Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (16 page)

53.
Fritze, Eugen,
Unter dem Zeichen des Aeskulap
, p.269.

54.
Gunter,
Letzter Lorbeer
, pp.19-20.

55.
Guderian, pp.382-3.

56.
TB Goebbels, 4/1/45.

57.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, p.588.

58.
BA-MA RH19 VI/33.

59.
Thorwald, pp.30-1 and Ahlfen, p.39.

60.
Konev, pp.5-14; Werth, p.706.

61.
Hastings,
Armageddon
, p.277.

62.
Freytag von Loringhoven, p.126. In fact, some 10,500 Soviet aircraft were lined up to support the winter offensive.
Luftflotte
6 – Air Fleet 6 – which provided aerial support for the central sector of the Eastern Front had barely 300 fighters to confront them. Things had actually improved for the
Luftflotte
. Six months before it had been outnumbered forty to one. In January 1945, the enemy ‘only’ possessed a thirty-five-fold superiority. See DDRZW, 10/1, p.497.

63.
Guderian, pp.386-8.

64.
Thorwald, p.31.

65.
Based on Jakubowski, pp.590-1, Polewoi, p.100 and Dragunski, pp.209-12.

66.
Hastings,
Armageddon
, p.133.

67.
DDRZW, 10/1, p.705.

68.
Ibid., p.702.

69.
DDRZW, 10/1, p.702 and Zeidler, p.121.

70.
Zeidler, pp.120, 121.

71.
Scherstjanoi, p.32.

72.
Art of War Symposium, p.72.

73.
Scherstjanoi, pp.29-30.

74.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, pp.581, 598, 600.

Chapter 3

God Has Washed His Hands of this World

An entire city with more than one million
inhabitants was beginning to die
.

Gefreiter
Ulrich Frodien

I
t was pitch black in the camp which served as the headquarters of 55th Guards Tank Brigade. After the feverish preparations of the preceding day, it was quiet now. Still the brigade’s commander, Colonel David Dragunsky, could not sleep. He spent the night fretting about the impending battle, about the fate of the men in his charge, before he finally fell asleep.

His adjutant shook him awake. “The time has come.” Bugle calls brought the brigade’s field headquarters to life. Infantry, tank crews and artillerymen scrambled out of their dugouts, buttoning up their uniforms as they rushed to their vehicles and guns. Tarpaulin and camouflage nets fell to the ground, engines clattered and exhaust fumes mixed with the clear winter air.
¹

Gefreiter
Ernst Dippel was half way through his night-time guard duty in woods near Szczucin on the southern extremity of the Baranow bridgehead. Dippel and his fellow tank destroyers in
Jagdpanzer
Company 1168 had spent the previous month building pens for their vehicles. Despite their toil, the protective pens, built from felled trees, were still not finished. Worse, the company was recovering from a dose of food poisoning after celebrating the end of the old year with a special meal: potato salad washed down with half a bottle of red wine each, and a ‘dessert’ of a bar of chocolate. The ‘seasoning’ for the salad had actually been rat poison.

The first hour of Dippel’s duty had passed without incident. But as the second began, a little after 5am on Friday, 12 January, the sky in the east turned red, followed a few seconds later by a terrible thunder.
²

Pravda
correspondent Boris Polevoy peered through the slit windows of fine stables perched on high ground overlooking the Sandomierz bridgehead. Once the property of a Polish aristocrat, paintings of racehorses hung on the walls. Until recently, it had still been used – the odour of horse manure lingered. Polevoy ignored the smell and enjoyed the view of the Polish landscape which the stables offered. At 5am precisely flares bathed the terrain in a reddish light and artillery salvoes began to crash.
³

Hans Jürgen Hartmann was writing reports in his bunker following a night patrol near Łukawa, half a dozen miles north of Sandomierz. It was still dark when he heard “a mighty thrashing” in the distance. He rushed up the bunker steps and watched transfixed as clouds to the west and south-west were “lit by countless incessant flashing lights beyond the horizon”. Hartmann dispatched runners to alert his platoons. “For weeks we’d awaited this moment,” he wrote. “Now it had been bubbling and simmering over there for half an hour already without the slightest pause.” Half an hour became an hour. Then two. The first streaks of dawn tried to break through the winter sky. Yet the Russians in the trenches opposite were still strangely subdued.

The barrage was short but stunning. As the Soviet guns fell silent, the first reconnaissance patrols moved forward and occupied the foremost German trenches after a brief fight. With the first light of dawn – a monotonously grey January morning – Boris Polevoy followed them. He had seen nothing like it. Not at Stalingrad, nor at Korsun in the Ukraine twelve months before. “A huge plough seemed to have smashed through everything,” he wrote. Paths through minefields were marked by signs.
Frontoviki
followed them, bunched together.
⁴
The defenders were so shaken by the bombardment and the foray by reconnaissance parties that they were convinced this was the main assault. It was merely the prelude. In the sectors earmarked for a breakthrough at Baranow there were 350 guns for every mile of front – “real punch” as the
frontoviki
called it. At 10am they opened fire. There was, Soviet captain Naim Chafisov observed, “an almighty howling, the distinct howl of artillery, thousands of guns went off ceaselessly – artillery, mortars.”
⁵
Fourth Tank Army commander General Dmitry Lelyushenko watched “plumes of smoke, fire and dust compounded with snow” rise up. “The ground quivered and the very earth of the battlefield was blackened.”
⁶
The timbers of Ernst Dippel’s bunker came loose. The windows shattered. In the middle of the hurricane, the order was given: “Men to the
Jagdpanzer
!” Dippel and his comrades ran across a mile of open ground under direct shellfire. Most were veterans of the Eastern Front. They knew when to throw themselves to the ground and when to run. Finally they reached the copse where their
Hetzer
– rabble rouser – tank destroyer, a 75mm anti-tank gun mounted on a panzer chassis, was waiting. As he closed the hatch, Dippel realized he had left his crew’s headphones and microphones behind. There was no question about not returning for them. He rushed back, grabbed them, then ran once more to his tank destroyer. He reached it safely. “I must have had a guardian angel,” he concluded.
⁷

David Dragunsky gathered his brigade in a forest. There were veterans of Bialystok, Leningrad, Odessa and Moscow in the ranks. A Hero of the Soviet Union held aloft the red banner of the Guards – a title bestowed upon units which had distinguished themselves in battle. The brigade’s commissar, Dragunsky and his chief of staff knelt down. A couple of men swore an oath to their Motherland and to the flag, while a few men fixed the colours to Dragunsky’s tank. There was a thunderous “Hurrah!” from the tank crews, then their colonel gave the order, “Mount up!”
⁸

At Łukawa, the barrage persisted. Three hours. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Still no attack. But disquieting reports began to reach Infantry Regiment 514: deep penetrations by Soviet forces. “It happened just as we had secretly feared,” Hans Jürgen Hartmann conceded. “One step and already the fragile wooden fence of the German front was in tatters …”

It was 2pm when Ernst Dippel’s company finally received orders to counter-attack. At first it was as if they were on manoeuvres, with mounted infantry sitting on the
Hetzer
’s hull, rolling over heavily frozen ground covered with a light sprinkling of snow. The tank destroyers came to a halt on a line of hills, watching Russian infantry swarming down the wooded hillside opposite. They directed their machine-guns and high-explosive shells at the Soviet troops. The enemy attack stopped.

Dippel’s company stood firm. Its neighbours did not. To the left and right, 304th Infantry Division’s front caved in, its artillery positions overrun by Russian tanks. In danger of being encircled, the
Hetzers
fell back with the onset of darkness.
⁹

Karl Hanke was writing at his desk in the Palais Hatzfeldt, the seat of government in Breslau for more than half a century. The palace was the city’s largest – and finest – but the
Gauleiter
’s office was rather small and dominated by the imposing, light wooden writing desk. The plush brown carpet muffled his secretary’s footsteps as she paced the room. “We expect the Wehrmacht communiqué shortly,” the radio announcer declared. Tense minutes passed. And then the dispassionate voice of the announcer once more: “The long-expected Bolshevik winter offensive has begun on the Vistula front. After extraordinarily strong artillery preparation, the enemy advanced on the western front of the Baranow bridgehead initially with numerous rifle divisions and armoured formations. Bitter fighting flared up. Diversionary attacks south of the Vistula and in the northern part of the bridgehead were repulsed …”

Eva Arlt watched Hanke nod quietly to himself. The twenty-three-year-old walked up to the
Gauleiter
and smiled. “Amazing really that they’re risking everything, in their situation.”

Hanke stared at her. “Who?”

“The Russians, of course, who else?”

“But where’s the risk?”

“But Karl, they’re at the end of their strength. They only have a couple of American tanks which have got through our blockade up there in Murmansk.”

“Dear child, that’s the wisdom of the propaganda office. Do not rely on it too much.”

“You’re a defeatist, Karl. According to my oath of office, I must report you to the
Gau
leadership.” Eva Arlt put her hand on Hanke’s shoulder. “Are you really worried?”

“
Ja
,” he answered, “It’s very serious. I wish we had at least a quarter of what the Russians have today. The Americans have literally fed them with tanks, ammunition and especially aircraft …”

“Aren’t they at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean?” The secretary’s question tailed off.

Karl Hanke changed the subject. “Since yesterday I’ve had a book on my bedside table, a book about the Mongol invasion of Silesia, a book about the Battle of Liegnitz, in which Duke Heinrich with a handful of determined men brought the Asian flood to a halt,” he told his secretary. The
Gauleiter
walked to the window, moved the net curtain back and looked down on to Albrechtstrasse. A few Breslauers hurried through the snow. “
Ja
, it’s coming to us – we must prepare ourselves well.”
¹⁰

In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels was struggling to make sense of patchy reports. Some suggested the Russians had advanced two, perhaps four miles, others that they had punched through the German front to a depth of eight miles. “At present we can’t say whether it’s a success or a failure,” he noted impatiently. There was only one certainty that Friday evening. “There’s nerve-splitting tension,” the propaganda minister observed. “It will probably continue for several days.”
¹¹

Night came to Łukawa with still no attack. Hans Jürgen Hartmann and his men were relieved, marching back to their quarters in the village of Chrapranów, six miles away. At the opposite end of the Baranow bridgehead, David Dragunsky’s armour had reached the right bank of the Nida in driving sleet. His tanks had advanced more than a dozen miles. The Red Army was now within 200 miles of Breslau.
¹²

It was nearing daybreak on 13 January by the time Hans Jürgen Hartmann and his men reached their quarters in woods at Chrapranów. Their beds beckoned, but first the
Landsers
checked their weapons, ammunition, food supplies, then tossed their kit on to baggage trucks just in case they had to move out suddenly. They did not. The men slept until midday, but when they woke Chrapranów was buzzing with rumours: some said Kielce, fifty miles to the west, was in danger, others that it had fallen. “Things here,” wrote Hartmann, “look completely black and gloomy.”
¹³

David Dragunsky’s T34s forded the River Nida after artillery and mortars had smashed the dam and lowered the water level. The tanks rumbled past destroyed earthen bunkers and other fortifications, overrunning village stations and German airfields, whose garrisons were convinced the armour was their own. The Russian armour bore down on the town of Jedrzejow, two dozen miles south-west of Kielce, which sat astride the roads to Kraków and Silesia. After a brief skirmish on the edge of Jedrzejow, German troops fell back on the town. Dragunsky’s tank simply drove straight after them. Jedrzejow fell into Soviet hands – and with it several thousand prisoners, their stores, and a train waiting at the station carrying Russian forced labourers. Breslau was now just 160 miles to the west.
¹⁴