Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (22 page)

Finally she found a house still occupied and rushed inside. She unwrapped Gabi from her blankets. The baby was silent. A woman standing next to her said simply: “She’s dead.” Hanisch wrote:

I do not know what I can still say, dear mother, but now everything is so different from what it was like before – even with this tragedy. I could not cry over Gabi any longer. But nor did I want to leave her behind. I continued with her.

She carried her dead daughter until her frostbitten arm could stand it no longer, then wrapped the corpse in blankets and buried her deep in the snow somewhere beyond Kanth. “Gabi was not alone there,” she wrote to her mother. Eventually soldiers in a car took pity Frau Hanisch and took her to a temporary hospital. There she was surrounded by fellow Breslauers, many struck down with pneumonia. There were mothers suffering from ulcers and frozen chests having tried to breastfeed their babies on the way, a handful hallucinated about Breslau, about their husbands, about their children. One of Frau Hanisch’s neighbours lay in the middle of the road; all three of her children had died on the march.
⁸⁸

The scenes in Breslau’s stations – the Hauptbahnhof and Freiburger Bahnhof especially – were no less distressing. People abandoned their last possessions in the hope of saving their skins. Beds, prams, carts, suitcases packed with belongings were piled up in mountains. Mothers weighed down by luggage often lost their children in the crowd. Station staff would try to call out the names of the missing above the hubbub. Sometimes they reunited mother and child, more often than not they failed. Pregnant women gave birth prematurely because of the fear and anxiety of flight. In the rush to get on trains at the Hauptbahnhof, sixty to seventy children were crushed to death or trampled. Lena Aschner noticed a woman curled up in a corner of the central station. Two children stood in front of her, crying, stroking her hand and face. The youngsters were shaking with cold after four days on the road, did not know where they were, and now their mother was sick. She foamed at her bloodless blue lips, her head slumped against the wall. Aschner carried her to a neighbour’s house until she warmed up, while the children received a little food. The next day, with the mother recovered, the family were taken to the Freiburger Bahnhof and put on a train. To where, no one knew. “I’m just glad to get away from this hell!” the mother cried from the window as the train pulled away. Ursel Dittman found a “real hotchpotch of humanity” on the platform of a goods station. The twenty-nine-year-old had packed two suitcases, one with food including the geese the family had been given as payment at their hotel, one with papers and documents, plus a little bedding and underwear. Her mother put on a black Persian lamb coat, Ursel a coat of canine fur dyed to look like brown mink. Underneath were jackets and sweaters to keep the cold at bay. At the station were mothers with babies, some newborn, others a few weeks old, plus hospital patients hobbling around on crutches, a few with broken limbs, some almost delirious. A hospital train pulled in and the Dittmans grabbed the first seats they could find, next to two middle-aged ladies, a younger woman and an elderly lady who looked as if she’d already lost her mind. For several hours, the train sat in the station before finally setting off – the position of the sun assured the anxious passengers it was moving west. At times it travelled so slowly that people stepped off in the dark, convinced it had stopped, among them the distraught elderly woman.
⁸⁹

This, of course, was not what the rest of the Reich learned of the mass flight from Silesia’s capital. “If you believe that there’s mood of disaster or panic in Breslau, then take another look around now,” the
Völkischer Beobachter
reassured its readers. “In three days, Breslau evacuated many thousands of people – only women and children – an achievement of which the Party, authorities, as well as the
Reichsbahn
and the deputy for local traffic at the
Oberpräsidenten
can be proud.” State radio, meanwhile, described how “women and children marched in columns towards safety.” It was too much for one Breslauer, who immediately penned a letter to the
Reichsrundfunk
– anonymously. “Just now we have listened to reports from Silesia and Breslau,” he complained. “It’s a long time since we heard such a god-damned pack of lies.”
⁹⁰

Faced with death on the snow-covered country lanes of Silesia, many Breslauers resolved to stay in their native city. Having packed to flee, Ursula Scholz was stopped by her mother, who was convinced she did not have the strength to withstand the trek. Some Breslauers feared their homes would be raided if they left. Others openly welcomed the prospect of the Soviet invasion, convinced the Russians would treat them fairly “because they are good Communists.”
⁹¹
Others still chose another way out of their predicament. Climbing the stairs to the family’s third-floor apartment, Ulrich Frodien noticed the door to the flat below, owned by a popular doctor, was ajar. Frodien nervously pressed the doorbell. No one stirred. He went inside and called out. No answer. As he walked into the surgery, the eighteen-year-old was confronted by the sight of the elderly doctor’s contorted body lying on top of a desk. On the patients’ couch, her eyes rigid and wide open, her face distorted, lay the doctor’s aged housekeeper. “They must have been dead for some time already because the smell in the room, heated by the still-warm oven, was so foul that I turned around on my heels and closed all the doors behind me,” Frodien recalled. “I had seen and experienced enough at the front, but these corpses right next door, in my home, upset me.”
⁹²

The teenage soldier rushed upstairs, fearing his father might have done the same. Instead, Herr Frodien stood in his bedroom, trying on the staff surgeon’s uniform he had not worn since the campaign in Poland. He sat down on the edge of the bed with his son and outlined their plan of escape: he would march into the office of the hospital and demand orders to take recovering soldiers, like his son, to another hospital – outside the city. Only with such an order could they leave Breslau. “It was an extremely daring plan,” his son remembered, “but it was also a game of
va banque
.” His father possessed no papers, no service record, no pay book, not even a dog tag. It was a plan based entirely on bluff. “My father fastened his belt and put his medals on his chest – he served as a front-line soldier in World War I from the age of fifteen to nineteen,” his son wrote. “I was very impressed.” Hopefully so too would be the
Feldwebel
in the hospital office.

And so Herr Frodien made for the hospital; his son headed into the city seeking a way out of Breslau:

We did not know whether we would meet again in three hours time as planned. It was one of those unreal situations when you would like to speak to express our affection, gratitude and hope to each other, things which as men we could simply not express given the way we were brought up then, and when a gesture tries to replace words. My father thrust his pistol into my hand and said: ‘Take it for the worst case.’
⁹³

It took two days and nights for Ursel Dittmann to reach Dresden – normally a 150-mile journey of only four hours. The train continued west, but not the Dittmans. They stepped off at Dresden’s high-vaulted central station where they found “a milling crowd of nationalities” and a Red Cross soup kitchen handing out broth, bread, coffee and milk.
⁹⁴

The Frodiens had decided to leave the city by the Hauptbahnhof. Father and son packed two rucksacks and an old sailor’s bag with a few personal belongings. Everything else was left behind. For Ulrich that was no hardship, but his father’s face turned to stone. He had settled in Breslau in 1921 “without a pfennig to his name” and spent the next quarter of a century building a new life as a successful doctor. It had all been in vain.

For the last time, the Frodiens passed through their large apartment, through the surgery with its still gleaming medical instruments, then down the stairs where there was a lingering smell of decomposition and out into the Strasse der SA. “Start forgetting right now that I’m your father!” Herr Frodien admonished his son. “From now on you will address me as ‘
Herr Stabsarzt
’, and don’t forget to stand to attention when you do.” If the Frodiens were discovered as father and son “we’d both be hung from the nearest tree.” But at that moment, all Ulrich could do was laugh. “
Jawohl, Herr Stabsarzt
!”

Hans Eberhard Henkel and his family spent three nights on the road: the first on an estate with numerous farming families, the second in a village kindergarten, well stocked with toys, the third with a friend of young Hans in Rogau-Rosenau in the shadow of the Zobten mountain.

War had yet to touch this village. The Henkels breakfasted on fresh bread, butter and warm milk, then caught a scheduled train to Schweidnitz. There, Hans observed, “people didn’t seem to appreciate the impending chaos”. Shops opened as normal, smart soldiers from the garrison marched through the streets. “It seemed that Breslau was located in a different world,” he recalled. “Perhaps it was also the famous lull before the great storm.”
⁹⁵

By now, the first refugees were beginning to pass through the city of Görlitz, on the western extremity of Silesia. Whatever Nazi propaganda assured or promised,
Hauptmann
Arthur Mrongovius realized an unimaginable catastrophe had befallen his beloved land. “So now places which I have come to love and cherish during my lengthy spell in Silesia are already under threat,” he observed. “For almost 150 years no enemy has set foot on this soil. The enemy inherits a rich heritage.” Now, he concluded, was “not the time to be faint-hearted!”
⁹⁶

Eleven wounded soldiers, including Ulrich Frodien, hobbled and staggered to the Hauptbahnhof. The evacuation of the city was now in its fifth day, but still there was a vast crowd seeking salvation. On the forecourt mountains of luggage were piled up, prams, hand carts, bags, baskets, sledges, household goods tied together with string and rope. The strong pushed the weak aside. Police, soldiers and railway officials tried to maintain order, but Breslauers were no longer prepared to follow instructions. Some fought or struggled, most ignored the announcements which the loudspeakers occasionally spluttered out. Not that anyone heard them, for above everything was an awful cacophony.

It was like a loud groan, made up the moaning and whimpering of completely overburdened and desperate people, the screaming of children, the crying of babies, the shouts of distraught mothers who had lost their children in the chaos and whose cries became ever louder the less chance there was of finding their children again.

Half a century later, Ulrich Frodien still heard this terrible din in his nightmares.

When a hospital train pulled into the station, his father stood in front of his ‘men’, then with a slight smile ordered: “Fall in, pick up your luggage, single file, by the right, march.” Eleven
Landsers
hobbled and limped behind ‘their’
Stabsarzt
, who showed the travel permit to the military police. The men were allowed to pass, then they quickly disappeared inside the train. Frodien’s father was still in character: “
Gefreiter
, kindly take notice – your rucksack is not properly tied up.” But then the doctor whispered: “Now just keep your mouth shut. Everything’s worked wonderfully. None of those swine asked me for identification. Long live Prussian military efficiency.” The doctor headed to the first-class compartment. The men found themselves in a carriage filled with sick men, beds stacked one on top of the next. The train was well heated but, Frodien remembered, “the stench of pus, shit, blood, urine took your breath away.” Otherwise, the wounded were provided for admirably. There was a laundry, a galley with a seemingly endless supply of pea and bacon soup, a dedicated water supply, a carriage which served as a makeshift operating theatre, a pharmacy, medics and nurses. Badly injured soldiers groaned loudly, but death to most came quietly. Barely had a man expired than the nurses carried away the corpse and changed the bed linen ready for the next patient. The train made its way laboriously through Silesia. As it passed through stations, Frodien noted their names: Kamenz, forty-eight miles from Breslau; Glatz, fifty-five miles; Mittenwalde, seventy-five miles away. The destination was Regensburg in Bavaria. “What,” he wondered, “will the future bring?”
⁹⁷

Notes

1.
Dragunski, p.214.

2.
Dippel, p.14.

3.
Polewoi, p.105.

4.
Ibid., pp.105-6.

5.
Kempowski,
Das Echolot
, i, p.10.

6.
Duffy, p.68.

7.
Dippel, pp.14-15.

8.
Dragunski, pp.215-17.

9.
Dippel, p.15.

10.
Schimmel-Falkenau, pp.120-1 and OKW Communiqué, 12/1/45.

11.
TB Goebbels, 13/1/45.

12.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, pp.601-2 and Dragunski, p.217.