num_pages: 591
description: 2004 hard bound with illustrated color cover 9x12 glossy page stock 475 pages nearly 1000 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.
language: English
title: Drama Between Budapest And Vienna   The Final Battles of the 6. Panzer Armee in the East, 1945
publisher: J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing Inc