writes:

“For decades, they have been hammered into us, a “sinned nation”, that in 1943 the soldiers of the 2nd Hungarian army were sacrificed to German interests, that our Honvéds fought and froze in the endless steppe for unrighteous goals, or rather, for nothing. […] The piles of regimental newspapers that have come down to us prove that the Honvéds had a fairly good idea of ​​what they were looking for away from their homeland. Corporal of the 7th Infantry Regiment Laszlo Nyri, for example, sent home in the fall of 1942 the following lines: “I sincerely would like to convey the personal feelings of the lack of culture of the Russians, which reduced them to an animal state […] the incredible poverty that seemed to our eyes is clearly felt. Every soldier compares this terror-controlled paradise with disgust to our beautiful Motherland. I don’t even know what would have happened if these people could have looked around with us. Then he would have had the right to say that he had visited paradise, because our Motherland, in comparison with their country, is a real paradise, if described even without any prejudice. […] But it is clear that we are a “sinned nation”, since to this day we pay some for the war injuries that befell their families, but those whose father or close relative gave their lives for their homeland are not worth words of gratitude. In the winter of 1943, not only tens of thousands of Honvedists and employees remained on the Don, but our honor also remained there.

Perhaps, we can agree with the author on this: indeed, not only Hungarian soldiers remained on the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian lands, but also their honor, shame and conscience, which they lost during their lifetime, creating their bloody atrocities.

Literature:

1. Abbasov A.M. Voronezh front: chronicle of events - Voronezh, 2010
2. Analytical review of the 4th department of the Hungarian Royal General Staff on the experience of fighting with partisans, April 1942, Budapest (The publication was prepared by E.-M. Varga, N.M. Peremyshlnikova, D.Yu. Khokhlov)
3. The Great Patriotic War, 1942: Research, documents, comments / Ed. ed. V.S. Khristoforov - M .: Publishing house of the Main Archive Department of the city of Moscow, 2012
4. Kraus Tamas, Eva-Maria Varga. Hungarian Troops and the Nazi Extermination Policy on the Territory of the Soviet Union – Journal of Russian and East European Historical Studies, No. 1(6), 2015
5. Filonenko N.V. The history of the military operations of the Soviet troops against armed forces Horthy Hungary in the territory of the USSR. Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences - Voronezh, 2017
6. Filonenko S.I., Filonenko N.V. The collapse of the fascist new order on the Upper Don (July 1942 - February 1943) - Voronezh, 2005
7. Filonenko S.I. Battles on Voronezh land through the eyes of Russians and invaders. 1942-1943 - Voronezh, "Kvarta", 2012
8. http://perevodika.ru
9. http://www.runivers.ru
10. http://svpressa.ru
11. http://all-decoded.livejournal.com
12. http://istvan-kovacs.livejournal.com
13. http://www.honvedelem.hu
14. http://magyarhirlap.hu

The message on "Military Review" that the Minister of Defense of Hungary came to Voronezh on a visit aroused interest.

Some of the readers expressed surprise both at this fact and at the fact that there are burials of Hungarian soldiers in the region.

We will talk about one of these burials.

In fact, there was already a story about him three years ago, but everything changes, people come, it’s not always possible to catch everything. So let's repeat.

1.


First, a little history.
Already on June 27, 1941, Hungarian aircraft bombed the Soviet frontier posts and the city of Stanislav. On July 1, 1941, units of the Carpathian group crossed the border of the Soviet Union total strength more than 40,000 people. The most combat-ready unit of the group was the Mobile Corps under the command of Major General Bela Danloki-Miklós.
The corps included two motorized and one cavalry brigades, support units (engineering, transport, communications, etc.). Armored units were armed with Italian tankettes "Fiat-Ansaldo" CV 33/35, light tanks "Toldi" and armored vehicles "Csaba" of Hungarian production. The total strength of the Mobile Corps was about 25,000 soldiers and officers.

2.

By July 9, 1941, the Hungarians, having overcome the resistance of the 12th Soviet Army, advanced 60-70 km deep into the enemy’s territory. On the same day, the Carpathian group was disbanded. The mountain and border brigades, which did not keep up with the motorized units, were supposed to perform security functions in the occupied territories, and the Mobile Corps became subordinate to the commander of the German Army Group South, Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt.

On July 23, Hungarian motorized units launched an offensive in the Bershad-Gaivoron area in cooperation with the 17th German Army. In August, a large group of Soviet troops was surrounded near Uman. The encircled units were not going to give up and made desperate attempts to break through the encirclement. The Hungarians played an almost decisive role in the defeat of this group.

3.

The Hungarian Mobile Corps continued the offensive along with the troops of the 11th German Army, participating in heavy battles near Pervomaisk and Nikolaev. On September 2, German-Hungarian troops captured Dnepropetrovsk after fierce street fighting. Hot battles broke out in the south of Ukraine in Zaporozhye. Soviet troops launched repeated counterattacks. So, during the bloody battle on the island of Khortitsa, an entire Hungarian infantry regiment was completely destroyed.

In connection with the growth of losses, the bellicose fervor of the Hungarian command decreased. On September 5, 1941, General Henrik Werth was removed from the post of Chief of the General Staff. His place was taken by infantry general Ferenc Szombathelyi, who believed that it was time to curtail the active hostilities of the Hungarian troops and withdraw them to protect the borders. But Hitler managed to achieve this only by promising to allocate Hungarian units to protect supply lines and administrative centers in the rear of the German army.

Meanwhile, the Mobile Corps continued to fight at the front, and only on November 24, 1941 did the last of its units leave for Hungary. Corps losses on the Eastern Front amounted to 2,700 people killed (including 200 officers), 7,500 wounded and 1,500 missing. In addition, all tankettes, 80% of light tanks, 90% of armored vehicles, more than 100 vehicles, about 30 guns and 30 aircraft were lost.
At the end of November, "light" Hungarian divisions began to arrive in Ukraine to carry out police functions in the occupied territories. The headquarters of the Hungarian "Occupation Group" is located in Kyiv. Already in December, the Hungarians began to be actively involved in anti-partisan operations. Sometimes such operations turned into very serious military clashes in terms of their scale. An example of one of these actions is the defeat of December 21, 1941. partisan detachment General Orlenko. The Hungarians managed to surround and completely destroy the enemy base. According to Hungarian data, about 1,000 partisans were killed.

In early January 1942, Hitler demanded that Horthy increase the number of Hungarian units on the Eastern Front. Initially, it was planned to send at least two-thirds of the entire Hungarian army to the front, but after negotiations, the Germans reduced their demands.
To be sent to Russia, the 2nd Hungarian Army was formed with a total strength of about 250,000 people under the command of Lieutenant General Gustav Jan. It included the 3rd, 4th and 7th army corps (each with three light infantry divisions, similar to 8 conventional divisions), the 1st tank division (actually a brigade) and the 1st air formation (actually a regiment ). On April 11, 1942, the first units of the 2nd Army went to the Eastern Front.
On June 28, 1942, the German 4th Panzer and 2nd Field Armies went on the offensive. Their main target was the city of Voronezh. The troops of the 2nd Hungarian Army - the 7th Army Corps participated in the offensive.

On July 9, the Germans managed to break into Voronezh. The next day, south of the city, the Hungarians came out and entrenched themselves to the Don. During the battles, only one 9th Light Division lost 50% of its personnel. The German command set the task for the 2nd Hungarian Army to eliminate the three bridgeheads that remained in the hands of the Soviet troops. The Uryv bridgehead posed the most serious threat. On July 28, the Hungarians made the first attempt to throw his defenders into the river, but all attacks were repulsed. Fierce and bloody battles broke out. On August 9, the Soviet units launched a counterattack, pushing back the advanced units of the Hungarians and expanding the bridgehead near Uryv. On September 3, 1942, the Hungarian-German troops managed to push the enemy back behind the Don near the village of Korotoyak, but the Soviet defense held out in the Uryv area. After the main forces of the Wehrmacht were transferred to Stalingrad, the front here stabilized and the fighting took on a positional character.

On January 13, 1943, the troops of the Voronezh Front, supported by the 13th Army of the Bryansk Front and the 6th Army of the Southwestern Front, attacked the positions of the 2nd Hungarian Army and the Alpine Italian Corps.
The very next day, the defense of the Hungarians was broken through, some units panicked. Soviet tanks entered the operational space and smashed headquarters, communication centers, ammunition depots and equipment. The introduction of the 1st Hungarian Panzer Division and units of the 24th German Panzer Corps did not change the situation, although their actions slowed down the pace of the Soviet offensive. During the battles in January-February 1943, the 2nd Hungarian Army suffered catastrophic losses.
All tanks and armored vehicles were lost, in fact, all artillery, the level of losses in personnel reached 80%. If this is not a rout, then it is difficult to call it something else.

The Hungarians have inherited great. To say that they were hated more than the Germans is to say nothing. The tale that General Vatutin (low bow to him and eternal memory) gave the order "not to take Hungarians prisoner" is absolutely not a fairy tale, but historical fact.
Nikolai Fedorovich could not remain indifferent to the stories of the delegation of residents of the Ostrogozhsky district about the atrocities of the Hungarians, and, perhaps, in his hearts, threw this phrase.
However, the phrase spread in parts with lightning speed. Evidence of this is the stories of my grandfather, a soldier of the 41st joint venture of the 10th division of the NKVD, and after being wounded - 81 joint venture of the 25th Guards. division page. The soldiers, being aware of what the Hungarians were doing, took it as a kind of indulgence. And they treated the Hungarians accordingly. That is, they were not taken prisoner.
Well, if, according to the grandfather, they were “especially smart,” then the conversation with them was also short. In the nearest ravine or forest. "We teased them ... When trying to escape."

As a result of the battles on the Voronezh land, the 2nd Hungarian army lost about 150 thousand people, in fact, all the equipment. What was left was already rolled out on the land of Donbass.

Today on the territory of the Voronezh region there are two mass graves of Hungarian soldiers and officers.
These are the village of Boldyrevka, Ostrogozhsky district, and the village of Rudkino, Khokholsky.

4.


More than 8,000 Honved soldiers are buried in Boldyrevka. We have not been there, but we will definitely visit for the 75th anniversary of the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh operation. As well as the town of Korotoyak, whose name in Hungary is known to virtually every family. as a symbol of grief.

5. But we stopped at Rudkino.


6. The memorial is always closed, it is opened only when delegations from Hungary arrive. But there are no obstacles for aircraft, and we used a drone.

7. It is difficult to say how many Hungarians lie here. On each plate - 40-45 surnames. How many plates, it is possible to count, but it is difficult.

8. I tried. It turned out that approximately 50 to 55 thousand were laid to rest here. And plus 8.5 thousand in Boldyrevka.

10. Where are the others? And all in the same place, along the banks of the Don-father.

11.

12. The moral here is simple: whoever comes to us with a sword will die anyway, regardless of nationality.

13.

14.


It is unpleasant for some that cemeteries of Hungarians, Germans, Italians exist like this. Well-groomed such.

But: we Russians do not fight with the dead. The Hungarian government maintains (even with our hands) the cemeteries of its soldiers. And there is nothing so shameful in this. All within the framework of a bilateral intergovernmental agreement on the maintenance and care of military graves.
So let the Hungarian warriors lie under the marble slabs, in a rather beautiful corner of the Don bend.
As an edification to those who suddenly still come up with utter stupidity.

Hungarian foot columns in the Don steppes, 1942

As soon as the Germans entered Voronezh (half of the city on the right bank), 2 divisions of the Hungarians staged a massacre of the population. At what the massacre was in the literal sense: they cut off heads, sawed people with saws, pierced their heads with crowbars, burned, raped women and children. Captured Russian soldiers were subjected to terrible torture before death. Having learned about these atrocities, the Soviet command unofficially gave the command not to take the Magyars prisoner.
After 212 days of fighting for Voronezh, Soviet troops liberated the city, captured 75,000 Nazis.
Of the two divisions consisting of Hungarians, not a single prisoner was taken. 160,000 Hungarians remained lying in the Voronezh land.

The complete collapse of the 2nd Hungarian army of Admiral Horthy. 150 thousand Magyars died near Voronezh. Of these - 10 thousand on the territory of the "Storozhevsky bridgehead"

After the war, during the creation of the Warsaw Pact, which included Hungary, the USSR quietly "silenced" those events and did not award the city the title of HERO. Only in 2008 was awarded the honorary title "City of Military Glory".

The fascists and Nazis lost 320,000 soldiers and officers in these battles. 26 German divisions, the 2nd Hungarian Army (in full) and the 8th Italian Army, as well as Romanian units.

By the way, a curious moment: Hitler, in order to support the fighting troops, sent grenadiers from the regiment in which he fought in the First World War to reinforce (these selected two-meter soldiers are often shown in ceremonial German films). So, the regiment that arrived at the front line, two days later had only 8 people alive.

Hungarian cavalry

The Voronezh catastrophe of the Second World War as the decline of Great Hungary

In Hungary, there is practically not a single family that was not affected by the Voronezh tragedy, and this is understandable, since from the entire composition of the 250,000-strong Hungarian army that fought on the Soviet-German front, according to various sources, from 120 to 148 thousand soldiers and officers died.
However, these loss figures are not complete, the real losses of the Magyars still remain unknown, not many of them were captured on the Don, only 26 thousand it was they who managed to survive, as well as those few deserter fugitives who were able to secretly make their way back home on foot, mainly from them, most of the Hungarian population and learned that Hungary no longer had an army.
The very army that they were all proud of and with the help of which they were going to restore the so-called "Great Hungary".

What did they all miss so much? Why was it sent in the summer of 1942. to certain death such a huge number of their youth? Hungary is located almost in the very center of Europe, has a wonderful climate, beautiful nature, blooming orchards, wheat fields, reigned around, satiety, comfort and well-being, why was it necessary to invade a foreign country?
The main reason for the growth of Hungarian revanchism at that time was that after the First World War, Hungary, as a defeated party, suffered significant territorial and economic losses, according to the so-called Trianon Treaty, the country lost about two-thirds of its territory and population. The terms of this agreement also led to the fact that almost 3 million Hungarians became foreign nationals, that is, they ended up outside their country.

In the late 1930s, the Germans, taking advantage of the wounded national feelings of the Hungarians, promised the Horthy government to help increase the territory of Hungary in exchange for its accession to the Axis.
And they kept their word, as a result of the so-called infamous "Munich Agreement", after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, in the period from 1938 to 1940, Hungary received some territories that it had lost as a result of the First World War, mainly from Czechoslovakia occupied by Nazi Germany , Yugoslavia and even Romania at the same time, without directly participating with these countries in military conflicts.

However, Hungary had to pay for all these territorial increments and now pay with the lives of its citizens, as the saying goes, "free cheese only happens in a mousetrap."
With the outbreak of World War II, it was no longer enough for the Germans to receive only raw materials and food from Hungary.
In the very first months of the attack on the USSR, the Germans demanded from Budapest the allocation of Hungarian national troops for the Eastern Front.

In July 1941 Horthy singled out a separate corps for the Wehrmacht, or as this grouping of Hungarian troops was also called, the Carpathian group with a total number of more than 40 thousand soldiers and officers.
For four months of fighting with the Soviet troops, the corps lost over 26 thousand people. of these, 4 thousand were killed, almost all of their tanks, 30 aircraft and more than 1,000 vehicles.
In December 1941, the Hungarian "conquerors", beaten and frostbitten, returned home, they were still very lucky, almost half of them managed to survive. True, the desire to create a "Great Hungary" among many of them has noticeably diminished.
However, Horthy was deeply mistaken, believing that it would be enough to get by with a one-time dispatch of troops to the Russian front, in the future Germany demanded from its ally more active participation in the war, and now in the summer of 1942. Hungary sent the 2nd Hungarian Army to the Eastern Front.

The 2nd Army included 8 fully equipped divisions, in addition to the Hungarians, formations and units of the army were also equipped with peoples whose territories were previously occupied and included in the "Great Hungary" - Romanians from Transylvania, Slovaks from Southern Slovakia, Ukrainians from Transcarpathia and even Serbs from Vojvodina.
In the beginning, everything went well for them, they advanced in the wake of the Germans, and during short stops, having a snack after a glass of palenki, they chose land for their future estates, because the Germans promised each Hungarian soldier who distinguished himself at the front a large land allotment in the conquered territories of Russia and Ukraine.
True, they could not fight against the regular troops of the Red Army on their own, without the close support of the German army, so the Germans mainly used them in battles against partisans or as security units in the rear, here they were real masters, in the sense of mocking civilians and Soviet prisoners of war.

Cases of robberies and facts of violence against the civilian population, everything that they did in the territories of Voronezh, Lugansk and Rostov regions, many older people can not forget until now.
The Honveds were especially cruel to the captured Red Army soldiers, the Germans were much more tolerant of the prisoners, where did such anger and hatred of the Modyar Honveds towards the captured Red Army soldiers come from?

This desire to mock defenseless, unarmed people, probably due to the fact that on the battlefield with weapons in their hands, these "heroes" simply had no chance of defeating their opponent in a real battle, since the Russians, and then the Soviets, always smashed them and put to flight, since the First World War.

In the autumn of 1942, the rear walks for the entire Hungarian army ended, the Germans drove all the Hungarians into the trenches to the front line, before that the Germans, in addition, took away from their allies all the warm clothes that their compatriots sent them from Hungary.
And only then did the Magyars finally realize that now they would not be in the mood for jokes. That in front of them there would no longer be poorly armed partisans or defenseless prisoners of war.
Now, ahead of many of them was the oppressive unknown and painful death from the cold and massive artillery fire of the advancing Red Army.

And soon, on January 12, 1943, all their “conquests” ended ingloriously, this is when Soviet troops crossed the Don River on ice and during the last phase of the Battle of Stalingrad in the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh offensive operation, from January 13 to January 27, 1943, they completely destroyed and captured on the upper Don all the Hungarian and Italian troops allied to the Nazis.

All those who survived and escaped the boiler rushed to the west. A disorderly retreat of the remnants of the Hungarian army began, turning into a widespread and wholesale, shameful flight.
True, it was very problematic to escape, the transport was all without fuel, the horses were all eaten, the conquerors walked, day and night, in a fierce cold, most of them died, the remains of the Hungarian soldiers were simply covered with snow, like a white shroud.

During their retreat to the west, the Hungarians lost most of their equipment and weapons.
Losses in people, for a country with a population of 10 million people, were truly catastrophic and irreplaceable.
Among the dead was the eldest son of the Regent of the Kingdom, Miklós Horthy. It was the largest defeat of the Hungarian army in the entire history of its existence, in just less than 15 days of fighting, Hungary lost half of its armed forces.
The defeat at Voronezh had even a much greater resonance and significance for Hungary than Stalingrad for Germany.
Many of the then occupiers nevertheless received their allotments of land in Russia, as they were promised, but they received them only as their graves.
As a result of the Second World War, Hungary lost not only all the territories conquered with the help of Nazi Germany, but also lost some of those that it had before the war, the history of the Second World War once again showed what happens to those states that want to improve their situation at the expense of their neighbors.