Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (33 page)

At midday the Luftwaffe troops were relieved. They had walked barely one hundred yards from the embankment when the Soviet artillery opened fire. The first shells landed in the foxholes the men had just left.
³⁸

After just three days, Gluzdovski’s troops had smashed Hans von Ahlfen’s southern ring and pushed to within two miles of the city centre, crossing the main railway line which ran through the suburbs along a sweeping semi-circular embankment. A battalion of Hitler Youths was ordered to drive the Soviets out of a copse in Südpark and beyond the embankment at the foot of the park. Fifteen-year-old Peter Bannert described the attack:

Then the sound, a whistle! We jumped up and ran to Südpark. We fired into the dark while we roared at the top of our voices. As I leapt up, various men who had been lying next to me did not move. “Hey, we’re off!” I screamed at them. When I touched one of them I realized that it was a dead Russian. I quickly ran after my comrades.

Our attack surprised the Russians and they fled back through an underpass behind the railway embankment. Südpark was captured! As I ran past, I saw a number of abandoned anti-tank guns, which were half dug into the ground between the trees. We’d been shot at with them. A dead Russian soldier hung in front of the entrance to a bunker. He looked as if he was still alive and wanted to alert his men inside.

The attack began to stutter just beyond the underpass as Russian machine-guns opened fire. Bannert took cover behind a tree trunk. From there he could just make out dark figures leaping from foxholes on the railway embankment. Bannert fired his rifle at them wildly while his comrades crept or rushed back to his left and right. It was time, he reasoned, to fall back too. He fired his
Panzerfaust
then began to run to the rear, only to be struck in his right thigh by shrapnel. He used his rifle as support to reach German lines, then was sent to a first-aid post. A week later, lying in a hospital bed with the wounded badge pinned to his uniform, he wrote proudly to his parents. “We turfed the Russians out of Südpark with our counter-attack. A number of dead Russians and six captured guns! Perhaps you have already read about the
Kampfgruppe Hitlerjugend
.”
³⁹

Perhaps they had. For the Party mouthpiece,
Völkischer Beobachter,
trumpeted the bravery of the boys defending Breslau. It championed the “fanatical doggedness and determined fighting spirit” they displayed ‘routing’ a Soviet regiment. One hundred and twenty boys had left 170 Ivans dead on the battlefield, seized several prisoners and captured a “rich booty – anti-tank guns, mortars, machine-guns, handguns and ammunition.” In doing so, the newspaper declared, they had “set a glorious example. They struck the hated enemy where they found him. They stood firm and attacked.” In short, opined the Nazi organ, they had lived up to the old adage: “The flag means more to us than death.” Other Nazi accounts of the battle for Breslau were no more accurate. Sudeten Germans in Kaaden – today Kadañ in the Czech Republic – were assured their compatriots were not suffering. “The trams are running again. The newspaper is published every day.” There was fighting, of course – “sometimes it’s more lively than others” – but the defenders of Breslau were “filled with self-confidence”. Inside the fortress, there was a whispering campaign to raise the troops’ morale. Propaganda officers spread rumours that “new weapons” were being used
en masse
, that a new counter-offensive along a sixty-mile front had been unleashed in Silesia aimed at Breslau and was making excellent progress. In an address to the nation, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels repeated the lies. Germany would deliver her enemies “blow upon blow” courtesy of new U-boats and a renewed V-weapon campaign, and her conquered territories in the East would be liberated.

Just as our forefathers did so often in our history, so we too will smash the Mongol storm against the heartland. Like them, we will defend ourselves with fanatical fury and dogged hatred, so that one day the legend – that after days of fierce fighting the dead continued to fight on in the heavens in the ominous darkness of night – can be recounted about us too.

And even if in the end we have to cling to our soil, even if we have to sacrifice our last remaining possessions, even if no end to the suffering and terror can be predicted, we will not give up the lawful right of our nation to life, freedom and a future. We prefer to die rather than surrender!

Priest Paul Peikert was not fooled. “These are the same old propaganda lies which have been used repeatedly for the past two years, from Stalingrad to the present day.” He was right.
⁴⁰

Tuesday, 20 February 20 had been a cold but sunny winter’s day. The night which followed it was moonlit. An hour after dark, Russian bombers approached from the east. Flares quickly outshone the moon, turning night to day. For the next three and a half hours it “rained bombs” on both sides of the Oder as the heart of Breslau was pummelled. “The foundations of houses shook, an indescribable noise filled the air,” Peikert wrote. “People in cellars prayed and begged for this terrible curse to pass. Because the houses shook awfully, everyone feared that the houses would collapse on top of them and bury them. The bombs seemed so close that everyone believed the entire neighbourhood would collapse in ruins.” Peikert led the occupants of his air raid shelter in prayer. With the cross in his hand, the Catholic priest blessed parishioners with the words:
Ecce crucem Domini; fugite partes adversae! Vicit Leo de tribu Juda
! Behold the cross of the Lord; flee, ye enemy armies – the lion of the tribe of Juda is victorious.

When the bombing ended, the priest tentatively stepped outside. He expected to see his church, St Mauritius, in ruins. It was not, nor was his rectory. Another house of God was not so fortunate. St Augustinus, a fine neo-Romanesque church in the south of the city, had been levelled. In ruined houses next to the Holteihöhe gardens by the Oder, the corpse of a soldier was found; his uniform had been ripped from his body by the force of a bomb blast. Kaiserbrücke was barely passable. Lessingbrücke no longer was; a second of its arches had collapsed into the river. “The city leaves a rarely-seen impression of neglect,” Peikert wrote. “Most windowpanes are smashed, the streets are full of rubbish and littered with shards of glass from the windows.” Post official Conrad Bischof agreed. “Breslau is turning more and more into a field of ruins,” he recorded in his diary, resignedly accepting the destruction of his home town. “It’s a pity for beautiful Breslau but it must sacrifice itself for Germany – that’s obvious.” Paul Peikert could not agree:

This air raid has left people utterly depressed. Everyone awaits the nights to come with a great deal of concern – the air raids are bound to get heavier. Everyone asks why, what for?
Ja
, the war which we waged has become madness, absurd. We cannot change its outcome. Criminally caused by our regime, it is the worst crime not only against our people, but the entire world. Every day the senseless continuation of this war devours countless human lives, destroys our cities and villages, makes an entire nation homeless and poor. How terribly has God’s judgment been unleashed against our nation, whose leadership has committed outrages against everything which God stands for these past dozen years.
⁴¹

Early on the morning of 22 February, the paratroopers of 25th and 26th
Fallschirmjäger
Regiments hung around on the edge of Jüterbog airfield, fifty miles south of Berlin. Just twenty-four hours before they had been blown kisses by the young women of Schwedt on the lower Oder, perhaps convinced they would defend the city. Now, ninety miles away, all manner of rumours passed from company to company as Junkers 52 idled on the tarmac. The men’s commanders asked them to gather round: the garrison of Breslau needed reinforcements. “Our faces became hard and serious, for we knew what it meant to fight in a fortress,”
Oberjäger
Rudi Christoph wrote. “But we wanted our men to hold their own because now we had to defend our regional capital. You see our battalion consisted mainly of Silesians and Sudetenlanders – and they would rather fight in Silesia than Pomerania.”
⁴²

Late that day, the men were divided into groups of sixteen for the flight to Breslau, 200 miles away. Shortly before midnight the
Fallschirmjäger
boarded their aircraft. At five-minute intervals, Junkers rolled down the Jüterbog runway. The paratroopers sat calmly on the linen benches. Some slept. Company commander
Oberleutnant
Albrecht Schulze van Loon put his steel helmet on his lap and let his dachshund settle in it. For nearly two hours, the transporter droned towards Breslau until the eastern horizon began to glow red.

We see the fires and the flashes of gun barrels [Schulze van Loon wrote]. Anti-aircraft searchlights nervously sweep the sky. We get closer with our engines throttled down. The Russians have heard us. Because only one aircraft can land, the Russian air defences concentrate on every single aircraft. The searchlights thrash about wildly. For a few seconds it’s as bright as day in the aircraft. We are above the city. The searchlight has seen us. It swings back and has us in its beam. Like a pack of wolves, the others join it and will not release us from their bright beam. The beams are fixed firmly on us, a signal for the light and heavy anti-aircraft guns. Light anti-aircraft shells shoot up to our left and right – as if someone in the sky above was pulling up a shining pearl necklace. The salvoes from the anti-aircraft batteries explode in front of us, behind us and next to us. It’s like running a gauntlet in the sky. Suddenly we’re hit. Fuel sprays in our faces, all the windows have shattered. The machine drops 2,000 metres. The air is full of iron. I move my dachshund and put on my steel helmet. The searchlights will not release us from their grasp. The pilot is able to regain control of the aircraft fifty metres above the rooftops. Only the middle engine is still turning. The propellers on the left and right are not moving. The aileron is shot to pieces and fuel is still spurting into the cabin, but it does not set on fire.

We cannot land at Gandau. Each shot-up aircraft must look after number one. Otherwise it would block the runway to subsequent aircraft. We try to escape in the direction of Schweidnitz. Once again we cross the front line. The searchlights capture the aircraft behind us. But the burning city provides us enough light anyway and so the Russian infantry creeping slowly across roofs and through the streets see us and fire rifles and machine-guns at us for all they’re worth.

The front lies behind us. In front of us towers the Zobten, a peak which rises several hundreds metres above the plain. We stick our heads out of the windows. Treetops sway beneath the left wing. There’s the aromatic smell of resin.

We land in Schweidnitz on literally the last drop of fuel. We leap out and take a deep breath first of all. A hole one metre across yawns on the tank in the right wing. The aircraft is riddled with shrapnel and bullet holes. Each man feels his body. No one is wounded, but an
Obergefreiter
has a shiner. A piece of metal struck him in the eye.
⁴³

Twenty Junkers 52s touched down at Gandau that night, delivering 295 paratroopers. Minutes later, eighteen aircraft lifted off again carrying nearly 350 wounded men and civilians.

Like the plane carrying Albrecht Schulze van Loon, Rudi Christoph’s Ju52 was diverted. The radio on his aircraft failed, the wings started to ice up. It turned around and set down on an airfield near Dresden. Two nights later, he tried again. As the
Fallschirmjäger
climbed into their Junkers – its doors left open to speed loading and unloading – they were warned that Gandau would be under fire when they landed. The eastern horizon glowed red as the transporter approached Breslau. On final approach a red flare was fired to warn the Junkers off. For the next twenty minutes the aircraft circled Breslau. The first strains of dawn were glimmering in the east as Christoph’s aircraft landed under heavy artillery fire. Three other Junkers were destroyed as they approached Gandau; one flew into a factory’s chimney.

Rudi Christoph and his comrades were put on a bus once used by the
Gau
orchestra and driven through the city to their billets at the new labour exchange, the
Fallschirmjäger
regiment’s headquarters. Each man received several hand grenades, then was driven to the front line in a truck constantly attacked by Soviet fighter-bombers. The wagon halted next to a railway embankment in the western suburb of Mochbern, where the paratroopers filed into the cellars of abandoned houses “and waited for things to happen”. Nothing did. After the strains of the night, the day passed “waiting and sleeping. We occasionally saw a comrade whom we’d already given up on, and learned from him that so-and-so was no longer alive,” Christoph wrote. “It was clear to us that this time it was serious.”
⁴⁴

Hans von Ahlfen had committed Rudi Christoph and his fellow paratroopers into battle immediately – and reluctantly.
Fallschirmjäger
had a fearsome reputation, justifiably. But the
Fallschirmjäger
of Breslau were not the
Fallschirmjäger
of Crete, Monte Cassino, Normandy. Many were pilots without aircraft who had re-trained as infantry. They had seen little fighting. They had plenty of
Panzerfaust
, but no mortars, no machine-guns. “In a nutshell, it was a good – but still young – unit, not yet suited to conditions in Breslau,” he said – and told Ferdinand Schörner as much. “The
Fallschirmjäger
battalion is good,” the army group commander snapped. “I expect the utmost energy from you now.”