Photos donated to a Hungarian archive reveal the devastating aftermath of the Siege of Budapest.

The above photo, taken from the Buda Castle, is one of hundreds held in the Hungarian archive Fortepan, capturing the scale of destruction of Budapest after February 13, 1945. That day, the guns of battle fell silent after seven weeks of destruction that would become known as the Siege of Budapest.

In late 1944, the Soviet Red Army was advancing west on its march toward Berlin but was stopped on the outskirts of Budapest by determined resistance from Nazi and Hungarian soldiers.

The Red Army and their Romanian allies then pushed entirely around Budapest, trapping tens of thousands of Nazi and Hungarian troops, and some 800,000 civilians inside. “Nobody except the most extreme Nazis believed that any magic could stave off collapse,” one Hungarian survivor recalled.

With Soviet-led troops pushing into the suburbs and escape now all but impossible, many Budapest locals descended into cellars to live “a rat's life” and await their fate.

Hungary, a German ally, had initially allowed Nazi Holocaust planners to deport hundreds of thousands of Jews to German death camps. Under increasing pressure, however, Hungary’s leader Miklos Horthy ordered an end to the deportations in the summer of 1944, placing the Jews of Budapest in relative safety.

As the Red Army closed in on Budapest and Hungary scrambled for a way out of the war, Nazi leadership replaced Horthy with the violently anti-Semitic Arrow Cross Party to ensure Hungary would not slip out of the Nazi-led alliance.

Gangs of Arrow Cross members, described by locals as "the dregs of society," were soon hunting down Jews, who were murdered in their thousands during the siege. Dishevelled Arrow Cross militiamen also prowled the streets for men who could be pushed into military service.

One child witness watched from her window as Jews were lined up and shot by Arrow Cross militia along the banks of the Danube River, which carried the bodies away. “With a throbbing heart, I ran back to the room in the middle of the apartment and sat on the floor, gasping for air,” she later wrote.

When advancing Soviet troops arrived on their blocks there was little for locals to celebrate. While many Red Army soldiers brought water and cigarettes to civilians, others robbed and pillaged. “Bang bang bang on the wall of the cellar,” one woman recalled of her first interaction with Red Army soldiers. “Then we learned the word, 'chasy, chasy,' which meant 'watches,’ because the soldiers came and took the watches from people who had wristwatches.”

Countless women were raped by Soviet troops. “I could speak Russian quite well and tell them that I’m on their side,” one woman, who was a teenager at the time, told a historian about her experience fending off sexual assault. “You could talk yourself out of it.... You had to be able to chat them up. It wasn’t always easy."

When German and Hungarian forces retreated west across the Danube to make a futile last stand around the Buda Castle, they destroyed all remaining spans over the river behind them. The famed Elizabeth Bridge (above) has never been restored to its original glory.

With the final Nazi-led resistance hemmed in on the western Buda side of the city, some of Europe’s finest royal architecture was destroyed by artillery as Soviet forces pummelled the shrinking Nazi-held territory.

By the time the Red Army took complete control of Budapest on February 13, 1945, some 80 percent of Budapest’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed by the fighting, and allied bombing campaigns that preceded the siege.

Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa arrived in Budapest following the siege. He described his hometown as akin to “a beautiful woman with her teeth knocked out.”

The Siege of Budapest cost the lives of some 38,000 civilians, 48,000 Hungarian and Nazi soldiers, and 70,000 Soviet and Romanian troops. Within days of the Nazi defeat, Budapest cafes began to open and rebuilding began on what would be a very different Hungary.

Soon after his army's victory in Budapest, Soviet leader Josef Stalin gave a hint of what lay in store for Hungary when he told a Yugoslav politician, "whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his social system."