Some extraordinary events had occurred during the withdrawal toward and into Vienna. There they occupied temporary positions on a reverse slope. That same day, General Rudolf von Bünau was appointed commandant of the city of Vienna, and 24 hours later Lehmann received an order said to have come from the Führer himself, which ended: “From now on there is to be no more retreating.” By this time, however, his men, despite intense fighting, had been forced back some two and a half miles across flat, open ground to a low ridge running from Vösendorf to Leopoldsdorf. Soldiers ride atop a Panzer IV during the long retreat to the Fatherland in January 1945. Despite the more famous Tiger and Panther models, the armored workhorse of the German Army in World War II was the ubiquitous Panzer IV medium tank. Das Reich’s commander, SS Colonel Rudolf Lehmann, had little option other than to prepare to withdraw his Kampfgruppen into the city itself. But it was now clear that the Soviets were also beginning to push northwest toward the Danube River valley in the area of Tulln with the intention of outflanking and isolating the Austrian capital.
There it was tasked with preventing a Soviet advance along the main roads leading into Vienna from Wiener Neustadt and Sopron. Stalin’s Soviet Red Army Pushes Toward the Danubeīy April 4, Das Reich, with a Kampfgruppe (battlegroup) from the 3rd SS Totenkopf Division on its left flank in the area of the Vienna airport, had been forced back to a line running roughly between the villages of Mödling and Achau. 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. 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. This position followed the approximate line of Austria’s eastern border. 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.
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.
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