Hitler was represented by Rundstedt at the state funeral in the town hall at Ulm on 18 October. Rundstedt declared in his eulogy that Rommel’s ‘heart belonged to the Führer’. Addressing the dead field-marshal, he intoned: ‘Our Führer and Supreme Commander sends you through me his thanks and his greetings.’ For public consumption, Hitler announced the same day that Rommel had succumbed to his severe wounds following his car accident. ‘With him, one of our best army leaders has passed away… His name has entered the history of the German people.’251
Another, more far-reaching, problem preoccupied Hitler in the middle of October: Hungary’s attempt to defect from its alliance with Germany. Hitler had feared (and expected) this eventuality for weeks. The alliance with Hungary had become increasingly unstable across the summer. The defections of Romania and Bulgaria in August had then made it a matter of time before Hungary would seek to extricate itself from its dependence upon Germany. The feelers, known to German intelligence, put out both to the western allies and to the Soviet Union after Romania’s defection gave a clear sign of the way things were moving. Another indicator, following the Romanian switch of sides, was the replacement by Admiral Horthy, the head of state, of the puppet Sztojay government, installed at German behest in March, by a military administration under General Geisa Lakatos directly answerable to him. At the beginning of October, Horthy had sent a delegation to Moscow to begin negotiations to take Hungary out of the war. A Soviet offensive driving forward on the Hungarian plains, beginning on 6 October, though fought off by German panzer divisions, gave the final impetus. Tough conditions laid down by Molotov, on behalf of the Allies, for Hungary to change sides, including an immediate declaration of war on Germany, were accepted by Horthy and signed by the Hungarian delegation in Moscow on 11 October. Their implementation had to await the coup being prepared in Budapest against the German forces in Hungary. Pressed by the Soviet Union to act, Horthy informed the German envoy Edmund Veesenmayer on 15 October that Hungary was leaving the German alliance and announced the armistice in a radio broadcast in the early afternoon.252
Hitler had not stood idly by while these developments were taking place. Both strategically, and also on account of its economic importance for foodstuffs and fuel supplies, everything had to be done to prevent Hungary going the way of Romania and Bulgaria. For weeks, Hitler had been preparing his own counter-coup in Budapest, aimed at ousting Horthy, replacing him with a puppet government under Ferencz Szalasi — fanatical leader of the radical Hungarian fascist Party, the Arrow Cross, a former discharged army officer who had subsequently served a three-year jail sentence — and thus ensuring that Hungary did not defect. Already in mid-September Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s leading troubleshooter (since his daring rescue of Mussolini a year earlier), had been called to the Wolf’s Lair and told that Horthy was approaching the western Allies and the Russians with a view to an imminent separate peace, and was ready to throw himself on the mercy of the Kremlin. Hitler ordered Skorzeny to prepare an operational plan to seize by force the Citadel in Budapest — the fortress which was the residence of Horthy and his entourage — should Hungary betray its alliance with Germany.
