Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (31 page)

Mortar shells started to land. Reunited with Feiner, Arnhold and Rosseck crawled across 100 or so feet of ground before yelling: “Hallo! Hallo! Haaaallooo! There are three German soldiers here – where are you?” No response. “Hallooooo! Hallooooo! Hallooooo! There’s a German
Oberst
here with two men. Where are you? Help us! We’re freezing to death. Tell us where you are!” Still no answer. “We’ve seen you shooting. Tells us for God’s sake where you are! One of us is wounded. We’re all freezing to death! Haalloooooo!” Finally, an answer through the night: “
Hier
!”

The three remnants of LVI Panzer Corps had run into a
Volkssturm
battalion holding the Oder’s left bank. They were led to the battalion headquarters where they were given civilian clothes, warm soup and a hot bath. “It was no pleasure,” Arnhold recalled. “The pain when thawing out was so unimaginable that we passed out on a few occasions. We could have screamed. But we had to get rid of five weeks of dirt, blood from our wounds, pus from our frostbitten feet before we could eat something. It was like Christmas – in hell!”

Sufficiently cleaned, Paul Arnhold was taken into Breslau, where he reported to von Ahlfen. His comrades volunteered to join 269th Infantry’s breakout that night. “Much as I wanted to, I could not go with them,” he wrote. “It was only now that the full extent of my exhaustion became clear. I could barely go on as I hobbled to the hospital located in a large bunker in the city centre.” Medics immediately decided the
Oberst
should be flown out of the city.
¹⁸

Siegfried Knappe also had orders to fly out of Breslau and rejoin Ferdinand Schörner’s staff. After two gruelling weeks in the fortress, Knappe was exhausted; he fell into a deep sleep on a bed in the barracks at Gandau – despite the constant crashing of shells outside and the sound of infantry fighting to the west of the airfield. Finally, a little after 7pm on the fifteenth, two Junkers 52 touched down. Russian shellfire was erratic, but the crates of ammunition the aircraft brought in were unloaded hurriedly anyway. The staff officers climbed into the empty transporters with their kit. In a matter of minutes, the aircraft rolled down the field. As it lifted off the ground, the pilots banked sharply, trying to gain altitude circling over Breslau. That gave passengers “a spectacular view of a large city surrounded by a pearl-like string of burning villages”. The muzzle flashes of artillery marked the Soviet front line. Knappe could also see flashes of heavy flak followed a few seconds later by the bursts of red shells close to the Junkers. After barely thirty minutes, the aircraft set down at Schweidnitz. “The tension, which I had hardly been aware of during the excitement of the flight, began to drain from me,” he remembered. “I also felt an enormous sense of relief at being out of a city under siege.”
¹⁹
Hugo Hartung was experiencing the full effects of that siege. All through 15 February the airfield at Schöngarten was subjected to a Soviet barrage. Hartung took shelter in the fire station; his less fortunate comrades were pinned down in their concrete foxholes on the airfield perimeter, unable to move thanks to the presence of Russian snipers. Only at nightfall were the airfield’s defenders able to fall back to the officers’ mess, left in a desolate state – “dirt and rubbish, leftovers from meals, puddles of wine and liquor”. The company tried to settle down for the night when a messenger rushed in: “Alarm! The Russians are at the airfield fence!” Rushing outside, they found wild shooting and tracer hissing across the runway. Hartung continued:

Everywhere the villages are on fire. We hear the terrible bellowing of cows in the burning stables, and also the shrill cries of people. Fires have broken out in the middle of the airfield. The cinema is aflame. Running and ducking, we look for cover in the officers’ houses. Dead lie in the road everywhere.

In the midst of the hellish noise of the barrage, the voice of a Soviet loudspeaker booms – it seems like it’s coming from very close by: ‘Come to us! Come to us!’ After that, distorted by the volume, there’s the
Internationale
,
Lili-Marleen
and the
Viennese Waltz
. Once we hear the ‘Urrah!’ of attacking Russians, partially to our rear. Palls of black smoke drift across the red sky and form strange figures.

The men took cover in the cellar of an officer’s house on the edge of the field – but not for long. A shell crashed through the water main, plunging water into the cellar. As the men dashed outside, they ran straight into direct Russian fire. In the small hours of the sixteenth, a messenger somehow reached them: Schöngarten was being abandoned. Its defenders were to pull out.
²⁰

That same morning Breslauers awoke to the realization their city was surrounded. The day’s edition of the
Schlesische Tageszeitung
carried an appeal by the fortress commander:

Festung
Breslau is encircled.

That comes as no surprise to us, for a fortress must always expect to be encircled and to fight while encircled. All that matters is that every person remains steadfast in the fortress despite – and precisely because of – this encirclement.

Everyone! Whether you are a man or a woman, old or young, soldier or
Volkssturm
man!

We must now prepare ourselves for artillery fire, fire from other heavy weapons and bombs smashing into the fortress. All this is completely normal in the defence of a fortress.

It would therefore be unworthy of every Breslauer to lose courage under this fire. Think of the many fortresses which have been encircled and successfully defended in our great history.

We want to show the same courage, bravery and steadfastness as our forefathers did defending their fortresses.

– Von Ahlfen,
Generalmajor Festungskommandant
²¹

Encirclement also prompted calls for the city’s surrender – but not from the Red Army directly. No, the call to capitulate came from a German, former Party member and regimental commander Luitpold Steidle, who had joined the anti-Nazi
National Komitee Freies Deutschland
– National Committee for a Free Germany – in captivity. Leaflets bearing Steidle’s appeal began to drift down across Breslau. “Any further resistance is utterly pointless and senseless,” he implored. “The only outcome will be the total sacrifice of your men for Hitler’s long-since-lost war and the ultimate destruction of our homeland.” The German response was printed in the city’s daily newspaper. “We refuse to deal with the Red Army, which brings terror and destruction to our beautiful Silesian home,” the
Schlesische Tageszeitung
declared. The article, which bears all Hanke’s hallmarks, continued:

What counts for us is the Führer’s order to defend
Festung
Breslau to the last. We will carry out the mission of this German bulwark of culture on the Oder, which brave German warriors have defended and held for centuries with their blood and their willingness to make sacrifices …

Warriors of
Festung
Breslau! This affects everything! It affects our people and our beautiful German home! We want to defend both to our dying breath. So to battle in defiance of Death and the Devil! We will meet the Red invader wherever we can. Their skulls will run with blood in the ruins of our beloved city. We are fighting for a just cause. We believe in our victory and God will stand by our strong hearts.
²²

Few believed the rhetoric. “Breslau will be quickly overrun,” a reservist wrote to his wife. “The end of the war might soon be upon us and we want to hope that we will see each other again safely.”
Sturmgeschütz
commander Leo Hartmann remembered “the most incredible rumours were circulating. Everyone believed we’d be relieved. But no one believed that the city could hold out more than three weeks.” Others sought refuge in revelry. The first night of encirclement, one officer found two city centre bars “almost filled to overflowing”, food was in more plentiful supply “than before the war” and the wine cellars were raided. It was not just officers enjoying a final night of debauchery. Accompanying many of them were finely dressed women, “most of whom looked like courtesans”.
²³

There were at least 150,000 people now trapped in Breslau – and only one in four was a warrior. Nazi Party documents suggest there were 80,000 civilians still in the city when it was surrounded: 6,500 men capable of bearing arms, 30,000 men and women capable of working, 5,000 mothers, nearly 9,000 children, 24,000 elderly, sick or infirm, and more than 4,000 foreign workers. The true figure is probably nearer 115,000, but no one knows with certainty.
²⁴

The 37,000 or so warriors in the fortress consisted of one division – the 609th under Great War veteran and artilleryman Siegfried Ruff – which had not existed just one month earlier, and five equally hastily formed regiments, each named after its commander. They were deployed around the forty-five-mile perimeter of the ring, more accurately an oval, on a north-west to south-east axis. Luftwaffe ground units meshed together under
Oberst
Wolf Wehl defended the southern perimeter of the cauldron. In the west,
Major
Karl Hermann Hanf commanded men from a former non-commissioned officers’ school, holding the line alongside the youthful
Obersturmbannführer
Georg Besslein and his regiment of Waffen SS replacement and training units. On their right, troops from the city’s barracks at Karlowitz and Rosenthal safeguarded the northern front under
Oberst
Hermann Sauer, while thirty-four-year-old
Oberstleutnant
Walter-Peter Mohr defended the north-eastern line with a newly formed replacement and training unit. The three regiments of the 609th – Kersten, Reinkober and Schulz, comprising reconnaissance units, trainee NCOs, anti-tank gunners, officer cadets and men of 269th Infantry Division unable to escape encirclement – completed the ring of defenders in the east and south-east of Breslau. To each regiment was assigned at least one
Volkssturm
battalion under the overall command of the city’s SA chief, Otto Herzog. Herzog was no fair-weather Nazi; a reserve officer, he had fought – and been wounded – in the campaign in France in 1940. He energetically set about organising the city’s 38
Volkssturm
units into ‘combat’ and ‘work’ battalions depending on the men’s experiences, plus two battalions comprised solely of Hitler Youths.

Against them were ranged an entire Soviet Army, the Sixth, led by the energetic – and young – Vladimir Gluzdovski. The forty-one-year old Georgian had served in the Red Army since the age of sixteen, fighting in the Civil War, defending the Soviet capital in 1941, and leading three armies westwards when the tide of war changed. With wiry jet-black hair, a wry smile often etched across his face, a cigarette invariably in his right hand, and with political commissar Vassily Klokov almost always at his side, Gluzdovski had commanded Sixth Army for barely two months. He was even-handed, sometimes stubborn, and regarded as one of the brighter young brains in the Red Army. He committed six rifle divisions to the siege of Breslau – 181st, 218th, 273rd, 294th, 309th and 359th – some 50,000 men armed with more than 1,000 field guns and howitzers, but only a few dozen armoured vehicles. In the small hours of 17 February Gluzdovski would unleash his forces to crush Silesia’s capital.
²⁵

For most Breslauers, there was little if any distinction between the different stages of the struggle for their city. It had been under siege for a good three weeks now. No longer did the air raid sirens sound. There was no need. Somewhere in Breslau was always under bombardment by day or night, be it from Soviet aircraft or Soviet artillery. “Smoke from fires constantly hangs over the city,” a bomber crewman in 82nd Guards Bomber Regiment wrote to his mother as he sat “next to an oven, formerly owned by a German, on a chair, formerly owned by a German”. Daily he watched “bombs exploding, setting houses on fire and destroying them.” He felt no pity. “Just imagine the Germans finding their graves under the ruins of their houses. Now these Fritzes are all learning what destroyed cities are and what war means.”
²⁶
With the impact of each bomb or shell, doors shook and shutters clattered, but it was windowpanes which suffered most. City streets were strewn with fields of broken glass. Breslauers patched their shattered windows up with boards, wrapping paper, cardboard – less as protection against the bombs and shells than to keep out the cold, made worse by the now intermittent gas and electricity supplies.
²⁷
Other damage was beyond repair. A shell smashed through the medieval wall of St Barbarakirche on the western edge of Breslau’s old town as
Pfarrer
Ernst Hornig led morning prayers. It lodged in the bars on the windows in the north vault. It failed to explode, but it did send clouds of dust billowing through the church. Hornig led his worshippers into the cellar of the adjacent parsonage. At least two more artillery strikes followed, smashing the harmonium, peppering the heavy vestry door “with holes like a sieve”. Despite the devastation, Ernst Hornig felt the protective hand of the Lord. “Had the first shell exploded, there would have been dead and wounded,” he wrote. “We know that we have been saved, as if by a miracle.” But never again did the bells of St Barbara toll to summon the devout to worship – the congregation were convinced the church had been targeted because of the ringing.
²⁸
“Everyone wonders whether Breslau will share the fate of the other major cities of the Reich. Breslau is a beautiful city with marvellous icons of its historic Christian culture, it has architectural structures seldom found in a city,” wrote Paul Peikert. “Dominsel, the town hall, the wonderful old churches – is all this to go down in ruins because military insanity wants to turn every house, every church, every cellar into a fortress? What will we achieve if Breslau holds out a couple more days as a result, if what is left is an endless field of ruins? It’s as if the world has been gripped by a mania for destruction. The moloch of war devours everything.”
²⁹
The answer would come on Tuesday, 20 February.