Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (49 page)

46.
Gleiss, iv, pp.860, 883, 886-7 and Hartung, p.85.

47.
Hornig, pp.188-91 and Gleiss, iv, pp.1019-21.

48.
Gleiss, viii, pp.1088-89.

49.
Gleiss, iv, p.1171.

50.
Gleiss, iv, pp.998-9, 1063 and Haas, ii, pp.144-5.

51.
Gleiss, viii, p.1153.

52.
Ibid., viii, p.1188. The revolt was deemed serious enough by Niehoff to report it to the German High Command – a report which was intercepted by British intelligence. See also NA HW1/3744.

53.
Hartung, pp.86-7, 89.

54.
Hornig, p.203.

55.
Gleiss, iv, p.887.

56.
Gleiss, ix, p.178.

Chapter 8

Any Further Sacrifice Is a Crime

Now it’s all over. My ideals are destroyed, Germany lies in ruins.
What will the Russians do with us?

Horst Gleiss

T
he first day of May in Breslau was traditionally one of celebration, a celebration of Nature and, in more recent years, a celebration of the National Socialist ‘people’s community’. “Today we have no time or opportunity to celebrate our May 1,” the fortress newspaper lamented. “Today, for us, it is predominantly a memory and a hope.” Some Breslauers celebrated anyway. “Our doctor, Dr Franz, is plastered and unable to work,” wrote priest Walter Lassmann. Drunken soldiers staggered through the streets yelling, “Enjoy life.” From somewhere the sound of an accordion. Soldiers in uniform danced with each other. One pranced around in his uniform like a horse, barefooted, but also wearing a top hat. “It all gave the impression of a last dance after a wild feast,” Lassmann observed.
¹

There was a strange mood in Breslau as May 1945 began, an unreal feeling, a feeling that the city was trapped between peace and war. There were signs that the great German war machine and the apparatus of Nazi rule were disintegrating. For the last time, during the night the Luftwaffe had dropped supplies over Breslau – seven tons of ammunition. There would be no more; there was no fuel for the aircraft. The guards of Kletschkau prison could also read the writing on the wall. This day they released fifty of the two hundred inmates and kept their rucksacks packed, ready to flee at a moment’s notice.

As for the attackers, a joke was doing the rounds of the Sixth Army which captured the mood of the
frontoviki
perfectly:

Victorious Soviet troops are on the way from Berlin to Moscow for the victory parade. Suddenly they hear explosions and the machine-gun fire.

“Is that our welcoming salute?” asks one soldier.

“No,” says his comrade. “It’s just Sixth Army. It’s still busy conquering Breslau!”
²

Except that Sixth Army wasn’t busy. It had not been busy for several days now. The loudspeakers continued to drone their promises and Soviet aircraft dropped leaflets – “It is madness to continue to fight now,” pleaded the former commander of 16th Panzer Division, captured a few days earlier in Czechoslovakia. There was little actual fighting, but that did not mean zero casualties. At least forty-four
Landsers
died in the fortress on 1 May, among them footballer Hermann Heinzel, a popular defender with Hertha Breslau during the 1930s and ’40s. Six Soviet officers were also laid to rest this day. There are no comparative figures for the ordinary
frontoviki
.

It was at least quiet in Lilienthal on the northern flank. Battalion commander
Major
Adolf Graf von Seidlitz-Sandreczki left his command post to rally his troops in the bunkers and trenches. “Hold out men,” he urged. “We’re all sitting all in the same boat – we don’t want to sink into chaos but to survive. The Lord has protected us from death until now and he will continue to protect us.”
³

In a cellar which served as a temporary hospital near the ruins of the cathedral, Walter Lassmann conducted his first service of the new month as the sun dipped beneath the western horizon. So many people – surgeons, medics, patients – wished to attend that they spilled out of the small room which served as Lassmann’s chapel, and filled the passageways. Whether they believed or not, they prayed and sang. “We beseeched the May Queen to intercede on behalf of all of us and finally bring an end to all the misery and agonising fear,” the priest recalled. “Rarely did we pray with such ardour and sing with such faith as during the May worship in 1945.”
⁴
The May Queen was listening.

There were few radio stations still in German hands as May 1945 dawned. Prague was still broadcasting. So too Bremen. But it was the
Hamburgsender
which was the last major station used by the propaganda machine of the ever-shrinking Reich. Tonight, despite the gravity of Germany’s situation, the programme was unchanged: Wagner’s
Tannhauser
followed by a piano concerto from Weber. As the music ended, the announcer broke into the evening’s entertainment with a warning to listeners to await important news. There was more Wagner,
Götterdämmerung
, but only for three minutes, as the announcer broke in once more. “
Achtung
!
Achtung
! German radio will broadcast an important announcement for the German people from the German Government.” Wagner again,
Das Rheingold
, before another interruption, then finally the adagio from Bruckner’s
Symphony No.7
. At 10.25pm, the music stopped. There were three drum rolls, then the ominous voice of the announcer once again. “It is reported from the Führer’s headquarters that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fell for Germany this afternoon in his command post in the Reich Chancellery, fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism.”

The news was described variously by Breslauers who heard it as a thunderclap, a bolt of lightning, an electric shock. Their reactions, however, differed vastly. In Klaus Franke’s cellar, men stopped playing chess or tossed playing cards to one side. Those who had been asleep threw off their blankets and got up. The artillerymen gathered around their company commander. “
Ja
, men, and now?” the officer looked at them. There was silence in the cellar, save for the ticking of wristwatches. “Now more than ever,
Herr Oberleutnant
,” the men told him in unison. Hans Gottwald, recovering from a bullet wound in a makeshift hospital in Reuschstrasse, observed mixed reactions. “Most of us are paralysed by horror initially, but some comrades also openly show their delight,” he wrote. His comrade Meier beamed. “Thank God the swine’s no longer alive.” Others shared Meier’s relief. “There was an indescribable joyous mood when we heard that,” priest Helmut Richter recalled. “Now we have the fundamental precondition for peace.” And in a command post on the fortress’s northern front, there was silence.
Major
Adolf Graf von Seidlitz-Sandreczki’s turned to his men. His question was brief, simple. “What now?”
⁵

The answer – from Ferdinand Schörner and Karl Hanke – was the same: the struggle would continue. From Schörner, recently promoted field marshal and now named Commander-in-Chief of the German Army by Hitler in his will, the assurance that “the struggle for Germany’s freedom and her future goes on”. From Hanke, named Himmler’s successor as head of the SS in the Führer’s testament, a call to Germans “to do everything in our power to save as many people from Bolshevism as possible”. The
Schlesische Tageszeitung
urged Breslauers to hold out “as long as we have to so that our time in the fortress comes to a happy ending, a reward for all our effort and sacrifices”, while placards quickly appeared around the city –
He lives among us, he fights with us, he fell for us
. The fortress’s senior National Socialist Leadership Officer, Herbert van Bürck, remained committed to the cause. “History teaches us that ideas which have a decisive role in shaping the world often only come to the fore when the original torchbearer of the idea has proven himself through his death,” he explained. “The revolution, for which the Führer has fallen and to which we all belong, must be won.” There would be no surrender. “We must never put our heads on the Bolsheviks’ block as long as we can still challenge them,” van Bürck continued. “In our situation there is only one choice: to be deported to Siberia or, by fighting on, to create the basis for a political change which ensures that the struggle of the German people has not been in vain.”
⁶

Few people rose to Herbert van Bürck’s clarion call. Elderly electrician Hermann Nowack had had his fill of Nazi slogans. As May began, the seventy-one-year-old struggled through the ruins of his city:

Crossed the piles of rubble to Kaiserbrücke. Utter desert. Garvestrasse to Stanitzkistrasse: ruins. Mauritiusplatz: ruins. Brothers’ convent: badly damaged. Brüderstrasse: a lot burned out. Tauentzienstrasse: totally burned out: My son’s house, No.101, razed down to the cellars. Not one slat, only the blackened walls. Goebbels said: “We must be hard.” Now I stand here. Turned to stone, like a rock.
⁷

Postal official Conrad Bischof shared Hermann Nowack’s disgust:

Now Adolf Hitler is dead and he has taken all of us and our beautiful Germany with him. I have been proved right that these fellows are our knights of death. His thousand-year Reich, like everything else, was a complete sham. Three years ago I wrote that not only Germans but the entire world would curse him one day. Now he’s like a gambler at Monte Carlo who’s simply left the game because of his death. That they still call it a hero’s death is neither here nor there; he has plunged 100 million people into misery and left them without jobs and homes.
⁸

Still the dying regime persisted with its lies. The whispering propaganda campaign continued to the bitter end. Panzer divisions were coming from Schweidnitz – some men claimed they could already hear the clatter of tank tracks, or had seen the relief columns on the edge of the fortress – or a ‘panzer corridor’ two dozen miles long would be carved through Lower Silesia, allowing the besieged garrison and civilians to flow out. The lies were not merely spread by Party functionaries, or by junior officers such as Herbert van Bürck. They also came from the upper echelons of the military. As he had done two months before, Ferdinand Schörner assured the fortress commander he would come to his aid. “Niehoff, we will liberate the fortress,” he promised. “Fight to the last round and to the last man.” Hermann Niehoff did not believe him. His staff had chewed over the idea of breaking out – and quickly dismissed it. A breakout would have been “an irresponsible, unworkable and senseless undertaking which would have drowned a terrible death in its own blood”. In the wake of Hitler’s death, the fortress commander had pleaded with the people of Breslau. “Have faith in me in this most difficult hour. Be assured that I shall do what is best for you.” With Hitler dead, with Berlin about to fall, with the full force of the Red Army about to be unleashed against his fortress, Hermann Niehoff could see only one course of action. “
Herr Feldmarschall
,” he told Schörner, “I intend to end the struggle and surrender the city.” As ever, ‘iron Ferdinand’ was inflexible. “Niehoff, I expect you to be loyal to our dead Führer.” Breslau’s commander did not respond. He put the telephone down. And he revealed his decision to no one.
⁹

Shortly after 1pm on 4 May, Niehoff’s staff car pulled up outside the entrance to Staatsbibliothek on the Sandinsel. Four clergy – Catholic bishop Joseph Ferche, in full regalia, and his canon, Joseph Kramer, and Protestants Joachim Konrad and Ernst Hornig – climbed out and were led past numerous guard posts into the bowels of the library cellars. Seated at a table waiting for them were Hermann Niehoff and two of his staff officers. The white-haired Ferche introduced his colleagues, then addressed the fortress commander, calmly but firmly. “
Herr General
, we do not have the right to intervene in your decisions. But we regard it as our duty, before God and before our people, to ask you whether you can still take responsibility for continuing the struggle.” Ernst Hornig now took up the cause. The plight of the city’s civilian populace was pitiful, he told Niehoff. Every day people asked him “Will all of us die beneath the bombs and in fires?” Every day faith in the Party, faith in the leadership declined. People no longer saw any sense in defending Breslau. Perhaps in a few days they would no longer follow orders. “Under these circumstances, can you answer to God for continuing the defence of the city?” the priest asked the general. There was silence in the bunker. Niehoff lowered his head for a good minute, then looked once more at the men of God. “Your concerns are my concerns. Now tell me what I should do.”

The clergymen answered in unison.

“Surrender.”

“
Meine Herren
, you can be certain that I will consider your suggestion very seriously,” Niehoff told them. “You will hear from me shortly.”

Three hours later, the guns on both sides fell silent. Two German officers stood at the corner of the Strasse der SA and Viktoriastrasse under a white flag. They wanted to discuss surrender terms.
¹⁰