The Waffen SS’s Last Tank Battle Was a Massacre: Balaton’s Steel Graveyard

The Waffen SS’s Last Tank Battle Was a Massacre: Balaton’s Steel Graveyard

Everyone knows Kursk, but almost nobody talks about the final German armoured offensive of the Second World War: Operation Spring Awakening, the desperate battle of Lake Balaton in March 1945. With the Red Army closing on Berlin and Germany collapsing on every front, Hitler sent the last great Waffen-SS Panzer formations into the mud and snow of Hungary to protect the Nagykanizsa oilfields, the last major fuel source keeping the Reich alive. What followed was one of the most brutal and futile battles of the Eastern Front, as Panthers, Tiger IIs and elite SS divisions drove into a Soviet defensive system built from everything the Red Army had learned since Kursk. Credit to : HistoryAtWar