Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (52 page)

Ernst Hornig had also retired. Monday, 7 May was one hour old when he was woken by footsteps and loud chatter. From his front door he watched Soviet troops swarming across Königsplatz and along Nikolaistrasse towards the Ring. It reminded Hornig of New Year’s Eves of old, when every street was filled with revellers converging on the city’s historic heart. “How different the crowd looked now,” the priest recalled. “How different was the night which followed.”
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At first light on Monday one Breslauer left her cellar on the edge of Schlossplatz to go to mass in St Antoniuskirche. It was the first time in weeks she’d been able to cross the huge parade ground without crawling, ducking, jumping from house to house, taking shelter from bombs, shells and mortars. The first Soviet troops were milling around the city centre, calmly, quietly. A few saluted the cross over the small church, some peered inside, others sat quietly in the pews. “It was all so peaceful that we really didn’t need to be worried about the Russians,” the woman recalled.
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The residents of the ‘garden city’ of Zimpel in the east of the city hurriedly hung out red flags – the outlines of a black swastika on a white background still visible on many – to greet the Red Army, while banners were stretched across the main road:
Welcome to the liberators from Hitler’s Fascism
. Banners were also erected across Jahnstrasse on the western edge of the old town:
We greet the brave heroes of the Red Army
! and
We thank our liberators from Nazi terror
! Women handed the Soviet soldiers bottles of wine and posies. German troops shuffled in the opposite direction. A woman stepped out from the side of the road and spat at a veteran
Landser
. “Be off with you!” she yelled. “You’re to blame for everything! Why didn’t you end it sooner?” An enraged
Volkssturm
soldier broke ranks and punched the woman in the face. He continued down the road, muttering to himself. “Poor people, they’re completely out of their minds. For us men, the war is over. For them everything is only just beginning …”
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To priest Joachim Konrad, the Ring this Monday morning “resembled an army camp”, filled with “
panje
carts pulled by small horses” and echoing to the “din of loudspeakers which blared out Strauss’s waltz” and “bawling and shrieking” Russian soldiers.
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There were similar scenes a couple of streets away in Schlossplatz. The Breslauer who had attended mass at St Antonius early that morning returned to find the scene in the square had changed completely. It was filled with carts and wagons laden with wine and liquor – there were rumours that 80,000 bottles had been found in the cellars of the Liebichshöhe alone. “Crouching and lying down between the barrels and wagons lay the victors in their thousands, bellowing and roaring,” the Breslauer recalled. She ran to the Antonius convent to warn the women and girls sheltering there.
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Dutch Waffen SS volunteer Hendrik Verton was enjoying a beautiful spring day in the courtyard of the Christian Hansen wine bar in Schweidnitzer Strasse. The courtyard acted as a suntrap for men being treated in the wine bar’s cellar, now First Aid Post No.5. A well-built Russian junior officer with short red hair suddenly appeared in the yard, muttering to himself in his native tongue. He suddenly grabbed Verton by the shoulder, kissed him on both cheeks and laughed: “
Woina kapuut, Hitler kapuut, guut
!” The officer pointed at the decorations on his uniform, and those on Verton’s. “
Guut Soldat, woina nix guut
!” The convalescing Germans managed to stop the Russian entering the cellar. Instead, he dragged three of them to the nearby Hotel Monopol, kicked open the tradesmen’s door and searched every room for alcohol. Finally, the Soviet officer and his new-found ‘friends’ stumbled into the hotel kitchen. The cooks and maids fled screaming. The Russian drew his pistol and began shooting wildly. He hit nothing but the white wall tiles which fell off and shattered. After the three Germans calmed him down, he took them out into the street, handed them a few cigarettes and urged “
Davai
!” – keep going.
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Klaus Franke had spent the day in hiding. He had no intention of entering Soviet captivity. He and half a dozen comrades skulked in the ruins of a church near the Rosenthaler Brücke waiting for an opportunity to slip out of the city. Suddenly, footsteps. Then voices. “Ursel, come quickly behind the hedge, to the large bush!” Someone sobbed. “I think they’ve seen us. Go, quickly!”

There was the sound of branches snapping, followed by the thud of boots and the voices of Russians. “Come, drink vodka, vodka’s good, very good.” There was the sound of rustling coming from the bushes, then screams from the German girls. “No, I do not want to. No! No!” The shrieks became hysterical. “Leave me. No. Go away!”

In the church’s ruined crypt, Klaus Franke wanted to act but could not. He heard the bodies fall to the ground. The women’s cries turned to sobbing and whimpering. “The
Landsers
shake with powerless rage, bite their teeth – they cannot help,” Franke wrote. The two girls were the first victims of the day in the churchyard. Throughout the seventh, as the soldiers hid, they listened to “weeping, groaning, tormented German voices, cursing, joking and very loud Russian voices,” the artillery observer recalled. “Sometimes they come close, at others you can hear them in the distance, and always the word ‘vodka’. It doesn’t end – all day long.”
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Soviet war correspondent Vassily Malinin found nothing but “an unnatural calm” over Breslau this day. “Silence rules in the streets. No barking of machine-guns, no explosions of mines and artillery shells. Houses set on fire during the fighting still burn.” At every road junction, weapons, military kit and ammunition were piled high, while white flags hung from every window and balcony in the city centre. German soldiers, their heads bowed, filed past. Some tried to fraternize with their new masters “like chattering parrots,” Malinin observed. “
Hitler kaputt
,
Breslau kaputt
,
Krieg kaputt
,” they smiled.
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As night fell on the seventh, the
frontoviki
fired their weapons into the sky in celebration. “All manner of weapons can be heard,” Major Pjotr Savchenko remembered. “Victory! The war is over! This night, no one closed their eyes.” Or perhaps some did. Not every Russian soldier celebrated. “The others went on a trophy hunt, searching for machine-pistols, binoculars and medals,” seventeen-year-old Alexander Fedotov wrote to his mother. “It may sound strange, mama, but what I have longed for most of all these past few months was quiet – quiet without the cry of machine-guns, without the noise of shells. I went down to the river and stared at the water running past for two hours. And in the evening, for the first time in my life I heard nightingales singing in the bushes.”
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There was little peace for Breslauers this Monday evening. They called it
Schreckensnacht
– the night of terror. Russian troops burst into the cellars of the Schlosskirche, an air raid shelter which had become home mostly to women and children. The handful of men were dragged outside, beaten senseless, gagged, then tossed into the corner of one of the cellars. Now the soldiers turned their attention to the women, forcing them to undress and take to their beds. “Then they jumped on top of their victims, beat them, cut them with scissors, stabbed them with knives until, submissive and powerless, they resigned themselves to their fate,” one eyewitness recalled. “It didn’t matter whether they were old women aged seventy or children aged thirteen or fourteen. They spared no one. Finally they set the beds alight and shot the electric lamps with their pistols. The ravaged women fled to the ruins of the nearby Schloss where they waited for this night to end, their clothes torn, their bodies and souls broken.” Twenty Russian soldiers kicked down the door of a convent near Karl Hanke’s runway. They ransacked every room, seizing food, suitcases, anything upon which they could lay their hands and tossed it into a waiting truck. Next they turned their attention to the nuns and the womenfolk of Breslau who believed the house of God would afford them protection. It did not, for the soldiers now scoured the cellars, shining torches into the corners and crevices. “A Russian grabbed hold of my wrists and dragged me to the cellar door,” one nun recalled. “I put up fierce resistance. In the end he tried to grab my veil, but seized my shawl instead and so I escaped into the darkness. Unfortunately, he grabbed one of the girls who tried to protect me and she was unable to escape. Six Russians pounced on her.” The poor girl was raped for the next two hours.
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The peoples of the Soviet Union learned none of this. They learned only that a great fortress had fallen. They learned that their foe had used every ruse, every conceivable weapon, defended every house, every room of every house. They learned that the Russian soldier displayed an iron will and brought up heavy mortars capable of “destroying a building several storeys high”. They learned that Breslau was surrounded by the wreckage of downed German aircraft, its streets littered with “hundreds of destroyed German guns, mortars and tanks”. They learned that Breslau burned: by day “grey clouds of smoke hung over the roofs”; by night there was a “dark red glow over the city”. They learned that Breslau had died. “Where once there was a great, beautiful city, there is a shapeless scene of devastation,” the special correspondent of the government organ
Izvestia
reported. “Thousands of German soldiers are buried beneath the rubble of houses, in deep communication trenches, in the vaults of cellars, and beneath heaps of ash.” For the conquerors of Breslau, there was “eternal glory” and twenty salvoes each from 224 guns lined up in Moscow after dark on 7 May. Ceremonies in Breslau itself were rather more modest. The wrecks of Ju52s and other detritus of three months of battle were cleared out of the way at Gandau airfield and a dais hurriedly erected in front of the remains of the terminal. Next to a banner of a
frontovik
brandishing the Red Army standard hung an inscription:
Long live the Party of the Bolsheviks, leader of the victory over the German Fascist yoke
. Regiments from every division which invested the city filed past Vladimir Gluzdovski and his staff on the platform.
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If he attended the victory parade, Vassily Malinin did not mention it in his diary. He did, however, head to the southern outskirts of the city and a Red Army cemetery where two guns stood mounted on plinths. After reading numerous terse inscriptions, he placed a few spring flowers on one of the graves. “We remember the names,” he recorded in his journal. “Glory to you, fallen comrades! Eternal glory!”
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As for the “once-so-mighty German Wehrmacht”, it had turned into “an endless column of misery” passing through the streets and squares of Breslau. For three quarters of an hour, Horst Gleiss and his mother watched captive German soldiers, six rows deep, march across Benderplatz. Women handed out bread and water, while Horst tossed packets of tobacco and cigarettes out of his apartment window at the marching prisoners. A delighted
Landser
picked them up and was promptly struck in the ribs with a rifle butt by his guard. “Tears filled our eyes at the sight of our warriors, young and old, ragged, shattered, worn out,” the fourteen-year-old recalled. “Shaken and still thinking about it, we stood at the window for a long time long after the column had gone past.” A mile to the south, thousands of German soldiers passed through the Ring, heading north. Most wore no shoes or boots, some were barefoot, others wrapped rags around their feet. All were hungry and thirsty. It was, thought travel agent Conrad Schumacher, “the perfect picture of human misery and the total collapse of the Wehrmacht”. Some of the prisoners asked for water. Pails, buckets and cans were quickly fetched from cellars, and water distributed among several hundred men “before our actions were suddenly stopped by a lot of screaming, pistol shots and cracking of whips by the Russian guards”.
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Peter Bannert had left the city behind and was marching, aimlessly it seemed, through the Lower Silesian countryside. By day the heat was unbearable – he cast his helmet aside. By night, the boys shivered. Bannert fell asleep even as he marched. “My legs moved mechanically,” he remembered. “When the column stopped, I pushed against the man in front of me.” The column of Hitler Youths,
Volkssturm
and soldiers passed Ohlau, eighteen miles south-east of Breslau. “Dead cattle, giving off an evil smell, lay everywhere. Here and there, a shot-up tank or a battered gun. The lane was muddy, we followed deep tank tracks,” the fifteen-year-old recalled. “My head sank when I saw the caterpillar tracks in the mud and the boots of the man in front. A face suddenly stared back at me – bloated and jet black from the morass. His white eyes seemed to look at me sadly. Tanks had rolled over him in the mud.” To raise morale, Hitler Youth leader Herbert Hirsch told his boys to sing:

Frail bones in the world tremble in the face of the great war!

We will continue to march until everything falls to pieces!

Silent, anxious people stood by the roadside. Some of them wiped tears from their eyes. Behind one window, someone raised their right arm to give the
Hitlergruss
. Poles with red-white armbands and rifles stood on the pavement, forcing back any Ohlau inhabitant who tried to hand the boys bread or water. “It was a grotesque scene,” Bannert recalled. “Thousands of beaten German soldiers moved wearily through a town occupied by the enemy, yet echoing off the walls ‘for today Germany belongs to us and tomorrow the entire world!’”
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