Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (47 page)

The mad day was far from over. In mid-afternoon the German armour was ordered to support a counter-attack by Hitler Youths to drive the Russians back to the railway embankment. They did. By nightfall, the allotments and marshes in north-west Breslau were in German hands. But that did not mean that the battlefield was silent. Towards dusk, the troops found a Soviet tank which had fallen into a bomb crater “as deep as a house”. It could not climb out again. Hartmann decided to salvage it with the aid of thirty
Volkssturm
men, leaving his deputy in charge. A few minutes later, his deputy staggered into his command post “black with smoke”. The tank’s crew were still inside – they had even fired the gun; the muzzle flash burned Hartmann’s deputy. The commander immediately returned to the scene. The tank crew refused to surrender. Grenades were tossed inside and finally a
Panzerfaust
was used. It was the thirteenth and final victory of the day for Hartmann’s men. They called it the day of the
Panzersterben
– tank slaughter. Leo Hartmann was mentioned in the daily communiqué and received the
Ritterkreuz
for his actions. Yet he was troubled by his thirteenth kill of the day.

Later I often wondered why the tank’s crew had not climbed out but had defended themselves so stubbornly to the end. I assume that the unit commander was in the tank. He had blundered into the crater early in the morning as this armoured formation had crossed the railway embankment in preparation for the true assault. At that moment – when the unit was leaderless – I arrived with my guns and began to clear things up. The Russian commander probably realized the scale of the catastrophe, no longer dared to go back and preferred to let himself be blown into the air.
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Leo Hartmann was not the only officer to question the Soviet troops’ lacklustre performance. Fortress commander Hermann Niehoff was equally puzzled. The general had transferred his headquarters from the Liebichshöhe – deserters had revealed its location to the Russians, who promptly turned it into a “smoking volcano” – to the cellars of the Staatsbibliothek on the Sandinsel. With sufficient will, the Red Army could have carried the day, it could have presented Breslau as an Easter gift for Stalin. It had not. Weeks later, in captivity, Niehoff asked his captors why they had not crushed the defenders at Easter. “We had a different plan,” a Soviet staff officer told him.
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The ‘different plan’ was the seizure of Berlin. On the day Vladimir Gluzdovski’s army smashed through Niehoff’s western front, Ivan Konev had been summoned to Moscow to draw up plans for the fall of Berlin. Thereafter, Breslau was merely a sideshow. The bulk of 1st Ukrainian Front regrouped for an assault on the capital of the Reich.

It was a decision which did not please everyone, not least Gluzdovski. Breslau could wait until after Berlin had fallen, Konev told him. The Sixth Army commander protested, convinced his forces were weaker than those inside the encircled fortress and convinced that the Germans would attempt a breakout. At all hours of the day he called his marshal, pleading for permission to take the Silesian capital. “We’re almost at the war’s end,” Konev told him. “There’s no need to storm the fortress.” All Gluzdovski needed to do was to keep the defenders of the fortress in check and remind them from time to time that their position was hopeless.
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Gluzdovski’s frustration was shared by the 90,000 men of Polish Second Army, fighting alongside Soviet troops. After combat in Pomerania, the Poles regrouped in mid-March 1945 and were sent south to take part in the final battle for Breslau. “In our imagination,” wrote Lieutenant Waldemar Kotowicz, Breslau “was a panorama of church steeples, a strip of white buildings, with a network of streets, hundreds of squares and the broad waters of the Oder passing through it.” And the reality? “We saw a huge cloud of dust and smoke hanging over the entire city, a swirl of raging chaos, then a mushroom shooting up into the sky, spreading out sideways and obscuring the afternoon sun,” he recalled. “We saw a gigantic sea of flames, fires side by side, the brief glow of fire from explosions which turned what had once been a house, school or church into dust.” Kotowicz scanned the horizon with his binoculars. “Nowhere was there a lofty Gothic tower, nowhere were there white buildings, no greens, no free streets, or the outline of the Oder.” It was a scene, the Polish officer remembered, “whose scale and impression bordered on madness”. Lieutenant Ryszard Skala found a street map of the city in an abandoned apartment. He spread it out on a large oak table and studied it with his comrades: “I memorised the names of the streets and districts, the location of crossroads and bridges,” he recalled. “We all tested our knowledge of the city: Matthiasstrasse, Gartenstrasse, Palmstrasse, Strasse der SA. We knew this city would be ours.”
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It would. But in April 1945, Polish Second Army got no closer than the outskirts of the city. It was ordered west to take Dresden instead.

There was only one man in Breslau who was happy in April 1945 and that man was Karl Hanke. The
Gauleiter
was basking in fulsome adoration from other senior Nazis for his leadership. There was praise from another besieged city in the East, Königsberg. “Just as in 1813, when the torch of freedom was lit in East Prussia and Silesia, so it will be lit in this decisive struggle,”
Kreisleiter
Ernst Wagner radioed.

Germany, Europe, the world are looking at us. Raise Hitler’s flags on barricades!

Heroic and loyal, proud and defiant, we will turn our fortresses into mass graves for the Soviet hordes. These dogs will come a cropper.

Like you, we know that the hour before sunrise is always the darkest. Remember that when the blood runs into your eyes during battle and there is darkness all around you. Whatever happens, victory will be ours.

Death to the Bolsheviks! Long live the Führer!
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There was praise from Hanke’s long-standing friend, Albert Speer. “You have already given Germany a great deal through your achievement as the defender of Breslau,” Hitler’s armament minister gushed. “Your example – whose greatness has not yet been appreciated – will have inestimable importance for the
Volk
, like many heroes in German history.” Speer’s fawning continued:

At a time when the nation’s entire leadership strata is collapsing and giving up, you set an example – a witness against many!

Germany will not go under! It has been badly hurt by Fate. It will live on and one day regain its old respectability. We must not give up hope in these bitter hours.

The
Volk
have been heroic, loyal, unique. The
Volk
have not failed.

Anyone who attacks this
Volk
and its destiny will be severely punished by Fate.

God protect Germany.

I, dear Hanke, thank you once more with all my heart for everything which you have done for me. You brought me my first decisive successes and later, as a friend, you have stood loyally by my side.

You have nothing to feel sorry about. You are approaching a beautiful and worthy end to your life.
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And there was praise from Adolf Hitler for the city in one of his final public pronouncements – “an example to the entire German people”– and for its
Gauleiter
, the highest honour the Party could bestow, the Golden Cross of the German Order, “in grateful recognition of your great achievement in the struggle for the future of our people”.
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In turn, the fortress would honour its leader on his fifty-sixth birthday. In years gone by, 20 April had been a public holiday, Breslau’s streets adorned with flags, garlands, banners. But not in 1945. In 1945, front-line commanders were urged to gather their men, their workers, their staff around them and explain that the best way to honour Adolf Hitler would be to continue the struggle “with an iron will and unbroken strength” and “do more than one’s duty until a German victory”. Breslau’s leaders obliged. “On the Führer’s birthday, we remember with gratitude and respect the man who held high the banners of the Reich and its honour against a world of enemies amid the storms and tempests of this mighty, fateful struggle,” declared the fortress’s artillery commander Hermann Hartl. “We pledge to him that we will fight to the last man. He can rely on us.” As for fortress commander Hermann Niehoff, he praised the Führer’s “unique greatness” in an order of the day which plumbed new depths of obsequiousness.

His life is Germany’s life, his struggle is the struggle of the German soldier, his goal is the freedom of the German worker and the German citizen. Because he is one of us, he has the love and the complete faith of the entire nation.

Today, in this fateful hour, the German people look to the Führer and withstand the hardest days in this war. We in Fortress Breslau also look to the Führer. Our confidence is based upon him and becomes all the stronger the longer we defend ourselves. For Adolf Hitler is with the brave, his strength will be our strength!
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Such words were meant to steel the defenders of Breslau. They did not. Hugo Hartung listened to his commander proclaim his faith in ultimate victory. “Most of his officers look extremely sceptical,” he observed. A National Socialist Leadership Officer addressed Emil Heinze and his
Volkssturm
comrades. “I have spoken with an expert,” the officer declared. “A destroyed street like Albrechtsstrasse can be rebuilt in four weeks.” The company fell about laughing. For most Breslauers, 20 April was remarkable only because it was an excuse to celebrate and forget about the horrors of life in the fortress. Girls from the
Bund Deutscher Mädel
serenaded convalescing soldiers in the bunker hospitals. Hugo Hartung enjoyed a fine lunch washed down with a bottle of wine. Hermann Niehoff handed out chocolate and champagne to his staff. After spending the day piling up 3,000 empty shell cases, Horst Gleiss returned to his cellar to find a party in full swing. There was gingerbread, raspberry juice, schnapps, red wine and cigarettes. A gramophone, radio and accordion provided the music, young girls provided the distraction. They sang the wistful
Es geht alles vorüber
– it’s all over – and danced long into the night. Only when the wine ran out did the party end.
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With or without Polish Second Army, with or without Ivan Konev’s approval, Vladimir Gluzdovski continued to gnaw at Breslau. Never was there a day without bombing, without an artillery barrage, without some house, some bunker, some building being contested. Soviet historians reckoned sixty-four
Landsers
and forty-nine
frontoviki
died every day in Breslau in April 1945; both figures are conservative. The focal point was the city’s western suburbs and one obstinate nest of German resistance in particular, the
Hochbunker
in Striegauer Platz. The wounded had already been evacuated, distributed among the city’s remaining bunker and basement hospitals. Eighty soldiers and pioneers took their place. The latter hid explosive charges in the centre of the bunker as a booby trap in case it fell to the Soviets. By the third week of April Russian troops had reached the outside of the bunker. They set charges on the ventilation ducts. One set fire to the bunker’s fuel reserves, igniting more than 400 gallons of oil which raced down the concrete ducts inside, setting fire to everything it touched. The defenders retreated to the only safe room: the airlock. Some eighty men squeezed into a room of barely 100 square feet. The final hours there, recalled master plumber Gustav Paneck, were hellish.

Concrete dust and clouds of smoke filled the lobby. On top of that, the charges placed by the pioneers exploded in the burning bunker. The steel door between the interior and the air lock opened around ten centimetres because of the enormous heat in the shelter. I dared to look inside and saw nothing but fire. Enemy shells now hit the wall of the air lock constantly. Concrete dust, powdery smoke and the flames carried by the blast of air billowed over our heads through the bunker. The young soldiers bravely defended our air lock with machine-guns. But some were hurt by enemy shells. Some suffered serious arm and leg injuries. The medic was also wounded while administering first aid. Remaining in the air lock became ever more dangerous.

The men pleaded with the pioneer commander to give up the struggle. He refused, convinced his family would be executed if he surrendered the bunker. One of his soldiers was prepared to take such a risk, fixing a white handkerchief to his rifle and pushing it through a metal grate. The handkerchief was shot off. “So we had to wait as our plight grew more and more threatening,” Paneck remembered.

There was another enormous explosion. Another of the charges placed by our pioneers had exploded. We felt as if our clothes, our faces, our hair were covered with oil. A small chink of light appeared at the airlock entrance and grew larger and larger. Overcome by panic, everyone tried to reach the exit, stretching their hands towards this gleam of light. Those escaping stepped on the injured lying on the ground, who cried for help. At that moment, everyone was trying to save their own skin. Those who escaped through the main exit fell into Russian hands. I was able to escape through the metal lattice which had now been ripped out and was slightly bent.

Behind Paneck, someone inside the airlock cried: “Open the door. Leave the bunker!” A non-commissioned officer struggled through the flames of burning oil to prise the door open. He was struck by a bullet and fell back into the flames. A comrade followed him, leapt through the flames and scurried across the square. It was only later that he realized his clothes and hair were on fire. No more men escaped the bunker. As they forced their way out of the exit, they fell almost immediately into Soviet hands – as did the bunker.
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