Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (5 page)

The end of war would offer no salvation. Breslau’s German inhabitants would be driven out of their homes, driven out of their city, driven westwards. Their city would rise again, rebuilt not by Germans but by Poles, rebuilt not as Breslau but as Wrocław.

Such was the price demanded of Hitler’s last fortress.

Notes

1.
Völkischer Beobachter
, 27/7/38.

2.
TB Goebbels, 23/4/38.

3.
Völkischer Beobachter
, 26/7/38.

4.
Lukas, Oskar,
Breslau: Bekenntnis zu Deutschland
, pp.43-4.

5.
Völkischer Beobachter
, 30/8/38 and TB Goebbels, 30/7/38.

6.
Frodien, pp.134-7, TB Goebbels, 1/8/38 and
Völkischer Beobachter
, 1/8/38.

7.
Gleiss,
Breslauer Apokalypse
, i, p.204. Hereafter cited as Gleiss.

8.
Frodien, pp.134, 138.

Chapter 1

The Happy Fusion

The war on the Eastern Front only interests me when
the first Russians appear before Namslau

Gauleiter
Karl Hanke

T
he passing of the old year and the start of the new had always been a cause for celebration for Breslauers. In the final hour, its residents converged on the Ring, at first a trickle, then a deluge, waiting tensely for the clock on the Rathaus to strike twelve. And when it did, the square reverberated to cries of “
Prosit Neujahr
”. A choral fanfare sounded from the tower of the town hall. In the distance, the deep chimes of the bells of St Elisabeth and St Maria Magdalena churches could be heard. For fifteen minutes or so the crowd milled around, then began to drift away down the maze of alleys and streets leading from the square, bound for the suburbs. A few called in at Breslau’s restaurants or bierkellers, but most went home.

Breslauers had celebrated
Silvesternacht
, as Germans call New Year’s Eve, like this for as long as any of them could remember. But the final day of 1944 was different. Inhabitants stayed at home. They waited tensely for midnight, not to hear the chimes of St Elisabeth or Maria Magdalene, but to hear the words of their leader. At the end of this darkest of years for the Reich, perhaps he might offer hope, even assurances.

Fifteen-year-old Peter Bannert sat down to a festive meal with his newly acquired friends in a former school on the edge of the city centre. Bannert had arrived in the Silesian capital in the first days of December, summoned from the small town of Habelschwerdt, sixty miles away, by the regional
Hitlerjugend
leadership. They gave him the grandiose title
Kriegseinsatzführer
– war service leader. The reality was rather less grand: making a tally of uniforms and equipment in warehouses across Silesia. He was one of eighteen schoolboys billeted in the old Andersenstrasse school, now makeshift quarters for youths called up to serve the Reich. A twenty-year-old blonde, “who embodied the ideal of an Aryan woman” with her flaxen hair neatly plaited in buns, looked after the boys, providing meals and keeping an eye on the accommodation. Tonight she laid on a substantial spread to mark 1944’s passing.

At his villa on the edge of Lake Bogensee, two dozen miles north of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels struggled valiantly to carve the roast goose on his plate into edible pieces. There was an awkward silence around the dinner table as the Propaganda Minister’s guests, his secretary Wilfried von Oven, the wife of the Nazis’ favourite stage and fashion designer Benno von Arent, and Breslau
Gauleiter
Karl Hanke played with their tough slices of goose. Finally, the master of the house broke the silence. “Tell me, my dear, is your goose leg as incredibly tough as mine?” Lively discussion ensued. It was, Hanke said, a good sign of Germany’s food supplies that in the sixth year of war such an old goose could have survived to be served.

Later, hosts and guests retired to the hall and sat in front of an open fire. Joseph Goebbels was glad to see the back of 1944 – “the worst year of my entire life. I hope Fate will spare us having to endure another year like it.” Karl Hanke assured him it would. He had mobilised all of his
Gau
, Lower Silesia, to dig an intricate network of fortifications – trenches and anti-tank ditches. “People in the East are convinced that we will succeed in holding the Soviets at bay in their impending offensive.” As the clock approached midnight, the radio was turned up to full volume, while servants brought in several bottles of champagne. Through the receiver came the voice of veteran character actor Heinrich George reading Clausewitz’s political will. As George came to the final sentence – “I would only feel happy if I found a glorious end in a magnificent struggle for the freedom and dignity of the Fatherland” – his words merged with the strains of the national anthem played on a violin. Twelve strokes brought 1944 to a close. With the final stroke, the iron clang of the Rhine bell in Cologne cathedral began and a choir sang
O, Deutschland hoch in Ehren
. Goebbels and his guests stood up. Frau Goebbels began to cry. Everyone raised their glasses and toasted each other.

Satiated by his meal, Peter Bannert listened to the evening’s entertainment – stirring speeches by the boyfriend of his young maid, a senior
Hitlerjugend
leader. The youth read some Nietzsche, a few extracts from
Mein Kampf
. “I did not understand the content, but the rousing words left me awestruck.” The small group downed several glasses of wine. Suddenly, the leader leapt up, pulled out his pistol and yelled: “I will defend my girlfriend and myself against the Russians with this weapon!” No one said a word. The silence was broken by the clocks of Breslau’s churches striking midnight.
¹

The radio’s speaker reverberated to the sound of Hitler’s beloved
Badenweiler Marsch
, before, at five minutes after twelve, the Führer himself spoke. For the next half hour it was a rather subdued – Goebbels preferred to call it “a firm and certain” – Adolf Hitler who addressed his nation. He offered his people no certainties, no specifics, no hopes of ‘wonder weapons’. Germany, he assured them,
would
not lose the war because it
could
not lose the war. “A people which achieves so many incredible things at the front and at home, a people which suffers and endures so many terrible things, can never go under.”
²

Adolf Hitler was right. The German people would not go under in 1945. But many of their cities would: in Berlin, one fifth of all buildings – one in every two in the city centre – were destroyed; in Dresden, a byword for devastation, two out of every five homes had been reduced to ruins; the figure in Hamburg was three out of five. And in one city, seven out of ten homes were devastated. That city was Breslau.

The name is thought to come from Vratislav I, but people lived there long before the Bohemians laid claim to the city. They settled there because the river which cut through the land was passable, fragmenting into rivulets which created a dozen islands, where two ancient trade routes intersected, the Amber Road from the Baltic to the Adriatic and the
Via Regia
from the Rhineland to Silesia. Vratislav either built or bolstered a small fortress on an island on the right bank of the Oder. By the beginning of the first millennium Bohemian rule had been usurped by Polish, and Wrotizla, as it was known, had grown beyond the original fortress to hold a population of around 1,000, including the city’s first bishop. Wrotizla would fall under the rule of first the Poles, then the Piast dynasty for the next three centuries; but for Nazi historians the defining moment in Breslau’s early history came in the year 1241 when the Mongols invaded. Inhabitants either fled west or withdrew to the fortified islands, razing the rest of the city. The Mongols invested Wrotizla briefly, then continued into the heart of Europe where they met the armies of Heinrich II – ‘The Pious’ – the city’s Piast ruler, on the battlefield at Wahlstatt, three dozen miles west of Wrotizla. The battle and Heinrich’s stand would enter Nazi mythology – they would frequently draw parallels between the Mongols and the ‘Asiatic hordes’ of 1945 – but the truth was that Heinrich’s armies were slaughtered, their leader decapitated. The Mongols advanced no farther westwards, however; internal politics rather than Heinrich the Pious and his knights led the invaders from the steppe to return to the east.

In 1241 Wrotizla was destroyed and reborn. To the Nazis, 1241 was the year Breslau was born – they would celebrate its 700th birthday in 1941. In the wake of the Mongol invasion, Third Reich histories proclaimed, “Breslau was built anew by German settlers as a German city and has remained so until the present day.”
³
Latin and German became the sole official languages. The heart of Wrotizla – also known as Presslau, Bresslau and, for the first time, Breslau – shifted from the right bank of the Oder to the left. A large market square, the Ring, became the focal point of the new city; a new cathedral, or Dom, began to grow on the site of the old city, giving name to the land around it,
Dominsel
– cathedral island.
^*
As Breslau flourished thanks to trade between East and West, and goods from the Netherlands, Hungary, Russia, southern Germany, Prussia and Poland were exchanged at its markets, it earned the trappings of a great city and gained the title
die Blume Europas
– the flower of Europe – courtesy of the seventeenth-century Silesian historian Nicolaus Henel von Hennenfeld. The flower possessed a myriad of churches – the twin-towered present-day cathedral, built between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Elisabethkirche with the highest steeple in the city, the Gothic St Maria on the Sand on Sandinsel, the imposing Kreuzkirche with its steep roof and three naves; there was a university, a library holding maps, manuscripts and the oldest printed volume in the city,
Statuta synodalia episcoporum Vratislaviensium
; and in the Ring, the city’s defining image, the Rathaus – the city hall. Built over a period of more than 200 years, the red-brick landmark is regarded as one of the finest examples of late Gothic architecture with a particularly ornate eastern gable featuring an astronomical clock and numerous pinnacles. On the south-facing façade stand two bays depicting life in the city in the fifteenth century, while the western gable is dominated by the 200ft tower. Below ground, in the Rathaus’ great vaults, Breslau’s most famous hostelry, the Schweidnitzer Keller, thrived.

While Breslau prospered, the city changed rulers frequently: Bohemia until the early sixteenth Century, the Habsburgs for the next 200 or so years, Prussia from 1741 until the formation of Germany 130 years later. Prussian rule began largely peacefully, but twice the city fell into the hands of invaders, first to the Austrians during the Seven Years’ War, then to Napoleon’s armies in early 1807 after a brief but bloody siege which saw much of the suburbs destroyed. Determined that Breslau would never again offer resistance to an invader, the French had the city’s ramparts and fortifications pulled down. Walls can be broken, but not a spirit. Six years later, with Napoleon tottering after his mauling in Russia, Breslau was the wellspring of revolt. The city’s university was the heart of the uprising. Volunteers who took up arms gave rise to Germany’s national colours – black, red and gold. And in the Schloss, Friedrich Wilhelm III, issued a legendary appeal, ‘
An mein Volk
’ – to my people – which captured the mood of the 1813 perfectly. “This is the final decisive struggle for our existence, our independence, our prosperity,” the king told his subjects. “There is no alternative than an honourable peace or heroic destruction.”

At the time of Friedrich Wilhelm III’s appeal, the city counted 70,000 inhabitants – and was growing rapidly. With the ramparts gone, Breslau began to expand beyond its former limits. Wide promenades, public gardens and fine houses dominated the suburb of Schweidnitz, south of the old town, while “high chimneys and the howl of machines”
⁴
dominated Nikolai to the west. Even before the railways came to the city in the 1840s (the imposing
Hauptbahnhof
– central station – was built a decade later on what was then the southern edge of Breslau), Gottfried Linke was building his first hundred railway carriages. There was a thriving woollen industry. There were firms producing steam engines, powered by Silesia’s rich seams of coal, mills, breweries, oil refineries, gas works, a fledgling chemical industry; there were firms producing clothes (more than thirty firms producing straw hats alone) and furniture, and paper mills on the banks of the Oder. The railways and industrialisation led to an influx of people from the countryside. By 1840, the city’s population had topped 100,000. It doubled in the next three decades and more than doubled again by the turn of the twentieth century. It was a reasonably cosmopolitan population: a large Jewish populace and three Poles for every hundred Germans. They were educated at a growing network of public schools and, from 1910, a technical university. They travelled on an extensive tram network which spanned the Oder on a flurry of new bridges. They were treated at numerous new hospitals, while spiritual needs were catered for by a host of new churches – the neo-Gothic Lutherkirche which dominated the suburb of Scheitnig with its 300ft spire, or the rather less forbidding St John the Baptist in Kleinburg in the south of the city. Breslauers could survey their metropolis by climbing some of these church steeples, or from the top of the 140ft water tower in the south of the city and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial in the north. There was entertainment for the few – opera at the new Stadttheater, singing festivals, museums, sprawling public parks; and for the masses – the variety theatres such as the Viktoria, the circus, the zoo, and, by 1900, the first cinemas. Such distractions perhaps took the minds of the working classes off their wretched lives in the city’s slums where conditions were fearful – and would persist as such well into the 1930s. Breslau’s wealthy and poor united in 1913, as they did throughout the Reich, to celebrate the centennial of throwing off the Napoleonic yoke. They did so at a huge new exhibition ground on the north-east of the city centre. There were pavilions, gardens, a lake with a pergola, and at the heart of the site, the largest reinforced concrete building in the world at the time, the huge domed
Jahrhunderthalle
– Century Hall. Here up to 10,000 people at a time could watch sport or theatre, industry could stage trade fairs, and politicians could – and would – stage rallies.