Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (55 page)

Few of Breslau’s German inhabitants noticed this
pièce de théâtre
. They were preoccupied with preventing their possessions being stolen by drunken Red Army soldiers, preventing their properties, their churches, their convents being set alight, preventing their daughters, sisters, mothers being raped. They registered their belongings – pianos, bicycles, radios, typewriters, sewing machines – with their new masters. It soon became apparent why. Trucks pulled up outside blocks and apartments stripped of their possessions, which were carried on the wagons to waiting goods trains. This looting was sanctioned. But there was unofficial looting as well. Kalmucks, Tartars, and Kirghiz were particularly skilled in locating some of the valuables Breslau’s citizens had hidden. They were rather less skilled in hiding them. They smashed their way into the vaults of Pohlanowitz cemetery, tossed out the decaying cadavers, and filled the now-empty mausoleums with their booty.

Besides registering their possessions with headquarters established on every block, Breslauers registered their personal details. Each morning, some days at 5am, others at 6.30, they reported in their hundreds for work details. They replaced sleepers and filled in bomb craters on the railway lines; two thousand men women and children were sent to the Linke-Hofmann works to dismantle equipment; they were sent to the Oder to salvage barges which had been sunk by German troops to block the channel. Everyone aged between fourteen and sixty had to work. Work meant food; payment for ten days’ labour was one pound of bread.

There had been plenty of food in Breslau when the city fell – enough to feed the 130,000 or so Germans estimated to be living amid the ruins. But in the chaos of the days following the city’s surrender the warehouses were emptied. Migrants, prisoners, thieves, forced labourers, soldiers, all plundered the stores.
²
Every day, scores of Germans returned to Breslau – refugees from the winter evacuations, displaced civilians, soldiers. They came from the rest of Silesia, the Sudetenland, sometimes Poland. There was no one to cater for these
Rückwanderer
– returning travellers – no one to organize accommodation. The consequences were chaotic. “Everyone gets what they need from apartments which are still standing empty,” wrote twenty-five-year-old Annelies Matuszczyk. “One cart after the next rolls through the streets, old prams, bicycle trailers, carts, trolleys and panel vans. It’s an organization like you’d find in an anthill. Everyone digs, burrows and looks for something useful. There’s no authority.”
³

There
was
authority in Breslau. It was Polish. And in many cases it would treat Breslau’s Germans as the Nazis had once treated Poles.

Barely a fortnight after the low-key Soviet victory parade on Gandau airfield, the city’s pioneering Polish settlers were urged to converge on Schlossplatz, now renamed Plac Wolności – Freedom Square. After marching on Berlin and defeating the “Hitlerist hydra”, the men of 10th Infantry Division were returning to Wrocław to stand guard on the Oder. “Fulfil your civic duty,” posters urged. “Come in great numbers to the festive square to demonstrate your respect for our army returning from Berlin, Dresden and other German cities with the flags of victory.” It was an eclectic group which gathered in front of the ruins of Frederick the Great’s palace: academics, railway workers, militia. “My eyes well up,” the city’s ‘president’ of two weeks, Bolesław Drobner, told his audience. “I can hardly believe that Polish forces are standing on the old Schlossplatz and that we can sing
Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła
[‘Poland is not yet lost’ – the national anthem] and that I can speak in the name of the Polish Government; and yet this is real.”
⁴

More Russians than Poles heard Bolesław Drobner speak that Saturday. And ‘real’ though the moment was, the Polish foothold in Wrocław – pronounced
vrots-waf
; the name, like Breslau, traces its roots back to Vratislav I – was precarious. The borders of Europe would be re-drawn in the aftermath of Hitler’s war, to be sure, Poland’s chief among them. Indeed, long before the war’s end, Stalin had insisted Poland’s boundaries would be shifted. At Teheran in 1943, the marshal had demanded that eastern Poland – the lands annexed when the Red Army invaded in 1939 – become a permanent part of the Soviet Union: the western Ukraine, Byelorussia, the lands around Wilno. Poland would be compensated with German soil: Danzig, much of East and West Prussia, and Upper and Lower Silesia. In short, the new Poland would ‘shuffle’ westwards, its frontier coming to a rest along the Oder and Neisse rivers. But none of this was set in stone. None of this had been formally agreed by the Allied powers. The task of Bolesław Drobner and his pioneers was to ‘Polonize’ the city as quickly as possible so that when the Allies did meet, Breslau would already be Wrocław.

Posters began to appear in railway stations across Poland with promises of an Eldorado in the West, a land where the farmer “lives like a prince”. One appeal declared:

Fellow countrymen!

The might of the Third Reich lies in ruins. Lands first stolen from us by Crusaders, then Bismarck and Hitler, are returning to the mother country. The [former] conqueror has fled across the Oder and has left behind villages and towns, estates and factories, well-tilled fields, ponds and gardens. These depopulated lands are waiting for us – the rightful inhabitants.

Farmers!

There’s no need to emigrate overseas any more. The new Poland has land enough for you, your property for eternity.

Do you want bread? There’s bread in the West!

Do you want land? There’s land in the West!

The urban population will find workshops and business abandoned by the Germans in the West, professionals will find work in offices and bureaux.

Fellow countrymen!

Go west!
⁵

Thousands did. As in January, the lanes of Silesia were filled with people on the move, carts and wagons, but this time it was Poles not Germans heading west, in hope not out of fear. They found no Eldorado. “The closer we got, the more our fear worsened,” one settler remembered. “All around us were fires, mountains of rubble and towering ruins. This city is almost dead!” He was filled with “consternation and growing dejection”. Above all, one question raced through his mind: Why have we come here?
⁶
Other settlers came by train – but not directly to Breslau; the bridge over the Weide was still not repaired. Instead, the trains halted in a marshy field outside Hundsfeld. The journey was often tortuous. The carriages were overcrowded – some people even tried to sit on the roof. Compartments had no floors. Passengers swung their feet on the benches, staring at the track and sleepers passing beneath them. When the train came to a halt outside Hundsfeld, the settlers stepped out into a field littered with carts, prams, bicycles. As they got off, other Poles got in, stuffing the carriages with pictures, carpets, bedding, anything which they had been able to plunder. The Konopińska family grabbed a blue pram, filled it with their possessions and made for the eastern suburb of Bischofswalde; the father of the family had ‘reserved’ a semi-detached property there on his first visit to the city. Tadeusz Konopińska had predicted this day since 1942. One day, he told friends, he would teach agriculture in Breslau’s university. “In Breslau?” his friends laughed. “Do you know how the war will turn out? You view things too optimistically, professor!” Tadeusz Konopińska relished a return to Breslau, where he had studied and lectured before the war, rather more than his twenty-year-old daughter Joanna. She would have preferred to remain in Poznań and continue her history studies. Joanna’s first impressions of Breslau did nothing to dull such feelings. “A huge cloud of dust hung over the city,” she recalled. “The air was filled with the smell of burning.” The family passed cherry trees and roses in full bloom, a sofa abandoned in a garden, three upturned military vehicles, apartments with all their windows blown out, fresh graves marked by simple wooden crosses. Despite the slaughter of many of the creatures in February, there were still animals in the zoo. A couple of zebras trotted behind the fence and there was an awful bellowing coming from somewhere in the zoo grounds. In the middle of the road, a wrecked yellow tram, the tracks twisted and reaching for the sky. There were rags, paper, a handbag, photographs scattered across the road. A little further on, an emaciated horse pulled a cart. The driver kicked a corpse off it into a mass grave. “The awful stench drifted towards us. I wanted to get away from all this evil and that very moment I wanted to return.”

Finally, the Konopińskas reached Heinzelmännchenweg and their new home. There was no gas, no electricity. Every window was boarded up. When the boards were removed, Joanna recalled, “the decay and chaos throughout the apartment became apparent”. She continued in her diary:

In the kitchen there were still dirty dishes in the sink, clothes and towels covered in dust hung on a line, over the back of a chair hung a white-and-blue-striped apron. The flowers on the windowsill had dried up, only the cacti flourished – one was even in bloom…

After supper, which consisted of bread baked in oil, we sat on the balcony. It was already dark, a light wind blew, catching the branches of the trees, and lifting up the scent of the roses in the garden. It was very quiet and it seemed to us as if we were completely alone in this dead city.
⁷

Bolesław Drobner would argue that this was not a dead city. The city president used the inaugural edition of the first Polish newspaper,
Nasz Wrocław
– Our Wrocław – to outline the achievements of one month of Polish rule: the first bus service was operating, there was a limited supply of electricity and fresh water; the cinemas would soon open – the first film,
Majdanek
, a documentary about the liberation of the death camp near Lublin, was shown on 16 June; the trams would be running imminently (in fact, early August); schools would re-open for the new academic year on 1 September, followed later in the autumn by the university (they did). The city president praised the 2,000 or so Poles who had already settled in the city – “you can call them pioneers of Polishness”. He continued: “We, people from the Vistula, came to these ruins to build a new Polish Wrocław in keeping with the tradition of the Silesian piasts.”
⁸

Despite Drobner’s high ideals and grandiose words, life in his city was chaotic. “The traditional sounds in Breslau” during the first weeks of Polish rule, recalled settler Andrzej Jochelson, were “shooting, the thunder of exploding mines and in between the songs of nightingales, the cries of swallows and the twitter of sparrows”. Jochelson passed the corpse of a German railway worker, lying in the street. The only dignity permitted the man was a curtain wrapped around his head. No one took the body away. “People were busy clearing artillery shells from the thoroughfare, throwing them into the ruins of houses. Perhaps a shell exploded. Perhaps it was a mine. Or perhaps this person had simply been shot dead.” It was likely the latter, for Breslau was quickly earning a reputation for lawlessness. The streets beyond the main railway station were regarded as particularly unruly. Gangs lived in the ruins. Not a night passed without nearby homes being raided and someone being shot. “Our people were dragged into the ruins and robbed by the hundreds,” one German priest protested. “If they tried to defend themselves or called for help, they were simply beaten to a pulp or shot.” Night after night, the streets resounded to cries for help or the hellish sound of cooking pot lids being banged to drive the plunderers away. Even the dead were afforded no rest. Graves were dug up and gold teeth pulled out of corpses. The plunder was sent east, on trains – as Joanna Konopińska discovered at Hundsfeld – or on the highways and lanes of Silesia. The road from Breslau to Oels – barely eighteen miles away – was, remembered Alfred Görny on the staff of the civic administration, “one long chain of people. People with wagons and on foot, some heading for Breslau, some for Oels. Gas-powered bathroom boilers, bathtubs, kitchenware and the devil knows what other things were the plunderer’s booty.” Poles soon branded Breslau
Dziki Zachód
– the Wild West – as Joanna Konopińska learned. “Can we live here?” a Ukrainian settler asked the student. “Isn’t it too dangerous?” Joanna said nothing. “So it’s true then,” she recorded in her diary. “Lower Silesia is regarded as the Wild West or Mexico by central Poland. Not entirely without justification.”
⁹

There were, of course, law enforcers in Breslau, militiamen, but they brought little order to the city. When a sixty-year-old German inhabitant failed to return from laying flowers on his daughter’s grave, his family set off in search. At the cemetery they found a large pile of leaves next to the grave. They frantically brushed the leaves away to find the man, stripped of his suit and shoes and shot. The police showed no interest. “We have several such cases every day,” an official told them. That week alone, some twenty Germans were killed. To most Breslauers, it seemed the militia – “rowdy louts dressed in leather or military jackets with rifles and revolvers,” in the words of one observer – were more interested in joining in the plunder than maintaining order. Four militia barged into St Heinrichkirche, ostensibly looking for hidden weapons and radios. They found neither. They did, however, deprive the Catholic priest of all his clothes, even his handkerchiefs. When he reported the theft to the authorities, they merely sneered. “You’re a German so you don’t have any possessions any more. We’ll take what we need.” It was not an uncommon response. Whenever Breslauers protested, they heard: “German soldiers took everything away like this in Poland”, or “Quiet, German pig.” Poles forced their way into Friedrich Mondwurf’s apartment “more than once” and took his mother and older sister away. “Powerless and full of horror I had to watch as they were taken away from us under the threat of force,” the schoolboy remembered. “And always the anxious question: will they come back unharmed?” To protect themselves, the city’s German populace barricaded themselves in their homes at night, placing boards under front-door handles so they could not be forced open. Frequently, Soviet troops intervened on the Germans’ behalf. But occasionally, Breslauers took matters into their own hands. When a young woman was dragged out of her apartment in Benderplatz and raped by Poles, the entire district rose up. “We Germans are not fair game,” a spokesman declared. “We want protection and help! We need food! Otherwise the people will stop working.”
¹⁰