Operation Konrad
It was dawn on New Year's Day in the final year of World War II. The enemies of the Reich were closing in on both the East and West Fronts. The Germans had squandered much of their last panzer reserves against the Americans at the Battle of the Bulge. In the east, the lines were holding pending the next major offensive by the Soviet juggernaut.
While Stalin hounded his generals to finish off the pocket of German and Hungarian troops holding Budapest, the Wehrmacht still had another offensive in it. And so the Germans launched Operation Konrad - an offensive that almost succeeded in relieving the surrounded troops at Budapest.
Can you succeed where the Germans historically failed?
Historians often refer to the Battle of the Bulge as the last great German Offensive of World War II, but in fact Operation Konrad holds that title. Konrad was the German-Hungarian effort to relieve the encircled garrison of Budapest in January 1945. Budapest '45 covers this campaign in 31 scenarios, including the Soviet prelude to the encirclement launched on 29 October. The main campaign focus, however, is Operation Konrad itself. The operation was divided into three phases and each phase is covered as a separate scenario. There is also a month long master campaign scenario, as well as the usual array of smaller battles which took place during this operation. We have also included a historically plausible situation to explore what might have happened had the Germans diverted just one panzer korps from the Battle of the Bulge in the west and instead sent to Hungary. What impact would it have had?
