Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (53 page)

Hans Gottwald was struck by Nature’s orgy in the gardens on the north-western outskirts of Breslau. “Everything’s sprouting and growing,” he wrote. “The fruit trees are in full bloom and a blackbird occasionally sings.” Such beauty and signs of spring merely made the prisoners’ fate “even more tragic”. There was no time to admire the wonders of Nature. The guards spurred the men on. Beyond Hundsfeld, the prisoners were ordered down a track until they came to a vast camp surrounded by barbed wire with watchtowers every hundred metres. Prisoners milled around between the wooden barrack blocks or dozed on the small patches of grass in the grounds: soldiers, Party officials, police, SS. Just a few weeks earlier, the last had guarded forced labourers in the same camp.
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Upon entering, a soldier’s rucksack was searched by the camp police – Germans – who were overseen by Russian officers. Weapons, ammunition, maps, compasses, candles, all were seized, as well as “other items which caught the guards’ eyes”. Watches were surrendered in a “special ceremony”. A large table covered with the Red Flag was set up in the middle of the camp. Prisoners handed over their watches to Russian officers and women in uniform before being presented with a receipt. Watches would be returned upon a prisoner’s release, the officials explained. “Marshal Stalin does not want to profit from your watches.” The receipts were meaningless. A few days later the German guards searched the prisoners’ possessions once more. They seized the receipts. Life in Hundsfeld was repetitive rather than brutal. It was the food, or lack of it, which prisoners complained about most. Breakfast and evening ‘meal’ consisted of a slice of toast, sometimes burned, and a drink of something the guards called tea or coffee. Lunch was the principal meal – a watery soup, occasionally flavoured with cabbage, potato skins or sauerkraut, accompanied by bread which, if it tasted of anything, tasted of lubricating oil. A few prisoners supplemented their meagre food with the iron rations they had kept from the fighting. Many men went hungry, some died of exhaustion.
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Hundsfeld was not the only concentration camp filled with prisoners once more. Breslau’s defenders were also held at Fünfteichen, once the labour camp for Krupp’s Berthawerk. It had been liberated nearly four months earlier, but there were still the corpses of forced workers littering its grounds. Fünfteichen’s new occupants began to learn about the horrors of Nazi rule. They found the barracks infested with lice. They slept in the same bunks as concentration camp inmates had once used – bunks just twenty inches apart. And they found the kitchens simply could not cope with an influx of between 12,000 and 15,000 prisoners; there were pots and pans to cook for barely 1,000 inmates.
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Just as Fünfteichen had been brought back into use, so there was soon traffic along the railway line which ran past it. Every day sixteen-year-old Christian Lüdke watched trains roll past the camp heading east, packed with all manner of loot, from pianos to bicycles. He also saw trains carrying German prisoners “with anxious faces”.
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They came from Breslau.

In all, 1,135 officers and 43,728 men marched into captivity. They left behind more than 250 field guns and mortars, 1,750 machine-guns, 30,000 rifles, plus twenty armoured vehicles and nearly 350 cars and trucks. Some 50 panzers and
Sturmgeschütze
had been destroyed during the three-month siege, plus well over 120 mortars, guns and batteries, while Red Army anti-aircraft gunners reckoned they shot down in excess of 130 German aircraft and gliders.

As for the human cost of battle, a tally of dog tags suggests 5,663 men were killed defending Fortress Breslau. In March, seventy
Landsers
died every day. In April, sixty-five. An estimated 23,000 soldiers were wounded – 6,000 were being treated in the cellar hospitals on the day of capitulation alone. In short, more than half the soldiers and
Volkssturm
in Breslau became casualties. Soviet dead numbered fewer than 8,000: 763 officers buried on the southern edge of the city, 7,121 men in a large cemetery not far from Südpark.

There is little agreement on civilian losses. At least sixty-four soldiers and civilians were hanged or shot by fortress authorities, mostly for desertion or plundering, although the true figure is thought to be four times higher. Some 3,000 Breslauers committed suicide. A similar number were killed building Hanke’s runway, although some estimates believe the figure was as high as 13,000. Total civilian dead numbered anywhere between 10,000 and 80,000 – the latter figure was provided by the senior doctor on the fortress’s staff, Paul Mehling; he told his captors that 50,000 civilians died in the first six weeks of encirclement, 30,000 between Easter and the city’s surrender. Thousands more died before the siege: 18,000 people froze during the Kanth death march while the corpses of 90,000 people were revealed in the ditches and fields of Lower Silesia when the ice and snow melted.
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The city they inhabited or defended suffered destruction greater than Berlin, greater even than Dresden – the byword for devastation in the popular memory of World War II. In twelve weeks of encirclement, the perimeter had been halved to around two dozen miles. Most of northern and eastern Breslau and the outlying villages were still in German hands – and largely intact. The same could not be said for the city’s southern and western suburbs. The latter were all lost – Mochbern, Gandau, Gräbschen, and with them the airfield and Linke Hofmann works. In the south, the front line ran down the middle of Augustastrasse, cutting the city’s finest boulevard, Strasse der SA, in two. Soviet troops stood less than half a mile from the central station and were contesting the yards of the Freiburger Bahnhof, barely half a mile from the Ring. Two-thirds of Breslau were in ruins, two-thirds of its industry damaged or destroyed. Two in every three homes or apartment blocks were no longer habitable. Seven out of ten high schools were in ruins. Almost the entire tram and rail network was wrecked, while every electricity line and three quarters of telephone wires were down. The water mains had been damaged or destroyed in 3,000 locations while the sewage system was broken in 7,000 places. Of the 400 miles of roads and streets in Breslau, nearly 200 were impassable, buried beneath 600 million cubic feet of rubble and ash. The Botanic Gardens had been ploughed up for ammunition bunkers, the Scheitniger Park scarred by trenches, bomb craters and mass graves. Four hundred of the six hundred memorials and monuments scattered around the city were gone. Other treasures fared no better. Most of the city’s museums had been destroyed – although at least most of their collections had been evacuated. Little was left of Karl Hanke’s former seat of power. The Oberpräsidium in the Palais Hatzfeld was hit by twenty-one bombs on Easter Monday alone. That other bastion of authority for much of the siege, the Liebichshöhe, had largely survived despite the pounding it received, with the exception of its ornate tower. The Jahrhunderthalle was mainly intact, so too the technical college and central station. The university was not so fortunate. Its southern wing and music hall were wrecked, its library badly damaged; only a fraction of the volumes it once held were not destroyed. At least the university’s magnificent eighteenth-century baroque hall, the Aula Leopoldina, lived on. So too did the Rathaus, apart from several shell hits to its southern gable. Only one wing of the Schloss was still standing, while Neumarkt and Königsplatz were in ruins, as was most of the Dominsel. Breslau’s many churches had suffered terribly during the siege: the Canisius and Luther had been flattened to make way for Hanke’s runway, the Begräbnis, Bernhardin, Hedwig, Georg, Erlöser, Paulus, Savaltor, Trinitatis were all destroyed, the Adalbert, Annen, Barbara, Holz, Kreuz, Konrad, Mauritius, Michaelis, Nikolaus, Sand, Vincenz burned out, and the cathedral was seventy per cent destroyed.
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Such a scale of devastation was inevitable. Breslau lay under siege for more than eighty days, longer than every other fortress in the East: Danzig, Königsberg, Schneidemühl, Kolberg, Poznań and, of course, Berlin. Nazi propaganda talked about
Das Wunder von Breslau
– the miracle of Breslau. The fifteen-week defence of the city was no miracle. It was the result of a resolute, nay ruthless, German leadership, redoubtable defenders with a remarkable propensity for improvisation, but above all a lack of will on the part of the Soviets to crush the fortress on the Oder. Lack of will was compounded by less than inspired Soviet conduct of the battle. To be sure, Vladimir Gluzdovski was hampered by a lack of resources and reined in by Ivan Konev – especially after Easter. But the attacks Sixth Army did launch were poorly co-ordinated. Never did the Soviets attempt to squeeze the pocket from every side simultaneously; a concerted assault on the city – particularly on 1 or 2 April – would probably have caused Breslau’s fall. Instead, Hans von Ahlfen and his successor Hermann Niehoff continued to tie down Soviet troops, slowing their westward advance, thus allowing thousands of civilians to reach safety before their towns and villages were captured. It is an argument which is only partly valid. Tie down the Red Army Breslau did – the fortress commanders believed the city was invested by a force three times the size of their garrison, 150,000 men in all (Soviet sources claim there were never more than 65,000 troops surrounding Breslau). But by Easter, the Soviet leadership had become quite content to leave barely 50,000 troops around Breslau, unleashing a force of more than two million men against Berlin. Fortress Breslau had become little more than an irritant to the Red Army.
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Three days after the Red Army marched into the capital of Silesia, posters began to appear on the city’s walls – in many cases the remains of walls:

To the German populace

The criminal war begun by Hitler is over!

Nazi propaganda terrified you with ‘atrocities’ which reportedly accompany the Red Army’s march into Germany. The Nazis deliberately deceived you and slandered the Red Army when they claimed that it was the goal of the Red Army to wipe out the German people.

The Red Army never had the task of wiping out the German people …

No danger threatens the civilian populace in the area occupied by the Red Army.

Only those who try to fight against the Red Army will be severely and brutally punished according to the laws of war …

The Red Army brings peace for every German who has broken away from the Hitler clique and returned to peaceful work.
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A Russian major claimed the Red Army was bringing order to Breslau, while the
Izvestia
special correspondent assured his readers in the Motherland that “after the bitter, bloody fighting in Breslau, the great calm began”.
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There was no great calm in Breslau, no peace, no order. Not in the first few days after the surrender at any rate. Plunder, pillage and rape were the orders of the day.

The occupier sought money, schnapps and women – “the latter were especially coveted” – recalled pharmacist Hanns Hoffmann (he might have added watches and bicycles to his list). Hoffmann had dismissed stories of assault and rape as Nazi propaganda. Now he realized they were not untrue. Women frequently came to him for medicine and recounted their horrific experiences. “Russians in groups of up to ten hunted down twelve-year-old girls, women were assaulted in such numbers that they were driven to the clinics because they were no longer able to walk, even seventy or eighty-year-old women were not spared by these fiends who apparently had no understanding of beauty or humanity,” the chemist wrote. Many Breslauers were convinced the Russians had been given free rein to rape and pillage. Some said for a few days, others a week, others still longer. At the very least, it seemed the people of Breslau were “considered fair game” by their new masters, former
Volkssturm
soldier Otto Rothkugel observed. To Rothkugel, the Russians were never Russians, never Soviets, never Ukrainians, never Mongols, Georgians, Uzbeks. They were always
Bestien
– beasts, a word which appears frequently in Breslauers’ descriptions of the days following the surrender. “The Russians rooted out women from the cellars of bombed-out houses,” Rothkugel wrote. “Cries of fear rang out when they arrived. They fell upon their defenceless victims like madmen.” Whenever a Russian forced his way into houses in Conrad Schumacher’s suburb of Wilhelmsruh in the north-east of the city, the occupant would rush into the street and cry for help. Neighbours would join them in the street and the shouting grew louder. “The entire district echoed with these cries,” Schumacher remembered. “They were horrific to listen to, especially at night.” Hendrik Verton watched as the Red Cross sister who had tended to his gunshot wound for the past ten days was raped by “several drunken Russians”. The woman’s fiancée, a medic in the same first aid post in Schweidnitzer Strasse, tried to stop them. He was beaten furiously. Not every woman of Breslau was a victim of the Red Army, however. As they had done during the siege, some women willingly slept with the soldiers to satisfy their lust or for personal gain. The uniforms of the masters had changed, but not human desires. And a handful of Breslauers simply resigned themselves to their fate. “It’s always like this when victors enter a city,” post official Conrad Bischof wrote. “Our soldiers have not and do not behave any differently in enemy territory.”
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The city’s underground communist, socialist and anti-fascist movements, who had welcomed the Red Army’s arrival “in the warmest possible manner” quickly became disillusioned. “It did not matter whether someone had been a Fascist or anti-Fascist; all that mattered was that they were German!” decorator Georg Fritsch recalled bitterly. Fritsch had been an opponent of the Nazi regime and hoped the fact would curry favour with the city’s new masters. It did not. Another Breslau communist was struck by the contradictory nature of the occupiers. A Russian soldier could “share his last piece of bread with German children” or a Russian truck driver could “pick up an old woman and her half-broken handcarts on a country lane and bring her home”. But this was perhaps the same Russian who “lay in wait at a cemetery to attack women and young girls, to rob and rape them”.
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