Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (58 page)

Joanna Konopińska spent the summer in her native Poland. The history student returned to Breslau at the beginning of October. She found the trams were now running – minus seats and windows – but little else had changed. The city was still scarred by rubble, ruins, houses without windowpanes, uprooted street lamps. She could not settle in her home in Bischofswalde – now given a Polish name, Biskupin. The house was still “terribly foreign and German. At every turn I come up against objects which belong to somebody else, are witnesses of a foreign life which I know nothing about, which remind me of people who built this house, lived here and now, perhaps, are no longer alive. How could I feel at home here? I cannot imagine that I could ever say: this is my home.” Six weeks later, she changed her mind after a trip to the city centre. “What struck me were the Polish signs above shops and in houses where the authorities are housed,” Konopińska wrote. There were the most primitive signposts and advertisements on trams and on the walls of bombed-out houses for restaurants, cafés and nightclubs. They were far from attractive, or professional, but it was proof, the student noted, of “Polish presence in a city which is still so thoroughly German”.
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What Joanna Konopińska had witnessed was the growing
Polonisierung
and
Entdeutschung
– ‘Polonization’ and ‘de-Germanization’ – of Breslau. Some things could be easily Polonized. The streets of Breslau had undergone radical name changes in the past twenty-five years. The Weimar Republic had erased traces of the Imperial era. The Nazis in turn had erased all traces of the Republic. Some streets had even changed their titles twice during the Nazis’ reign as acolytes such as the first
Gauleiter
Helmuth Brückner and SA leader Edmund Heines fell out of favour. And now new titles were applied once more. Schlossplatz had been renamed Plac Wolności on the orders of Bolesław Drobner, but otherwise the
Komisja do Zmian Nazw Ulic
– Committee for the Changing of Street Names – determined the new names of 1,500 streets, alleys and districts. In many instances, the committee simply translated German names into Polish: Sandbrücke remained faithful to its old name as Most Piaskowski (sand bridge), the Ring became the Rynek (market), Neumarkt was turned into Nowy Targ (new market). Adolf Hitler Strasse had to go, of course; it now bore the name of the poet Adam Mickiewicza. Hitler was not the only German leader to be erased from Breslau’s streets. Bismarck – regarded by many as an oppressor of Poles – was replaced by Bolesław Chrobry (Bolesław the Brave), who forged a Polish empire in the eleventh century. The wasteland created by Karl Hanke’s runway around Kaiserstrasse was renamed after the iconic triumph of Slav over Teuton, the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, while Kaiserbrücke became the Most Grunwaldzki. The names of German cities and towns disappeared from the street map – unless they had become part of post-war Poland, such as Stettin (Szczecin) or Danzig (Gdańsk). There was a nod to the liberator of Breslau: not Vladimir Gluzdovski, but the Soviet leader, honoured with Ulica Marszalka Stalina (Marshal Stalin Street) – previously Matthiasstrasse. In time, more Soviet-inspired street names would appear: Ulica Stalingradzka (Stalingrad Street), Ulica Przyjazni Polsko-Radzieckiej (Street of Polish-Soviet Friendship) and roads and squares named after the doyens of communism – Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
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De-Germanization did not end with eradicating German names. “All traces of German culture are to be removed,” Silesia’s communist leadership ordered. The Polish authorities demanded German ashtrays and beer mats in bars and restaurants be thrown out, inscriptions on chapels removed, even gravestone headings removed. German music – popular or classical – was banned. German books were burned by the dozen – it was less about the contents than the simple fact that the words within were in German. “Everything which bore a German inscription had to be removed from our house,” recalled truck driver Hans Gora. The authorities tried to take away his mother’s bread bin and cups with gold Germanic lettering. “We had to paint or tape over German lettering. After that the items could remain in the household.” Breslau’s sixteenth-century coat of arms with its double-tailed Bohemian lion and ‘W’ (for Wratislavia, the city’s Latin name, rather than Wrocław) was retained. But German monuments were demolished, statues melted down, their foundations used to rebuild the city or to serve as pedestals for Polish monuments. For the most part, the removal of German symbols and symbolism was carried out discreetly, but not that of the fifty-year-old monument to Wilhelm I in Schweidnitzer Strasse. The statue was removed with great ceremony in October 1945. An orchestra played, the street was bedecked with banners, Polish flags and standards. A large crowd listened to speeches, cheered and applauded as the statue was toppled. “The fall of this little Fritz is a symbol for the fall of the entire Nazi-Prussian regime,” rejoiced the city’s socialist newspaper,
Naprzód Dolnośląski
(Forward Lower Silesia). There was no place for Frederick the Great’s Palace in Polish Wrocław. Burned-out and left in ruins by the fighting for the city, civic authorities determined not to rebuild it. The palace was “a German reminder of a political nature. To preserve it could feed German revisionist desires,” the city’s curator decided. Besides, the palace possessed little architectural value. “You find buildings like this all over Europe.” The ruins of the Palais Hatzfeldt, the seat of German government in Breslau for nearly 150 years and Karl Hanke’s former headquarters, lasted rather longer. They were only pulled down in the 1960s, leaving behind just an entrance and lobby.
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Just as the city’s physical past was erased, so Poland’s leadership re-wrote its history. They talked of living
w odzyskanym Wrocławiu
– in regained Wrocław. At its core, they argued, Silesia was Polish, not German. Silesia was one of the
ziemie odzyskane
– regained territories – and the Germans who had lived there for centuries were
okupanci
– occupiers. As late as the nineteenth century, its capital – “Germanized outwardly” – was a “half-Polish city surrounded by a Slavic sea,” the Polish tongue “the language heard everyday in Breslau’s streets”. Only with the advent of Wilhelmine Germany and the Third Reich was Breslau’s ‘Polishness’ eclipsed. This was “the soil of our grandfathers,” Poland’s communist leader Władysław Gomułka proclaimed in a speech in Psie Pole (Hundsfeld). For centuries, the land had been “Germanized by force and oppression”. There was, Gomułka told his audience, “no way of Germanizing history,” however. Silesia – Wrocław and Głogów (Glogau) especially – had been bastions of Polish culture which had eventually succumbed to the “overwhelming might of the Germanic invaders. After many centuries without freedom, this land has been liberated.”
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As 1945 drew to a close, Wrocław was still far from being ‘liberated’. Despite the changes to street names, despite the removal of German statues, it was still not a Polish city. Germans still outnumbered Polish settlers and repatriates five to one. Plans to brand Breslauers, as Jews had once been branded with the yellow star, using armbands marked with the letter ‘N’ for
Niemiec
– German – were finally dismissed by the city’s leadership, but not on moral grounds; it would merely reinforce Breslau’s “German character”.
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In truth, neither German nor Pole felt at home in the city at the year’s end. The new settlers deserted Wrocław in their droves, determined to rejoin their families who still lived in central Poland. There was little celebration of the festive season among Breslauers left behind. “It’s bleak and tragic,” wrote former post official Conrad Bischof. “You sit alone and abandoned, as poor as a beggar in Breslau, city of ruins.”
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The turn of the year was no less bitter. “We awaken in the New Year to one long horror,” tailor’s daughter Charlotte Pösel noted. “The general mood is lousy.”
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Another of the city’s German inhabitants recorded despondently:

The situation is desperate, the nights are restless, hundreds of thousands destitute, homeless, without a roof over their head. The responsible authorities are helpless and heartless. Discussions are futile, complaints useless. Young people are hopeless, women are unstable, men are disloyal. The hunt for calories is unrestrained, the meals fat-free. After the currency reform, hope of things getting better is pointless. They have made us despondent and unemployed, deprived us of all rights, deprived us of our future. That’s what is happening to us. It is our sad, central German fate.
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The sad daily fate of Breslauers was to serve in Polish work details, clearing the ruins. By January 1946 much of the rubble had been removed from the streets and pavements. But walls and ledges, balconies, the entire façades of properties were still falling into the street and killing pedestrians on a regular basis.

There was no new city rising in the place of the ruins. The bricks which built Breslau and could build a new Wrocław were being dispatched to Warsaw to rebuild the Polish capital. A miniature railway was laid down the middle of Ulica Oławska (Ohlauer Strasse); carts carried away bricks in their thousands. The wholesale dismantling of Wrocław continued well into the 1950s. Nor did the city’s factories fare any better. In his first interview with the communist-run press in June 1945, Bolesław Drobner praised the Soviets for providing Polish settlers with working sewage plants, a power station and gas works, as well as “various extremely valuable industrial items in a relatively good state”. In fact, Wrocław’s factories had been stripped bare, their contents shipped east. Not half the machines in the two dozen textile factories remained – and most of those were damaged. More than 3,700 pieces of equipment were sent east from metalwork plants – 1,000 each from the FAMO and Rheinmetall works. Every tool was removed from the Linke-Hofmann works, now renamed
Państwowa Fabryka Wagonów
– National Railway Carriage Factory – while barely one in four machines the Soviets left behind after removing hundreds of lathes, engines and motors, worked. And what was not sent to the Soviet Union was sent to the Polish capital. Joanna Konopińska watched trucks carrying printing presses, teletypes, telephone exchanges and other machines to Warsaw. “It’s probably my local patriotism speaking,” the student fumed. “but I’m angry at the way Wrocław is being impoverished.” In short, the city possessed just two-fifths of its industrial potential. It would take more than a decade for Wrocław’s factories to recover from the ravages of war and Stalinism.
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The same counted for some of Breslau’s defenders. Most would not see Germany again until the end of the 1940s. Some, such as Hermann Niehoff, would not see Germany again until ten years after the end of the war. And some – one in ten prisoners – would never see their country or their families again. This first winter of captivity was the worst. The men fell victim to the cold, to disease, to maltreatment, to starvation. “Death moves around the camp, he’s our constant, invisible companion,” wrote former
Leutnant
Erich Schönfelder in a camp in Karelia, where temperatures dropped to forty degrees below zero. Many of Schönfelder’s fellow inmates simply gave up. “It’s not the workload, but the despondency of their situation, the sapping of all energy, their inner instability.” After watching the dead carried out of the camp hospital day after day, one of the prisoners turned to poetry:

A flat sledge, a white horse in front,

Moved each night through the camp gate

A dark, rigid, horrible cargo:

Our dead from last night.

We stand at the wire, the snow is deep,

The storm drives ice crystals into our faces

And in the snowstorm around the gate

The sledge of the dead slowly disappears.

The Russian guards called to us:

“
Davai
,
davai
, all men back!”

The storm devoured our faint cry

The gate was only open for the dead.

The burden of these days was soon so great

That many could not stand it any more

A flat sledge, a white horse in front

Only move through the camp gate at night.

You will not see your homeland again

The mounds will blow away in the snowstorm

But you won, you died in agony

You unforgotten on the sledges of the dead.
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In the Ukraine, dead prisoners were carried out of camp on a wheelbarrow. “They are just skeletons, so light that even we emaciated men can lift one body in pairs comfortably,” one inmate recalled. The burial details – always German prisoners – struggled to dig even a shallow grave in the frozen ground. Finally, they had removed earth for the dead to be buried. “The stretchers are moved to the edge, one man pulls the tarpaulin away, the other tips the stretcher up and lets the naked, frozen-stiff bodies, slip down,” the prisoner wrote. “Frozen clods of earth are already slapping against the dead bodies, followed by snow, the wind takes care of the rest. By tomorrow it will have rounded off the uneven edges of the flat hill and covered it up with a cold, white shroud. Lord, what a misery.”
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There was little dignity shown the dead even when the snow melted. They were buried in mass graves and covered with a layer of pine branches before earth was thrown on top. If there was time, a brief prayer was said.

And for the living? In a camp north-east of Gorki, prisoners were woken at 4.30am. Breakfast – “a blob of porridge, some bread and a spoonful of sugar” – was served an hour later. Then the work began. The men were marched out of camp to begin a day’s hard labour, usually construction. “‘
Davai davai
’ – get a move on – the cry hounds us constantly, at every opportunity, even when we have to relieve ourselves, this ‘
davai, davai
’ was ever-present,” former SS
Sturmmann
Werner Zillich recalled. Eventually, even the guards tired of their constant exhortations and marched the prisoners back to the camp at the double. After a wash and perhaps a brief doze – the men always kept one eye open so as not to miss supper – the evening meal was served at 7pm. The prisoners rushed for the serving hatch, then took their food back to the barracks, guarding it covetously, eating every crumb. For the next two hours there was political instruction from a commissar, occasionally a film. “If you were to draw comparisons, it was the same system as under the National Socialists. Informants, threats and the like are the order of the day,” wrote Zillich. At 10pm the
Last Post
sounded across the camp and quiet descended. By then, most prisoners were already asleep.
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