Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (62 page)

As for the conscientious chronicler of the fledgling Polish city,
Joanna Konopińska
completed her studies and became a writer. Four decades later two volumes of her diaries were published. They provide a unique record of Wrocław’s ‘pioneer days’.

National Socialist Leadership Officer
Herbert van Bürck
spent the few remaining months of his short life in the Polish city. Van Bürck had been wounded by a mine as he returned from surrender negotiations on 6 May 1945. Once he recovered from his wounds, he was thrown into Kletschkau prison where he was mistreated for four months. His health and nerves broken, he was released and sent home by train. He died at the end of the five-day journey on 1 February 1946, aged just thirty-six. Van Bürck was not the only one of the fortress’s trusted staff officers to die in captivity.
Kurt ‘Papa’ Tiesler
was among a group of officers condemned to twenty-five years’ hard labour in the Urals. He died of a heart attack while peeling potatoes in a basement in early 1953.

And then there is
Karl Hanke
. Little is certain about his fate. The circumstances of his flight from Breslau on the morning of 6 May have become myth and legend – his friend Albert Speer (who was not there, of course) claimed he fled by prototype helicopter, for example. Some accounts say the
Gauleiter
took off from the Kaiserstrasse runway, others from the grounds of the Jahrhunderthalle. He landed in Hirschberg. He landed on the slopes of the Zobten. He landed in Schweidnitz, where he spent the day with Party leaders before a car took him to Hirschberg. Reports generally agree that Karl Hanke reached the Sudeten Mountains, but thereafter the trail runs in every possible direction. He was shot by Czech partisans some time in July 1945. He was shot by Soviet troops as he tried to swim the River Eger, close to the Bavarian border. He was living in Spain courtesy of misappropriated funds he had sent to his wife. British and American war crimes investigators were certainly still looking for him in February 1946, while authorities in Cologne were making inquiries into Karl Hanke’s whereabouts in the late 1950s. By then, most people believed the
Gauleiter
dead, not least his widow Freda who had him declared legally dead in the early 1950s. Karl Hanke’s most likely fate, however, is one which befits the shabby nature of his flight from Breslau. Dressed as an ordinary SS trooper, he mingled with stragglers from the 18th SS Panzer Grenadier Division in Komotau (today Chomutov) in the Sudetenland. Before he could leave the farm where he was hiding, Hanke and several other fugitives, including the local Party functionary, were seized by Czech partisans and taken a short distance up the road to Görkau (Jirkov) where he was held in a cellar for several weeks with other German prisoners. In early June, the Czechs decided to move the prisoners – 65 men in all – on foot. When a train passed the march route, Hanke and several prisoners made a break for it and clung on to the train. The guards opened fire. Karl Hanke fell first. Two other prisoners slumped on to the track. The Czechs then beat the three men repeatedly with rifle butts until there were no more signs of life. They returned to their prisoners laughing: “
Vse v poradku
– everything’s okay.” They had no idea they had killed the last
Reichsführer
SS and former
Gauleiter
of Breslau.
¹⁴

New homes, new careers, new lives. But there was no way of creating new minds. “In the silence of the night, when the memory of all these events deprives us of our sleep, the scenes of terror and the hours of mortal fear come to life once more,” priest Walter Lassmann wrote twenty-five years later. It was the flight of Breslauers in the snow, rather than the inferno of Easter, which came to life when he closed his eyes. “The faces of so many dead appear in front of me repeatedly as if out of one hundred fogs; I see them again and again, the thousands who had lost their lives on country lanes, fleeing before the approaching enemy in the icy winter. An endless column, all the misery in the world seemed to be on the road.”
¹⁵
Former Hitler Youth Peter Bannert was haunted by the face of the corpse he had seen when marching into captivity, staring back at him from the mud into which a tank had crushed it. For years, Bannert was hounded by a single question: “Which mother might be waiting for this man, her son, who was trampled on by thousands of feet?”
¹⁶
Other Breslauers were reminded of the horrors of 1945 by the seemingly innocuous. Holidaying in Copenhagen two decades later with her husband and three children, Vera Eckle visited a waxworks. “Suddenly there was a display case with wax heads, about the size of a child’s head,” she remembered. “They were pale and had eye sockets with rigid glass eyes.” Eckle began screaming. “Just take these dead children away. Take the children away!” In an instant, she had been taken back to the Kanth road in January 1945. It took sedatives to finally calm her down.
¹⁷

Wrocław’s buildings and structures still bear the scars of 1945 too. Concrete bunkers still pepper the city. You will find them in the suburbs on Ulica Grabiszynska (Gräbschener Strasse) and on Ulica Ladna (Selenka Strasse). They are still pockmarked. At least two of the huge round
Hochbunker
survive. The Ulica Ołbińska (Elbingstrasse) bunker remains grey and forbidding. That in Ulica Legnicka (Striegauer Platz) is a brilliant white. For years it served as a warehouse, then as a shopping arcade. Today it is being turned into a museum of modern art. Less obvious are the subterranean bunkers. The one beneath Nowy Targ is likely to be turned into an underground car park. The former hospital under Plac Solny (Blücherplatz) is due to become a puppet museum, of all things, whilst there are plans to create a Fortress Breslau museum under Plac Strzegomski (Striegauerplatz).

Other fortifications crumble. Those on the Promenada Staromiejska (Holteihöhe) are smashed. Much of
I-Werk
41 lies in ruins in fields not far from the route of a new motorway. On the reverse slope of the Wzgórze Partyznatów (Liebichshöhe) there is another crumbling concrete structure, its entrance bricked up, its walls daubed with graffiti. As for the one-time headquarters of the fortress command, they are now a rather run-down restaurant with a Russian-themed nightclub – Provocation – on the ground floor. After dark a thumping bass-line reverberates across Ulica Piotra Skagi (Taschenstrasse) and down Ulica Teatralna (Zwingerstrasse) into the park opposite. Perhaps it was this which caused the sorry statue of Mother Russia, her eyes closed, to crumble and decay. She forlornly faces east. There are no inscriptions, no plaques. A handful of students sit on the chipped marble base, perusing their notes and enjoying a coffee.

It is not the only Soviet monument to suffer. On the southern edge of the city, two anti-tank guns and a couple of T34 tanks mounted on plinths stand guard at the entrance to the resting place of 763 officers. Regular visitors to military cemeteries in Western Europe will be surprised by the poor state of the grounds. It has at least fared better than Skowronia Góra cemetery a mile and a half away, where more than 7,000
frontoviki
are buried. Most of the Soviet dead were interred here in mass graves between 1947 and 1953 as the temporary burial grounds of 1945 were cleared. Skowronia Góra is dominated by a huge slab of marble which promises “eternal glory to the fallen heroes of the struggle for freedom and the independence of the Soviet motherland.” There is little eternal glory to be found here. The mass graves are overgrown. Individual monuments to the fallen have faded over time, been chipped or cracked, and photographs prised off many of the headstones.

But at least the Soviet cemeteries, however run-down, still exist. Not so the city’s German cemeteries. For a quarter of a century they lay untouched, overgrown. But in 1970 the civic authorities began clearing them – no burials for twenty-five years provided the official pretext. Over the next two years, all were cleared, flattened, bulldozed. The gravestones and sculptures were used as rubble to strengthen the gullies in the city moat, or served as the foundation for a stand in a sports stadium. Some were incorporated into a new animal run in Wrocław’s zoo. “Only the animals can stare at the epitaphs of German citizens,” city historian Maciej Łagiewski wryly observed. Other headstones ended up on the site of the former cemetery in Osobowice (Oswitz). Stonemasons wandered among them with pots of white paint, daubing the ones they wished to recycle as headstones for Wrocław’s Polish dead. No one protested. Most Vratislavians turned a blind eye, objecting only when there were plans to erect memorial stones explaining the German past of a cemetery or park.
¹⁸

Other traces of the city’s German past have been erased. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the
Entdeutschung
– de-Germanization – of Breslau was waged almost fanatically. You will find few, if any, pre-1945 buildings with the inscription ‘
Erbaut
’ – built – or ‘
im Jahre
’ – in the year. The Kaiserbrücke still spans the Oder, but as on the Most Grunwaldzki all traces of Kaiser and Reich have been removed. The motifs on the imposing stone towers celebrate the Slavic heroes of 1410. If you look closely, however, you will see a few traces of a more recent battle.

On the other side of the bridge, Karl Hanke’s Kaiserstrasse wasteland has been replaced by a mish-mash of bleak Communist-era tower blocks and the more sympathetic stone structures of the polytechnic. Plac Grunwaldzki (Scheitniger Stern) is now a celebration of capitalism. A glass skyscraper office block and one of Wrocław’s many shopping malls –
galeria
– which have sprung up since the fall of Communism dominate this once vast space.

Walk east along Ulica Marie Curie Sklodowskiej (Tiergartenstrasse) and cross the Most Zwierzyniecki (Passbrücke) which spans the Stara Odra (Alte Oder). The inscription on the bridge reads 1895–1897, but the plaque above has been erased. Another couple of hundred yards and you will come to the Jahrhunderthalle – far larger and more imposing than any photograph can convey. It survived the war largely intact and resumed its pre-war role as a venue for exhibitions, conferences, rallies and concerts under two names,
Hala Ludowa
– People’s Hall – and
Hala Stulecia
– Century Hall, a direct translation of its original title. The broad boulevard which leads up to the imposing structure is dominated by a 315ft spike, the
Iglica
– needle – erected for an exhibition celebrating the ‘regained territories’ in 1948. And on the left is the now partially empty four-domed pavilion with its fading memorials to the Soviet and Polish soldiers who drove the Wehrmacht from Moscow to Berlin.

Whilst monuments to the Red Army and Poles who fought side-by-side decay, more recent memorials are visited on a daily or weekly basis by Vratislavians. In a park on the north-eastern edge of the old town, a mother holds her son to her bosom as she looks upwards forlornly at an angel – the memorial to the victims of the Katyn massacre. A short distance away on the former Holteihöhe, now a rather run-down green space, there is the statue of a crucified man torn in two – the monument to the people of Lwów, driven from their homes at the war’s end.

Although Wrocław’s leaders strove not to make it “a second Lwów”, the city is inextricably bound with the capital of the Western Ukraine. Lwów’s world-famous Ossolineum, one of the finest collections of Polish art and literature in existence, found a new home in Wrocław. The city’s academics helped re-start Wrocław University. And Lwów’s greatest treasure of all became one of Wrocław’s most popular tourist attractions. Eventually. The
Racławice Panorama
depicts the victory of a Polish peasant army against the Russians in 1793 – a military triumph ranked by Poles almost as highly as the defeat of the Teutons at Grunwald in 1410. It was transported west with the rest of the Ossolineum, but for four decades the enormous painting – 375 feet long and 50 high – remained in storage, the rotunda built to house it during the mid-1960s remaining empty until 1985 when the panorama was finally unveiled to the public once more.

Not five minutes’ walk from the rotunda is the Odra (Oder) promenade. Directly opposite, the cathedral continues to dominate the skyline of the right bank of the Oder. For nearly half a century its twin towers lacked their spires. They were only replaced at the beginning of the 1990s. The view from the top – if you pay a few złoty to ride the lift – is as commanding as it ever was. Below, the sun dances over the Oder as the gentle September breeze catches the river. Pleasure cruisers carry tourists, while rowers paddle hurriedly out of their way. To the east, the four floodlights of the Olympic Stadium – which has never hosted an Olympic event – lean inwards, towering above the woods and parks below. It has changed remarkably little since the
Sportfest
of 1938, although the principal sporting activity enjoyed here these days is speedway. In the south, almost hidden by the haze, lies the distinctive outline of the 2,350ft Mount Ślęża (Zobten). Sixty-five years ago, observers in Breslau’s spires and towers looked at German positions on its slopes and prayed that Schörner would come.

The immediate skyline to the west is dominated by the green copper spire of the Kolegiata Świętego Krzyża (Kreuzkirche). From this height the cross shape which gave the church its German name is obvious. Beyond that, the Oder is channelled around half a dozen islands. Wyspa Piasek is much as it was when it was known as Sandinsel. The warehouses and mills on the Vorderbleiche, today Wyspa Słodowa, have long gone. A single tenement block remains from the city’s German era, its rear walls dominated by gigantic paintings. The rest of the island has been turned into a park. On an early September evening you will find couples, young people, perhaps a few older ones, sitting on the wooden benches here. They look across at the magnificent façade of the university, like the town hall, wonderfully lit up by night; so too is the cathedral; one spire is silver, the other a drab grey. An elderly fisherman rests his rod over the side of the steep bank and chews away at a sandwich as he waits for a bite. All that passes on the water is a family of ducks, making its way downstream. The Oder is at peace.