In mid-March 1945, the Joseph Stalin's Soviet Red Army launched a major offensive with the aim of clearing Axis forces out of Hungary and forcing them back to the very borders of Hitler's Greater German Reich. It was successful, and at 1925 hours on the 29th a “Führer Decision” finally arrived at the headquarters of Army Group South authorizing a phased withdrawal to what was called the Reichsschutzstellung—the Reich Guard Position.
This position followed the approximate line of Austria's eastern border. Four days later, on April 2, Waffen SS General Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the Sixth Panzer Army, was presented to the people of Vienna as their “defender,” and over the next two days a number of his battered formations, notably the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, pulled back in chaotic conditions toward what had inevitably been designated Fortress Vienna. The withdrawal was complicated by roads jammed with miscellaneous German and Hungarian troops and hordes of civilians—all desperately trying to reach what they thought might be a place of safety.
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