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

Written by Adam LeBor
Read by David Thorpe
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

Budapest, autumn 1943.

After four years of war, Hungary was firmly allied with Nazi Germany. Budapest swirled with intrigue and betrayal, home to spies and agents of every kind. But the city remained an oasis in the midst of conflict where Allied POWs and Polish and Jewish refugees found sanctuary.

All that came to an end in March 1944 when the Nazis invaded. By the summer Allied bombers were pounding Budapest’s grand boulevards and historic squares. By late December the city was surrounded and under siege from the advancing Red Army. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians died in the savage fighting as Budapest collapsed into anarchy. Hungarian death squads roamed the streets as the city’s Jews were forced into ghettos or were shot into the Danube. Russian artillery hammered the city into smoking rubble as starving residents struggled to survive the winter.

Using newly uncovered diaries, documents, archival material and interviews with the last survivors, Adam LeBor has brilliantly recreated life and death in wartime Budapest.

PublicAffairs, April 2025
17 hours and 42 minutes