Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (26 page)

Karl Hanke’s hagiography claimed he arrived in Breslau with “a raft of original plans”, a new broom to sweep away bureaucracy. He certainly carried out Nazi policies energetically, none more so than the eradication of Breslau’s Jewish population. It was his intention, he declared, to “make Breslau free of Jews” and he immediately set about clearing the 1,800 apartments in the city still occupied by Jews. Hanke was as good as his word. By the summer of 1943, the Jews of Breslau were no more. The
Gauleiter
of Lower Silesia was left in no doubt of the consequences of this ‘Jewish resettlement action’. ‘Resettlement’ meant ‘extermination’ – the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, told him so at a conference of Party leaders in Poznań in October 1943. But Karl Hanke also witnessed the business of extermination, visiting Auschwitz. According to his friend Albert Speer, the visit left the
Gauleiter
shaken. He urged Speer never to go there – “never under any circumstances”. It was a rare crack in Hanke’s ruthless edifice. For the most part, however, he showed no sympathy, no mercy. At least 1,000 people were executed during his unforgiving reign. Not without good reason did the city’s inhabitants refer to their leader as
der Henker von Breslau
– the hangman of Breslau.

It was hardly surprising that Breslauers never warmed to Karl Hanke. He was at best an awkward public speaker, at worst plain awful. He was overbearing and often abused his ever-growing powers. “Hanke had an exaggerated sense of his own worth,” schoolboy Horst Gleiss recalled. “In person, he was overbearing, his appearance was brutal, he was tight-lipped and non-committal.” Above all, Breslauers viewed their
Gauleiter
as a “carbon-copy Hitler” who “enjoyed playing the role of dictator”. Except that in the winter of 1945, Karl Hanke wasn’t simply playing.
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Hanke’s clearing of the decks did not end with the execution of Wolfgang Spielhagen. The
Ortsgruppenleiter
and mayor of Klettendorf, the mayor of Brockau, a senior civil servant, all left their posts, ostensibly without orders. All were sentenced to death. Ordinary Breslauers were not spared. Looting and theft were now punishable by death. “Whoever misappropriates the property of evacuated comrades when there is no crisis forfeits their lives,” Hanke decreed. Widow Maria Bramer and the divorcée Walli Langer took food, luxury items and curtains from an abandoned apartment. They had acted “solely out of greed and hedonism”. They were shot. The same fate befell four foreign workers, also found in abandoned apartments. Two soldiers who threw away their uniforms, donned civilian clothes and returned to their homes were caught by a Wehrmacht patrol. Before the day was out they had been condemned to death by a flying court-martial and shot. Another
Landser
who plundered an abandoned house, stealing women’s clothes, wine and champagne, was shot dead. Defeatism also meant the death penalty. Party member and
Zellenleiter
Gerhard Malek “had a special duty to be loyal to his Führer and nation”. Instead, he distributed Soviet leaflets among fellow armaments workers. He was shot dead on Hanke’s orders. No one was safe, not even the fortress’s staff. Intelligence officer,
Major
Hans Meyer, was charged with undermining fighting spirit by making “demoralizing remarks” in front of a large group of soldiers,
Volkssturm
troops and civilians. Krause spoke up on Meyer’s behalf. A standing court martial ignored him. Meyer was shot dead. “I resolved to cast off all inhibitions in dealing with the utmost severity against those who paralyse or harm the overall will to stick it out as a result of their thoughtless or irresponsible actions,” Hanke told Breslauers unapologetically. He described a selfless
Volkssturm
man, a sixty-year-old government inspector, he had encountered who suffered frostbite after spending a week in a foxhole. “How can I look such men in the face if I deal leniently with weaklings?”
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And still Karl Hanke was not done. Next he turned his attention to Breslau’s universities, which had decamped to Dresden, 150 miles to the west. The
Gauleiter
expected a repeat of 1813, when the city’s university had been the fount of the national uprising against Napoleon. Instead of rushing to the flag to defend their Fatherland, he chided Heinrich Blecken, director of the technical high school, they had scurried to safety. Blecken could not agree. In six years of war, the city’s universities had given their all. At least 500 students had been slain on the battlefields of Europe. There were no longer any able-bodied students at his technical high school. The only men on its books were 250 war-wounded amputees and foreigners. The figures were similar at the university. “One more combing out of the students now in Dresden to find some men still capable of bearing arms is utterly pointless,” Blecken protested. “You cannot wage war with one-armed or badly wounded students.” The
Gauleiter
brushed the chancellor’s objections aside. One-armed students could still man barricades. He despatched a special courier to Dresden bearing an appeal:

Lecturers and students of Breslau’s universities!

Why do you not defend your universities with us on the Oder? Do you think you can save the Fatherland by your current actions? We know that scientific work is vital even in wartime. But in times of the gravest danger academic youths and their lecturers must defend the sites of their scientific work with weapons in their hands.

We will defend Breslau and the Oder with bitter determination. We are waiting for you, because we do not want to believe in the self-abandonment – and with it the moral death – of our Breslau universities!
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Breslau’s students did not return, but others did. Just days after fleeing the city, refugees began to make their way back to recover their possessions – against the instructions of Karl Hanke.
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At the Freiburger Bahnhof, Lena Aschner saw a woman trying to head back to her apartment to retrieve her papers and money. Brownshirts blocked her way. She tried to slip past them. One of the SA men struck her in the neck, grabbed her dress and threw her against the wall. The woman staggered, straightened herself up and screamed: “You damned dogs! You’ll die like dogs, our Lord will see to it!”
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Her job as a doctor did allow Annemarie Hegenscheidt to return to the city. She borrowed a baggage cart from the Hotel Savoy, now derelict, its red curtains fluttering in the wind which whistled through the broken windows. She hauled it to Fürstenstrasse in the north-east of the city, where every house, every apartment block lay empty. Her flat was just as she left it. She packed her books, climbed through the open cellar window of a neighbour’s house to retrieve her microscope. By the time she had gathered everything, it was dark – too late to leave. She lay down on her bed – “it seems to have been waiting for me in a ghostly manner” – and tried to sleep as shells crashed all around.
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By the end of January, artillery fire and bombing were Breslau’s nightly soundtrack. The Red Army stood outside Hundsfeld, barely five miles from the city centre. Its howitzers were lined up on the Trebnitzer Heights fifteen miles north of the Silesian capital. It had forced the Oder at Märzdorf, a dozen miles upstream of Breslau, then at Peiskerwitz, ten miles downstream. “You can easily hear the thunder,” post office employee Wilhelm Bodenstedt wrote to his wife. “It doesn’t upset people.” Perhaps the fifty-year-old was trying to be reassuring, because the bombardment
was
upsetting Breslauers – and beginning to change the face of their city. The roads were peppered with bomb craters. Front doors had been blown in by the pressure of explosions and window panes shattered. Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse was scarred by artillery strikes, so too Tauentzienplatz.
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Fritz Neugebauer visited his Aunt Gertrud to celebrate her birthday. She and her husband Horst sat calmly in their fourth-storey apartment, refusing to leave the city. “
Ach
, it doesn’t matter where we die,” she told Fritz. After sharing memories and eating cake, Fritz parted company with his aunt with the words: “We’ll see each other again in a mass grave.” It was 11pm by the time he left, yet the trams were still running. The No.6, its lights dimmed, scraped over shattered glass strewn across Feldstrasse. Suddenly the sirens droned, two bombs landed nearby. The tram ground to a halt. Neugebauer and the driver dashed into the alcove of a house and waited for the raid to end. The tram did not resume its journey. Neugebauer returned home on foot “through empty, sinister streets, making detours because of the barricades”. For Fritz Neugebauer this was the signal to leave Breslau. The next day he headed to the Ring and the savings bank, withdrew 800 Reichsmarks, then took his family to the village of Leuthen, a dozen miles away.
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Lena Aschner stayed. Every day she selflessly helped refugees at the Hauptbahnhof. As she crossed Tauentzienplatz returning home late one evening, she was caught in an air raid. Bombs landed barely 600 feet away, throwing Aschner against the wall of a house.

I can’t hear or see. I stagger on and begin to run filled with a mad fear, I stumble over a piece of wall, fall, get up and run, run for my life until I reach my staircase out of breath, sink into a corner and am unable to go down to the cellar.

A soldier came to her aid and helped her down. “I suddenly realize that my head hurts. Blood streams down my face.” The people in the shelter washed and bandaged her, then handed the housewife a glass of cognac. “It burns my throat and stomach, but I soon get better.”
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Volkssturm
soldier Alfred Hardlitschke took shelter in the cellar of the Menzel fur store on the Ring to escape one Soviet raid. “The civilian populace is filled with a thousand fears and we sit in our cellar like a mouse in a trap, and wait for Death. This is terrible,” he wrote to his wife. A bomb interrupted his letter. The neighbouring building had been hit. The cellar filled with dust, the windows in the passageway shattered, walls fell down. “If only it was over soon.” His letter is unclear as to whether he meant the bombing or his life.
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During one ten-hour bombardment, fifteen shells landed close to Paul Peikert’s St Mauritiuskirche. The Lobe theatre, the Lazarus hospital, the friary, plus numerous homes were all damaged. “It was barely possible to sleep for one hour,” Peikert wrote. His parishioners were “extremely depressed and despondent” – several families even gassed themselves. Across the city there were at least half a dozen suicides daily.
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And yet life in Breslau went on. The trams ran – at least those in the inner city and lines to the southern suburbs did. They no longer ran as frequently, but they were free to ride now. There was still a postal service – and 1,800 people working in the central post office to deal with the several hundred sacks of mail daily. Nazi Party officials still stamped ration cards on Mondays as they had done throughout the war. Food was one thing Silesia’s capital did not lack. Thanks to its status as Germany’s ‘air raid shelter’, the warehouses on the Oder, on the Sandinsel and in half a dozen other locations across the city were filled with flour. And in the freezer warehouse there were 32,000 sides of pork, 150,000 rabbits, 150 barrels of fat and five million eggs. “The food’s very good and there’s plenty of it,” one
Volkssturm
soldier wrote. “In the evening there was sausage and fatty sausage for the grease – 100 grammes of each. At mid-day there’s always a large bowl of roast meat and potatoes.” But otherwise normal life in Breslau broke down. Rationing and shortages meant there was little, if any fuel. The electricity supply was erratic. The average daytime temperature in early February was seven degrees Centigrade – outdoors
and
indoors. Snow piled up in roads – no one shovelled it to one side. Indeed, hardly anyone could be found in the streets, no people scurrying to work, no children playing, just soldiers. By night, dogs scampered from door to door, howling, in search of their master who had fled. The Gestapo and most of the SS, including its intelligence service which kept an eye on the city’s morale, abandoned Breslau for the safety of Saxony – taking a truckload of files with them. More important papers were also shipped west: some of the oldest manuscripts in the city library, the papers of the sixteenth-century humanist Thomas Rhediger, the writings of fifteenth-century chronicler Jean Froissart, parchments from before the millennium and the signature of Martin Luther. But far more of Breslau’s treasures were left behind. Refugees, the sick, machinery from the city’s factories, forced labourers, troops, all took precedence on trains heading west, ahead of cultural heritage. The technical high school’s Professor Günther Grundmann had urged Karl Hanke to evacuate Silesia’s treasures the previous autumn. The
Gauleiter
refused. Now the desperate Grundmann tried to persuade the local head of the
Reichsbahn
to spare him a few carriages. The response was curt: “Too late, professor!”
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Breslauers could still listen to the radio, but the city’s transmitter which had broadcast to the world for fifteen years, stopped broadcasting early on the evening of 26 January. The airwaves were not silent for long. Within a week, the Russians were broadcasting on the same frequency. The
Schlesische Tageszeitung
continued to appear daily, no longer published in Breslau, rather
Festung
Breslau. It was, however, reduced to a single sheet – perhaps two at weekends. The Propaganda Ministry in Berlin suggested ideas for articles to its editor Herbert Zeissig. There was a myriad of birthdays to celebrate: the centenary of a Potsdam publishing house, the eightieth birthday of geographer and polar scientist Erich von Drygalski, the sixtieth birthday of theatre director Franz Ulbrich, the death of the Nazi poet Sepp Keller on the Italian front – and on and on. Zeissig was not, however, to make any mention of history professor Alexander Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg – brother of the man who tried to kill Hitler the previous July. The editor of the
Schlesische Tageszeitung
preferred to offer more practical advice – what to do in an air raid, where to find a dentist, how to trace relatives evacuated from the city – and tried to raise the morale of the 200,000 or so people still in the city. The newspaper encouraged the troops defending Breslau to strike up a tune. “The odds are stacked against soldiers who no longer sing.” It talked of the “struggle at Breslau’s gates”, of “defence to the bitter end”, of the “Soviets’ countless losses”, of “huge craters” left by the impact of V2 rockets in London, of
Volkssturm
men who destroyed two dozen Russian tanks with
Panzerfaust
. And on 30 January – the twelfth anniversary of the Nazi assumption of power – it carried a clarion call by Karl Hanke: “Even during these days we look full of faith to the Führer. He can count on all of us. The German people will not let him down now.” A Luftwaffe unit defending Breslau held a collection in Hitler’s honour, donating more than 60,000 Reichsmarks – a lowly soldier earned just fourteen a month – for the reconstruction of Silesia’s homes after the war. At midday, the city’s streets resounded to songs from the heyday of the Nazi movement as the
Hitlerjugend
paraded. It was all a prelude to the main event: a speech by the Führer, just as he had given every 30 January. The overture on the state radio – an hour of excerpts from Wagner’s operas – was longer, more dramatic and more stirring than Adolf Hitler’s limp speech. At twenty minutes long, it was his shortest public pronouncement – and the last time the people of Breslau would hear their Führer. His address was almost a carbon copy of his speech four weeks before, except that now he acknowledged that “tens and hundreds of thousands” of Germans in the east had suffered a “terrible fate”. But, he continued, “whatever suffering our enemies might inflict on German towns, the German countryside and above all our people, it pales compared with the irredeemable misery and misfortune which would befall us if the plutocratic-Bolshevik conspiracy was victorious.” There was only one course of action, Adolf Hitler told his people, to “make our hearts stronger than ever and steel ourselves with our holy determination to bear arms wherever and whatever the circumstances until in the end victory crowns our efforts.” To Joseph Goebbels, the speech was “firm, virile and full of character”. He thought it would leave a deep impression on the German people. He was wrong. There was, one Breslauer wrote, “nothing comforting” in the Führer’s words, “only a list of the Nazi Party’s achievements and we’ve all had our fill of those.”
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