Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (24 page)

Except that by now, the Russians were also on the left bank of the river. They had tried to force it on 21 January near the small village of Gross Döbern, forty miles upstream of the Silesian capital. Schoolboy Josef Wszyk watched Soviet troops trying to build a pontoon bridge across the Oder outside the village of Gross Döbern. It was almost complete when German planes appeared and bombed it. Fresh bridging equipment was brought up. The Luftwaffe attacked again. “This was repeated until the Oder turned red with blood and carried thousands of dead Russians in the direction of Breslau,” Wszyk remembered.
⁷

The Red Army proved more successful downstream. On the night of 22 January, VI Guards Mechanized Corps crossed the Oder at Steinau, forty miles from Breslau. The crossing caught the Germans unaware. A steamer chugged down the river from Breslau ferrying supplies. As it approached Steinau, Russian tanks opened fire. The steamer sank within three minutes. Still the Germans were none the wiser. A couple of hours later another vessel appeared. It suffered the same fate.
⁸

There was no continuous front around Breslau this third week of January – Russian or German. Soviet spearheads may have reached, even crossed, the Oder, but the bulk of the 1st Ukrainian Front was still spread across huge tracts of Upper and Lower Silesia. Ivan Konev’s thrust towards the regional capital was inexorable. On 21 January his troops stormed historic Kreuzberg, sixty miles east of Breslau. As two intelligence officers rifled through the home of the
Kreisleiter
, searching for important Party documents, the telephone rang. “Is that you, Franz?” a gruff voice asked. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you since early morning. You should have at least left someone manning the phone.” One of the Russian officers answered in German. “Are you drunk, Franz?” said the voice. “Or have you lost your mind? The Ivans are attacking and are already approaching your town. And you’re bumbling around God knows where.” The voice was that of Karl Hanke.
⁹
That same afternoon, Russian artillery began shelling Namslau, thirty-five miles from Breslau. The next day, Luftwaffe ground crew blew up more than a hundred unserviceable aircraft in Oels, a mere eighteen miles from the Silesian capital.
¹⁰
The town itself was “eerily quiet”
Major
Günther Tenschert noticed. “There were a few fires flickering, but the black night hung like a black ribbon over everything.” Tenschert, commanding a scratch unit of convalescing Eastern Front veterans, fell back through Oels just in time. Twenty-four hours later, 269th Infantry Division also had to pass through Oels – but they had to fight their way through; the Russians had encircled the town. The men found the airfield ablaze. They grabbed anything white they could find – curtains, sheets, even a chemist’s overalls – and threw it over their
feldgrau
jackets to camouflage themselves. “The glow of fire and flares light up the narrow gap which we’re breaking through individually or in small groups,” wrote the 269th’s Kurt Awe. Tiger tanks held the gap open while furious anti-tank and machine-gun fire from both sides dissected the field. A couple of officers sat on a wall, pointing the way to safety for their men. At least one panzer was hit and towed off the battlefield. As for the men, those who reached a plain beyond the airfield were loaded on to trucks and driven away under shell fire.
¹¹

It was almost midnight on 24 January by the time Oels was in the hands of the
frontoviki
of Fifty-Second Army. Soviet accounts say the small town was “liberated”. German accounts speak only of the suffering of Oels’ inhabitants. Entire streets were razed. The town hall, the fourteenth-century Propstkirche, the Catholic church, the meeting hall, the high school, all were burned.
¹²
The people of Oels fared no better than their bricks and mortar. Thirteen men, women and children were found murdered in the house of a leading local Nazi, while one elderly inhabitant found the corpse of his wife in the cellar. “She’d been raped with her clothes tied together over her head.”
¹³

The rape, plunder, murder and arson were repeated across Silesia. Oels was the rule, not the exception. Looters rampaged through the village of Albrechtsau, ancestral home of one of Prussia’s great military dynasties, the Blüchers. They smashed any statues of the family, forced their way into the field marshal’s tomb and scattered his remains around the village; his head was never recovered. Another vault next to the Blüchers’ tomb was also raided and a mummified woman dragged out. The shroud was removed and the naked figure was left standing in full view.
¹⁴
The historic heart of Kreuzberg was burned down: the Ring, the railway station, the pharmacy, its chemicals exploding, the homes of Party officials.
¹⁵
German stragglers passing through the village of Freyhan in the wake of the Russian advance came across the bodies of an elderly couple in front of one of the many smashed, looted houses. “The man had been shot four times in the head,” an officer wrote. “He had clearly wanted to stop his wife being raped. Both perhaps hoped that things would not be so bad and so had not fled. Now they lay there with heartbroken eyes which captured the horror of the final moments of their lives.”
¹⁶
A dozen miles from Breslau, the villagers of Jungfernsee endured “days and nights only imaginable in hell,” their Catholic priest recalled. His church was ransacked, his clothes scattered around the vestry, trampled on and covered in dirt. As for the rest of the village, “the doors had been kicked in and hung off their hinges, each room was in such a chaotic state that it brought tears to your eyes. Everything turned upside down, smashed, crushed, ripped to shreds. There are no words to describe the devastation”. The priest found two women hiding in a stable and vowed to take them under his wing. The house of God offered no protection; one night four drunken Russians burst into his vicarage, and thrashed the priest and two women he was sheltering.
¹⁷
In Gerlanden, a small village south-east of the Silesian capital, soldiers searching for quarters found a young woman dead in a farmhouse, lying naked on mattresses. Her breasts had been sliced off. Knitting needles were sticking out of her windpipe.
¹⁸
Kanth, to where 60,000 Breslauers had fled only days before, also succumbed to the relentless Red Army advance. When it fell, the Russians “acted like out-and-out beasts,” one forty-year-old housewife later testified. “We suffered as if we were in hell.” That first night she was raped a dozen times. “I kept wanting to hang myself but I did not have the chance because Russians constantly came in and out of the house.” The priest was killed trying to protect seven elderly nuns. A factory owner was shot dead, a post office employee locked in a cellar and left to starve. Some of Kanth’s women were eventually transferred to a Soviet field hospital where they were assaulted “by one bandit after the next”. One young girl was raped and beaten until her innards were hanging out “in front and behind”. She died. The housewife took ten sleeping pills to end her misery, only to wake up three days later.
¹⁹

None of this should have happened. The
frontovik
marched on to German soil with unequivocal orders not to rape, not to plunder, not to burn or loot. But as he did so, he passed signs by the roadside: ‘Red Army Soldier: you are now on German soil: the hour of revenge has struck’; ‘Here is damned Germany’; ‘Soldier: you are in Germany. Take revenge on the Hitlerites.’
²⁰
He read the words of Ilya Ehrenburg.
Nastala rasplata
– the reckoning has begun – he proclaimed in
Red Star
:

We forget nothing. We march through Pomerania but before our eyes is destroyed, bleeding White Russia. Now we want to bring that pungent smell of burning, which seeped into our soldier’s coats at Smolensk and Orel, to Berlin. In front of Königsberg, Breslau and Schneidemühl we think about the ruins of Voronezh and Stalingrad. Soldiers of the Red Army who are now attacking Germany’s cities will not forget how mothers in Leningrad carried their dead children away on small sledges. Berlin has still not paid for the torture of Leningrad.
²¹

The
frontovik
had seen his motherland despoiled, he had seen the towns and villages of the Ukraine and White Russia razed. “We had seen so much destruction, so many corpses,” recalled Semyon Sipernyak, advancing on Breslau. “And so we were angry with the Germans. Some were filled with hate, others less so. Some had lost their father or their mother, others only distant relatives. Some had more reason to hate, others less.”
²²
And so to many Red Army soldiers, what happened to the people of Silesia was not revenge, it was justice. “You cannot imagine the deep satisfaction which our soldiers and officers feel, regardless of their rank or education,” veteran soldier Sergei Grebenik assured his family in the Ukraine. “The Germans will now suffer all the same misery which they inflicted upon us in 1941.”
²³
The fascist hordes, one infantryman gleefully wrote home, “will turn to ash and we will carve the names of those whose blood was spilled for the good of mankind on the remains of Hitler’s lair.”
²⁴
Another
frontovik
told his family enthusiastically: “We warriors of the Red Army, sons of the Soviet Union, are now telling German hangmen that they have sung their little song to the end and the day when the Red Army raises the victory banner over Berlin is not far off.”
²⁵

And this
was
a just cause. This was a war of liberation. “Everywhere we run into Poles and Russians returning from slavery,” one Red Army war correspondent wrote to a friend. “They tell terrible stories.”
²⁶
A torrent of people and nations streamed east. Public buildings were opened as makeshift quarters. Guards and traffic police tried to persuade these refugees – Russians, Ukrainians, Danes, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs – to wait a few days. “Attempts were made in every tongue,”
Pravda
correspondent Boris Polevoy wrote. “Railway traffic would resume in a few days and they would be carried home.” But no. They headed home on foot. “Their desire to put places connected with so many terrible memories behind them was stronger than reason,” the journalist noted. “With rucksacks on their backs they moved along their road, meeting troops on the way, waving cheerfully at them and sometimes even singing.”
²⁷
Many liberated Russians, one of Konev’s staff reported, “expressed the wish to join the ranks of the Red Army so they could take revenge for their ill-treatment at the hands of the Germans.”
²⁸
Some were even afforded the opportunity to do so – courtesy of Karl Hanke. Around 6,000 Russian prisoners of war had been moved out of the camps supporting the Krupp works at Markstädt, bound for Strehlen, two dozen miles south of Breslau. They never got there. Hanke ordered the prisoners turned around and marched back to Markstädt. They never got there either. They were liberated by their Red Army comrades. Fed and re-armed, they joined the battle for Breslau.
²⁹
The 3,000 inmates of the camps serving the chemical weapons laboratories at Dyhernfurth on the Oder were less fortunate. In driving snow they were force-marched towards Gross Rosen concentration camp west of Breslau. Their fate remains uncertain. Some say they were liberated by Soviet troops, others claim that two out of three were either shot or died on the journey. Those left behind in Dyhernfurth were shot, while any fair-minded Germans who tried to offer the prisoners food or medicine were either turned away or, in the case of two people, butchered by local Nazis.
³⁰
Perhaps as many 2,000 prisoners died on the march from Dyhernfurth – a terrible toll, albeit one dwarfed by Auschwitz. From 18 January the roads of Silesia began to fill with columns of prisoners as the camp complex was emptied. Healthy – or rather
healthier
– inmates marched west, the young, the elderly, the infirm were left behind, their guards with instructions to kill them. In all, perhaps 60,000 prisoners were sent west, their destination Gross Rosen. As many as one in four died on the way. SS
Obersturmbannführer
Rudolf Höss was sent to Auschwitz to oversee the death camp’s evacuation. Höss struggled eastwards through Silesia against a torrent of refugees. He never got to Auschwitz. He never got to the right bank of the Oder. He did, however, find the tortured souls of the death camp, “stumbling columns of corpses” on the Silesian roads and country lanes. No provision had been made for the inmates on this death march. There was no food, no shelter – the public buildings were filled with civilian refugees fleeing the Red Army. Instead, the corpses of shot prisoners – executed by their SS guards when they could march no further – littered the roads every few hundred yards. When his staff car stopped next to one cadaver, he heard a pistol shot. “I ran towards the sound, and saw a soldier in the act of stopping his motor cycle and shooting a prisoner leaning against a tree,” he wrote. “I shouted at him, asking him what he though he was doing, and what harm the prisoner had done him. He laughed impertinently in my face, and asked me what I proposed to do about it. I drew my pistol and shot him.” It wasn’t the death of the prisoner which haunted Rudolf Höss – some one million people, almost all of them Jews, had been exterminated at Auschwitz under the SS officer’s command. It was the disintegration of order, the loss of slave labour which might prop up the tottering Third Reich economy for a few more weeks.