He envisioned a larger offensive that would roll back the gains of Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front in Hungary. Hitler wanted to stem the Soviet tide in Hungary. Despite the setbacks of January, Hitler devised a new offensive called Operation Fruhlingserwachen (Spring Awakening) that had both economic and military objectives. By early 1945, the Austrian and Hungarian oilfields furnished 80 percent of the oil for the German armed forces. The Hungarian oilfields at Nagykaniscza constituted the last major petroleum resources available to Germany. On February 13, the city fell to the soldiers of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front. But the tenacious Soviet forces had repulsed each assault. Hitler had sent the IV SS Panzer Corps against the forces threatening Budapest in three consecutive counterattacks in January 1945 that were known collectively as the Konrad Offensives. The German leader became fixed on the need to protect the Hungarian oilfields from Red Army tank and rifle units that had encircled Budapest in late December 1944. The Soviet forces gathering on the Oder River in early 1945 seemed not to bother Adolf Hitler. Making light of the situation, tank commanders quipped that they were steering tanks, not U-boats. A few of the 68-ton King Tigers sank up to their turrets in the mud produced by an early spring thaw. As the panzer crews of mighty Tiger II tanks rumbled forward in the last German offensive of World War II in eastern Hungary, they joked about the difficulties they were having coming to grips with the enemy. Even in the dark days of March 1945, when the Third Reich was on the brink of collapse, its troops managed to exhibit that grim humor that enables frontline soldiers to endure the horrors of battle.
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