Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (21 page)

Whatever the time of day, the schoolboy observed large crowds gathered in front of loudspeakers, hanging on every word of news which they sputtered out infrequently. Some time that afternoon, the announcer spoke once more. “Attention! Attention! Citizens of Breslau! … Women and children leave the city on foot in the direction of Opperau and Kanth …” Opperau lay five miles south-west of the city centre, Kanth ten miles beyond it. It was snowing. The temperature fluctuated between fifteen and twenty degrees below zero. For thousands, the order to evacuate Breslau would become a death sentence.
⁷⁷

Horst Gleiss stared through the windows of the family apartment in Benderplatz at the crowd of people in their thick winter coats, fur hats, earmuffs and sheepskin mittens, ignoring snow two feet deep and temperatures of twenty below, and huddling around the loudspeaker column. When the speaker urged them to flee towards Kanth, the group quickly dispersed. The fourteen-year-old was torn between feelings of pride and abject fear: pride at living through a historic moment in his country’s history and fear that his fate was beyond his control. Above all, he realized that the war he had experienced – in the newspapers and newsreels – “was actually no experience of war at all.” Now things would turn “deadly serious. There will be merciless murder here.”
⁷⁸

Jürgen Illmer’s mother telephoned the barracks to ask permission for fourteen-year-old Hans to leave the city with them. “Leave in this situation is impossible,” the voice on the other end of the line coldly informed her, adding that fleeing the city would be regarded as desertion, punishable by death. Frau Illmer put the receiver down and turned to Hans. “Please, take off your uniform immediately. You’re still a child and you’re coming with us.” He did. It was stuffed with some bed sheets in a large red canvas bag and left in the cellar.

As the Illmers packed, the doorbell rang. A neighbour wanted some razor blades so she could kill herself. For half an hour Frau Illmer pleaded with the woman to change her mind. In the end she walked away.

Young Jürgen crept into the dining room and grabbed the last packet of his favourite chocolate drink – “a reminder of better times and was brought out for birthdays and special rewards”. There was still space for it in his small rucksack next to the various pairs of shoes shoved inside.

His brother Hans filled a leather suitcase with the family silver, plus bread, sausages, butter and a jar full of salt, while their mother put more food and cutlery in a large leather shopping bag.

After an hour’s packing, the Illmers were ready to leave. With tears in their eyes, the family stepped out into the street in the dark. There were twenty inches of snow on the ground, it was twenty degrees below zero, and there was a solemn procession of people wandering down the road, their hoods pulled up, hauling hand carts and sledges.

The Illmers stopped briefly at a relative’s house to bid farewell. “We’re only leaving Breslau temporarily,” Jürgen’s mother comforted them. “In fourteen days the situation will have calmed down, then we’ll see each other again.” No one believed her.

They headed out into the streets once more, not for Kanth, but for Hartlieb on the southern edge of the city. Frau Illmer knew the stationmaster, but that proved of little use. Bells announced the approach of trains. Each time they rang, Jürgen and Hans got off the floor and stepped to the front of the platform where they jostled with the crowd, including three Lithuanians smoking Soviet-made Pappirossi cigarettes. “They were filled with a fear of the Russians,” Jürgen recalled. “They said they’d rather lay their heads on the tracks than fall into Russian hands.” No train stopped. They continued on their way to the Sudeten Mountains. So overcrowded were they that people squatted on the running boards of the freight wagons.
⁷⁹

After assisting refugees at the Freiburger Bahnhof, schoolgirl Ursula Scholz now faced the prospect of joining this exodus. She and her sister Margot filled home-made rucksacks with documents, clothes, a towel, a few small pots and a plate to eat from. They pulled the rest of their possessions – clothes and blankets crammed into a trunk – behind them on a sled. Having witnessed the scenes at the station, the Scholzes resolved to walk.
⁸⁰

Having waited unsuccessfully for a train, Hans Eberhard Henkel’s mother decided the only solution was to make for Schweidnitz, thirty miles south of Breslau, on foot. “You will freeze,” one woman admonished her. “Tanks will drive over you.” Frau Henkel pressed on undeterred. “Come, children, we have a lucky star!”
⁸¹

Luck came to the aid of Dr Theofil Peters. Peters had spent days at the Hauptbahnhof in vain. Now desperate, he headed to Party headquarters in the slender hope of obtaining a travel permit for his car. He was in luck. He bumped into a former patient from the Upper Silesian village of Pitschen, now a career Party man. “We Pitschen folk must stick together,” he told Peters and handed him fuel and travel permits to allow the family to escape to Berlin.
⁸²

It was approaching midnight at Hartlieb station and still the Illmers were waiting. They were about to return home when the bells rang again. The family automatically rushed out on to the platform. But this time the train stopped. Four passenger carriages had been laid on for the people of Hartlieb. There was space for all those waiting – just. As the train got under way, recalled Jürgen, “we realized for the first time all that we had left behind”. Only now did the tears truly flow. Jürgen sobbed over his electric train set, Hans over his fishing tackle. “Children, don’t be sad,” their mother told them. “Think about everything that I have left behind.” The train eventually reached its destination, Schweidnitz. It too was overcrowded, but the stationmaster refused to open the first-class waiting room, convinced its fine furnishings would be ruined by the crowds.
⁸³

As the third week of January 1945 began, there were as many as 600,000 Germans struggling west through Silesia. There were ethnic Germans from Romania, the Ukraine, the Baltic, Bessarabia, who had come ‘home to the Reich’ in 1939 and resettled in Poland – at the expense of the native population, of course. There were the rural and urban populations of Silesia. There were wealthy farmers with their well-fed horses and fine wagons, loaded with beds, household goods, hay, straw. There were less affluent farmers with small gaunt horses pulling canvas-covered carts. Their families lay inside and shivered, despite the bedding and blankets. The farmers ran alongside the carts, their eyebrows and beards frozen, their horses covered with hoarfrost as thick as a finger. There were the ill and wounded from Breslau’s hospitals, frogmarched down country roads, clinging to carts and supported by fellow patients. There were lengthy columns of Russian prisoners of war accompanied by armed escorts. In their ill-fitting, faded blue-grey prisoner suits, they shuffled along, hands in their pockets, some hauling sledges carrying the sick. There were
Landsers
hoping to slip away with the trek, hiding under the tarpaulin of a farmer’s cart having discarded their weapons and uniforms. “
Ja
, there’s one with us,” refugees would admit when questioned by the military police checking refugee columns on the roads leading out of the city. The fate of the deserters was unequivocal – and brutal. Near the Hundsfelder Brücke the bodies of hanged soldiers swung in the cold wind with a cardboard sign around their necks: ‘For cowardice in the face of the enemy.’
⁸⁴
The
Bonzen
– Party big shots – also sought to hide among the refugees. On the Kanth road, Otto Rogalla stopped a senior Party figure dressed in civilian clothes and carrying two pigskin suitcases stuffed with winter clothing, jewellery and bundles of Reichsmarks. He shouted at the policeman, told him he had orders to go to Berlin – but could not produce them. “Then he tried the soft touch,” Rogalla recalled, “offering me money and jewels.” The bribe did not work. Otto Rogalla handed the
Bonze
over to the criminal police to take back to the city. “I had done my duty but I did not feel good about it,” he admitted.
⁸⁵

The policeman stopped military vehicles and pleaded with their occupants to take women and children with them. Mothers beseeched soldiers: “Carry this for me, guide my child for me.” Children screamed, farmer’s wives begged anyone they met to give their horses and children shelter for a night. The exhausted, frozen beasts stumbled along, dragging heavily-loaded carts. Babies whimpered. A girl asked her mother: “
Mutti
, do we still have far to go?” Anyone who fell in the road was simply crushed by the crowd, by people trampling, by the wheels of carts. Mothers were frequently separated from their offspring in the throng. Women pushed prams and were delighted when their children finally fell silent, unaware that they had frozen to death, despite the pillows and blankets protecting them. Fritz Neugebauer peered into a pram pushed by a young mother from Trebnitz. “Dear madam, your child has lips which are completely blue. He could freeze to death,” he warned her. “
Ach
, Jesus, I couldn’t do anything,” she sighed. Neugebauer touched the child. It did not move.
⁸⁶

Barely a day into the evacuation, there were more than fifty graves of children in the city’s Südpark. There were many more on the country lanes outside Breslau. The ditches along the road to Liegnitz filled with frozen babies as well as suitcases, bedding, and clothes, while the corpses of forty small children were laid to rest on straw in the market square of Neumarkt. For the most part, the dead were simply left by the wayside. There was no time, nor means to bury them. Their fathers at the front had no idea that the snow was their only blanket. “None of them closed their eyes,” secondary school teacher Lucia Kusche remembered. Occasionally, a corpse was covered by a piece of paper but that, thought Kusche, “was even more tragic because it was so squalid.” Search parties were sent out to recover the dead. Sixteen-year-old
Bund Deutscher Mädel
girl Vera Eckle was collected by a
Volkssturm
man in an open truck filled with blankets. It headed down the road to Kanth, finally coming to a halt when the mass of people prevented any further progress. From the cab, Eckle stared at children stumbling along, weighed down by the layers of clothes keeping them warm; an elderly woman puffed and wheezed, an old man on crutches constantly slipped on the ice. “Get out, come on, get out girls, take the blankets with you and pick up the dolls!” the
Volkssturm
man yelled at the schoolgirl. She did. But which dolls? And then she stumbled over a bundle on the ground. Eckle picked it up – then dropped it immediately. “For God’s sake, they’re children, the corpses of children,” she screamed and burst into tears. The
Volkssturm
soldier showed no compassion. “
Jawohl
, they’re children which German women have tossed away to save their own skin,” he snarled. “We can’t allow our leader to see this so gather them up as quickly as possible.” The burial parties were simply overwhelmed by the task facing them. There were too many corpses for the trucks to carry; 400 dead children and adults were found along a single short stretch of road.
⁸⁷

Breslauers gave this exodus a chilling name: the Kanth death march. Of the 60,000 people who responded to the instructions to leave the city, perhaps 18,000 died. It is not figures which have the power to convey the horrors of this trek, but the plight of the individual. Housewife Frau Hanisch had dutifully left her home city with four-month-old daughter Gabi. Now she lay in the hall of a makeshift hospital somewhere southwest of Breslau, writing the bitterest letter of her life, trying to explain to her mother how her daughter had died.

She had wrapped Gabi in two blankets, before slinging the most vital items, including powdered milk and a bottle, in a rucksack, then struck out into the night. In the suburbs, the women grouped together while Party officials drove up and down the streets in loudspeaker vans urging people to flee the city. Occasionally, cars stopped and took a handful of people with them. Most were not so fortunate. The refugees skidded and slipped on the ice. Those with prams often abandoned them because they would not move. Soon they began to toss their luggage into the roadside ditches, unable to carry it any more as the snow fell heavily.

And then the first dead children appeared, some in the ditches, some laid out in the market squares of Silesian hamlets. Women sat in front of the houses, trying to rest. Frau Hanisch banged on the doors of several homes, hoping to warm up some milk. No answer. She gave up and sat down in the snow, watching this endless column of women trudge past for half an hour. And then on to the next village. “I counted the trees along the avenue, hauling myself from tree to tree,” she wrote.

Possessions thrown away simply lay in the middle of the road. Women sat on their sledges, wanting to rest. The cold always drove them on, however, until they simply stayed sitting on them and perhaps froze to death with their children. I saw many who sat there with their back resting on a tree. Sometimes larger children stood next to them crying. Motherly love is surely the greatest love. However strong any love might be, we are but weak creatures in the end.

It was beginning to grow light as Frau Hanisch approached Kanth. After two hours of crying, her daughter had finally fallen silent. Her mother began to bang on the doors in the hope once more of warming some milk. Other mothers hurled snowballs at windows. No doors opened. “They will get their just dessert for their hard-heartedness,” Frau Hanisch wrote bitterly. The milk in her baby’s bottle had frozen. She resorted to breast feeding, but her daughter was not interested. Despite the continuous icy wind, she continued towards Kanth, down a road lined with the corpses of children.