Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (20 page)

Already rolling west were the workers and heavy plant of Breslau’s sprawling FAMO works. Just a fortnight earlier, some 8,000 people had been employed here, but now engineers were dismantling its machinery and operating equipment, loading them on hundreds of freight cars, and sending them to Schönebeck on the Elbe, ten miles south-east of Magdeburg.
⁶¹

At Krupp’s Berthawerk in Markstädt, managers had fled, but not the workforce, as Hugo Hartung discovered. Hartung and a few fellow artists were relieved of duties protecting Schöngarten airfield and ordered to organise an evening of classical music and recitals for staff and directors of the Berthawerk. Except that “none of the leading figures for whom our evening had been arranged was present,” the former theatre director observed. “There was a chilly, uncomfortable feeling in the half-filled hall.” It was half-filled with good reason: that afternoon a telegram had been handed to the Berthawerk’s directors outlining the Red Army’s rapid advance.
⁶²

The torrent of refugees from the East soon swamped the Silesian capital. Scenes at the Hauptbahnhof were chaotic – and harrowing. Soldiers struggled to control the crowds. A few helped to load the carriages, luggage first, the people on top. It was not unusual for owners and suitcases to become separated – or for children to travel on one train, mothers on another, but not necessarily to the same destination. Women with small children besieged the hut on the platform run by the Nazis’ welfare organisation. Soup had run out; the volunteers handed out hot water instead. “People press, bump, look for someone, climb over the piles, call out inaudible names across the crowd,” wrote Red Cross volunteer Lena Aschner, trying to offer help to the exodus. “Everyone fights for a place close to the track so that they can find a place when the next train comes.” She noticed a fair-haired woman slumped on one of the piles of luggage, staring at the feet of passers-by. “Suddenly she leaps up and looks around like a madwoman, runs to a pram, hauls the child out, not giving a thought for its frightened, screaming mother, presses it to her chest and runs off,” wrote Aschner. “Someone succeeds in taking the wailing child from her and returning him to his mother.” Frau Aschner took the woman to one side, gave her a cup of strong coffee and sat down with her. The woman had come on foot from Oels, just eighteen miles away, pushing a pram. When she reached the Hauptbahnhof, she had tried to change her baby’s nappy – only to discover it had frozen to death.
⁶³
A shiver went down the spine of veteran policeman Otto Rogalla as he watched an “endless train of human misery” pass through the station, people “with rucksacks on their backs, children on their arms and horror etched on their faces”. Some had lost their children in the chaos of evacuation, others carried dead babies who had frozen to death during the journey, while lost youngsters screamed for their mothers. Rogalla and his fellow officers directed this torrent of refugees, as best they could, to temporary quarters, and reunited mothers and children. But deep down, the policemen felt stiff, “as if paralysed,” Rogalla recalled. “We had never thought something like that was possible to us.” It slowly began to dawn on the officers that soon they too would suffer the same fate.
⁶⁴

It was even worse for those on foot. “Columns without end” passed through the city “by day and night”, Catholic priest Paul Peikert noted. “The sight of these haggard, withered people who had to leave the land of their fathers with what little possessions they had was terrible.” Peikert’s housekeeper passed the corpses of eight children and an old man in a ditch, while there was talk of trucks filled with the dead heading for the city’s cemeteries. “Silesia,” wrote Peikert, “hasn’t experienced such hardships since the Thirty Years War, and given its scale that hardship must be called minor.”
⁶⁵

Normal life in Breslau ground to a halt. From a tram nine-year-old Jürgen Illmer watched staff at the Luftwaffe headquarters burn huge piles of documents in full view. In the distance there was the dull crash of explosions as the frozen earth was blown up to create anti-tank ditches.
⁶⁶
“You could see things breaking down almost by the hour,” Ulrich Frodien recalled. Snow was not cleared from the streets. Rubbish was not collected. Trams became less and less frequent. Traffic lights stopped working. Nazi Party officials disappeared from the streets. Cinemas and restaurants closed. “In just a few days, the routine changed completely,” the
Gefreiter
noticed. “A feverish unease had seized Breslau. I smelled it, it already stank like a front-line city, it stank of fires and death.”

After more than five years of war and rationing, shopkeepers were issuing double, even triple rations. “You might as well take it before Ivan gets his hands on it!” they told customers. Frodien was sent by his mother to pick up her fur coat from a store in Gartenstrasse, close to the central station. It was already closed, its shutters and bars lowered. The young soldier clambered over rubbish bins and entered the back of the shop. Inside, receipts and order forms were scattered over the floor, order books were piled up, there was even some money left in the till. And there were coats, jackets, capes, cloaks by the hundred. Sable, mink, wolf, sheep, fox and others. “For a poor soldier, who had frozen often enough on cold nights, it was a staggering sight,” Frodien recalled. He tried on an officer’s fur-lined coat. It fitted perfectly. “But then I hung it back up in the cupboard resignedly,” he lamented. Plundering was punishable by death.
⁶⁷

It was dark on Thursday, 18 January by the time Christa Ozanna reached Breslau’s Hauptbahnhof after a couple of changes of trains and a delay of several hours. “Somewhere in the East and West there was war,” she thought. “In Breslau you forgot about it.” Just before 7pm, she walked through the door of her mother’s home in Kronprinzenstrasse. Suddenly the air-raid siren howled. The family hurried into the cellar of the apartment block. “No reason to be alarmed,” the concierge assured everyone. “Nothing is happening.” But then bombs fell. The cellar walls shook, the building shook. Plaster fell from the ceiling. Dust and sand was whirled around, stinging eyes and choking throats. It went on like this for ninety minutes until the all-clear sounded. The Ozannas returned to their apartment, collected their thoughts, and prayed before going to sleep.
⁶⁸
Jürgen Illmer’s family rushed to his uncle’s house – he had built a concrete bunker in his garden with heavy iron blast doors. Before they got there, the sky was lit by ‘Christmas trees’, the bombers’ marker flares. The shelter itself was shaken repeatedly by loud explosions, not Russian bombs but German 88mm flak batteries in nearby Birkenwäldchen. It lasted only half an hour. As the all-clear sounded, the Illmers stepped out of the bunker and saw “the bright glow of fire over our city”. The oil tanks by the Oder were aflame, a handful of homes had been hit by bombs, but otherwise there was little damage and no one killed.
⁶⁹

Barely had the sirens abated than the loudspeaker columns spread around the city crackled and a tinny voice announced coldly:

The civilian populace must evacuate every district of Breslau east of the Oder immediately. The Oder bridges in the city are being prepared for demolition by engineers. Every inhabitant in the eastern part of town must leave his house immediately and proceed on foot to the western side of the city where every step has been taken to prepare for their arrival.
⁷⁰

Every step had
not
been taken, and Breslau’s Party leaders knew it. The head of Silesia’s propaganda office nervously walked around his office in Charlottenstrasse. Barely a fortnight earlier, Dr Schulz had reported that the Führer’s New Year speech had been a fillip to morale in the city. Now he questioned the decision of his masters. “What are we going to do with the people?” he asked his deputy, Carl Wichmann, adding: “How many are there actually?”

“A good two hundred thousand,” Wichmann answered.

“
Ja
, Carl, and what are going to do with them?”

Wichmann shrugged his shoulder. “We can’t do anything more. At such times, the fate of individuals does not matter,” he added coldly.

That was something Schulz, a former officer in a panzer regiment, could not tolerate.

“But we can’t let these people freeze outside, let those 200,000 go wild, half-starved when it’s twenty below again.”

“One thing you cannot be, not now, not ever, is weak,” his deputy warned. Carl Wichmann still believed his own propaganda. The handful of Russian tanks in Oels were scouts, at least sixty miles ahead of the bulk of the Soviet forces. It would be weeks before the Red Army stood at the gates of Breslau. “By then,” he smiled at Schulz, “by then our wonder weapons will have come into play.”
⁷¹

To Ulrich Frodien, the radio announcement had been both horrifying – and electrifying. “It suddenly dawned on me: here an entire city with more than one million inhabitants was beginning to die,” Ulrich Frodien recalled. “A world was going under – my world, my home, and I was an eyewitness. I told myself that what was happening here now I would never be able to witness again in my entire life, that it would be in the history books and that I was there, a direct participant, if I survived.” There was only one thing to do, the teenage soldier decided:
get out and see what is happening
.

In the small hours of 19 January he crossed the Oder and headed in the direction of the Jahrhunderthalle. At the Passbrücke, over the arm of the old river, he ran into a “long column of refugees” trying to reach the city centre. “In the bone-chilling cold children screamed for their families, old people collapsed,” Frodien observed. “Hand carts and sledges became stuck in the snow. Many people were too exhausted and too distraught to cry out loud and – this was very eerie – the constantly-falling snow and the thick blanket of snow smothered all loud noises like a powerful muffler.”
⁷²

In Rosenthal, just a couple of miles north of the city centre, former union official Otto Rothkugel helped his family pack, calmly but purposefully. His daughter and wife each had a bicycle and trailer. The latter were filled with whatever bedding, warm clothes and food they could hold – including two freshly-slaughtered turkeys.

Otto would not be accompanying his family. The forty-seven-year-old had been called up by the
Volkssturm
. He buried the supplies he would need to sustain him in a neighbour’s cellar under a pile of sand. Next came tubs filled with clothes and underwear, valuable household items, plus the radio. It too was hidden, then more sand poured in until it filled the cellar. Rothkugel then bricked up the entrance. Just to make sure, he stuck several old barrels on top. “No stranger would be able to tell there was a cellar there,” he declared proudly.
⁷³

Barely a mile away in the ‘garden city’ suburb of Karlowitz, thirteen-year-old Hans Eberhard Henkel’s mother grabbed the family silverware, photographs, clothes and documents. “Children, we’re going for a couple of days to the other side of the Oder,” she assured her offspring. “Once things have cleared up, we’ll come back.” A few minutes later the Henkels and five other families stood in front of their block with suitcases and rucksacks. The women cried at the top of their voices.

The Henkels loaded their trunks on to a pram and began pushing it down Wichelhausallee, then across Hindenburgbrücke and into the heart of Breslau. “A torrent of people moved over the bridge, heavily laden, fleeing into the city,” recalled Hans. His friend Manfred, barely fifteen, parted company with the refugees. As a member of the
Hitlerjugend
he had to stay behind to defend Breslau.

The Henkel family was quartered in the huge, but spartanly furnished apartment of an
Ortsgruppenleiter
. They lay on mattresses in otherwise empty rooms. It would be their penultimate night in the city.
⁷⁴

Karl Hanke tried to appeal for calm. “A few Soviet tanks” had clashed with
Volkssturm
units on the Silesian border – and been repulsed. To be sure, some districts on the right bank of the Oder had been evacuated. “If the same steps are required in Breslau, the appropriate orders will be issued in good time,” the
Gauleiter
assured the city’s inhabitants. “Comrades! Maintain your calm and do not let careless chatterboxes and scurrilous gossipmongers make you nervous! Steps have been taken to ensure the safe return of Breslau’s women and children, if evacuation becomes necessary.”
⁷⁵

Saturday, 20 January barely dawned. An almost black layer of cloud hung over the city as heavy snow fell. The wind whistled through the streets of Breslau, driving the snow into huge piles in front of corner houses. It was, wrote police officer Otto Rogalla, “one of those days which gives the impression that God has washed his hands of this world.”
⁷⁶

School had been cancelled for Horst Gleiss so he and his
Hitlerjugend
comrades could collect clothes for the
Volksopfer
collection. Instead, the fourteen-year-old went with his mother into the city centre to buy a winter coat. The Gleisses found the streets of Breslau filled with unending columns of farmers from the Silesian hinterland. Breslauers stared with disbelieving eyes at these refugees from Hünern – six miles from the city centre. From Ransern, also six miles from the centre. From Oswitz, just four miles away. The farmers drove their cattle, their sheep, their horses and other animals to the west. Panzers, anti-tank guns, armoured vehicles and infantry tried to make headway against them, moving eastwards.