Operation Spring Awakening

Operation Spring Awakening

Operation Frühlingserwachen ("Spring Awakening") (6 – 16 March 1945) was the last major German offensive launched during World War II. The offensive was launched in Hungary on the Eastern Front. This offensive was also known in German as the Plattensee Offensive, in Russian as the Balaton Defensive Operation (6 – 15 March 1945), and in English as the Lake Balaton Offensive.

The offensive was launched by the Germans in great secrecy on 6 March 1945. The German attacks were centered in the Lake Balaton area. This area included some of the last oil reserves still available to the Germans.

Operation Spring Awakening involved many German units withdrawn from the failed Ardennes Offensive on the Western Front including the 6th SS Panzer Army.

Read more about Operation Spring Awakening:  Order of Battle, German Plan, German Attack, Soviet Counterattack and Subsequent Operations, Aftermath, Armband Order

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