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Individualogist Review knows life is a puzzle. Oftentimes, you are faced with situations that you can't comprehend or questions that you can't answer. While other people thrive chasing their dreams, you can't even see a clear direction on where you are going. If you feel lost right now, stuck on a crossroad, not knowing which path to take, Individualogist may just be the right guide for you towards the successful life that you want.
What is Individualogist?
Individualogist is a program that can help you discover you true self and use it to propel you towards achieving the life you have always dreamed to live. It teaches you the importance of your true self and your true potential which will drive you to your goal and help you overcome any obstacles that may come your way as found by our Individualogist Review.
To help you identify your true self, the program uses 12 types of archetypes: Caregiver, Creator, Explorer, Hero, Innocent, Jester, Lover, Magician, Member, Outlaw, Ruler and Safe.
Each archetype has its own characteristics, strengths and weaknesses and will help you gain an understanding about yourself which you can use to your own advantage and be successful in almost all aspects of your life. You can identify which archetype you are as the archetype reading comes for free with the program. Each archetype is unique, just like you are a unique individual with unique abilities. The program gives you an in-depth analysis of your archetype so that you will be guided on what to do given your unique characteristics and will teach you what to avoid so that you can achieve the abundant life.
Who Created Individualogist?
The program was created by a group of people who practiced individuation to discover identities with unique set of characters, inclinations, strengths and weaknesses. They guide you on how to navigate your life with positivity and by using your true potential, making you believe that you have the power to create your own path and take it to make your dreams into a reality.
How Does Individualogist Work?
The program focuses on individuation which can help you discover your true, unique self. Individualogist has a website that you can subscribe to, by inputting basic but relevant details about you like your name, gender and birthdate, you will be given a free archetypal reading to determine your archetype which will be sent to your email address, so make sure you have that right.
You will be sent an analysis of your archetype which is a vary valuable and useful information that you can maximize to achieve success. You will be learning the secret used by successful people who have unlocked their true potential by self-discovery.
You will know your strengths and your weaknesses which will help you overcome limitations and will help you set your own path and create your own destiny achieving success, abundance, good relationship and more.
Individualogist Review Advantages:
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Stop asking the questions without getting answers, stop wondering why others are doing great while you are struggling no matter what you do, this program can help you achieve what you want and bring you closer to the life that you want to live.


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25 Things Young Professionals Must Know Before 25
This post is from Jenny Fukumoto of PRdaily.com. I loved it so much that I wanted to share it with all of you:
Last month, I turned 25. Since becoming gainfully employed, I've made a lot of professional mistakes—and learned a few things, along the way. Here are 25 of them. Let me know if you agree, or what you would add to this list.
By 25, you should know how to:
1. Take rejection with poise.
By now you should've faced some sort of professional rejection. My favorite was having my résumé handed back to me after a job interview.
2. Do your own bitch work.
Empathy is an important trait for all managers. Knowing what it's like to do the grunt work makes you appreciate those who have to do it after you. Assuming that you are not above anything will help you soar in your career.
3. Craft an appropriate LinkedIn connection invite request.
I don't mind getting LinkedIn connection requests from random people, but it irritates me when they don't have a tailored message and instead use the standard LinkedIn invite line. Here's an idea for something that could work: "Hi Jenny, I noticed we both work in the Chicago marketing scene and wanted to connect with you. Maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee/tea in the near future to learn more about what you do?"
4. Ask for a raise.
When you're worth more than you earn, you need to know how to ask for more. After being out of school for three years, learn how to broach the topic. Not sure how to do that? Read this.
5. Delegate work.
Delegating responsibility is underrated. By 25, you should know when it's appropriate to delegate and how to do it. For example, if someone asks me to perform a task that is within my power, but I don't have the time for it, I look for the colleague it makes most sense to perform that task regularly, and ask him or her to do it.
6. Pick your battles.
Not every battle is worth fighting; you should know which are worth your time and energy. Getting upset with the way someone sends incessant emails takes a backseat to someone who fails to communicate important pieces of information.
7. Unplug.
Once you answer that work email at 11 p.m., you set a precedent that you're available 24/7. Unless it's an emergency, try not to check your work email (or mark it unread and deal with it when you get to the office).
8. Put in your two-weeks' notice.
If you're lucky enough to have loved your first job out of college and are still there by 25, bravo! But you should know how to tactfully put in your two weeks' notice, if you make a career move. This requires a written resignation. Here's a great guide on doing the dirty deed.
9. Tactfully give your business card at a networking event.
No one likes the business card ninja who swoops in, throws his or her card at you, and leaves you stunned. First, have a conversation with someone. Find out stuff you have in common. Then offer your card as a way to stay in touch.
10. Avoid getting sloppy at a networking event.
An open bar doesn't give you permission to act like you did at college frat parties. Have a few drinks to loosen up, but keep it professional.
11. Prioritize your time.
For example, tackle your bigger work issues toward the beginning of the day and save your smaller, less important tasks for the end of the day when you're winding down. Remember: There's always tomorrow.
12. Set professional goals.
You want accomplishments on your résumé, not just finished tasks. Setting annual professional goals will set you on track to advance your career. Meeting mentors in your industry through networking events and LinkedIn will help you realize what goals you need to prioritize.
13. Send an SOS.
Chances are you've felt overwhelmed by your workload at least once in your career. Knowing when and how to send a help signal to your manager and or co-workers is essential to preventing burnout.
14. Conduct an interview.
Knowing how to interview someone is an important skill. Not only does it teach you how to ask the right questions, but also it teaches you what skill set and personality you value in yourself and your potential co-workers.
15. Communicate.
Communication, when done well, sets you apart from other young professionals. Good communication is a strong asset, so learn it while you're in the beginning stages of your career. For example, when emailing project specs, I copy as many people I think will benefit from the discussion. Bringing someone in during the later stages of development could mean painful—and unnecessary—back-peddling.
16. Handle being caught venting about co-workers.
It happens to the best of us. Your co-worker commits a major faux pas, and you need to vent about it to another co-worker. Then you get caught. Knowing how to turn it into a dialogue with constructive criticism—or knowing how to avoid it all together—is important.
17. Not sweat the small stuff (you're not curing cancer).
Unless, of course, you are curing cancer. Then disregard. Ask yourself, "Will this matter a year from now?" If not, don't sweat it. Acknowledge your mistake and learn from it.
18. Invest in your 401(k)—or at least think about it.
The numbers don't lie. Someone who starts saving before the age of 25 accrues more interest than someone who starts saving at 30. Not sure how much to invest? This is a great guide.
19. Be a team player.
No one likes a selfish co-worker. Learn this healthy habit early in your career to get ahead of those who didn't. You can operate under the "CYA" (cover your ass) mentality, just make sure it doesn't turn into a "TUB" (throw under the bus) one.
20. Talk to the CEO of your company.
Get sweaty palms talking to authority figures? Nix those nerves now.
21. Lead a meeting.
You'll need to learn how eventually, why not get it out of the way before you turn 25? Have a meeting agenda, and make sure you open it for discussion as often as you can so you're not the only one talking. Also, you can take it one step further by following up with action items and decisions made during the meeting.
22. Ask for time off without feeling guilty.
You earn your time off, so it's important to take it with a clean conscience. If you're planning on having a "Treat yo self" day, look into local brewery tours, daytime trapeze classes, or some simple retail therapy.
23. Put together a visual report.
Putting information into a strong visual report speaks volumes more than just throwing the numbers onto a spreadsheet and clicking send. About 60 percent of people are visual learners, so it's important to make your information pop with charts and graphs.
24. Give your elevator pitch.
Since I work for a small company, the question I get asked the most is, "What's Ragan?" It took some practice, but I finally got my company's elevator pitch down a few months after joining the team. Not sure what yours is? Listen to what your co-workers say.
25. Be a mentor.
By the time you're three years out of college, you will have had at least one younger person ask you for career advice. Understanding the impact you have as a mentor is powerful, and the relationships you have with mentees can be some of the most rewarding ones you'll have in your mid-20s.
Jenny Fukumoto is a marketing manager at Ragan Communications, which publishes PR Daily. She is also a self-proclaimed Mexicanese marketer, beer buff and networking nerd. A version of this story first appeared on Ragan's Millennial Mafia blog.

subset: commoncrawl


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In a closed-door meeting Thursday, lawmakers will consider whether to approve a secret report that chronicles CIA detention and interrogation practices -- including methods that critics have compared to torture.
That report -- along with the release of a new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden -- is rekindling an old debate about whether those methods worked.
California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee that's meeting Thursday, told NPR in an email that her 6,000-page report is "comprehensive," "strictly factual" and "the most definitive review of the CIA program to be conducted."
Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the committee, has a different view.
"This draft report contains a number of significant errors and omissions about the history and the utility of the CIA's detention and interrogation program," he says. "It's really not surprising, given the fact that the review was conducted without interviewing any of the people involved. It was taken solely from written documents."
Chambliss and several other Republicans on the panel backed away from the investigation. And few -- if any -- of them are expected to vote to approve the report.
"It's entirely possible that a party-line vote would be interpreted in some quarters as just a political statement," says David Irvine, a retired Army brigadier general who taught junior officers how to interrogate suspects.
Irvine, a Republican, thinks a lot more than politics is at stake.
"We've been searching for evidence for six years that enhanced interrogation has made the nation safer," he says. "And we're still looking."
"Enhanced interrogation" is the name authorities in the Bush years gave to a series of tough practices: waterboarding, sleep deprivation, forced nudity.
Some of those tactics are on display in the new movie Zero Dark Thirty, which focuses on the search for bin Laden.
In one scene, a CIA operative gets tough with a detainee: "Can I be honest with you? I am bad news. I'm not your friend. I'm not going to help you. I'm going to break you."
When President Obama took office, he said he would put an end to the harshest interrogation tactics -- which drew some pushback from former Vice President Dick Cheney.
"I don't think we should just roll over when the new administration says -- accuses us of committing torture, which we did not, or somehow violating the law, which we did not," Cheney said. "I think you need to stand up and respond to that, and that's what I've done."
Melina Milazzo of Human Rights First points out that Feinstein "has said that this report would show that there is no evidence that torture led to Osama bin Laden's whereabouts or any significant portion of that operation."
Former Bush intelligence officials disagree, but say they can't talk in detail because the information is still classified. That's why human rights groups are pushing for the Senate to make most of the report public as soon as possible.
"Societies are not able to move on until they confront the truth," says Curt Goering, who directs The Center for Victims of Torture. "They can't bury the past. They can't simply move on. There's a process of reckoning with what happened."
Part of that reckoning, he says, is looking at what was gained from the interrogations and what may have been lost.
Tony Camerino, who conducted 300 interrogations in Iraq, opposes the use of harsh tactics.
"As someone much smarter than me once said, 'If you use coercion, you might get the location of a house. But if you get somebody to cooperate, they'll tell you if it's booby-trapped,' " he says.
Camerino says he'd like to see accountability, such as criminal prosecutions of the people who employed harsh tactics.
That's unlikely, since a Justice Department investigation into interrogation abuses ended this year with no indictments. But opponents of those methods say they want to keep talking about them, as a reminder for history.
In her email, Feinstein made clear that whatever happens Thursday on Capitol Hill, it won't be the final chapter.
"The Intelligence Committee's 3-year review of the CIA's detention and enhanced interrogation technique program (2002-2009) will not be released this week," Feinstein said. "The committee is, however, scheduled to vote to approve the report. ... Any decision on declassification and release of any portion of the report will be decided by committee members at a later time."
Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit www.npr.org.


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Pedal . Pedal
staubgold 83
2008. cd . dl
Pedal is Chris Abrahams and Simon James Phillips. Beautifully recorded in a concert hall on two concert grands, these seven pieces have an emotional intensity, which transcends the minimalist form of their conception.
What are they thinking? These guys are doing a record of acoustic piano music in this day and age! And let me tell you something, my prejudice was totally crushed within the first minute of listening to this CD. Just when I was thinking two grand pianos, four hands have nothing to say in this 21st century...
Yes, we have two grand pianos, four hands, and two brilliant minds! These musical soldiers are highly decorated. Both players were drawing from their unique musical gene pool. Every single piece of music on this recording was fully improvised. I was making little imaginary film clips in my head to all seven improvisations on this CD. A range of emotions was deeply felt.
To borrow a phrase from Mr Ornette Coleman in relation to his view about the state of music in general… "Beauty is a rare thing". Well, here is that rare thing.
Chris Abrahams (The Necks, Sydney): Jazz, be-bop, hard-bop, free, rock 'n' roll, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, improvisation, Terry Riley, and dare I say... Little Richard.
Simon James Phillips (Sydney): Concert hall, opera house, chamber works, Grieg, Janacek, Feldman, Ives, old-school, new-school, classically trained pianist, conductor, pedagogue.


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An elite invitation-only consortium of the top real estate agencies worldwide, connecting buyers and sellers to the highest caliber of property experts and luxury properties around the globe.
The network is the exclusive worldwide partner of Forbes, one of the world's most trusted media brands, with featured properties introduced to potential buyers across digital, social media, print and editorial content.
Members are highly vetted for their integrity, knowledge and trust, and are considered to be leading experts within their market. With numerous awards for its technology innovation and service, OKAY.com is the exclusive member in Hong Kong, bringing a new level of representation to homeseekers while enabling property owners to achieve better exposure to prospective tenants and buyers than any other agency in Hong Kong.


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A lot of websites and or blogs owners are now hiring Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies to boost their sales or popularity potentials. SEO companies increase the website marketing efforts and search engine traffic of clients through different services like pay per click management, keyword analysis, and link building services, code optimization, content writing, and search engine marketing.
They provide SEO tools for optimizing and tracking of website. Imagine your website/blog obtaining a higher rank in Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Inktomi and a lot more search engines. This means you'll stay ahead of your competitor because your website can easily be accessed through the Internet and your rank will increase in two to four weeks.
However, I got some advice through reading that not all SEO companies are true to their promises. Business owner should be able to look for cost effective marketing for SEO like the one offered at discountclick.com. Check out the site for additional information.


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New Hudson, MI
Coyote Golf Club offers a world-class, challenging & immaculately maintained course, fully stocked Pro Shop, comfortable Clubhouse, extensive event menu and friendly staff. All this plus easy access from I-96 makes Coyote the perfect place to meet your golf buddies, host your league, corporate outing or business meeting.
Our Staff will make the day an enjoyable one for all. We offer a variety of services and packages to meet all your event and budget needs. Click the Outings & Events button, call or email Coyote Golf Club and insure that your event is a memorable one for you and your guests.


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This is part of a series about the scrapbooking booths I visited at CHA 2016. If you'd like to see all the posts in the series, please click HERE.
My Minds Eye had a large and very pretty booth. They were crowded every time I walked by so I assume biz is good!
Here are some of their lines:
I didn't talk to anyone in the booth as they were all busy taking orders. Who am I to interrupt scrapbooking commerce??
You can see these new collections up close on their website HERE.


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TUCKER CARLSON: That's all true, I agree with that completely, but it still doesn't absolve men of the responsibility to stop complaining about the cards are stacked against them, and man up and become me. Because you don't become a man until you assume responsibility.
DR. HELEN: What man would take such a raw deal? I don't consider that a man.
TC: Well, it's not, actually, it's not a raw deal. You derive deep satisfaction, as a man, by taking responsibility for other people. That's the only place you get deep satisfaction
DH: So, men are supposed to take a really bad deal and sign their rights away, and you call that a good deal? Look, you don't understand economic reward -
TC: Well, I did!
DH: You did, well, that's good, maybe you have a really good wife, but a lot of men don't feel that way.
OTHER GUY: Why hasn't a man written this book?She's doing a fantastic job in her interviews and I'll be doing an interview with her about the book and its reception once she finishes her current round of media appearances. She is, quite literally, giving a voice to the voiceless, because as she knows very well, the media will begrudgingly give her the microphone it will never permit the likes of Roissy, Roosh, or me, still less the men who are incapable of articulating the male case.
DH: Because men can't speak up. I'm here to speak up because people will actually listen to a woman. It's really unfortunate, I want the next man, and I'm hoping by this book, that this next man is out there.


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Alcohol metabolism causes DNA damage and triggers a breast cancer-related DNA damage response
Source: sciencedaily.com
Alcohol is known to be carcinogenic to humans in the upper aerodigestive tract, liver, colorectum, and the female breast. Evidence suggests that acetaldehyde, the primary metabolite of alcohol, plays a major role in alcohol-related esophageal cancer. A new study using human cells has established linkages between alcohol metabolism and acetaldehyde-DNA damage that may have implications for breast and liver cancers.
Results will be published in the December 2011 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.
"Although the link between drinking alcohol and certain types of cancers was first established in the 1980s," said Philip J. Brooks, program director in the Division of Metabolism and Health Effects at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), "the existence of such a relationship did not prove that alcohol itself caused the cancers. More recent evidence, however, has confirmed that alcohol -- or more specifically, ethanol -- is carcinogenic to humans at several sites in the body." Brooks, who is the corresponding author for the study, carried out this research while he was an investigator in the NIAAA Laboratory of Neurogenetics, part of the Division of Intramural Clinical and Biological Research.
When alcohol is metabolized in the human body, it is converted to acetaldehyde, a chemical that is structurally similar to formaldehyde. Acetaldehyde can cause DNA damage, trigger chromosomal abnormalities in cell culture studies, and act as an animal carcinogen.
"In most people, acetaldehyde is quickly converted to acetate, a relatively harmless substance, by an enzyme called aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2)," said Brooks. "However, approximately 30 percent of East Asians are unable to metabolize alcohol to acetate due to a genetic variant in the ALDH2 gene, and have a greatly elevated risk of esophageal cancer from alcohol drinking. This helped researchers establish the carcinogenicity of acetaldehyde in humans and its role in alcohol-related esophageal cancer."
Brooks explained that when cells divide, they have to replicate their genomic DNA. "However, when the DNA is damaged, replication cannot continue," he said. "The Fanconi anemia-breast cancer (FA-BRCA) network is a collection of proteins that responds to DNA damage by coordinating DNA repair or helping the replication machinery to bypass the DNA damage, thereby allowing replication to continue. In the human body, the FA-BRCA network seems to be particularly important in protecting against breast cancer."
Brooks and his colleagues used human cells engineered to metabolize alcohol into acetaldehyde by the same enzyme -- alcohol dehydrogenase 1B (ADH1B) -- that is expressed in human liver and breast tissue. They exposed these cells to alcohol at concentrations that would equate to levels found in the human body during social drinking.
"We found that the cells converted the alcohol into acetaldehyde, and that this resulted in increased levels of acetaldehyde-DNA damage," said Brooks. "In addition, the cells responded by activating the FA-BRCA network, as measured by two different methods.
"As our work was done in a cell culture system, using alcohol concentrations designed to correspond to blood alcohol levels attained during social drinking, it remains to be shown whether our findings reflect what happens in human body during alcohol drinking," said Brooks. "Similarly, while our work is consistent with a role for acetaldehyde in alcohol related liver and breast cancer, more studies in animals and humans will be necessary to prove such a role."
Brooks added that he hopes this research and its findings will encourage other investigators to carry out further studies, especially in humans, to explore the extent to which acetaldehyde resulting from alcohol metabolism causes DNA damage and activates the FA-BRCA network in liver or breast cells. "Based on our research as well as more recent findings, it seems likely that the relationship between alcohol metabolism, the FA-BRCA network, and human health will become an increasingly important area of investigation in the future," he said.
Source: sciencedaily.com


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Report # 1403 (Class A)
Submitted by witness on Saturday, July 18, 1998.
A creature spotted walking along shoreline
SEASON: Unknown
PROVINCE: Alberta
COUNTRY: Canada
LOCATION DETAILS: Canada, spruce coulee resevoir, in western cypress hills.The town of elkwater is about twenty minute drive from spruce coulee resvoir.The nearest road has no name but leads to the resivoir from highway #41.Highway #41 heads south from the transcanada highway through the western part of the cypress hills to the united states border crossing called wildhorse.
OBSERVED: while fishing at sprucecoullee a creature came bounding out of the trees and then started walking along the shoreline,the creature stopped walking and started to look in my direction that is when i called my partner ,who was also fishing, to come and take a look to see what i was seeing was real. my partner had a very good look at it ,that is when some low cloud rolled in and we both lost sight of it. we ran back to our vehicle and quickly left the area.the creature was between seven and eight feet tall we did not have an idea what it would have weighed. the color was a reddish brown.when i first saw the creature i froze with fear,when it stopped walking an started to look in my direction that is when i called my partner to have a look.the distance the creature may have been from us was about 50 – 100 yards.
ALSO NOTICED: nothing was heard or seen before this incident that we know of.
OTHER WITNESSES: we were both fishing along the dam.
ENVIRONMENT: lots of pine trees poplar and spruce trees.the ground in the area is very hard and full of rocks.


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- A hozzászóláshoz regisztráció és belépés szükséges
The Siege of Budapest
On Christmas Day 1944, the trams stopped running in Budapest. Cadet Ervin Galantay, a dispatch runner for the recently mustered Hungarian paramilitary Vannay Battalion, was headed for home to partake in holiday celebrations when he saw a throng of civilians surrounding a group of tram conductors in Buda's central Szell Kalman Square.
He went over to ask what was going on. The conductors' answer stunned everyone: "The Russians are at the Budagyongye Tram Depot." Galantay promptly rebuked the conductors for spreading false rumors but joined some gendarmes and soldiers hurrying to investigate. Approaching the grounds of the imposing Janos Hospital, they were surprised by a hail of small-arms fire. In the ensuing chaos a rapidly withdrawing German tank recovery vehicle almost ran Galantay down. It was true; the Soviets had somehow entered the back door into Budapest and were just two miles from the Royal Palace.
So began the Siege of Budapest and the destruction of Central Europe's "Pearl of the Danube." Unimaginable to all who lived in Budapest during this unfolding drama was that this first skirmish near the hospital would soon turn into one of the most frightful urban battles of World War II.
Since June 1944, the Axis forces had been steadily pushed back from the southern Ukraine, through Romania, and into central Hungary. The fighting had been bitter and costly. In August, Germany and Hungary's erstwhile ally, Romania, abruptly changed sides during the devastating Soviet Jassy-Kishenev offensive, which led to the collapse of Army Group South Ukraine in Bessarabia. By mid-September, after a fighting retreat through Transylvania, the Germans and Hungarians managed to cobble together a sufficient armored force to fight the Soviets to a standstill near Debrecen in eastern Hungary.
The rapid buildup of Soviet forces, combined with heavy losses and the chronic German shortage of infantry to hold recaptured ground, however, meant that any defense based in the broad plain east of the centrally located Tisza River was doomed to failure. Additionally, an entire Soviet front, the Third Ukrainian, commanded by Marshal Fedor Ivanovich Tolbukhin, the "Liberator of Belgrade," appeared from the south after a brilliant wheeling maneuver through the Balkans. By late October, the Soviet offensive slowed as it approached historic Budapest. Bisected by the broad Danube River, this strategically located city had always been an important outpost and trading town within the fertile Danubian basin.
Hilly Buda, on the Danube's west bank, is key military terrain, especially for defending against forces attacking from the east. Dominated by Castle Hill, site of the imposing Hungarian Royal Palace, Buda is a natural bastion. In contrast, highly urbanized Pest, situated on the Danube's flat east bank, was exposed through the centuries to a host of invaders from the east -- most notably Mongols, Ottomans, Russians, and Romanians. Kati Marton vividly captured how Budapest was then in her book Wallenberg:
Budapest is a dramatic, theatrical kind of place. More than anything else it resembles a stage set. Buda perched on steep hills, her sprawling Royal Palace, and her Citadel carved into jagged cliffs which plunge into the river, craves the attention of the visitor arriving down the Danube from Vienna. Pest on the flat plain that is the continuation of the Puszta, is all business, commerce and intellect, all conversation and art. Fantastic amalgams of Romanesque, Gothic and Byzantine straining to find their Magyar soul face boulevards which are unabashed imitations of both Paris and Vienna. The Parliament, ostentatiously outdoing Westminster, spire for spire, Gothic arch for Gothic arch, faces the dirty gray Danube, the heart of the city.
For Adolf Hitler, Budapest was vital. It was the capital of Germany's last remaining ally in Europe and the gateway to Vienna and southern Bavaria. In addition, the Axis' only remaining crude oil plant was in southwest Hungary. Hitler believed that strong counteroffensives in Hungary coupled with a stout defense in Poland would keep the Soviets off-balance and prevent them from massing their forces against Berlin.
Josef Stalin also viewed Hungary's capital city as a key political prize. The Allied summit at Yalta was just three months away, and the swift seizure of Budapest and Vienna would greatly increase his bargaining power. He ordered Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, a future Soviet minister of defense and commander of the Second Ukrainian Front, which was spread throughout southeast Slovakia and north-central Hungary, to seize Budapest "in the shortest possible time -- in days even."
Malinovsky requested a five-day respite to prepare his weary forces, which had since July pushed west through Romania, Transylvania, and eastern Hungary with barely a break. He was curtly rebuffed by Stalin, who told him, "I categorically order you to begin the offensive on Budapest tomorrow." Therefore, on November 1 Malinovsky attacked from near Kecskemét in central Hungary with several only partially resupplied armies. In one week his troops managed to punch about seventy miles, up to Budapest's eastern suburbs. The swift and unexpected arrival of numerous dusky-brown Soviet T-34 tanks near the small towns of Vecsés and Soroksár, just fourteen miles from the Royal Palace, threw the city into a panic.
During those dangerous early days of the siege, German and Hungarian reinforcements rode the city trams to battle in Pest's eastern suburbs. The weakening Soviet offensive, although having reached the Danube to the north and south of Budapest, broke against the hastily built-up Axis bridgehead. Here the Hungarian defense stabilized, heavily reinforced by German soldiers rushed to Budapest from throughout the Eastern theater.
The six weeks between the Soviets' November arrival in Pest's eastern suburbs and the Christmas night encirclement of the entire city proved surreal for the capital's almost one million inhabitants. Although a number had fled into western Hungary, the overwhelming majority of residents remained, including many who gravitated to the capital from the countryside. Conventional wisdom was that the Soviets would rapidly take Budapest and Hungary, and therefore it would be safer and more orderly in the great city. It was generally accepted that in the city, "inhabitants will face field marshals while in the villages corporals will govern."
After the initial panic a strange lull took place. Life returned to a forced normalcy. Shops reopened. Noted coffeehouses such as Gerbeaud and the New York Cafe did a brisk business as citizens prepared for subdued Christmas festivities. In packed cinemas many watched newsreels of the fighting just kilometers away. All this activity went on under the barrels of heavy Soviet artillery, which could already shell much of Budapest.
The German reporter Werner Hannemann exclaimed, "Budapest is unique among front-line cities!" He expressed his astonishment and admiration of the residents when he described their life in Budapest:
On the Danube bridges connecting Buda and Pest you encounter a German guard every twenty meters. He bears his weapon ready at the hip, not over his shoulder. Along the Danube quay, where one strolled pleasantly under the lanterns in the pale summer nights in front of the row of world famous hotels -- the Ritz, Bristol, Hungaria and Carlton -- work detachments prepare for war. The coffee house habitués meet as usual at five p.m. in the Negresco and knot the tablecloth fringes together out of boredom, then move on to the Dubarry or Hungarica Bar around seven to have their customary "Flip" or a good Tocay -- while Soviet aircraft indiscriminately drop bombs followed by flares into the city. For dinner, the Soviet long-range artillery sends heavy shells into the city. The waiters serve on, nobody makes a fuss. Each day there are at least four or five air-raid alerts.
The Soviets on December 19, after a brief respite and aided by excellent deception -- false radio signals and unit designations to conceal the intended breakthrough sector -- launched a two-pronged attack against hastily built Axis Magarethe Line fortifications. This tenuous line ran along the enormous Lake Balaton up through the eastern Pest bridgehead and then north along the Danube into Slovakia. The Second Ukrainian Front, roughly the size of a U.S. army with four armies and 625,000 men -- including a Romanian corps -- first stormed westward just north of the Danube River bend. The Third Ukrainian Front, about 450,000 strong and spread from Yugoslavia to south of Budapest, then attacked from a Danube bridgehead near Lake Balaton with twice the forces the Germans had anticipated. Nine rifle divisions supported by two mobile corps quickly shattered the thin defensive line, and by December 21 they had penetrated deep into the Axis rear.
Just two days later, Soviet forces swept into the strategic city of Székesfehérvár near Lake Balaton. This secured Marshal Tolbukhin's left flank as his armored spearheads turned north to envelop Budapest. They then severed the main Budapest–Vienna highway at Bicske, eighteen miles west of Budapest, and continued north with the bulk of their forces. By noon of the 26th, forward detachments of the Eighteenth Tank Corps, spearhead of the Soviet Forty-sixth Army, triumphantly capped this double envelopment by linking up with Malinovsky's forces at the ancient cathedral city of Esztergom at the bend of the Danube River. Budapest now lay within the death grip of two Soviet fronts.
Despite the distant rumble of battle from the south, Budapest's inhabitants carried on as if in denial of the fast-moving peril enveloping them. Soviet tank units roared in the evening gloom toward unsuspecting, undefended western Buda. Most thought the clatter represented reinforcing German units headed east. By mid-morning on Christmas Day, Soviet armored reconnaissance units were filtering through the Buda hills toward the quiet Castle District.
The Hungarian police were the first units to raise the alarm. Near the Janos Hospital a company of the untrained Hungarian University Storm Battalion scrambled to stop the early Russian probe. The veteran Eighth SS Florian Geyer Cavalry Division, in positions in Vecsés, twelve miles east of the Danube, received a hurried call to drop their Christmas celebrations and redeploy to the western suburbs. Within hours they were crossing the Danube bridges in trucks and taking up battle lines in Buda. The violence of this confused urban engagement heightened as both sides fed troops piecemeal into the fighting.
The earliest firefights swirled from house to house, hill to hill, and boulevard to boulevard, as both sides sought to obtain the most advantageous positions possible. Without enough forces to fully exploit their near coup de main of Budapest, the Soviets went to ground, but not before securing vital positions on Schwabian Hill and at the Janos Hospital, within one and a half miles of the Royal Palace. In turn, the German-Hungarian forces narrowly avoided the Soviets occupying all the tactically significant high ground of Buda behind the bulk of the Axis troops deployed east of the Danube in the Pest lowlands.The German Ninth SS Mountain Corps, under the command of SS Obergruppenführer (Lt. Gen.) Karl von Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a police general sent to Hungary in September 1944, was trapped in Budapest. The garrison consisted of roughly seventy thousand German and Hungarian soldiers. Troop quality ranged from excellent to substandard. Comprising the core of the garrison were several first-class German fighting units, including most of the Feldherrnhalle Panzergrenadier Division, the depleted Thirteenth Panzer Division, the Eighth SS Cavalry Division, and the recently formed Twenty-second SS Maria Theresa Cavalry Division.
The German defenders were supplemented by Hungarian army forces, including the Tenth Infantry Division, remnants of the First Tank Division, some armored hussars, and an elite assault gun battalion. Less reliable was the recently conscripted Twelfth Reserve Infantry Division. The Hungarians also fielded numerous ad hoc units, including several well-armed detachments of Arrowcross fascists, two battalions of anti-Bolshevik university students, the tough paramilitary Vannay Battalion, plus numerous police, service, and support elements.
Several dozen tanks, assault guns, and self-propelled howitzers provided credible armored support for the garrison until fuel stocks ran low. The corps' chief of staff, the highly capable Oberst (Colonel) Uscha von Lindenau, later wrote:
The number and composition of the troops at our disposal proved unfit for the defense of a large city like Budapest from the very start. After all what could Panzers, anti-tank and cavalry units do in a labyrinth of houses? The staff of the defense had no independent signals system of its own. We used the public telephone lines of Budapest instead. During the siege this resulted in the paradoxical situation that often the number called was answered not by our people but by the Russians who were already there.
The Soviets' holiday attack split many families, catching numerous Budapest inhabitants outside the city on Christmas foraging trips. Citizens calling from suddenly occupied western Buda were dumbfounded when inner Budapest residents confirmed, via still intact phone lines, the unimaginable -- the dreaded Russians had surrounded and were storming the city. German soldiers rushing to rejoin their units were amazed to see civilians desperately trying to hitch rides back into the dying city. A German military mail truck picked up one young woman who had been shopping near Bicske for food. As the truck rattled toward the capital at dusk, the veteran Germans looked on with foreboding, as did the young lady, at the artillery flashes that lit up the darkening sky, heralding the Russians' approach.
On December 24, 1944, Hitler, over the heated objections of much of his staff, ordered SS Obergruppenführer (Lt. Gen.) Herbert Gille to immediately prepare his formidable Fourth SS Panzer Corps, then refitting in the Warsaw area, for deployment to Hungary to relieve the encircled German corps in Budapest. Thus began the disproportionate buildup of German panzer forces in Hungary during a period of extreme peril on both the Eastern and Western fronts. By March 1945 six elite Waffen SS panzer divisions and a quarter of all available Wehrmacht panzer divisions would be committed to Hungary, ostensibly to retain the Reich's last remaining strategic oil reserves.
In January 1945, while German forces were gathering, Soviet armies were poised on the Vistula River, preparing to thrust into eastern Prussia and the heart of Germany, and Allied forces, having stopped the Ardennes offensive, were preparing to cross the Rhine into Germany's vitals.
The first week of the siege was characterized by a series of uncoordinated, violent Soviet attacks from several directions while the defenders contracted their lines in eastern Pest and stabilized the precarious situation in Buda. The Eighth SS Cavalry Division deployed its three regiments in a rough semicircle from an elevated railway embankment south of Gellert Hill to opposite Margit Island, a thousand-yard-long park in the middle of the Danube. The key terrain features of Eagle Hill, Farkasreti Cemetery, Schwabian Hill, and Rose Hill down to the Danube were all turned into urban strongpoints. Interspersed between these strongpoints were a mix of Hungarian and German combat groups that would help shore up the inevitable gaps. In Pest, the extended defenses in the eastern suburbs were pulled back to free up more troops for Buda and to tighten the perimeter. The shortened German battle line still covered most of Pest, roughly following a heightened railway embankment that ringed the eastern half of the city and extended south through Csepel Island. Margit Island was defended by a mixed battle group.
On December 29, Marshal Malinovsky, impatient to complete the capture of Budapest and continue his drive on Vienna, sent two officers, Miklos Steinmetz and Ilya Ostapenko, to offer surrender terms. They were curtly dismissed by the Germans and were killed during an unfortunate accident on their return to Russian lines. Subsequent investigations revealed that one of the ill-fated emissaries drove over a land mine, and the other was hit by random mortar fire. The Soviets blamed the Germans for wantonly killing the officers and whipped up their propaganda machine, thereby inflaming emotions in the increasingly bloody battle.
In Pest, the Soviets pressed their attack through the eastern suburbs along several avenues of approach, mainly from the north- and southeast. Their assault groups, supported by armor, assault guns, and several Lend-Lease Sherman tanks, slowly swept past the forward Axis strongpoints. Reluctant to become decisively engaged so far from Budapest's urban heart, the enemy gradually gave ground, inflicting enough casualties to slow the Soviet advance to a crawl.
By January 1, 1945, Pest's defenders had fallen back to an inner perimeter about five miles from the Danube, while defensive lines in Buda had barely budged. On this day the stakes for Budapest dramatically heightened.
Since Budapest's encirclement, intense German planning had concentrated on how to best punch through the hardening Soviet outer and inner lines into the beleaguered city. Options evolved into northern and southern solutions. The northern option focused on a quick but difficult attack over hilly, heavily wooded terrain directly toward Budapest. The southern option seemed more promising; German forces would drive east from between Lake Balaton and Lake Velence, seize Székesfehérvár, and wheel northeast toward Budapest over relatively flat terrain. A successful offensive along this axis would not only break into Budapest but also split Tolbukhin's front in half. Pressed for time and plagued by serious misgivings, the German high command chose the more direct, but more difficult, northern option, calling it Operation Konrad.
On New Year's Day the lead elements of the newly arrived Third SS Totenkopf (Death's Head) and Fifth SS Wiking (Viking) Panzer Divisions, advancing in column and without initial artillery preparation, crashed into the overextended Soviet Fourth Guards Army near Táta. Although Soviet Intelligence was aware that Gille's corps had recently redeployed into Hungary from Poland, it had lost track of the two elite SS divisions, mainly because they used different radio security procedures than the more numerous Wehrmacht units. The Soviet failure to track these dangerous units enabled the Germans to achieve full tactical surprise and a quick breakthrough.
This attack from the northwest heralded an extraordinary month of maneuver warfare, coupled with strikes and counterstrikes in western Hungary, with Székesfehérvár and Bicske as the hubs and Budapest always the prize. Although strategically the war was clearly lost, January 1945 would be the last month of the war during which the Germans fought the Soviets with some possibility of securing any sort of tactical victory.
By January 3, Marshal Tolbukhin, commanding the outer encirclement ring, was forced to acknowledge the severity of the threat bearing down from the west and northwest. In three days Gille's panzer spearheads had driven twenty-five to thirty miles over rugged terrain, half the distance to Budapest. In response Tolbukhin rushed four additional corps -- each one averaging fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand men -- north from the Székesfehérvár area to buttress his crumbling line. At the same time, Malinovsky, commanding the inner encirclement ring and responsible for reducing Budapest, pulled a rifle corps out of the developing siege battle and reoriented it to the west. This shift of Soviet forces barely managed to stop the German counteroffensive at Bicske, just eighteen miles from Budapest.
Simultaneously, on January 6 Malinovsky's premier armor formation, the Sixth Guards Tank Army, with more than 250 tanks, smashed a ten-mile-wide hole through the German/Hungarian positions north of the Danube near Esztergom in a well-timed counterstroke. During the next three days it knifed fifty miles toward the rail junction at Komárom, which was the main Axis supply terminus for much of the Hungarian campaign. By January 8, the attack had stalled in Komárom's outskirts, much as Gille's panzer corps was blocked at the Bicske road junction. There was an extraordinary symmetry between these two offensives; the Germans advanced east along the southern bank of the Danube while an equally strong Soviet offensive advanced west along the northern bank.
Meanwhile, the tenacious General Gille would not give up. He pulled his Wiking Division out of the line and within three days it reappeared just south of Esztergom near the Danube bend. In miserable weather the battle-hardened Wiking Division advanced south toward Budapest along the narrow roads and tracks of the Ardennes-like Pilis Mountains. By January 12, the SS Westland Regiment, comprised mostly of Scandinavian volunteers, reached Pilisszentkereszt, just fourteen miles from northern Buda. That morning German soldiers spotted the church spires and turrets of the distinctive Budapest skyline poking through the morning fog from the highlands near Dobogoko. Despite its success, the German relief force, overextended and vulnerable, was unable to exploit this small breakthrough and was eventually ordered to pull back and regroup.
In Budapest, hopes of relief ran high. The garrison could both see and hear the approaching fighting, the sound of which was magnified by heavy cloud cover, while the relief troops heard the city's haunting air-raid sirens. At night the relief force and the defenders communicated with each other using flares. Heeding Hitler's directive that Budapest remain a fortress city, the garrison did not attempt to battle out of the pocket, a prospect that at this juncture had some prospect of success.
The situation in the beleaguered city became increasingly serious, however. While the Soviets chipped away at Buda, they also concentrated on reducing Pest. With three rifle corps on line, supported by heavy assault guns, armor, artillery, and combat engineers, the Soviet forces relentlessly ground down the outnumbered defenders. A German war correspondent dramatically reported:
The sky gleams in red and violet colors over the Hungarian capital. The thud of shots and the clatter of machine guns mingle with the muffled rumbling of the aircraft circling over Budapest. Cowering behind quickly erected barricades, moving with exemplary tenacity from cellar to cellar, SS-men, tank grenadiers of the army, Hungarian parachutists, supported by German tanks encounter the Soviet storm troops again and again. Every defender of Budapest knows the necessity of this battle. Therefore the defiant perseverance, the repeated thrusts into the masses of the enemy. In the heart of Budapest the German garrison defends itself with fanatical bravery. Daily it inflicts tremendous losses on the Soviets. Its obstinate perseverance is not in vain. It is giving the German command precious time to take extensive countermeasures in the Hungarian theater of war.
By this time the bulk of Budapest's almost one million civilians huddled in cellars, ground-floor apartments, and tunnels throughout the city. On Castle Hill thousands were crammed into several miles of tunnels bored into the surrounding natural limestone formations. Several German and Hungarian field hospitals operated in this dank, fetid environment. The German weekly Die Zeit graphically described these conditions:
At first the girls, women and men of Budapest worked on. They wore fur coats and built barricades under the orders of the SS. In the beginning, they cowered together when a round exploded nearby. For a while they tried to carry on. But at last they disappeared in the cellars and sat or lay down with their hunger. Like the people of Budapest -- this city that crumbles more on all sides with each passing day -- like these people sitting down there in the cellars, the women in fur coats and silk stockings sheer as breath, the girls who mechanically reached for their lipstick and compact now and then, as if they had to pretty themselves up in the usual big city manner for Death the Cavalier, the confused peasant girls in colorful headscarves and, in between, the children with long, lowered eyelashes, none of them had anything left to eat, yet nobody felt the hunger anymore.... Yes, it was not easy to bear the sight of it. Civilian corpses already lay in the streets.
With the loss of Budapest's main airport on December 27, the supply situation became critical. Eighty tons of provisions per day were needed to supply the garrison alone. The Germans threw everything they could into the support of Budapest. A racetrack in Pest was hurriedly converted into a makeshift airport where venerable Junkers Ju-52s flew in rations, ammunition, and gasoline and evacuated the seriously wounded, including the son of German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. When Soviet tanks overran the racetrack on January 9, the Germans converted the Vérmezö, an eight-hundred-yard-long park directly below Castle Hill, into a last-ditch landing zone. This narrow park, appropriately called the Blutwiese (bloody meadow), drew constant fire as light aircraft, frequently gliders piloted by daredevil teenage Hitler Youth members drawn from junior flying clubs across Germany, continued to recklessly land by night.
Resupply did not come only by air. As the Danube flows north to south, the Germans attempted early during the siege to float supplies by motor launch and barge from the recaptured Esztergom area into Budapest. On one occasion, a barge with four thousand tons of ammunition hit a sandbar about fifteen miles north of the city. Despite this setback, the Germans successfully brought its cargo down to Budapest under cover of fog and darkness. By mid-January the tightening Soviet noose had cut off this vital river artery, which shortly thereafter froze almost completely over.
Rations within the city were primarily horseflesh and thin soup. Though some of the cavalry horses were led out of Buda-pest before the encirclement, more than twenty thousand animals remained within the perimeter and provided a ready source of meat for the garrison. The miserable mounts could be seen everywhere in lower Buda standing inside shops, inner gardens, and narrow streets. Their stripped carcasses littered the streets. Many of the more affluent Budapest citizens, particularly in the wealthy Buda villas, had large larders well provisioned with food and alcohol, making each a valued mini-objective. Fierce firefights broke out among these villas. A favored German tactic was to allow the Soviets to seize one stocked with wine and spirits, wait a few hours until early morning, and then counterattack the groggy and besotted enemy.
Hundreds of thousands of poorer or displaced civilians were not as fortunate, often prowling the streets after dark foraging for scraps of food. Thirst was also a major problem, and many inhabitants were killed as they crept to the Danube to fill containers of water. An eyewitness described the chaos:
The bombing was constant. It was very dangerous to go outside. Many people died while running for water, or just going to the courtyard for a cigarette. We went down into the cellar on December 29 and until the fall of Buda on February 12, we lived a rat's life. Apart from the windows, it's a miracle our flat remained intact. In our immediate neighborhood everything was completely destroyed by mines and bullets.
The Hungarian units generally fared better than the Germans, as the populace gave them what support they could. The Waffen SS cavalry units were also well treated due to their high percentage of conscripted ethnic Germans who were native-born Hungarians. As the siege lengthened and supplies diminished, hunger and sickness affected almost all the defenders.
Both sides recognized that the Battle of Budapest was developing into the bloodiest and most sustained siege since Stalingrad. Consequently, psychological warfare increased as the battle intensified. Through loudspeakers and airdropped leaflets, the Soviet chipped away at the morale of the garrison. While Gille told the beleaguered garrison, "Hang on, we're coming!" the Soviets broadcasted, "Gille kommt aber kille [sic] Gille" (Gille's coming but we're going to kill him). Another leaflet read, "Die Schwarzen Raben fliegen aus Stalingrad" (The black ravens are flying from Stalingrad). The Germans generally were unfazed by these psychological operations, whereas Hungarian units, especially those formed from recently mustered recruits, suffered heavily from desertion.
Adding to the combatants' woes was the fact that the winter of 1944–1945 was unusually cold. Most troops lived in buildings and large apartment blocks. However, those who manned positions in parks and large open areas suffered badly from the cold, particularly in daylight, when the ubiquitous Soviet snipers pinned them down. In Buda, Soviet marksmen on the rooftop of the Janos Hospital, just eight hundred yards to their front, plagued defenders deployed across Városmajor Park. Some were deadly accurate Siberian riflemen.
Not only did snipers unnerve the garrison. The Soviets, masters at infiltration and small-unit patrolling, were sometimes able to penetrate behind the urban defense lines to acquire intelligence, snatch prisoners, and kill officers. For example, a six-man patrol of Soviet marines was able to penetrate deep behind German defenses near Buda's Royal Palace by slithering through a narrow sewer main. They emerged and waited for hours in the shadows, letting several German soldiers pass by. Their patience was eventually rewarded when they were able to surprise two German officers, killing one and dragging the other back through the sewers to Soviet lines.
The subterranean war in Budapest worked both ways, however. Although the subway tunnels were blocked early in the siege, the city was laced with countless sewer mains, maintenance tunnels, and passages. The Hungarian paramilitary Vannay Battalion, which was made up of municipal workers who knew the city's underground well, worked deep in the city's bowels to counter the Soviets. They emerged phantom-like in captured buildings' cellars to query cooperative Hungarian civilians as to the Soviets' whereabouts.
When uncertain if the enemy were lurking at the other end of a dark tunnel, they would throw a urine-soaked tennis ball down the passageway and release dogs trained to fetch them. In theory the dogs would bark or draw enemy fire if they encountered any Soviets. On one occasion Vannay members infiltrated Soviet lines near Janos Hospital and carved up several Hungarian defectors, who were broadcasting propaganda over Soviet-provided loudspeakers.
On January 11, Malinovsky, pressed by Stalin, who was clearly irritated by the sluggish nature of the assault, ordered a reorganization of Soviet forces. A special combat group equipped with flamethrowers, heavy weapons, and sappers commanded by Maj. Gen. Ivan M. Afonyin was formed. Budapest would be reduced by brute force. Rifle divisions were assigned attack sectors between four hundred and eight hundred yards wide, with regiments pushing on 150- to 300-yard-wide fronts, several soldiers advancing per yard. Heavy artillery, including 122mm, 152mm, and 203mm guns, was brought up to support this steamroller with direct fire.
The German battle group defending Csepel Island, Budapest's industrial heart, was forced out after a bloody fight through its many factories and machine shops. The munitions factories founded by the great Hungarian Jewish industrial magnate Manfred Weiss, the "Hungarian Krupp," continued to fabricate artillery rounds, small arms ammunition, and Panzerfausts for the defense of Budapest until literally the last moment.
The pressure on Pest intensified as the Soviets closed in on the contracting German and Hungarian positions. Varosliget Park and Millennium Square, the last wide-open area in northwest Pest, fell on January 12 after bitter fighting. From the park, the tempo of the Soviet advance quickened, passing the many embassies and ornate villas on the broad Andrassy Boulevard. By January 14, Hungarian infantry and assault guns were locked in mortal combat for the Eastern Railway Station with most of General Nicholae Sova's Seventh Romanian Rifle Corps. Whereas in most instances Hungarian units had fought halfheartedly during the Battle of Budapest, here -- faced with their Romanian arch-nemesis -- they fought savagely.
The fighting traveled from track to track, through the rolling stock, and into the station. By January 16, the outnumbered defenders were bludgeoned in close-quarter fighting amid the rubble of the shattered station, and the exhausted attackers stood close to the Elizabeth Ring Road, a short distance from the Danube. Sova's corps, already having suffered eleven thousand casualties out of its thirty-six-thousand-man force, was pulled out by Malinovsky, who was incensed by the Romanian tendency to whip up frenzied resistance among previously demoralized Hungarian troops.
A similar episode occurred at the Western Railway Station (in Pest), where another furious fight ensued. After the station was captured on January 16, the Soviets were just a thousand yards from the Danube bridges, threatening to split the hard-pressed Pest garrison in half. Faced with the annihilation of the entire Pest group, Hitler finally consented to giving up the eastern bridgehead and consolidating the garrison's defense in Buda.
Consequently, on January 17 the Chain and Elizabeth bridges into Buda were jammed. One observer recounted the horrendous chaos:
The bridges stood constantly under the heaviest fire, and despite this flowed confused and unthinkingly over the Danube from Pest to Buda -- all who could run, roll or hobble, vehicles of all kinds and civilian wagons covered in canvas with shying horses, wretched mothers, crying wives and children, and many, many wounded soldiers. When the mortar rounds fell in the moving mass of humanity, men and material were thrown from both sides of the bridge into the Danube."
Flying low along the river, Soviet fighter-bombers raked the exposed columns. From Buda's heights German anti-aircraft artillery attempted to shoot down the low-flying Shturmoviks, which resulted in extensive damage across the river to the row of buildings lining Pest's waterfront. Despite the protestations of General Ivan Hindy, the senior Hungarian commander, German sappers blew up the magnificent Chain and Elizabeth bridges into the Danube in the early dawn hours of the 18th.
The Soviet capture of Pest was welcomed by at least one large element of its population: the tens of thousands of Jews caught up in the fury of Pest's defense. When not enduring the constant shelling and bombing, they were ravaged daily by the depredations of Arrowcross thugs, who forced their way into the ghetto and committed unspeakable acts of brutality. George Lang, a young Hungarian Jew who survived Budapest's dangerous streets by using guile and luck, later wrote:
It was a time when God was arranging our lives with his left hand. It was a time of deliberate cultivation of evil. The city was shivering and it was not only the exceptionally cold weather. Buildings, under the Russian artillery and machine-gun fire from low-flying planes fell like tree leaves while human shaped creatures terrorized the city. Most people just tried to survive with obscene indifference towards others while fourteen-year-old Hungarian fascists, probably neighbors I played soccer with -- shot the helpless thousands of Jews, but first removing their gold teeth before pushing them into the indifferent Danube. For the rest of my life I will never understand why God did not repeat his Biblical flood trick to end all that horror.
While the defense of Pest collapsed, the Germans were surreptitiously disengaging Gille's bloodied but still dangerous corps from the northern sector and stealthily redeploying it south by rail. Although weakened from the failure of their northern option they now planned a belated execution of the southern option.
Once again, Soviet signal intercepts failed to track the SS corps. Four panzer divisions, including those comprising the veteran Third Panzer Corps, flattened the unprepared Soviet 135th Rifle Corps, rending a fifteen mile hole in the Soviet line. German armor rampaged through the enemy positions, gaining a dozen miles the first day. By January 20, in the last great German panzer raid of the war, lead elements of the Third Panzer Division pushed almost seventy miles into the Soviet rear, reaching the Danube near Dunapentele, where they shot up enemy river traffic. The storied First Panzer Division, with its infantry augmented by the Hungarian SS Regiment Ney, retook the key city of Székesfehérvár on the 23rd, unhinging the entire Soviet sector.
This was the last serious Soviet military crisis of the war. Within five days the German attack had split Tolbukhin's front, pinning it against the Danube. Advancing German spearheads were just miles from the Soviets' main supply routes crossing the river and were just one bound from Budapest. Marshal Tolbukhin perceived the threat to be grave enough that he requested to withdraw his forces back across the Danube, which would have meant success for the German southern option and temporary relief of the garrison. For a moment Stalin almost relented, but then ordered the Soviet marshal to hold his ground.
Soviet countermeasures were swift once the magnitude of the crisis revealed itself. Two rifle corps slated for the final reduction of Buda were hurriedly redirected south. The Fifth Guard Cavalry Corps rode sixty-five miles in twenty-four hours, arriving with the other redeployed corps in the nick of time to blunt the increasingly attenuated German advance. On the 24th, the Germans conducted a last-gasp attack that approached to within thirteen or fourteen miles of Buda's southern suburbs. The garrison managed to make radio contact with the fading German spearhead, greeting it with the words, "Warm wishes towards your success and our liberation, ten thousand of our wounded await you."
Once again Pfeffer-Wildenbruch requested to break out, and once again Hitler ordered the wavering garrison to remain in place. Faced with fresh Soviet forces to their front and the erosof their dangerously extended southern flank, the German relief force was forced to postpone the offensive on January 28, thereby sealing Budapest's fate.
In the capital, the progress of the offensive was closely monitored. Once again the starving garrison could hear the sounds of approaching battle, this time from the southwest. Once again their hopes for relief were dashed, this time permanently, when word spread that the relief operation had been repulsed. Morale sank among the defenders though not their capacity to fight.
The garrison was now engaged in a battle of attrition that it could not hope to survive. Two full rifle corps exerted relentless pressure against the defenders in the Kelenfold district in southern Buda and the bleeding German line defending the valleys, saddles, and hilltops facing west. Assault after assault was beaten back by Kampfgruppe Portugall, which defended Eagle Hill overlooking the entire German defense of Buda. Below, in Farkasreti Cemetery, Soviet and German soldiers fought a macabre battle among its gravestones and crypts.
In this grim environment, the sight of an elegant Hungarian woman in her mink coat, calmly walking her dog in the midst of the carnage, bemused both sides. During a seesaw struggle for the adjoining Little Schwabian Hill, Hungarian Zrinyi assault guns, in tandem with troopers from the Eighth SS, retook the height and held it until February 6. Nearby, a group of university students fought viciously for the heights of Rose Hill. In one counterattack, several German Hummel 150mm self-propelled artillery pieces led the young students' charge. During this intense bombardment, General Afonyin, the Soviet group commander, was severely wounded.
An unusual battle for Margit Island, once Budapest's playground and site of several well-known cafes and baths, continued throughout January. Defended by a mixed Hungarian and German garrison, this narrow, 250-yard-wide strip of earth, linked to Buda by the intact half of the Margit Bridge, was the site of a pure infantry battle, complete with extensive trench lines and river landing attempts on the defenders' flanks. The Germans defended Margit Island because of its importance as an excellent site to airdrop supplies and as a final approach for any aircraft trying to land on the Vérmezö.
By now daily rations were down to melted snow, horsemeat, and 150 grams of bread. Most of the garrison suffered from diarrhea and were infested with lice. There was a real fear of typhus breaking out in the crowded, makeshift hospital in the tunnels and catacombs of Castle Hill where thousands of Buda civilians were sheltered from the fighting. Archbishop Gennaro Verolino, then a young assistant to the Papal Nuncio in Budapest, Father Angelo Rotta, vividly described the nightmare scene:
We had only to cross Disz Square, which already separated the non-existent building of the Nunciature from the Royal Palace. A short walk but what a walk! The building next to the Nunciature, that of the Foreign Ministry, was in flames. The Ministry of Defense, on the opposite side of the square, was aflame, too. Flames rose towards the sky from several places in the Palace itself. And in the square there were bomb craters, trenches, wreckage...there were only the flames to light our way. Then inside the palace we had to descend lower and lower. Wherever we passed, in every hall, corridor, there were wounded, operations were in progress on ordinary tables, we heard cries and wailing everywhere.... Hell itself.
Sensing the kill, the Soviets intensified their attacks through Farkasreti Cemetery and Schwabian Hill. The stout defense of the cemetery was finally overcome and the defenders, lacking the strength to counterattack, grudgingly fell back in an attempt to hold the old Taban quarter between Gellert Hill and Castle Hill.
On February 6, the Soviets, attacking from three sides, finally took Eagle Hill after six weeks of continuous fighting. The defense of Budapest was fatally compromised with the Soviet seizure of this key tactical height. From Eagle Hill's summit, Soviet artillery spotters were able to call in accurate fire on the garrison's positions below them on Castle and Gellert Hills. The improvised landing strip on the Vérmezö became untenable. German counterbattery fire was negligible and was unable to answer the torrent of Soviet shellfire. The doomed garrison was relentlessly pressed against the Danube into an area of approximately one and a half miles by seven hundred yards. Critical shortages in artillery, ammunition, and gasoline limited the garrison's ability to respond to any crisis.
Despite the realization that further defense of Buda was pointless and that there would be no relief, the Germans and Hungarians hung grimly on for another six days. The Vannay Battalion, a bare memory of its former self, and an Arrowcross detachment counterattacked and drove a Soviet combat group back to the upper floors of the huge castlelike Buda Postal "Palace" on the northwest corner of Szell Kalman Square. They then made a determined stand on the lower floors of the recaptured building, thereby keeping open a key potential breakout route to the northwest.
South of the Gellert Hotel, the exhausted defenders fought determinedly against Soviet infantry and tank forces released to the besieging forces after the relief threat from Gille had subsided. For two days, heavy fighting raged around the Southern Railway Station, the last major structure in front of Castle Hill itself. When it finally fell, the Soviets pressed on and up the southern and western sides of Gellert Hill. On February 10, the Soviets' Eighty-third Marine Brigade stormed the heights, managing to carve out a foothold near the summit in the area of the Japanese and Swiss residences. At the same time, fighting raged from villa to villa below and other detachments infiltrated the Orthodox Church in the Taban district, almost splitting the defense.
With all hope of relief gone, ammunition depleted, and the Soviets only a ten-minute climb from his headquarters under the Royal Palace, Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, against Hitler's orders, directed a breakout to commence at dark on February 11. At eight o'clock that night, while President Franklin D. Roosevelt was dining with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, the garrison began its breakout attempt.
The defenders, broken down into three assault waves, managed to use heavy fog to momentarily surprise the Soviets by infiltrating their forward positions opposite Széna square and the Vérmezö with Russian-speaking soldiers. They then poured out of the constricted streets and alleys traversing the broad Attila Street, Vérmezö, Szell Kalman, and Széna squares and pushed through to the streets beyond. Many were shot down here as they were silhouetted by flares and fires in the open parks and boulevards while the few accompanying armored vehicles were knocked out. Other soldiers, stricken by terror, remained prone, too frightened to move. Small groups advanced using coordinated assault techniques, others just ran pell-mell toward the Soviet positions. Herd psychology overtook most, and the sheer forward momentum of the thousands of desperate soldiers overwhelmed the lead Soviet positions in savage, close-quarter fighting.
The Soviets initially responded sluggishly, but within an hour they were bombarding the second and third waves, many of whom were still pinned down in firefights or lying in terror or exhaustion on the exposed Budapest streets. Despite horrific losses, the surviving defenders, with almost all their small-arms ammunition expended, made a desperate rush for the concealment of the hilly, wooded terrain in Buda's northwestern suburbs. More than ten thousand of them somehow found their way out of Buda's charnel house. The fleeing soldiers left thousands of dead strewn in heaps in their wake, while most of the others -- those wounded, exhausted, frozen, or in shock -- meandered aimlessly around until rounded up by the victors.
Three German division commanders lay among the fallen. Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Joachim Boosfeld was in the initial Eighth SS attack. Hit in the leg by mortar shrapnel in mid-January, hecredited his survival to his servant, Ricard, who had never left his side and had found him a special pair of Hungarian boots for his damaged leg. Boosfeld related: "All around us people were falling -- bodies lay everywhere. Ricard was hit in the head. I pulled him in and treated his face as best I could, my hands shook so much I had difficulty binding the wound." They then joined the attack that overran the Soviet positions opposite Szell Kalman Square, rushed through a factory, and hobbled their way into the Buda hills. Boosfeld evaded the subsequent Soviet manhunt, reaching German lines on February 14; Ricard was captured.
By dawn on the twelfth, thousands of Germans and Hungarians were swarming through the wooded hills north and northwest of Budapest, even outnumbering the Soviets in some areas. In a desperate race against time, the exhausted survivors slogged through the snow, forest, hills, and finally into the exposed plains toward German lines, receiving occasional Luftwaffe support as the Soviets intensified their efforts to round them up. Within a day the Soviets managed to seal off most escape routes and set up an extensive manhunt. Trucks patrolled the edge of the Buda hills, offering safe conduct to those who surrendered.
Many did, and hundreds of them, mostly Germans, were summarily executed and dumped later into mass graves. Arpad Goncz, the current president of Hungary and a Cold War-era dissident and poet, composed "The Mass Grave," capturing his memories of this frightful slaughter's aftermath: "They dug two graves: In one they threw the Hungarians, in the other the Germans and the dead horses. The Germans and Hungarians were usually barefooted: in those days they paid due reverence to soled footwear."
One Hungarian lieutenant led a group of eleven Hungarian and four Waffen SS soldiers out of the cauldron along a railway up and over Schwabian Hill. This was the same general route used by the largest group of German survivors, several hundred Feldherrnhalle troopers led by Oberstleutnant (Lt. Col.) Helmut Wolff, who managed to reach German lines on the 14th. The lieutenant's group, however, was not as lucky. Concealed Soviet infantry ambushed and captured the small group. The four SS soldiers were immediately stripped naked and shot, while the Hungarians barely escaped with their lives by promising to help the Soviets with the roundup.
By February 14, the siege and breakout was over. Of the approximately thirty thousand souls participating in the breakout only 785 German and Hungarian soldiers managed to evade the relentless Soviet pursuit and reach German lines. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch and his command group never made it; they were surrounded and captured in a Buda villa after emerging from a sewer main a kilometer behind Soviet lines. Malinovsky reportedly told the German commander, "If I didn't have a direct order from Stalin himself, I'd hang you in the main square of Buda castle for all the trouble you caused us."
Haupsturmführer Kurt Portugall, commander of the German battle group that defended Eagle Hill, also failed to escape the cauldron. Captured on Rose Hill, he expected immediate execution when his winter smock was torn open, revealing his SS runes and combat decorations. As he could speak some Russian he was taken to a tall, distinguished major who told him:
I have a lot of respect for the combat soldiers of the Waffen SS. You will shortly be transported behind our lines. In our rear area there are as many swine as in your rear area. I'm telling you, leave your SS runes and your decorations here; it will be better for your future health. I will not keep your decorations nor will any of my soldiers because we are Guards soldiers, the Russian Waffen SS!
A brief orgy of horror and violence ensued in Buda after its capture. An estimated two thousand wounded were burned or suffocated to death in fires that broke out in the catacombs under the Royal Palace. Soviet soldiers plundered, looted, and raped the populace. Occupation troops rounded up all able-bodied Hungarian men and youth and sent them down to the Danube to build pontoon bridges across the river. For weeks afterward, especially after the spring thaw, bloated bodies piled up against these same pontoons and bridge pylons.
Budapest lay in ruins. Thousands of structures were destroyed or damaged. The distinctive Parliament building and Royal Palace were gutted, and all five of the city's unique and graceful bridges lay broken in the Danube. Almost forty thousand Hungarian civilians, about half of whom were Jewish, died in the carnage. Sandor Marai, noted Hungarian novelist and poet, later wrote:
Beware, now your feet will sink in blood, here at the mud dazed Bulwark, the scattered dead yet gaze at the Heavens. Smoke signals swirl up from the depths to the firmament. For somewhere below Krisztina town blazes. All traces of zither and Gypsy have been blown from the "Broadaxe," filled now by shadows and stench alone. And side by side in the castle church lie corpses of dead princes and slaughtered horses.... This used to be the bridge. You rode out here in full moon. Halfway across the hansom cab put on the brakes. It was built by Adam Clark in the Age of Reform. Above the arches seagulls used to oscillate. Then so many suicidal leant against the railings. Now the suicidal lie below water with the balustrade. A cold wind cuts through the Tunnel and its fingers stroke the hair of the dead.
The cost of the campaign to the Soviets has never been confirmed, although estimates range from one hundred thousand to as high as 160,000 casualties. Postwar Soviet statistics claim that more than 180,000 German and Hungarian "fighters" were trapped in the pocket, of which 110,000 were captured. Immediately after the siege, thousands of Hungarian civilians were rounded up and added to the prisoner of war count, allowing the Soviets to validate their previously inflated figures.
There is an epilogue to Budapest's fall. Hitler committed significant reserves to Hungary, including the battered Sixth SS Panzer Army fresh from the Ardennes counteroffensive. Consisting of four of the most battle-hardened Waffen SS Panzer units, including the dreaded Leibstandarte and Das Reich divisions, this formidable force was squandered in early March during an ill-conceived panzer "death ride" into waiting and well-prepared Soviet anti-tank defenses near Lake Balaton. Handily defeated by the now highly proficient Soviets, this reverse of Hitler's best divisions finally broke German resistance in Hungary. Within a month Vienna had fallen. The war in Europe ended three weeks later.
- A hozzászóláshoz regisztráció és belépés szükséges
Alkoss, teremts, tisztítsd a Világot
örökítsd tovább az Ősi Szent Lángot!
Ha ellened szólnak ne szólj gyűlölettel,
a gonosz nem bír a testvéri szeretettel.
/Kecskés Gábor 1974-2001/
- A hozzászóláshoz regisztráció és belépés szükséges
A "Florian Geyer" WSS lovashadosztályról több forrás írja, hogy Bp.-ért vívott harcokban semmisült meg. Nincs információ interneten arról, hogy Tatabánya vonzáskörzetében (Felsőgalla) milyen egységei kerültek bevetésre 1945-ben. Ezért ide leírom az utókornak: az említett településen egy "gyerekhadosztály" került bevetésre, ez váltotta le az ott állomásozó WM erőit Felsőgallán. Mikor ellentámadásba lendültek a szovjetek, kezdődött el a fejvesztett menekülése a gyerekeknek. Természetesen hivatalosan "önkéntesekről" ír minden forrás, ez azonban nem állja meg a helyét mindig. Ugyanis a nyilas hatalomátvétel után, a 14 év feletti magyar leventéket is átadták a németeknek. Akaratuk ellenére is történt ez, a katonaszöevényeket agyonlőtték.
Erről az esetről csupán ennyit találtam interneten, gondoltam kiegészítem: "Alsógallától északra az ellentámadás a szovjet ellenállásban elakadt."
Egyébként biztos forrásból vannak információim erről a gyekekből verbuvált hadosztányról a Florian Geyer zászlója alatt a leírt térségben. Az iratot nem szeretném megosztani.
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Ezt találtam. Nem Felsőgalla, de Vértes.
Leventék pokoljárása a Vértesben2008-10-02 11:10:24
"1928. jan. 30-án születtem, melyből az következik, hogy 1944. jan. 30-án lettem 16 éves. Ugyancsak ez év okt. 15-i hatállyal Szálasi Ferenc nemzetvezető átvette a hatalmat Horthy Miklóstól. Az új kormánynak az első teendője az volt, hogy elrendelte a teljes mozgósítást, melyszerint minden 16 év feletti leventének be kellett vonulni. Kihangsúlyozták, aki a behívóparancsnak nem tesz eleget, felkoncoltatik! Hát így lettem én 16 évesen katona. 1944. novemberében nyilas fegyveresek összegyűjtöttek bennünket mint leventéket, és kb. nyolcvanad magammal Ácsról Komáromba kísértek bennünket. Közölték velünk, hogy két lehetőségünk van. Vagy elvisznek bennünket Németországba és mint német katonák fogunk harcolni az oroszok ellen. Vagy Magyarországon maradunk, beöltöztetnek, felfegyvereznek, majd kivisznek bennünket a frontra. Én a két rossz közül az utóbbit választottam. Komáromban a Monostori Erődben beöltöztettek, felfegyvereztek bennünket, és elindultunk a frontra. A kiképzésünk annyi volt, hogy egy homokbányában öt darab lőszerrel célbalőttünk, a német Mauserral. A Vértes hegységben több helyen bevetettek bennünket. Az első bevetésünk Kőhányáspusztánál volt, ahonnan a mi századunk szorította ki az oroszokat. Emlékezetem szerint 4 halottunk volt. Másnap az újság is megírta, hogy a leventék Kőhányáspusztáról kiszorították az oroszokat. A századparancsnokunk emlékezetem szerint Hollósi nevezetü főhadnagy volt. Egyszer találkoztam vele. Majd Várgesztes és Oroszlány melletti erdőségekben voltunk az első vonalban. Mivel ez 1945. telén volt, Kőhányáspuszta kivételével álló harcok voltak. 1945. márc. 8.-a környékén a századot átirányították Kömlőd község melletti harcvonalra. Ez a falu kb. 10-15 km-re van Tatabányától. A rajunknak jutott arcvonal sajnos egy sík részen volt. A naptár 1944. márc. 14-ét mutat. A kora tavaszi nap sugarai már kicsaltak egy-két tavaszi virágot a sík mezőn. Előttünk a lövészárkunkkal párhuzamosan délkeletre 800-1000 m-re egy fasor, ahonnan egy-egy puskalövés, vagy géppuskasorozat hallatszott. Délnyugatra egy istálló, északkeletre egy dombvonulat, melynek az alsó része szőlővel volt beültetve. Mögöttünk a falu, és az odavezető országút. Távolban a falu templomtornya volt látható. A réten pár vakondtúrásnak tűnő földbuckán kívül semmi sem volt, csak a lövések hangja és az ellenség aknáinak becsapódása jelzi, hogy ott emberek vannak, katonák, a nyilasok által elhurcolt fiatalok, akiket minden különösebb kiképzés nélkül kivittek a frontra, az első vonalba.
Nehéz 16-17 éves fejjel elszámolni az ember életével. Mi ezen már túlvoltunk. Tudtuk, hogy innen nincs menekvés. Szépen csendben közeledtünk a vég felé. Egy-egy puskalövéssel a fasor irányába jeleztük létezésünket. Nem kellett sokáig várni. 14.00 h-kor megkezdődött a tüzérségi előkészítő, melyben az ellenség minden fegyverét működésbe hozta. Fülsiketítő vijjogó hangon csapódtak be a tüzérségi lövedékek, az aknák, és a katyusa lövedékei, felszántva körülöttünk a tavaszi rétet. Perceken belül eltűntek a vakondtúrások, helyettük aknatölcsérek sokasága keletkezett.
Északkeletre 800 m-re lévő bunkerba becsapódott egy tüzérségi lövedék, jajgatás és az emberi testmaradványok a levegőben ezt jelezték. A következő lövedék ugyanoda csapódott, majd csend lett. A "mi" tüzérünk tévedett, mert a lövészárkunk mögé 70-100 m-re csapódtak be a lövedékek. A tüzérségi előkészítő látványától bénult állapotba kerültünk. Ezt az állapotot fokozta a szakaszparancsnok helyettesünk, aki kiugrott a lövészárokból és el kezdett szaladni hátrafelé. 100 m után telibetalálta egy aknalövedék. Ahol pillanatokkal ezelőtt az őrmester futott, egy aknatölcsér, húscafatok, ruhafoszlányok voltak láthatók. Ez végleg meggyőzött bennünket, hogy a legcélszerűbb a lövészárokban vagy a bunkerben maradni. 14.30-kor hirtelen síri csend lett. A szomszédos bunker felől a tavaszi szél felénk hozott jajszón kívül más nem volt hallható.
Rajparancsnokunk az öreg zupás közölte: na fiúk, most kezdőkik. Valóban, pillanatokon belül színes rakéták röppentek felfelé, a fasor több kilométer szélességben megmozdult. Őrjítő hajrá kiáltással többezer ember előre szegezett szuronyos puskával és rövid géppisztolly sorozatokkal rohantak felénk. Az aknák és tüzérségi lövedékek becsapódása ismét elkezdődött, tűzhenger formájában a katonák előrehaladásával egyetemben folyamatosan húzódott előre.
Az események gyorsan peregtek. Pillanatok alatt géppisztolyos szuronyos puskával felszerelt orosz katonákkal voltunk körülvéve. Davaj, davaj, hangzik a hangjuk! Kiparancsoltak bennünket a bunkerből és a lövészárokból feltartott kézzel, majd lefektettek bennünket, aki ezt nem értette, annak puskatussal ennek nyomatékot is adtak. Négy hozzánk hasonló fiatal kiskatona félkörbe fogott bennünket és egy-egy hosszú sorozattal végigpáztázták a fekvőket. Tizenhárman feküdtünk le és csak ketten álltunk fel. Az őrmester halkan jagatott. Ezzel az első vonal átvonult rajtunk. Rövidesen megérkezett a második vonal, akik összeszedték a hadifoglyokat és megadták a kegyelemlövést a haldoklóknak. Ezek viszonylag barátságos emberek voltak. Átkutattak bennünket, ami értékünk volt azt elvették és továbbmentek.
Egy kiskatona maradt velünk, aki apró rugásokkal próbálta ébreszteni a fekvőket, majd mikor meggyőződött róla, hogy halottak, megnyugodott. A rajparancsnokunkkal, az öreg zupással volt gondban, nem tudta, mit kezdjen vele. Ugyanis mind a két combja és herezacskója volt átlőve. Mikor felajánlottuk, hogy elvisszük, tudomásul vette. Na, davaj, hangzott a kiskatona parancsa. Közrefogtuk az őrmestert és elindultunk kelet felé. Párszáz méter után az őrmester elkezdett jajgatni, tegyük le, nem bírja tovább. Mielőtt letettük volna, egy hosszú sorozattal kisérőnk kilőtte közülünk. A háta közepén egy ököl nagyságú lyuk jelezte, hogy vége. A rajunkból már csak ketten voltunk életben, én és Bíró Ferenc bajtársam. Minden pillanatban bekövetkezhetett a vég, nem lehetett tudni, hogy a kiskatona mikor unja meg a kísérésünket. Közelünkben feltűnt egy maszatos harckocsizó, tőle kérdezte meg, hogy mit csináljon velünk? A harckocsizó legyintett és a mellettünk lévő lövészárokra mutatott. Sorsunkban megnyugodva tudomásul vettük, hogy nálunk is elérkezett a halál pillanata. A géppisztoly zárja csattant, melyet egy határozott éles hang megállított. Távolból az erdő fáitól takarva gyülekeztek a hadifoglyok, kb. 200-an lehettek." (Részlet Hatejer János leveléből, amely a Sírjaik hol domborulnak? szerkesztőségébe érkezett.)
Alkoss, teremts, tisztítsd a Világot
örökítsd tovább az Ősi Szent Lángot!
Ha ellened szólnak ne szólj gyűlölettel,
a gonosz nem bír a testvéri szeretettel.
/Kecskés Gábor 1974-2001/
- A hozzászóláshoz regisztráció és belépés szükséges
Köszönöm, nagyon tanulságos! Amely iratot én olvastam, ott is már a tűzérségi előkészítés nagy károkat okozott a gyerekhadnak. Felsőgallán mindenki menekülőre fogta ezután, érthető okok miatt.
- A hozzászóláshoz regisztráció és belépés szükséges


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Monday, August 11, 2008
2008 Goudey Blaster Pack-akkake! #3
Pack #3
Carl Crawford
Jack Morris
Nick Markakis
Bill Mazerowski
Mark Ellis
Miguel Tejada
The Greek God of Walks
Sport Royalty: Mr. Hockey© (SP)
Yes, it really says "Mr. Hockey©" on Gordie Howe's Sport Royalty card. In fact, the word "Gordie" appears nowhere on the card.
Something else that's strange about this card: both the Detroit Red Wings and NHL logos are on the back of this card. From a licensing perspective, I wonder how many legalese hoops UD had to jump through to put an officially-licensed hockey card in an officially-licensed baseball card set.
Chris Harris,
Mr. Hockey,
Upper Deck
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Modern colourful antenna socket of genuine porcelain. This one in gilded finish. The surface is enamelled and engrained. Precise handwork. Dust resistant and colourfast. CE conformity certificate. Decorative cover. Guarantee 50 years!
Exceptionally durable mechanism with guaranteed warranty of 10 years!
Test this colour directly in your home... Select one piece from the other porcelain socket colours that you like. You may return the samples within 90 days and we will fully refund your money.
TV + R + SAT, A = 1dB, B = 10dB, 500 ma, 24 V DC. Designed for multiple boxes.


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Okay, I'm asking a question similar to this one here: Time Dilation – what happens when you bring the observers back together?. Specifically, I am curious about a specific angle on the second part of his question, regarding when two moving frames of reference (FoR) are brought back together, and how "it" knows which one should be still young.
The accepted answer on that question says that it is whichever FoR experienced the forces of acceleration/deceleration. But, isn't that the whole point of relativity, is that it's all … well, relative; that it is not possible to say with a certainty that it was the traveler in the spaceship who was accelerating/decelerating?
Isn't it the case that it is just as legitimate to say that the universe and people on the planet accelerated/decelerated and the traveler in the spaceship was stationary? This would therefore then lead to that the universe and planet-side people should remain young and the spaceship occupant should be old, no?
Does dilation (temporal-spatial) just generally apply to the smaller of the two FoRs, or is there some other system or rule which "decides" which FoR gets dilated?


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Mad Love is specially ONE OF A KIND hand screen printed, hand dyed, hand painted, fashionable and unique items. made with Love by me. I make each unique item one at a time, as if each piece were a creation of art
I am a Freelance Graphic Designer and Illustrator, I create everything
I can get my hands on from Painting, Screen Printing, Sewing, Crocheting, Jewelry, Book making, Photography, and even some handy Wood working at my home. I love and enjoy life, my family,
my cats, good food, and traveling.
I can create anything in any style with a reference, my styles are mainly line drawing, urban, nature, and magazine design but, I have created many and any types of illustration and designs over the years that you might be looking for.


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5 Nov 2015
We belong to the Lord
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
For 5 November 2015, Thursday of 31st Week, based on Romans 14:7-12
We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living. Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, "As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.†So then, each of us will be accountable to God.
Scripture passage from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright 1989, 1993, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.


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Customer Update:
OS2 bindings are in stock and ready to ship. We've sold through almost all of our initial stock of the new Kessler Cross BX and Alpine Race boards. More of these speedy rides are headed our way...if you need a new board, get your order in ASAP.
Welcome to the CATEK website. Take a look around the site and you'll see that we have some cool new products joining our Freeride 2 series soft bindings and the OS2 series alpine plate bindings.
Thanks to all of our customers for contributing to our success. We have a blast making the best snowboard bindings on the market. We hope that you have a fantastic, snowy season, and we'll look for you on the hill.
Product Line-Up
Olympic Series 2: Alpine | Race | Freecarve | Extremecarving | BX
We built upon our solid Olympic Series foundation – the patented CATEK Quick-Cant tilt and lift system that enables you to infinitely adjust your snowboard binding cant and lift settings for optimal performance and comfort. Then we added in our radical new Power Plate system, which provides infinite, repeatable angle adjustments (with a machined angle indicator) and zero-wear stainless steel tilt cups. The CATEK OS2 – available with our standard elastomers or the incredibly popular D3 Elastomer Upgrade – is the most sophisticated, highest performance plate binding in the snowboard market. (And you can mix and match any of our anodized colors – silver, gold, red, blue and black – with the Custom Color option.)
Freeride Series 2: Freeride | All-Mountain | BX | Soft-Boot Carving
Looking for the ultimate freeride or boardercross soft boot snowboard bindings? Well, check out the options then take a look at our updated Freeride 2 Pro EVO bindings – the latest incarnation of the highest performance snowboard soft binding on the planet. The FR2 Pro EVO combines delivers incredible responsiveness and total anatomical adjustability. The EVO model bests the performance and comfort of last year's LIMITED model and dropped a few bucks off the price. Whether you're looking for the snowboard binding to rule the boardercross course, charge the powder, or freeride all day long, the new FR2 Pro EVO is your ticket.
F2 Race Ti & Intec Ti: Alpine | Race | Freecarve | Extremecarving | BX
F2 plate bindings are have long been favorites of freecarvers and competitive racers alike. This season the standard bail configuration F2 Race Ti model offers improved flex and power transmission due to new bail geometry. The step-in F2 INTEC Ti model boasts a refined base design that provides increased flex for comfort and control in all conditions.
Kessler KST Snowboards: SL Race | GS Race | BX
We're delighted to carry the latest Kessler Swiss 'Alpine' and 'Cross' models in a complete range of sizes. These are Kessler's very latest designs and most popular sizes for current World Cup alpine and boardercross disciplines. No other snowboard has won as many titles and medals in the world, whether international cups, world championships or Olympic medals.
If you absolutely need something different, we also are pleased to offer special order full-custom race and boardercross boards hand built by Hansjürg Kessler. These are the same boards that are under the feet of national team riders.
SP Brotherhood FASTEC: Freestyle | Freeride | All-Mountain
If you're looking for the convenience of a highback entry binding, but don't want to sacrifice performance or comfort, look no further. The SP Brotherhood model combines the best elements of conventional strap bindings with the super easy in-out convenience of highback entry. It's a light weight, all-mountain, all-style ready binding that's perfect for riders who don't need the absolute precision and adjustability of our FR2 Pro EVO.
CATEK Binding Spacers: Race | Freeride
Snowboards are getting more expensive these days, and titanal boards as well as many of the new super light soft-boot Freeride boards are prone to damage from the point loads transmitted by any binding. Riders have been scurrying to install riser systems or hack-sawing homemade plastic spacers to fit between their boards and bindings. We saw the need for a simple, protective binding spacer to help keep everyone's boards happy, and here it is.