The Last Days of Budapest The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital in World War II

"The Last Days of Budapest is a masterpiece. Immaculately researched, it is packed with large-than-life characters and revelations about the unknown espionage history of the Second World War…. This is history as it should be written: utterly engrossing." -Malcolm Brabant, author of the New York Times bestseller The Daughter of Auschwitz

An Economist Best Book of the Year

Budapest, autumn 1943.
 
After four years of war, Hungary was firmly allied with Nazi Germany. Budapest swirled with intrigue and betrayal, home to spies and agents of every kind. But the city remained an oasis in the midst of conflict where Allied POWs and Polish and Jewish refugees found sanctuary.
 
All that came to an end in March 1944 when the Nazis invaded. By the summer Allied bombers were pounding Budapest’s grand boulevards and historic squares. By late December the city was surrounded and under siege from the advancing Red Army. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians died in the savage fighting as Budapest collapsed into anarchy. Hungarian death squads roamed the streets as the city’s Jews were forced into ghettos or were shot into the Danube. Russian artillery hammered the city into smoking rubble as starving residents struggled to survive the winter.
 
Using newly uncovered diaries, documents, archival material and interviews with the last survivors, Adam LeBor has brilliantly recreated life and death in wartime Budapest.

 

Adam LeBor is an author, journalist, and literary critic based in Budapest. He writes for the Economist, the Times (London), and numerous other publications, and also reviews books for the Financial Times. He has been a foreign correspondent since 1991, covering the collapse of communism and the Yugoslav wars, and has worked in more than thirty countries. He is the author of eight critically acclaimed nonfiction books, including the groundbreaking Hitler’s Secret Bankers, and seven novels. His books have been published in fifteen languages.