Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (29 page)

67.
Schlesische Tageszeitung
, 25/1/45.

Chapter 5

In Defiance of Death and the Devil

Every house of Fortress Breslau, which has been entrusted to us
by the Führer, will cost the enemy rivers of blood

Generalleutnant
Hans von Ahlfen

F
or ten days there had been an uneasy lull along the Oder. Scratch German forces had finally given up the struggle for Steinau, allowing the Red Army to expand its bridgehead unfettered. There was fierce fighting in Breslau’s satellite villages. But otherwise the war had stalled. Each evening, history-professor-turned-reluctant-soldier Heinrich Appelt lay in a foxhole on the left bank of the Oder, observing the Russians on the other side of the river. It was relentlessly tedious. Nothing happened apart from ice floes drifting down the thawing Oder. “Very occasionally – and probably without any good reason – there was the sound of a gunshot, but apart from that this sector of the front was utterly quiet,” Appelt recalled.
¹

One reason for the quiet was the ice floating past Heinrich Appelt. The thaw which had uncovered so much horror on the Silesian country lanes also seriously hindered the Red Army’s thrust westwards. A thick sheet of ice moved inexorably down the Oder, carrying pontoon bridges and ferries away and crushing them. The approaches to the river became a morass. “The splashing in the gutters is like angelic music to our ears,” Goebbels’ secretary Wilfred von Oven noted with relief. “
Ja
, you can say without exaggeration that the Soviet offensive has largely ground to a halt for the time being.”
²
Ferdinand Schörner agreed. The Soviet onslaught had “stalled at the Oder”. The climax, the army group commander assured his men, “has undoubtedly passed”.
³
It had passed, at least in part, thanks to Schörner’s uncompromising leadership. The fifty-two-year-old Bavarian was an able commander, but his abilities were surpassed by his ruthlessness. His methods were draconian – he hanged stragglers on trees with placards around their necks: “I am a deserter and have refused to protect German women and children” – and his beliefs were pure National Socialism. “In this Asiatic war we need revolutionary officers who can carry men with them,” he told his commanders. “I demand clear and obvious fanaticism, nothing less.” He banned words such as ‘withdrawal’ or ‘breaking off’, lambasted staff officers for their “obsession with retreating” and “overestimating the Bolsheviks”, and demanded commanders prefix every mention of Soviet units in their reports with the word
sogenannt
– so-called. “We shall not do Stalin the favour of confusing his deliberately deceptive designations with our factual terms.”
³
But in February 1945, ‘so-called’ was a far more apt description for many of Ferdinand Schörner’s formations. “No longer was one division the same as the next, one regiment identical to another,” wrote Hans von Ahlfen. There were still elite units, the armoured units, the Hermann Göring panzer division or the Brandenburg panzer grenadiers, which received the pick of men and material but which were “rushed around to and fro like the fire brigade”. There were
Kampfgruppen
, the remnants of divisions smashed in the retreat from the Vistula. There were makeshift formations recruited from training schools, cadet academies, police units. And there were divisions comprising soldiers previously considered unfit for battle – men with stomach complaints who needed, but rarely received, a special diet, or troops with eye or ear problems. “Company commanders were forced to carefully plan how they used their personnel so that those with eye and ear conditions were on double guard duty at the same time,” von Ahlfen wrote. “The man with eye problems acted as the ears, the man with ear troubles acted as the eyes.” Had Germany’s plight not been so grave, it would have been farcical.
⁴
The German soldier now defending Silesia fell into one of two categories, Soviet intelligence observed: men who had abandoned all hope, who cared only that the war would end, and men – “a large number” – who were convinced some new weapon would turn the tide of the war. “Retreating into a belief in miracles has become even stronger as a result of the successes of the Russian offensive. Soldiers do not want to – and cannot – bring themselves to contemplate an unfavourable outcome of the war.”
⁵
Veteran artilleryman Klaus-Andreas Moering had already abandoned all hope. “Villages and towns smell and are falling apart,” Moering wrote home. “In homes there are radios where you can pick up voices and sounds from all over the whole world yet we don’t know how things are twenty kilometres away.” The former teacher was growing increasingly fatalistic. “I almost doubt that we will see each other again because probably no one will get out of this.” Klaus-Andreas Moering was right. He would be killed in the offensive Ivan Konev was about to unleash.
⁶

The shaven-headed Soviet marshal was well pleased with the accomplishments of his 1st Ukrainian Front. In four weeks of fighting it had advanced nearly 400 miles, smashed more than sixty German formations, killed perhaps 150,000 enemy soldiers, and seized a good 40,000 prisoners, 5,000 guns and mortars, plus 300 panzers. Land, prisoners and booty were all well and good, but the real prize was Berlin, and Ivan Konev was a long way from the Reich’s capital. Silesia – and above all Breslau – blocked his way. His solution? Another lunge across the province to the River Neisse, 100 miles to the west, would provide his troops with the springboard for the drive on Berlin. Two pincers, one advancing out of the bridgeheads at Steinau and a little upstream near Dyhernfurth, a second south of Breslau striking out of the Brieg bridgehead, would seal off the Silesian capital. The city would either fall to the Red Army – or be left to wither and die in the rear as Soviet troops continued towards the Neisse. Ivan Konev could commit eight armies in his onslaught – history has rather blandly branded it ‘the Lower Silesian operation’. He outnumbered his foe two to one and enjoyed a fivefold superiority in guns and armour. Yet compared with the assault launched four weeks earlier, this was a pauper’s offensive. “Oh, how far we now are from the Vistula,” war correspondent Vasily Malinin lamented – rightly. The 1st Ukrainian Front’s railheads still stood behind the Vistula. The troops were at the end of a 300-mile supply line. Fuel and ammunition were at a premium – there was only enough ammunition for a brief initial barrage. It would be more than sufficient.
⁷

Before dawn on Thursday, 8 February, aircraft of 4th Bomber Corps attacked German troop concentrations, artillery positions and command posts ringed in a semi-circle south of Breslau. Ten minutes later, Konev’s guns opened fire with a thirty-five-minute barrage while pioneers cleared a path through minefields. In drizzle mixed with snow, Soviet engineers stood up to their hips in the icy waters of the Oder to prevent the wall of ice drifting down the river from devouring four ferries.
⁸

Hauptmann
Heinze was woken by the Soviet barrage plastering his battalion’s positions a dozen or so miles north-east of Liegnitz. The reservist officer had broken off his convalescence to lead a makeshift force of Silesians rounded up on leave and formed into a battalion. They were well equipped – winter clothing, assault rifles, carbines, Czech machine-guns – and determined to defend their native soil, but they lacked leaders: most of their NCOs “had never smelled gunsmoke”. After just three days of skirmishing in woods around the Dyhernfurth bridgehead, Heinze’s battalion was exhausted. It would never recover. As darkness gave way to a sullen grey this Thursday, the reservist could make out a battalion of Russian troops supported by two tanks advancing sluggishly towards his lines – the boggy ground impeded their movement. When the tanks paused near a farm, Heinze seized the opportunity. He grabbed a
Panzerfaust
. “Then a bang, sparks flew up. Gotcha!” Three mounted infantry slid off the Soviet tank which burned, but was not knocked out. A comrade tackled the second tank with a
Panzerschreck
– the German counterpart of a bazooka. Again the tank was hit, but not destroyed. The two wounded beasts withdrew to the relative safety of a copse and began to shell the farm. “A cow was bloodily torn to pieces,” the
Hauptmann
recalled. He was struck in his left foot by a splinter, his adjutant was gravely wounded. After defending their ground heroically, Heinze now saw his men falling back – and fresh Soviet armour bearing out of the woods. “Continued resistance here was pointless,” he decided, and ordered a withdrawal.
⁹

The thin German veneer holding the Oder shattered. By the end of the second day of Konev’s offensive, his men were fighting in Liegnitz, forty miles west of Breslau, where empty or partially-filled trains pulled out of the station because inhabitants “preferred to remain rather than make a journey into the unknown”. Many felt betrayed by their mayors, by their local Party leaders, by National Socialism. Despite stories of Russian atrocities, some even openly welcomed the Red Army with the greeting ‘Heil Moscow.’
Pravda
correspondent Boris Polevoy found the roads to Liegnitz strewn with abandoned cars and trucks filled to the roof, bicycles, motorcycles, helmets, rifles, coats, uniforms. Roadside ditches were littered with trunks, rucksacks, gasmasks, rifles, photograph, even a “vase which belonged in a museum”. And there were corpses, “heaps of German soldiers” and the cadavers of horses. The fighting for Liegnitz was brief, but ferocious – and offered a foretaste of the impending battle for Breslau: German and Soviet troops clashed in the streets, in houses, in rooms, on rooftops, even in the cellars and underground passages of Liegnitz. By the morning of 10 February the town was in Russian hands, its fall celebrated with a twenty-gun salute in Moscow. That same day, Red armour seized Bunzlau, seventy miles west of Breslau, in a heavy snow flurry. More alarming for Breslauers, on this same Saturday Russian tanks were seen rolling along the Autobahn from Liegnitz towards their city. Breslau was about to be encircled.
¹⁰

The renewed thunder of cannon was the cue for the final exodus before the Soviet jaws shut. The new offensive caught Breslauers off guard. They expected the enemy to come – just not from the south. Now those who had postponed the decision to leave the city three weeks earlier delayed no longer. Post official Josef Dittman waited for night to shroud Silesia before grabbing his bicycle and pedalling to Schweidnitz. Some of his employees tossed their belongings into the final mail train to pull out of the city. “Refugees begged us to take them along,” Wilhelm Beier recalled. “We did what we could. When the train departed our mail carriage was crammed with women and children.” Annelies Matuszczky and her family hauled two small handcarts towards the Freiburger Bahnhof, the only station still open. It was 1am on the ninth before the Matuszczkys reached the concourse. As they did, the air raid sirens wailed. The station shelter was full. Hundreds of Breslauers stood on the forecourt with their carts and simply waited for the all-clear. When it came, ninety minutes later, the throng shuffled inside and found a half-empty train pulling out of the station. The next scheduled train, eight hours later, was cancelled. Finally, in driving rain, a train was provided – “no seats of course and terribly dirty, but empty at least,” Annelies wrote. For four hours it sat outside Freiburger Bahnhof before beginning a tortuous journey to Schweidnitz, just thirty miles to the south-west. It took more than eighteen hours to get there. It was the last train from Breslau: just an hour after it pulled into Schweidnitz, Russians captured the line. No more trains left the Silesian capital.
¹¹

Other facets of everyday life in Breslau were also disappearing. Party functionaries began to burn documents, stripping off their brown uniforms, donning
feldgrau
in their place. For the final time, the band of the local army unit,
Standort Bataillon Breslau
, performed in the courtyard of the cuirassier barracks. The men had barely finished their third march when Russian aircraft circled over the base. The musicians and their audience scattered – although no bombs fell. Never again did the men perform together during the siege. They swapped their instruments for rifles, machine-guns and
Panzerfaust
.
¹²
By day and night there was a new sound: the crash of entire blocks in the south of the city being demolished to provide rubble for the barricades. Field guns were moved into position in Scheitniger Park. Once popular with Sunday strollers, the park now also served as a makeshift cemetery. Shocking though this was, what happened on the opposite side of Horst Wessel Strasse turned Breslauers’ hearts to stone. They had grown up with their beloved zoo, which could trace its history back eight decades. By the winter of 1944-5 it was one of the few zoos in Germany still open – most in the rest of the Reich had long since put down many of their animals as a result of the Allied bombing campaign. Now the same fate awaited the beasts of Breslau: fortress commander Hans von Ahlfen feared they might escape and attack the populace. He ordered the animals shot. First to face the executioners were the wolves. “They looked at us mistrustfully, shrewdly,” recalled Dr Herbert Kraeker, the only native Breslauer in a group of pioneers given the bitter task of killing the creatures. “They stood there motionless, wonderful to look at, and died without a sound.” The sound of the carbines unsettled the monkeys in a neighbouring pen, but it was the bears in their open enclosure who were shot next.