Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (57 page)

What saved me this whole time were the many prayers which my mother had taught me. I was no longer very religious, of course, that had been driven out of us in the
Hitlerjugend
, but I composed prayers in my own way. I asked the Lord to give me a sign if I still had any chance of a sign. I did not know what kind of sign it would be. Suddenly a great tit went for the bars in front of the window. It sat there for a long time and looked straight at me – as if it was the sign, as if it wanted to say: I bring you the news you’ve been longing for.

After several months in Kletschkau prison, Kindler’s sentence was commuted to fifteen years’ hard labour in Pomerania. He was finally released in 1956. By then, Breslau had long since been cleansed of Germans.
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To thousands of Germans, Breslau and Silesia still offered sanctuary. Displaced and evacuated by the war, sent west in the face of the Red Army, by mid-summer 1945 they were streaming eastwards, driven by a single thought:
Heimat
– home. Most got no further than the Oder or the Neisse. The small city of Görlitz, which straddles the Neisse ninety miles west of Breslau, was the centre of the maelstrom. Each day, an estimated 20,000 people arrived in the city. And there they stayed – they were not permitted to cross the river. Görlitz could not cope. The authorities erected signs on the edge of the city, urging people to turn back. “If you do not heed this warning, you are at risk of death from starvation.”
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People did not heed the warning, among them Richard Süssmuth, trying to reach Penzig, a few miles downstream from Görlitz on the right bank of the Neisse. Conditions in the city were every bit as black as the posters warned. “The inhabitants of Görlitz look like walking corpses – waxen, gaunt and emaciated like skeletons,” Süssmuth wrote. Every day carts collected the corpses of people who had starved. Süssmuth counted 46 coffins on one passing wagon, 114 in Görlitz’s Nikolaikirche – the dead from just two days. Notices were fixed to every tree, every front door:

Residents of Wohlau! Richard Höhne and family have moved on in the direction of Niesky. Whoever finds our daughter Marianne Höhne, give her this message
.

Residents of Güntersdorf! We have found Hans and Joachim from the family of Willi Einer found, taken them with us and are heading and are heading towards Bautzen and Saxony.

An endless column of “ragged, starved and robbed people” streamed westwards through the city, pushing what meagre possessions they had left on hand carts or hauling them on horse-drawn carts – minus the horses. “This rope is all I have left,” one man muttered. “They took everything away from me but they left me this rope with which I shall surely hang myself today.” Those coming from the east bank of the Neisse urged Silesians hoping to return home to go no further. “Turn around – there’s no point continuing,” they insisted. “You cannot cross the Neisse. The Poles will take everything from you. They will steal from you as they stole from us and throw you out of Silesia. Go back to where you’ve come from.” People did not listen. Scenes on the banks of the Oder were chaotic and horrific. The columns of carts stretched back for miles on both sides of the river. Polish militia shot anyone trying to force their way across to the east bank. Süssmuth watched six women from his home town shot in the river. And on the right bank he observed Polish soldiers plundering carts, unharnessing horses, stealing luggage.
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Those who did manage to slip across the Neisse entered “the land without security, the land without laws, the land of the outlaws, the
Totenland
– land of the dead,” wrote journalist Robert Jungk. Beyond the river lay “ransacked towns, villages ravaged by epidemics, concentration camps, barren untended fields, streets littered with corpses where robbers lurk and deprive refugees of their last possessions”. The deeper he went into Silesia, the more common “the huge posters at the edge of villages with warnings in Latin and Cyrillic characters: TYPHUS”. Jungk, a German émigré who had fled Berlin when the Nazis seized power in 1933, wrote of “a veritable wave of suicides sweeping the land,” “girls, women and old women raped in public by members of the Polish militia,” of vast swathes of Silesia with not a single child aged under twelve months “because they all starved or were beaten to death”. This was not atrocity propaganda, he told readers of the Zürich
Weltwoche
. “We have rightly condemned Germans for closing their eyes to the atrocities of the Nazis for so long because of their belief in the mission of their Fatherland. Will the champions of democracy be blamed for the very same thing one day?”
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Richard Süssmuth never entered the land of the dead. He spent seven weeks following the course of the Neisse, trying without success to find a way across. And yet he did not despair. These chaotic conditions were only temporary, he reasoned. “No one thought that the line of the border was the definitive one, that all of Silesia, above all purely German Lower Silesia, as far as the Neisse would be surrendered to the Poles,” he wrote. “Everyone clings to the hope that a reasonable solution must be found and that we will be able to return one day.”
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There would be no return. The frontier along the Neisse and Oder was the definitive one. Breslauers learned as much from a British radio report on 2 August “which specifically made Breslau a Polish city,” fourteen-year-old Horst Gleiss recorded in his diary. Throughout the summer, “one big, terrifying question” had dominated conversation: Breslau or Wrocław?
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There was no news, only rumours. Radios had been confiscated – although a few Breslauers hid sets and listened in secret to foreign broadcasts. The postal service had resumed as early as 16 May, but only for Poles. Not until 24 June, seven weeks after the city’s surrender, did the first German-language newspaper appear, the
Deutsche Zeitung
– German newspaper. It told Breslau’s inhabitants little of substance. They learned that their country had been partitioned by the four Allied powers, that the Red Army had been partially demobilized, that the peoples of Czechoslovakia had sent a gushing greeting to their brothers in the Soviet Union and their liberator, Stalin. They learned nothing about their fate, or the future of their city.
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Only on 5 August – three days after the British radio report Horst Gleiss had overheard – did the
Deutsche Zeitung
publish details of the agreement reached in Potsdam by the governments of the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States. The three powers re-drew the border of Poland along the lower Oder and western Neisse: henceforth Breslau and Lower Silesia belonged to Warsaw. It meant the greatest human migration in history, upwards of seven million Germans expelled from their homes in lands now under Polish, Czech and Hungarian control. The governments of all three countries promised the transportation of Germans would be carried out “in an orderly and humane manner”. In Breslau it was orderly, but rarely was it humane.

It began in earnest in October 1945. Breslau, declared its new president Aleksander Wachniewski – the first mayor, Bolesław Drobner had quickly fallen out of favour with his communist masters – “must be cleansed of Germans as soon as possible”; Germans outnumbered Poles ten to one in the city.
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Wachniewski’s staff talked of
Aussiedlung
– resettlement. “The Germans should feel they are being expelled as little as possible,” one senior administrator in Lower Silesia wrote. “As a result, a repatriation of Germans shall begin.”
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Germans know it only as
Vertreibung
– expulsion. It began at 6am on 1 October. Guards stood at the door of every house in the village of Friedewalde on the north-eastern edge of Breslau. The 800 or so inhabitants were given half an hour to leave their properties, then were marched to barracks in the city, while Poles moved into the homes the Germans had been forced to abandon. The next day 1,157 Germans were evicted from the suburb of Rosenthal.
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It went on like this for two months. “Entire districts were evacuated in a few hours,” decorator Georg Fritsch remembered. “We could take forty-four pounds of luggage, but the guards took what they liked. To protest would have meant death.”
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Four policemen thumped on the door to Horst Gleiss’s apartment in Benderplatz. The flat was being commandeered. A Polish officer would move in that afternoon. The Gleiss family could take with them only what they could carry. “We packed everything jumbled together in blankets, sheets, bags, even cushion covers, at top speed,” the teenager recalled. What he could never take was his beloved chemistry set and a collection of more than a hundred jars.
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Ursula Scholz, now turned seventeen, was given just ten minutes to leave her apartment. She was not unprepared. “For weeks, we’d hidden a rucksack as well as two suitcases with things behind piles of wood in the cellar as a precaution.”
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The expulsion of the Germans evoked memories of the German invasion of Poland seven years before for Joanna Konopińska. Her family had been given fifteen minutes to pack their belongings when they were driven out of their village near Poznań. “When I think back to 1939, I believe we’re fussing too much over the Germans.”
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Senior officials concurred. The commander of 5th Infantry Division called on his men “to throw the German
plugastwo
[filth] from these eternal Polish lands,” while his counterpart in the 10th Infantry told his soldiers they had “been given the honourable task of clearing ancient Polish soil of German vermin. Expel the Germans from Polish soil without any chance of them returning.” As for the general in charge of Second Army, he urged his troops to “deal with the Germans as they dealt with us”. He continued:

We must carry out our mission in such a harsh and decisive manner that the Germanic vermin do not hide in their houses but flee from us of their own accord. Once they’re in their own land they’ll thank God they were lucky enough to save their skin.
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Nor were civic officials against stoking anti-German hatred. “Us or them,” declared the senior government representative in Silesia, Aleksander Zawadzki. “Now is not the time for any sentimental weakness and sympathy for Germans. The Germans are our mortal foes and we must fight them with all means at our disposal.”
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The expellees spent several days in a transit camp – usually an abandoned school or barracks – before they were sent west. After a transitory existence lasting three months – they spent a couple of days living in a laundry room, ten days in a coal cellar, and finally ten weeks in an apartment in Gräbschen – the Gleiss family were driven out of Breslau in a Red Army truck at the end of October. The column stopped for the night on the Autobahn. The refugees climbed out and lit a campfire. “We all sat down around and sang melancholy songs about our homeland and the golden stars in the firmament,” wrote Horst Gleiss, now turned fifteen. “Many tears welled up in our eyes. Several drops crept down their cheeks and dampened the native soil which is so dear to and beloved by all of us.” The column entered the ‘rump’ of Germany, as the refugees called it, near Cottbus, eighty miles south-east of Berlin. “For the first time in many days we felt we were safe again and free of the Polish yoke among our German brothers and sisters,” wrote Horst.
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Most Breslauers were ‘repatriated’ by train, not bus, in locked cattle trucks and goods wagons from the Freiburger Bahnhof. “I left my home town of Breslau, a dead city, full of ruins, graves, starving, pale, dejected and broken people, leaving the misery behind,” wrote one expellee. “A torrent of indescribable misery crashes into the border day after day – women, old men, babies, the sick and invalids.” Many crossed the border at Görlitz, where refugee camps were established to receive the influx of refugees – and where the carriages were often opened for the first time since the train had departed. “Out of one wagon alone ten corpses were taken and thrown into coffins,” Catholic priest Conrad Gröber remembered. As for the living, some had been driven insane. The rest “were covered in excrement, which led me to believe that they were squeezed together so tightly that there was no longer any possibility for them to relieve themselves at a designated place”. At the beginning of December a train of anti-Fascists left Breslau. Their opposition to the Nazis afforded the passengers no protection. After a seemingly uneventful journey as far as Sagan, militia and railway workers began to unload luggage at gunpoint in the middle of the night at an unscheduled stop. When the train finally reached the German border, the passengers were ordered out into a field on the Polish side of the line. Drunken militia searched the refugees, depriving them of most of the luggage which remained. At the border post there were more surly Poles who refused to let them pass unless they paid a toll in złoty. Those who still had some handed it over and were allowed to pass, others were searched yet again, surrendering candles, batteries, even shoes. A few refused and were beaten, some were even thrown into the Neisse. Soviet troops came to the Germans’ aid and helped them collect the corpses. There were fifty-seven dead in all.
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The trains passing through Görlitz and Sagan were not the only ones pulling west through Silesia carrying expellees in the autumn and winter of 1945. Coming from the east were hundreds of thousands of Poles displaced as Stalin drove the borders of his Soviet empire on to Polish soil. One in ten of Wrocław’s new inhabitants came from the capital of the western Ukraine, Lwów. The fate of these expellees – Poland’s communist rulers preferred the term ‘repatriates’ – mirrored that of Germans driven from the Silesian capital. They too were transported in cattle trucks. There was no food for them. They had little idea where they were going. The trains stopped frequently on Polish soil. They were told to continue on their journey; the settlers from the east were not wanted. “Everywhere we heard the same thing,” one woman lamented. “There’s no more space. They moved us from place to place for six weeks.” During the spring and summer, the passengers jumped out and foraged for food for their animals. Farmers repeatedly drove them back on to the trains. “We asked them to give us some grass for the cattle because we’d come a long way,” one woman remembered. “They did not even listen. We returned to the trucks and cursed their heartlessness and miserly attitude.” All that kept the refugees from slaughtering their cows was the need for milk by mothers and children on the train. “We all learned to steal,” one Ukrainian Pole admitted. “As soon as the train stopped, everyone pounced upon the fields and ripped up what they could. Grass, clover, even raw grain. The cows wanted to eat! People and the children needed milk!”
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Poles who had already settled in Wrocław showed the repatriates little sympathy. They cared little for this largely rural population who kept rabbits in their bathrooms, chickens in kitchens, cows, pigs and goats in garages and cellars.
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Nor did they wish to turn their city into “a second Lwów”; instead, they were forging “a Polish Wrocław which is not a replica of a city in eastern Poland”.
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