Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (4 page)

The Sudeten Germans – perhaps 30,000 in all – had indeed been called, but not by their blood and their heart. They had been called by Joseph Goebbels.
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Outwardly, the
Deutsche Turn und Sportfest
appeared to be a celebration of the human body and physical achievement. In reality, it was the latest act in a propaganda campaign carefully orchestrated by Berlin to demonstrate solidarity with the ‘oppressed’ ethnic Germans who inhabited the mountainous Sudeten region just a few miles south of Breslau. The Silesian capital was festooned with the black flags of the Sudeten Germans. Cries of ‘Sieg Heil!’ echoed through the narrow alleys, across the squares decorated with swastika banners and green garlands. “It’s as if all the hardship has suddenly ended,” the
Völkischer Beobachter
gushed. “Joy – a silent joy which springs from the depths of the heart – is etched on the faces of men and women.”
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Wherever visitors to the
Sportfest
went, they were reminded of Sudeten Germans’ suffering and sacrifices. At the sporting exhibition in the four-domed pavilion in Schneitniger Park, one and a half miles from the sports ground, there was the usual Nazi art – statues of naked wrestlers, a bare-chested Aryan swinging a mighty hammer. There were also two halls of honour: one dedicated to the 236,000 German athletes who fell in the world war – plus thirty-eight ‘heroes’ who had been executed for their part in the failed Nazi coup in Austria in 1934 – and a second devoted to the Sudeten ‘fallen’. Black flags hung over two golden basins commemorating Niklas Böhm and Georg Hofmann, Sudeten Germans shot on May 21 1938. “See our flags wave,” the words of Nazi poet and journalist Kurt Eggers exhorted, “black like death. We must go forwards through night and hardship.” The propaganda onslaught reached its zenith after dark on Friday, July 29. The grandstands in the Schlossplatz were filled as the audience watched more than a thousand flags – the standards of more than a thousand groups of ethnic Germans from beyond the borders of the Reich – march on. Sudeten Germans lined all four sides of the square, carrying torches to create a ‘fiery border’. They heard their bespectacled leader, Konrad Henlein, a former junior officer, bank clerk, gymnastics instructor, and belated convert to the National Socialist cause. Henlein was not a great orator – there was no spontaneity, he read his speech. His reception was rapturous nevertheless, as he declared there was now “one united, one great, one proud German people”. He continued:

We will return from here to our homeland proud that destiny has given us a special and difficult task: to faithfully protect German soil and German blood and to help the German people safeguard peace.

As the spokesman of the largest German ethnic group in Europe I proclaim to every German living beyond the borders of the Reich: We are all inseparable parts of the great German people!
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Joseph Goebbels
was
a great orator. And tonight, the propaganda minister smugly noted in his diary, he was “on top form”, filling his speech with jokes and sarcastic comments. “These past few days, tens of thousands of our German brothers and sisters from abroad have poured into this Reich,” he told his audience. “Do not believe …” The applause drowned out Goebbels’ words. “Do not believe that we do not understand your feelings. I can well imagine that all of you crossed the German border with a shudder of emotion.” The minister paused once more as cries of ‘Heil’ reverberated around the square. In the past these ethnic Germans had returned to their adopted homes “with a feeling of shame in their hearts about their native land”. Today, however, every German, every
Volksdeutsche
could be proud of his nation and his people – thanks to the achievements of one man, “an unknown
Gefreiter
from the world war who directs the fate of the Reich”. To cries, cheering, chanting and applause, Goebbels closed his address:

From his face, you will draw fresh faith and fresh hope, which you need more than anyone else, which will take with you in your difficult daily struggle for the greatness of our people and the honour of our blood.
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And now on Sunday morning, July 31, 1938, they would see his face. And they would draw strength from it. As the thunder of the cannon faded, the bombastic strains of Hitler’s favourite piece of music, the
Badenweiler March
, performed by the combined band of the German Army and Navy which had entertained thousands the previous evening, announced the Führer’s arrival. It did not need to. A roar, growing ever louder, deafening, terrifying, intoxicating, steamrollered through the Breslau streets towards the Schlossplatz. Dressed in his brown Party uniform, the German leader shook hands with local Nazi dignitaries before striding across the square accompanied by the slavish Martin Bormann, a weary Goebbels, SS leader Himmler, Henlein, Silesian
Gauleiter
Josef Wagner with his copycat Hitler moustache, to a specially constructed rostrum opposite the Stadttheater. A small balcony, carpeted in red, adorned with a huge swastika and surrounded by a sea of colourful hydrangeas, had been erected at the front of the rostrum for the Führer and his closest entourage. As Hitler took his seat, his SS
Leibstandarte
bodyguard, each man dressed in black, each wearing a black steel helmet, each at least five feet ten inches tall, closed ranks in front of the tribune. Standard-bearers marched into the Schlossplatz, filing past both sides of the theatre, following ropes which marked out the huge square and guided their route around it. Athletes from Bavaria, the cradle of Nazism, were the first to parade past the tribune, yodelling as they did. There were four German mountaineers who had recently scaled the north face of the Eiger – the ‘face of death’ – fencers whose foils glinted in the morning sun, Austrians from the Tyrol in their bright national costumes, East Prussians, Danzigers. The cacophony of cries, shouts, cheers and applause reached their deafening peak as the Sudeten Germans, six rows deep, dressed in grey with Tyrolean hats, led by their black flags, entered the square.

A little over one hundred yards away, twelve-year-old Ulrich Frodien clung to the flagstaff he proudly held, bearing the black standard of the
Deutsche Jungvolk
, the younger arm of the
Hitlerjugend
. Like everyone else in the Schlossplatz, the schoolboy was excited. He had never seen ‘him’ before. Now, he observed Hitler’s every move, every expression. Sometimes tense, sometimes smiling, sometimes standing with his hands on his hips, sometimes turning to Henlein, so far the Führer had appeared somewhat subdued. It was all an act. As the first Sudeten standard-bearers marched past the rostrum, Hitler stood up, stepped forward to the balustrade, raised his right arm and saluted the ‘oppressed’ athletes. “I felt the entire square and the hundreds of thousands of people in it explode like a bomb,” Frodien recalled. “If the roar had been almost unbearable so far, now it reached a level which I would never have thought possible.” The schoolboy was carried away by the enthusiasm, by the mass hysteria. He yelled for all he was worth. “I wanted to be part of it, to feel I was part of this great, magnificent community,” he admitted. Suddenly, out of the tumult, the indescribable, indistinguishable roar, a sharp, staccato sound became apparent. “I couldn’t make it out at first, but it spread like wildfire around the entire square, passing from mouth to mouth.” The crowd swayed backwards and forwards feverishly. “
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!
” the spectators yelled in unison. One people, one empire, one leader. Repeatedly. Ever louder. “In my long life,” Frodien wrote six decades later, “I have experienced nothing comparable.” He continued:

This euphoria took people away from their daily existence, it gave them an uplifting feeling: they were part of one great, admirable community, invincible, strong, powerful. For a few moments, it promised the impossible, a touch of immortality.

All order, all discipline collapsed. A fair-haired boy darted out of the procession and rushed up to Hitler’s dais. He offered his hand to his Führer, who leaned over the edge and pressed it strongly. Young Sudeten girls and women in traditional dirndl dresses broke ranks and swarmed around the foot of the platform, pushing the
Leibstandarte
bodyguards aside. It was, Joseph Goebbels observed, as if “a wave of fanaticism and belief breaks in front of the tribune”. Himmler stretched far over the parapet and urged his men to close ranks and move the women on. It was pointless. A mother carried her five-year-old daughter on her shoulders, raising her up to show Hitler. With tears streaming down their faces, crying ‘Heil, heil!’ the Sudetenlanders stretched out their arms. Again the Führer obliged. Smiling, he shook hand after hand offered to him.

It took several minutes for the procession to re-form, to move on. Ethnic Germans from Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romanians. Athletes from overseas, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, South West Africa, the USA,
Volksdeutsche
from the Netherlands. Again they frequently broke ranks and shook the Führer’s hand. A procession which should have ended after three hours dragged on for nearly four. As the last marching athlete left the square, the audience left their seats in the stands and spilled across the sandy parade ground, rallying around the dignitaries’ platform. Once again there was a surging wave of outstretched hands, hysterical women, screaming girls. The band’s podium was the sole island of calm and order amid a raging sea of enthusiasm. Only reluctantly did the throng disperse and Hitler step down from his tribune. He shook hands with a row of disabled veterans in wheelchairs then climbed into his black open-topped 1937 Mercedes-Benz 770. Adolf Hitler left the Schlossplatz “deeply moved”. He was, his club-footed propaganda minister observed, “the great hope of Germanity” and “a symbol of our national awakening”. It was, Goebbels decided, “an honour to be permitted to serve him”.
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On a bitingly cold January morning, Ulrich Frodien stood once more before the Schlossplatz. The city moat was frozen. The sand was hidden beneath a blanket of snow. Military vehicles, guns, a few panzers were mustered on the parade ground – on the exact spot where Hitler’s tribune once stood.

A week before he had been hunting with his father in the village of Germanengrund, two dozen miles north of Breslau. The now eighteen-year-old panzer grenadier was convalescing, recovering from an artillery strike on the Eastern Front the previous autumn which smashed his thigh, and left shrapnel in his head and chest. Frodien still clung to the slight hope that the war might end in Germany’s favour. His father, a doctor, could only scoff at – and feel pity for – Ulrich’s naïve optimism. War had not touched this rural idyll, save for the death notices which filled the papers each day. To the villagers of Germanengrund “every front had always seemed a world away”. But now there was talk of a new Russian offensive, an attack from the bridgehead on the Vistula at Baranow, a little over 200 miles to the east. The armed forces communiqué mentioned the Soviet spearhead passing the famous monastery of Łysa Góra, near Kielce. The news seemed to galvanize Frodien’s father. He decided to return to Breslau immediately.

Now, this Tuesday, 23 January, 1945, the teenager headed for the centre of Breslau. For three days Breslau’s railway stations had been under siege, ever since an alarming, electrifying broadcast from the 1,000 loudspeakers, erected throughout the Silesian capital shortly before the
Sportfest
, once clarions of Nazi triumphs. “Women and children leave the city on foot in the direction of Opperau-Kanth,” the tinny voice urged, adding comfortingly. “There is no reason for alarm and panic.”
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Their men would not join them. Breslau had been declared a
Festung
– fortress, a fortress which would be ‘defended to the last’.

But not by the Frodiens. Ulrich’s mother and younger brother Michael had already fled Breslau. His father had every intention of joining them and sent the young
Gefreiter
into the city centre to see whether there was a chance of fleeing the city via the Freiburger Bahnhof. He left the family’s comfortable third-floor apartment in Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse – renamed Strasse der SA in honour of the Nazi brownshirts. He passed beneath the railway bridge where two elderly militia stood guard, shouldering
Panzerfaust
anti-tank weapons. He crossed Tauentzienplatz, past the Ufa Palast, the city’s largest cinema. The hoarding over the entrance still spelled out the title of the last film shown,
Opfergang
– The Great Sacrifice – an
Agfacolor
melodrama, the story of a Hamburg politician’s son who becomes infatuated with a young woman. Frodien passed the Wertheim department store, again the city’s largest, now known as AWAG after being appropriated from its Jewish owners. He skirted the edge of an empty square where once Breslau’s new synagogue had stood and came to the frozen moat, staring across at the Schlossplatz, recalling that Sunday in 1938. “I was seized by a profound feeling of sadness and despair at the thought that perhaps it had all been utterly pointless, our belief in Germany, our belief in the ideals of National Socialism, the endless sacrifices and the many fallen comrades,” he wrote. For a moment he considered reporting to the nearest barracks, joining one of the hastily-formed
Festungskompanien
– fortress companies – and manning a machine gun, determined to go down with his home. Reality quickly made him change his mind. Pain from his shattered thigh, his bandaged head, his scarred chest, pulsed through his body. Ulrich Frodien, just eighteen years old, was, he realized, “a wreck, utterly unsuited to any heroic fantasy of going under”.
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Ulrich Frodien and his father would escape the besieged Silesian capital. Thousands more would die trying. And thousands more still would die fulfilling the promise to defend the city ‘to the last’. They were as good as their word.
Festung
Breslau would hold out longer than Königsberg, longer than Danzig, longer than Vienna, longer even than the capital of the Reich itself. But Breslau and Breslauers would pay a terrible price for their obstinacy. At least 6,000 soldiers were killed and another 23,000 wounded defending the fortress on the Oder. The toll among civilians was far graver. Perhaps as many as 80,000 died. The city they knew, the city they had grown up with, the city where they had fêted Hitler and his cabal, the city which had been virtually untouched by war before 1945, would be no more. Two-thirds of all industry was destroyed. Seven out of ten high schools lay in ruins. Two in every three homes were uninhabitable. Nearly 200 miles of roadway were impassable – more than 600 million cubic feet of ash and rubble were lying in them. Eighty per cent of the railway and tram network was wrecked. All electricity lines and seventy per cent of the telephone lines were down.