Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (50 page)

Karl Hanke had been involved neither in the discussions with Breslau’s clergy nor in Hermann Niehoff’s decision to send negotiators across the lines – but he heard about them. Late on the fourth he stormed into the cellars of the Staatsbibliothek.

“General, I’ve just learned that you want to surrender!”

“You heard correctly,
Gauleiter
, I am preparing to surrender.”

“Then I must have you arrested, general!”

“If anyone is doing the arresting,
Gauleiter
, then it’s probably me!”

There was an awkward silence before Hanke spoke once more.

“Forgive my threat, it was not meant as such. But what should I do?”

Niehoff suggested Hanke take his own life. “I can’t do that,” the
Gauleiter
insisted. “I’m still so young. I must live. If I have to wander around the world like a tramp …” The sentence trailed off. “General, help me!”

Niehoff offered to disguise Hanke as a front-line soldier, a
Grenadier
Meier. The
Gauleiter
shook his head. “I’d be recognised and betrayed in half an hour.” Niehoff offered bandages, perhaps some plasters. Again Hanke declined. “That’s no use either. I’ll be betrayed just as quickly.”

“Then there’s only one thing left for you,” the general said. “When it’s dark tonight, I’ll clear a path for you through the minefields. You can sneak out of the city. Behind the Russian lines you will be on your own.”

As Hanke considered the general’s proposal, Niehoff added bluntly: “That’s the only choice you have left.” But Karl Hanke had other plans.
¹¹

With Berlin subdued, the Red Army and Red Air Force could devote their full wrath to Hitler’s last fortress. Soviet loudspeakers declared they would level Breslau with the earth. Mid-morning on Saturday 5 May, there was a portent of the impending onslaught. Despite the previous afternoon’s tentative surrender negotiations, the bombers were unleashed once more: countless twin-engined aircraft escorted by fighters. The raid caught many Breslauers by surprise. Several bombs straddled Benderplatz, killing at least ten people, including a soldier who was decapitated by the force of the blast. The bombs this day badly damaged two churches in Zimpel, a suburb largely untouched by the war. In the city centre, the Matthias school was destroyed, houses in the narrow streets around the university collapsed, burying inhabitants alive. After the attack there was another tense cease-fire, this time for three hours – one last attempt to persuade the fortress to surrender before the final onslaught. Under a white flag, Soviet negotiators crossed the lines, accompanied by prisoners captured at Stalingrad – proof of fair treatment for German soldiers in Russian hands. In Viktoriastrasse, Hitler Youth Max Baselt watched a few Ivans tentatively emerge from their trenches and beckon the Germans over. Some
Landsers
heeded the call. In no-man’s land they exchanged cigarettes, a few even played football. For a while friend and foe fraternized, until a German officer appeared and ordered the men back to their positions. The Russians also sheepishly returned to their lines.
¹²

As the Soviet envoys crossed the lines, Hermann Niehoff summoned his officers in his headquarters beneath the Staatsbibliothek. While the men gathered, a brief signal from Seventeenth Army was handed to the fortress commander: “Germany’s flags are lowered in proud sorrow in tribute of the resolve of the garrison and the self-sacrifice of the populace of Breslau.”
¹³
The Reich expected Breslau to surrender – and that was what Hermann Niehoff intended to do. “The clouds of an impending storm, which the city would no longer be able to withstand, were gathering over Breslau,” he wrote later. It was time to end the struggle, as he explained to his staff.

Meine Herren
, I have called you together for a final roll-call. What has been achieved by you, by our men and the civilian population, needs no words. One day history will pass judgment.

Hitler is dead. Berlin has fallen. The Eastern and Western Allies have shaken hands in the heart of Germany. There is no longer any reason to continue the struggle for Breslau. Any further sacrifice is a crime. I have decided to end the fighting and to offer to surrender the city and the garrison to the enemy under honourable terms. We have fired our last round. We have done our duty as the law dictated.

Every man agreed except Otto Herzog, an inveterate Nazi who had been rewarded with the
Ritterkreuz
for his leadership of Breslau’s
Volkssturm
. In a few weeks, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union would be at war and the German Army would once again be marching, he told Niehoff as he left the command bunker. Herzog’s fate is unclear. Some reports say he shot himself, others that he tried to escape the fortress and was killed when his car struck a mine.
¹⁴

Saturday night was warm and languid. On the Russian side of the lines, loudspeakers repeatedly broadcast the surrender terms interspersed with music, while the
frontoviki
fired star shells, tracer and rockets in celebration. And behind the German front, Breslau burned – as on every night for the past three months. The flames ‘cooked off’ some infantry ammunition which roared skywards. And yet, every Breslauer, every defender knew that peace was at hand. “There’s a feeling that the end of a three-month struggle – waged with such fury on both sides – is in the air,” Max Baselt wrote. In these final hours, the defenders of Breslau became wistful. Now was no time to die. “Thoughts drift far, far away,” one
Landser
wrote. “We dream of bygone days, scenes appear before our eyes which seem to have been long since forgotten. We long for our mothers, the maidens whom we love, the people who are dear to us. We see them in front of us, they speak to us, we caress them, speak to them. Everything is so clear.” From FAMO employee Carl Völkel, a simple prayer: “May we still get through these final hours in the fortress.”
¹⁵

In western Breslau, battalion commander Captain Vasiliya Grigorievich Kostielniuka was directing one more raid by the men of 135th Rifle Division. Five times his division had been singled out for praise by the Red Army’s command for its performance on Polish soil, culminating in its receiving the Order of the Red Banner. The battles of 1945 had cost it 4,000 men. And now, on the eve of victory, a bullet fired by a German sniper in one of Breslau’s church towers struck down Vasiliya Kostielniuka. He was probably the division’s final casualty of the Great Patriotic War.
¹⁶

Saturday was turning to Sunday as a column of Red Army trucks headed down Frankfurter Strasse, past the ruins of Gandau airfield, under the railway underpass and into the western suburbs of Breslau. The vehicles halted and three platoons of soldiers, some eighty men in all, jumped out. From here it was perhaps 1,000 yards to the front line in Friedrich Karl Strasse, the men’s objectives. This night, for the first time during the siege of Breslau, for the
only
time during the siege of Breslau, German would face German as the anti-Fascists of the
Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland
– National Committee for Free Germany – tried to infiltrate the defenders’ lines with the aim of seizing the former offices of a pensions company, now the headquarters of an SS battalion. After struggling to orient themselves amid the ruins of the West End, the three platoons crawled their way through fences and rubble as far as Friedrich Karl Strasse. Some of the men were spotted and snipers open fired. One of the platoon leaders stepped into the light and yelled out: “You moron, if you don’t stop shooting, I’ll bash your head in.” The shooting stopped. Three SS guards were taken prisoner in a house and led back through Soviet lines, but it proved impossible to sneak inside the battalion command post, defended by at least one machine-gun. Instead, the anti-Fascists learned the meaning of street fighting as
Panzerfaust
and machine-guns were brought to bear against them. The operation’s commander,
Leutnant
Horst Vieth, was mortally wounded by a burst from a machine-pistol during a skirmish for rooms in one apartment block. Shortly afterwards, as the first signs of dawn began to appear in the East, the mission was abandoned. The NKFD troops and their Soviet radiomen were ordered back to Russian lines. They had captured perhaps a dozen German soldiers. Otherwise, the raid had been a complete failure.
¹⁷

The inmates of Kletschkau prison awoke on Sunday, 6 May to find the three cells of condemned inmates empty, the doors wide open. Some time during the night, eighteen men and one woman had been ordered into the field behind the prison where each one was dispatched by a shot to the back of the neck. Their corpses were tossed into a pit next to barracks for foreign workers, where soil, ash, jars of food and other rubbish was thrown on top of them. At least one of the prisoners struggled to the very end. His face was swollen, his eyes were battered, his right hand still clasped a tuft of hair.
¹⁸

The typesetters on the
Schlesische Tageszeitung
finished composing the copy of the day’s edition, the 122nd of the sixteenth year of publication. It did not take them long; the ‘fortress newspaper’ had been reduced not merely to a single sheet of paper, but a single side.
Widerstand gegen die Sowjets geht weiter
! – Resistance against the Soviets continues – screamed the headline next to a eulogy to the defenders of Breslau – “a shining example to the entire German people”. Rather less prominence was given to the surrender of Berlin, the capture of Hamburg or the fact that the British had seized Kiel. And there was no mention of Breslau’s imminent capitulation.
¹⁹

It was light by the time Karl Hanke arrived in the grounds of the Jahrhunderthalle where a young
Leutnant
was waiting for him. Helmut Alsleben had wheeled a small Fieseler Storch reconnaissance aircraft out of one of the hall’s side buildings and unfolded its wings. The Storch was the only airworthy aircraft in the fortress, held in storage for Hermann Niehoff to use at his discretion. He never did.

The Storch’s only passenger was the
Gauleiter
of Breslau, dressed in the ill-fitting uniform of an ordinary soldier. Karl Hanke had commandeered Niehoff’s aircraft to reach Hirschberg, sixty miles to the southwest, before crossing the border to join German forces in Bohemia and Moravia. Around 5.30am, Alsleben and Hanke took off, flying south, low over the ruins of Breslau. For the first ten miles, the flight passed without incident. But then the Storch was struck by machine-gun fire. The engine stuttered on for another mile before Alsleben set the aircraft down on the slopes of the Zobten to effect emergency repairs. With the fuel tank patched up, the Storch was airborne again for a flight of no more than a dozen miles to the airfield at Schweidnitz, where a panzer officer was waiting for Breslau’s
Gauleiter
.
²⁰

Breslauers were waking to a beautiful spring morning. “A peaceful calm ruled,” recalled chemist Hanns Hoffmann. “No shell fire, no bombs exploding, and Nature had put on her Sunday best.” Pale figures crawled out of cellars and filled their lungs with the fresh May air.
²¹

In the basement of the Staatsbibliothek, Hermann Niehoff was feeling harassed. “Have you any idea where the
Gauleiter
is?” his officers asked him. Then came the telephone calls, finally a visit from one of Karl Hanke’s staff. As officers, soldiers and Party officials searched the fortress for Karl Hanke, a breathless soldier reported to his commander. “
Herr General
, your Fieseler Storch has gone.” There was further confirmation in the form of a terse signal from Hirschberg handed to Niehoff: Gauleiter
Hanke, lightly wounded, has just landed here with faulty machine
.
²²

Leo Hartmann drove his
Sturmgeschütz
through the city for the final time. The guns on both sides were silent, the only noise came from the civilian populace who had spilled into the streets. “You poor soldiers!” an elderly woman called out at the gun commander. “Now you must go into captivity!”
²³

Throughout the siege, the brutal Party leader of Breslau
Mitte
– central – liked nothing better than a roast on a Sunday, usually rabbit. Today was no different for
Ortsgruppenleiter
Hass in the house he had occupied when its Jewish owners had been deported. The family’s elderly tomcat had stayed behind where he was pampered by Hass’s housekeepers – until the day when they had nothing more to give him. Today was that day. The cat was killed, cooked and served to the Nazi. It was his last meal. Satiated, Hass shot himself.
²⁴

The fate of more than 100,000 men and women, warriors and civilians, young and old, weighed more heavily on the mind of Hermann Niehoff than the fate of one Nazi overlord. “Never in the two world wars did I struggle with my conscience – daily and hourly – as much as I did during the struggle for Breslau,” the general recounted later. Today, for the final time, he would try to influence the fates of the Breslauers entrusted to him. At 3pm, two Soviet negotiators – the Chief of Staff of XXII Infantry Corps, Colonel Tchitschin, and interpreter Major Omar Jachjavev – were ushered into Niehoff’s command post. Jachjavev eyed up the maps and charts on the walls of the fortress commander’s office while his colonel pulled a letter from his pocket. One of Niehoff’s staff began to translate – “Proposal for an honourable surrender of the city and garrison of Fortress Breslau …” – as Omar Jachjavev gathered up all the useful documents and maps he could find and put them in a trunk. To Hermann Niehoff, the terms sounded “unusually magnanimous”. There was one snag, however. Neither Tchitschin nor Jachjavev had any authority. Negotiations with them, however correct, even cordial, were useless. The fortress commander resolved to sit down with his opposite number. As he left his bunker with the two Soviet officers, he turned to his operations officer Albrecht Otto. “If I don’t come back, continue the fight.”
²⁵