Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (44 page)

Dawn on Easter Monday was hidden by swathes of smoke which the sun struggled to penetrate. In Niehoff’s headquarters, a staff officer tapped an urgent plea to the Luftwaffe to shield the city from the Red Air Force. The fighters, he insisted, should come at 9.30am. The fighters did not come – and by 9.30 Soviet bombers had already been over Breslau for half an hour.
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They heralded, priest Walter Lassmann wrote, “the worst day in the 1,000-year history of Breslau.”

Librarian Friedrich Grieger arrived at the state library on Sandinsel at 8am, determined to rescue as many historic volumes as possible. He was surprised to see others had also turned up, “albeit in smaller numbers” than on Easter Day. The work was barely under way when the bombers approached. For the next few hours, library staff and soldiers stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the shelter as the small island was struck by “one bomb after another,” Grieger wrote. “With each impact the women and girls cry out and cling to the soldiers.” When the aircraft passed, the men opened the cellar hatches and climbed out into Sandstrasse. The first floor of the library had been completely burned out – 100,000 volumes consumed by the fire. Grieger headed home dejected. His apartment in Kreuzstrasse had till now escaped the inferno. But no longer. Kreuzstrasse was “a single sea of flames”, the house next to the Griegers’ already burning. With the help of three friends, the fifty-three-year-old hacked at the wooden fence separating the two buildings with pickaxes. It was too late. The tarred roof began to burn. The four rushed inside to save what they could. As the blaze spread, two bombs landed nearby devastating the rooms, causing shelves to collapse. Nevertheless, several suitcases and bundles were rescued and buried in the grounds of the neighbouring Botanic Gardens.
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The bombardment reached its peak in the early afternoon. It was not constant. The Soviet aircraft came in waves, each lasting up to three quarters of an hour. One doctor counted the bombers flying overhead: 100 aircraft in a thirty-minute period. The litany of destruction was never-ending. The 500-year-old Catholic St Maria auf dem Sande – known to every Breslauer simply as the Sandkirche – was burned out. On the other side of the Oder, the Vincenzkirche with its monument to thirteenth-century ruler Heinrich IV and the Klosterkirche of Ursuline next to it had been reduced to rubble. Its thirty remaining nuns knelt in front of it in disbelief. The famous organ in the Jahrhunderthalle, the largest in Europe after the one in Passau, Bavaria, played its final, awful notes as it was smashed by a Soviet shell. Twenty-five Party activists from an
Ortsgruppe
in Kreuzstrasse were buried alive by a bomb. The hand of God could not protect Dominsel – Cathedral Island – the spiritual and historic heart of Breslau. Besides the cathedral which gave the district its name, there were three more places of worship, plus seminaries, convents, numerous curiae – residences of the city’s clergy – and the archbishop’s palace. All fell victim to the inexorable conflagration. All bar one, that is. A sister stood on the roof of Our Lady of Sorrows, the cross in her hand. She turned to face every corner of the building, blessing and praying for each one in turn. Our Lady of Sorrows did not burn. The cathedral had no such guardian angel. Some time in the afternoon of Easter Monday, a terrible cry spread through the city:
Der Dom brennt
! The cathedral is on fire! And how it burned. The ceiling vaults on the south side and the nave collapsed under the heat, a mountain of ash had accumulated in the vestry as far as the vault. Rubble piled up “as high as a house”. Only the building’s north wing was spared.
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On the opposite bank of the Oder, around 150 employees were sheltering in the cellars of the central post office in Albrechtstrasse. They stayed there for the next forty-five minutes listening to the whistling when bombs fell, the roar when they exploded, the crash when walls gave way. It was perhaps 5.30pm when they dared to emerge from their shelter. They found the post office ablaze. Every pane of glass was broken and from every empty window frame licked tongues of flames. The postal workers turned around and saw “nothing but a sea of flames,” according to senior telegraphist Kurt Hanke.
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Sea of flames.
Flammenmeer
. It is a description which appears frequently in Breslauers’ accounts of that terrible afternoon and evening. There is another word they use repeatedly.
Feuersturm
. Firestorm. The weather throughout Easter Monday had been stormy. By evening, the winds had been whipped up to hurricane-like speeds; the conflagration heated the air around and above the city, causing it to rise. Cooler air rushed in at tremendous speed to feed the inferno, funnelled down Breslau’s already burning streets. The result was a firestorm.

Friedrich Grieger took shelter in the Botanic Gardens as “a storm of millions of sparks and balls of fire” were carried over his head, setting buildings along Kreuzstrasse alight. He watched an elderly couple struggle against the firestorm, hauling a small cart. “The man falls suddenly, hit by a blow, the old woman moves on without even looking around once.” In Röntgenstrasse, near the Scheitniger Stern, elderly electrician Hermann Nowack watched “gale-force” winds carry “embers the size of a fist” into abandoned apartments. “We run in, tear the curtains down, and tie the doors firmly shut somehow to prevent a draft, reducing the threat of a fire.” Paul Peikert witnessed identical scenes in Klosterstrasse. “The hurricane-force storm drove thousands of sparks and balls of fire through the smashed windows into apartments,” he wrote. “They found rich pickings in the bedding and cushions. The houses then went up in flames from top to bottom like furnaces.” His vicarage succumbed at 5pm. It burned so swiftly, he was barely able to rescue any of his possessions. Paul Peikert fled to an air-raid shelter further down the road. First the building opposite, then Peikert’s own church began to burn. The house above the shelter caught fire. The priest decided Klosterstrasse was no longer safe and ran to the next block, Alexanderstrasse, still not ablaze. He had been there barely an hour when that street too was devoured by the moloch of the firestorm. The occupants fled “through a corridor of fire” and a shower of a million sparks, past collapsed houses and mountains of rubble. The next street along, Herbert-Welkischstrasse, was also aflame. Only the Oder, a few yards away, offered salvation. But when they reached Kaiserbrücke, the ferocious winds almost hurled them on to the river. The bridge also offered the stragglers “the indescribably tragic sight of the burning city of Breslau, an unforgettable, blood-curdling drama”. It was a sight as mesmerising as it was horrific. “We repeatedly turned around to see this tragic scene,” Paul Peikert wrote. “Breslau burning on the evening and night of Easter Monday was an awful, gruesome sight, the downfall of this beautiful city and its most beautiful part. The dark, cloudy sky glowed red. Huge swathes of smoke hung over the entire city.” The priest and his group fled down the right bank of the Oder, finally finding shelter in the technical high school, his fourth cellar of the evening.
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It was around 8pm when the Soviet onslaught ended. A disquieting silence descended upon Breslau when the bombing and shelling ceased and “one single fiery cloud” hung above the city, Friedrich Grieger observed. The towers of the cathedral still burned, their cupolas “glowing like a beacon in the night, announcing Breslau’s destruction far and wide,” according to Erich Schönfelder. “Like drops of blood, burned out, charred pieces of the tower fall down and the ravenous flames are reflected in the waters of the nearby Oder. The old Breslau is no more!
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Several sisters from Our Lady of Sorrows stuffed essential items into rucksacks, wrapped themselves in damp clothes as shields from the rain of sparks, and set out to offer aid to the people of Carlowitz. “It was the worst journey of my life,” Mother Superior Sigrid Negwer remembered. “The burning city behind us, a tragic, majestic sight. A world going under.” Hugo Hartung’s company spent the night trying to dowse the flames around Matthiasplatz. There was the distant chime of a church bell, moved by the heat – “Breslau’s peal at Easter,” Hartung observed. Soviet biplanes flew low over the city, through the clouds of smoke, strafing rooftops and streets, scattering bombs around Matthiasplatz. “The fire rages through our courtyard, burning pieces of wood and tumbling sparks are carried up by the infernal hurricane, deposited on the rooftops, kindling new fires,” Hartung noted. His company was exhausted, dirty, the men’s eyes smarting from the smoke. The pump no longer drew any water. “Everyone hopes that things will draw to a close quickly.” On Dominsel, Walter Lassmann emerged from a cellar opposite the cathedral with numerous Breslauers taking refuge from the firestorm. “We faced an apocalyptic situation,” he recalled. The entire street was burning: the cathedral, the archbishop’s palace, at least two curiae. “The heat in the narrow Domstrasse was unbelievable. We protected ourselves from the flying sparks using wet cloths held over our faces.” They ran to the end of the street and there, with other survivors, they resolved to make a stand. “We faced the supreme test but our courage and our will to live remained unbroken,” wrote Lassmann. Thirty people formed a chain down to the Oder, where buckets were filled. “Each one of us used every ounce of our strength and our efforts were rewarded,” Walter Lassmann remembered. While everything else around us was in flames, and the sweltering heat became ever more unbearable, while the wild fury of the unchecked fires turned the cathedral, the archbishop’s palace, the remaining curiae of the cathedral’s leading figures into burned-out ruins, our three curiae were spared.”
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The Griegers returned to their apartment – “there’s only the cellar left” – then wondered where they should spend the night. There was a large rabbit hutch in a corner of the botanic garden. The couple cleared it out, put on thick coats, and sat on two small chairs. It was so cold in the depths of night that the couple had to run around to keep warm. They remained there till dawn on the third, then climbed to the attic of what was left of the botanic institute. “We have a panoramic view of almost all of Breslau,” Friedrich Grieger wrote. “It seems as if there’s hardly any of the city left: jagged ruins everywhere.”
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Horst Gleiss and his Hitler Youth unit were roused from their beds around 10pm. The fire they thought they had put out in the ruins of an apartment block in Belltafelstrasse had flared up again. Now it was raging out of control, threatening neighbouring buildings. A bucket chain was hastily formed, while a barricade of horse-drawn carts, tree trunks and sandbags so carefully built to stop the Soviets was quickly dismantled to halt the fire’s spread. It took a good three hours to put the fire out. The boys were rewarded for their efforts by a local shopkeeper who brought out his remaining supply of schnapps and called a toast: down the hatch.
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Some time after 2am on the third, Walter Lassmann gave up his fire-fighting duties and wandered down to the Oder. There was “a magical unreality” about the sight with which he was presented.

It was hard for me to believe that this was no dream, that the scenes before my eyes appeared to come from Hell. It is probably rare for the eyes of man to see what I saw here. I was amazed, bewildered, shaken to the depths of my soul. Behind me the huge flames of the cathedral towers, next to that the sea of flames that was the archbishop’s palace, to the right the bright flames of the imposing Sandkirche, the entire Dominsel was a raging, roaring firestorm. In front of me, on the opposite bank of the Oder, the city burned. Five-storey houses were on fire, every window was lit up as if it were a festival of light. Every now and then a burned-out house collapsed, sending a magnificent shower of sparks high into the sky rather like wonderful fireworks.
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The people of Breslau woke to a light rain falling on their city as dawn broke on 3 April. They found their eyes smarted and stung thanks to the heavy, acrid air and smouldering smoke which hung over the Silesian capital, still ablaze in many places. The smell of burned flesh mixed with the foul stench emanating from the smashed sewer system. There was also an uncanny, discomforting silence this Tuesday morning. “What kind of a ghastly scene awaits us this morning?” wondered Hitler Youth Max Baselt as he woke. His question was soon answered. “Wherever we look, smoking ruins and burned-out houses. Where the firestorm raged there are only mountains of ash, a few stumps.” It was enough, the fifteen-year-old remembered, “to leave even the most hardened person among us lost for words.” The city, wrote
Stabsgefreiter
Theo Klose, “had turned into a blazing pyre. Corpses lay piled up in the streets.” Hermann Nowack watched clearance parties move down Röntgenstrasse and three neighbouring streets. “They load corpses like wood to drive them to the pits.” Hugo Hartung passed “large white parcels” – the dead were wrapped in paper – awaiting burial in the gardens of the Holteihöhe, just along the Oder from the university. The Oder embankment was lined with cadavers of horses and pools of blood. Almost every garden, every allotment had been dug up to accommodate the fallen, while the bombardment unearthed the dead as shells and bombs churned up cemeteries old and new. As for the flames, they had turned the yellow forsythia in the gardens of Matthiasplatz black, but the heat had also caused tulips and hyacinths to bloom.
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And so ended the blackest days in Breslau’s history. The extent of the devastation was almost impossible to comprehend. Sandinsel – in ruins. Dominsel – burned-out; this day, the cupola of the cathedral’s north tower finally gave way and crashed into the nave. It was symbolic, believed sixteen-year-old soldier Hans-Joachim Terp, who recalled an ancient Silesian proverb: “When the Oder flows with blood to the north and the destroyed towers reach for the heavens like scrawny fingers, Breslau will go under.” The cathedral was not the only Breslau church to die that night. Paul Peikert surveyed the damage to his St Mauritiuskirche. The interior was largely untouched, but not its tower. The new clock was wrecked. A bell dating back to 1618 – spared when the Nazis raided Breslau’s churches for metal – had melted. Doors and windows were blown out, the ceiling in the upper vestry had caved in and the tiled roof had been stripped, although the furnishings and decorations inside the church were all intact. The steep roof of the Dorotheenkirche had been stripped of most of its red slates, but the Elisabethkirche continued to tower over the city even if its baroque façade had been wrecked by shells. The list of devastation was almost endless: Neumarkt – burned out, not a single house spared; more than twenty bombs crashed into Hanke’s headquarters in the Oberpräsidium; the city’s principal shopping street, Schweidnitzer Strasse, was ruined; the central post office and the modern giro bank were ruins, so too the portrait gallery and the museum for antiquities and arts; the great market hall in Ritterplatz – wrecked, a huge hole in its roof; there were gaping holes in the west wing of the university, while the remnants of the legal department’s reference library lay scattered along the bank of the Oder, tossed there by soldiers defending the bridge over the river; three Oder crossings now lay partially submerged; the Jahrhunderthalle still stood, but not two of its exhibition halls. And perhaps a few Breslauers raised a wry smile. The fires of Easter 1945 razed the SS headquarters in Sternstrasse.
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