Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (9 page)

At the beginning of August 1944, children in the picturesque town of Habelschwerdt were enjoying summer at the foot of the Sudeten Mountains, among them Peter Bannert. Bannert had taken advantage of the school break to spend a few days in Prague. Proudly wearing his
Hitlerjugend
badge, he visited the church where the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich had committed suicide when surrounded – the walls were pockmarked with bullet holes. On his return to Habelschwerdt, the schoolboy found posters plastered around the town, signed by the local
Hitlerjugend
leader: boys born in 1928 and 1929 had been called up to support the war effort. Townsfolk protested. Their complaints were brushed aside. Their sons packed rucksacks and headed for the railway station, where a fanfare from
Hitlerjugend
trumpeters bade them farewell. The squeal of the wheels drowned out the final words of advice from mothers on the platform. The boys waved furiously, “torn between an awful feeling and a curious thirst for adventure,” Bannert recalled. The train moved slowly through the Silesian countryside, through Glatz, through Oels. Around midnight it came to a halt in Neumittelwalde, thirty-five miles north-east of Breslau. The boys marched in darkness to a large field on the edge of the town where a sea of tents awaited them. They threw down straw mattresses, put their rucksacks under their heads and tried to settle down under canvas. “We fought for every centimetre,” Peter Bannert recalled – there were sixty-five to seventy men in every tent. “When sleeping, the legs of my opposite number reached as high as my stomach.” The Hitler Youths were woken at 6am. They ran a mile to a dirty pond where they washed, then grabbed a breakfast of cold malt coffee, bread, a little fat. There was an hour of cleaning kit and tents, then the boys marched out of the town and headed east.

Peter Bannert was one of more than 100,000 people – German men and women, Hitler Youths, some 30,000 foreign workers – sucked into a huge construction project along the old Polish-German border,
Unternehmen Bartold
– Operation Bartold. Named by Karl Hanke for Vogt Bartold, the mythical 13th Century coloniser of Silesia, the massive undertaking aimed to create an impregnable barrier, an
Ostwall
– eastern wall – in a semi-circle from Trachenberg, thirty miles north of Breslau, past the rural towns of Militsch, Neumittelwalde, Gross Wartenberg and Namslau. An anti-tank ditch twenty feet wide and thirteen feet deep would be dug, and behind it a network of trenches and machine-gun nests.

Makeshift camps, such as the one in which Peter Bannert found himself, sprang up across Silesia to accommodate the influx of diggers. Workers found themselves living in tents, in empty factories, barns, in outhouses, in school buildings. Facilities were rudimentary. Pits were dug on the edge to serve as ‘toilets’ and thunderboxes provided, but the smell was so overpowering, many did not have the stomach for using them. Food came courtesy of field kitchens, invariably soup or some form of broth, which was often so weak that the diggers poured it back into the vat in disgust. Life was rather better for the Party leaders overseeing
Bartold
. They enjoyed better accommodation, better food, a
very
generous allocation of alcohol – many turned up on duty drunk – and various other privileges. They exploited their special position, swaggering around the ditches in their brown uniforms. Above all, they drove their workforce ruthlessly and relentlessly.

Hugo Hartung, chief dramatist at the city’s opera house and now a reluctant soldier, was woken daily at 3.30am for roll-call at 4am, before marching off to his place of work near Trachenberg. Sometimes the men sang
Graue Kolonnen marschieren in der Sonnen
– Grey Columns March Towards the Sun – as they headed out of camp. Before sunrise, they were digging the fertile Silesian soil. As the sun climbed higher in the sky, so the number of workers collapsing grew. These were middle-aged or elderly musicians, men more accustomed to the violin or flute than the spade, who struggled to dig the wet clayey soil. Ballet dancers, dressed in colourful swimsuits which conjured up images of summer at the beach, fainted.

The
Hitlerjugend
toiled with spades, shovels and pickaxes for six hours in the torrid August heat, then underwent two hours of
Wehrertüchtigung
– preparatory military training – practising marching and parade ground exercises with spades. One day, their instructors told them, they would swap spades for rifles and defend the very trenches they were digging.

Older men in uniform enjoyed free afternoons. Hugo Hartung explored a part of Silesia he did not know. He picked blackberries, bathed in the Bartsch, a river which once formed the border between Poland and Germany, and lay on the ground staring into the sky. Sometimes he would hear the faint hum of Allied bomber columns streaking their faint vapour trails across the heavens.

Evenings were almost idyllic. Hartung and his comrades sat around camp fires and sang childhood songs or folk tunes, or debated how the war might end. Peter Bannert and his fellow Hitler Youths would regularly march into Neumittelwalde, singing as they went –
Marianka, come, let me kiss you
, or
Master, have no mercy
. The town’s only cinema offered standard fare: the musical
Der weiße Traum
, the ever popular musical drama
Wunschkonzert
or Veit Harlan’s colour melodrama
Immensee
. Once the projector bulb burned out; the boys sang as they waited for someone to drive to the next town to get a replacement.

And in the morning, the diggers returned to the trenches and anti-tank ditches – and found them half-collapsed where the soil had given way overnight.

The propaganda machine painted
Bartold
as an unqualified success, of course. “Thanks to a tremendous effort, the populace of Germany’s eastern
Gau
have created a protective position many hundred kilometres long and given assurance to German troops fighting before the borders of the Reich that the homeland is giving them strong support with this energetic action.” Peter Bannert believed the propaganda. “The Russians will bleed to death at our positions,” he wrote home with pride, “and victory will be ours.” The voices of dissenters were far more numerous, however. Youngsters joked that the Russians would need only thirty-two minutes to break through the
Ostwall
: they’d spend thirty minutes laughing and just two minutes to overcome the fortifications. “This will not stop one Soviet tank,” Hugo Hartung overheard one Army officer complain. “If one really falls into this network of ditches, the next one will already be driving across it.” How could ditches and walls of earth hold back the enemy, people asked, where the concrete and steel of the Atlantic Wall had failed, while one senior officer inspecting the works told diggers: “It’s wonderful that you’re working, but it’s all for nothing.”
⁴⁹

Beyond the huge eastern wall its citizens were digging along the old Polish frontier, Breslau possessed a handful of weak concrete and earthen fortifications dating back to the Great War. Napoleon had razed the city’s ancient walls and bastions, so a century later a series of infantry positions – or
I Werke
– numbered forty-one through forty-three had been hurriedly thrown up to protect Breslau from the north, and a fourth built in Gräbschen cemetery, three miles south-west of the city centre.

Trenches and anti-tank ditches dug by hand, a few light field fortifications, such were the domain of
Generalmajor
Johannes Krause when he arrived in the Silesian capital on September 25. Breslau had been earmarked as a
Festung
– fortress – and the fifty-one-year-old general its commandant. Krause was an artilleryman with relatively little front-line experience – he had spent most of the war in Greece. But he knew what the designation ‘fortress’ meant. If war came to Breslau, then the city would be defended to the last round.

Johannes Krause found Breslau not merely lacking in fortifications, he found it lacking in men. His staff were aged officers and ranks fit for only light duties. His garrison troops were two battalions of reservists and militia, almost all old or sick men. His artillery comprised captured French, Russian, Yugoslav and Polish guns, but some lacked the optic equipment and firing tables their inadequate crews, once again elderly soldiers unfit for the battlefield, would need to fire them. As for the working batteries, they had too few shells so it was almost impossible to train.
⁵⁰

Johannes Krause’s rank and experience counted for naught in the face of the Party. He had no say in
Bartold
, how the ditches were dug, how the trenches were laid out, how the bunkers were built. When his men tried to install machine-guns, they found the weapons would not fit. They spent weeks chipping more than an inch off the concrete pedestals the guns were to sit upon. Few if any of the beds the garrisons of the
Ostwall
would need had arrived. Farmers refused to surrender their vehicles to move material from railway stations to the entrenchments because they were collecting the turnip harvest. Not that much material arrived by train in the first place anyway – there was insufficient fuel in Breslau to move items from depots to the stations, and there were too few wagons on the railways to carry them into the countryside.
⁵¹

The shortcomings of the
Reichsbahn
did not merely bedevil the enormous fortification programme, however. The railways were central to plans to evacuate Breslau’s civilians should the city be directly endangered. And on paper, these plans were first-rate: 100 trains a day would carry Breslau’s citizens westwards. Johannes Krause thought it was beyond the capacity of the
Reichsbahn
and urged Hanke to evacuate 200,000 Breslauers – the elderly, the sick, children and young mothers – now. The
Gauleiter
dismissed the general’s suggestion. “The Führer would have me shot if it went to him with such matters now, in the deepest peace!”
⁵²
That deepest peace was about to be shattered.

It had been dark for a little over an hour on Saturday 7 October as Hugo Hartung made his way through the city centre towards the shores of the Oder. He had been relieved from his duties at Schöngarten airfield and permitted to lay on a concert by singers and musicians from his opera house at a makeshift hospital in a converted government building. As he arrived at the hospital, the sirens began to howl. The theatre director was unperturbed. For three months, first digging the
Ostwall
, then back at the airfield, he had watched “silver flashes beneath a blue sky flying in formation, as if on exercise”, his heart skipping a beat as the American bombers approached Breslau. They had always avoided the city, continuing on to the synthetic oil plant at Heydebreck, eighty miles to the south-east. Tonight, however, the dreaded ‘Christmas trees’ – coloured marker flares to aid the bomb aimers – appeared over the Silesian capital. The flak thundered. The bombs fell – one fell barely 300 feet from the hospital, shattering windows. Hartung watched as gravely-wounded patients were brought on stretchers from the upper storeys into the cellar. A soldier whose legs were lacerated was brought into the temporary operating theatre in the cellar, where staff worked by candlelight. It was an hour and a quarter before the all-clear sounded. There was no thought of giving the concert now. Hugo Hartung stepped outside and surveyed the damage. Under the bright moonlight, he could see widespread fires on both sides of the Oder. The Rhenania-Ossag oil depot was on fire. The trams no longer ran. It was the first significant raid Breslau suffered: sixty-nine people were killed, among them thirty-seven women and thirteen children. The city’s status as ‘air raid shelter’ was over.
⁵³

A fortnight later, the Reich’s desperate position was reinforced. On Friday 20 October, Karl Hanke climbed a small white podium in the centre of Schlossplatz, surrounded by a handful of standard bearers and rather more Party and Wehrmacht leaders. The few huge swastika banners on the edge of the square hung limply in the still autumn air. Hanke looked out across a sea of people; he estimated perhaps 100,000 Breslauers had gathered on the parade ground, while those who could not hear his words in person listened on the city’s public address system. Two days before posters had appeared on billboards, on lampposts, on advertising columns across the Silesian capital:

After five years of the most bitter fighting, the enemy stands close to or on the German border on several fronts thanks to the failure of all our European allies. They are gathering their forces to smash our Reich, to destroy the German people and its social order. Their ultimate aim is the eradication of the German people.

The needs of the hour, the decree continued, demanded “a second great effort” by the German people, namely calling to arms every man capable of bearing them “to wage a merciless struggle wherever the enemy sets foot on German soil”. Thus was born the
Volkssturm
– literally ‘people’s storm’ – a national militia of men aged sixteen to sixty. In Breslau it was Karl Hanke’s personal army. It was his to form, it was his to command.
⁵⁴

Over the coming three weeks, the men of Breslau were expected to register for the new force. Any man who could carry and use a weapon as well as carry out a short march was regarded as fit to fight. Every city block was expected to provide a
Gruppe
– squad – every
Zelle
of eight blocks a platoon, every
Ortsgruppe
a company and every
Kreis
a battalion. The Sunday closest to the anniversary of the Munich putsch in 1923 was chosen for the solemn act of swearing-in the
Volkssturm
ranks. And so on Sunday November 12, men dressed in civilian clothes, in the uniforms of railway workers, boys in the brown of the
Hitlerjugend
, men fresh from work in Breslau’s factories took the oath: