In early 1945, Hitler made a final attempt to turn the tide of the war and avoid final disaster on the Eastern Front by ordering a large-scale offensive in Western Hungary to drive Red Army units beyond the Danube, stabilize the front line and hold the Hungarian oil fields. By the beginning of March, the German command concentrated almost the entire armored elite of the Third Reich in the area of Lake Balaton: SS tank divisions “Leibstandarte”, “Reich”, “Totenkopf”, “Viking”, “Hohenstaufen”, etc. - in total up to 900 tanks and assault guns. However, the monstrous blow of the 6th SS Panzer Army, which was supposed to sweep away the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, was met by powerful anti-tank defense and did not reach the target. Subsequently, even the Germans themselves admitted that the Soviet anti-tank artillery acted exemplary in this battle. The ten-day battle ended with the most severe beating of Hitler's last combat-ready reserves - the Germans lost about 400 tanks and up to 40,000 people in the Balaton area. After this crushing defeat, the German army finally lost the ability to conduct offensive operations. Until now, the domestic reader could judge the Balaton operation only from Soviet sources. In a new book by a famous historian, this battle is shown for the first time from the German side - having studied all available literature, relying on operational documents of the Wehrmacht and the memoirs of German soldiers and military leaders, which have never been translated into Russian, the author analyzes in detail the course of hostilities, analyzes the tactical miscalculations of the German command, from -for which the initially successful operation ended in complete failure, depriving Hitler of his last hopes for a more or less acceptable outcome of the war.