Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (56 page)

The demand for food was a common one. Those who worked earned food, but the rations were minimal – barely one-third of what Poles were given. Very small children received less than one pint of milk every two days, but otherwise Germans rummaged in the rubble and in cellars for old potatoes, picked corn from the fields and tried to find food in any way they could. “Those who don’t want to starve are forced to hunt for food, that is to say, from cellar to cellar, from ruin to ruin, often with the threat of collapse. We look, hoping to find something edible,” Annelies Matuszczyk recalled. She was successful. Beneath the ash in several collapsed cellars, she found some old potatoes. “At the moment they’re our only source of food.” Twelve-year-old Friedhelm Mondwurf was entranced by the sight of Russian soldiers with their horses camped on the few green spaces in the city not scarred by war. “I soon began to mingle with them,” he recalled. “Depending on their mood they’d curse and chase me, or embrace me – perhaps I reminded them of their own children.” Friedhelm would sing songs for them. The Soviet troops swigged vodka and spurred him on. Soon he was “spinning around like a dancing bear”. After each song, he held out his hand and the soldiers offered some of their rations – black bread, a few ounces of sugar wrapped in strips of newspaper, a piece of bacon. After a couple of draws on strong Russian cigarettes, the boy collapsed exhausted. “With my last ounce of strength, I made my way home, full of pride, and couldn’t understand why my mother burst into tears,” he wrote. “But we survived.” While Germans begged, stole or rummaged for food, in Breslau’s Polish-run shops, one report noted, “there’s everything the heart desires – meat, butter, bacon, eggs, bread etc.” There was one snag. Only Polish currency, Złoty, was accepted. Germans could convert their Reichsmarks into Złoty, but the exchange rate was punishing. The Reichsmark was devalued 120-, 150-, sometimes even 200-fold. Before the war, Breslauers could buy one kilo of butter for 4 marks; in June 1945, the price ranged anywhere from 320 to 880 marks. Bread, once 30 Pfennigs, would cost at least 60 marks. Medicines were similarly expensive – a single aspirin tablet cost perhaps 15 marks, a bottle of child’s cough mixture 50 marks – while doctors charged up to 30 Złoty for each consultation.
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Germans resorted to selling what possessions they still had on the thriving black market. The wasteland in Kaiserstrasse, now renamed Plac Grunwaldzki, became the unofficial heart of the city. Germans and Poles, civic officials and militia, all jostled for bargains in what they dubbed
Szaberplac
– Plunderers’ square. “A painter could take inspiration for all his work here: there are so many different characters and races here,” Annelies Matuszczyk wrote. “There’s haggling, bartering for every Złoty and cheating.” The square was littered with scrap iron, old cars, bicycles, smashed glassware and ornaments. The Polish settler could find anything in
Szaberplac
: dinner sets, individual plates, cups, pots, quilts, duvets, cutlery, pictures, typewriters, sewing machines, cameras, shoes, clothes, vases, crystal, vacuum cleaners. Bacon, sausage, ham, meat, cakes, butter, cigarettes and tobacco were laid out on stalls, while Polish women squatted on the ground offering fruit, vegetables, chickens and geese. No one bought goods with money, they merely bartered. Sugar was particularly valuable, so too tea and coffee, and alcohol – vodka and cognac especially – even more so. Joanna Konopińksa went in search of a meat grinder, taking two bottles of cooking oil and a bag of sugar as barter. She found no grinder, but she did swap her oil for a set of bed linen, while the sugar was exchanged for a pair of winter shoes. “I then cursed myself for that deal because right in front of me a woman got a fur jacket for the same amount of sugar.” At night, the square emptied, leaving behind mountains of rubbish. Next morning, the traders gathered once more and the bartering resumed.
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Bartering and the black market could not save Breslauers for long. By the end of July 1945, the city was gripped by what priest Johannes Kaps called “a hunger catastrophe”. The old and the very young were particularly affected; Kaps estimated nine out of ten babies died from starvation. Schoolboy Horst Gleiss regularly passed elderly – and sometimes young – people sitting by the roadside; they had fallen asleep through hunger or exhaustion. “Children, who are normally so wild and noisy, sit in the midday sun, hungry and sluggish, far too weak for frivolous playing,” he wrote. Those who did not succumb to hunger, succumbed to typhus, dysentery and diphtheria. Scraps of yellow cloth were hung outside cellars or houses where disease struck – a warning to other Breslauers: do not enter. At least three dozen Germans were dying daily. Paul Peikert reckoned the figure was closer to three or four hundred. “Old people and children are dying like flies,” the priest told a friend. Newborn babies were all but condemned to death. “Mothers could not silence them since they had no food,” a former estate agent recalled. There was no bathing water, no clean laundry, no way of caring for a child since most of their mothers had to work.” Young or old, there were no coffins. The corpses were wrapped in blankets – but even these were stolen during the night by bandits. Mortuary attendants arrived in the morning to find the bodies naked. “Almost every day completely naked, battered, skeletal corpses were delivered to the cemetery,” one priest remembered. Funeral services at one of the two cemeteries in use – the rest were still mined – were often interrupted by marauders who fired their guns indiscriminately and even raped female mourners. In many cases, Breslauers simply buried the dead next to their properties – as they had done during the siege. It wasn’t the only phenomenon from the days of encirclement which was repeated. “The number of suicides rises alarmingly,” Johannes Kaps observed in August 1945. “It would be even higher if there was cooking gas.”

The city’s leaders – Polish and Soviet – were not oblivious to the plight of the German populace. Around 1,500 Germans demonstrated outside one labour office on the edge of the city centre, refusing to work without adequate food. The arrival of the militia merely inflamed the situation – they wanted to open fire on the demonstrators. It took Soviet troops and the mollifying words of a Polish official to quieten the unrest. “As they have nothing with which to pay, the Germans are dying without medical assistance, their children especially,” a civic official reported. To labour the point, one woman laid her child on the desk of the city’s commandant, Colonel Lapunov; it died in front of him. Another Breslauer even wrote to Stalin. The city’s German inhabitants were being starved by the Poles, she protested. The death-rate was rising alarmingly. These were valid points, but the letter was laced with traditional German contempt for the Pole. Breslauers, she claimed, were possessed by a single wish – “to be free of the Poles”, so much so they would rather have the Russians in charge. “Reconstruction can never be carried out by the Poles with the energy it requires,” the letter’s author complained. “Silesia is not a suitable land for the Polish nation. To whom is reconstruction dearer than the Silesian himself?” Her letter never got beyond the city’s Polish administration. “The same methods of extermination which we used against other peoples are being used against us,” Paul Peikert commented, “only with the outward appearance of humanity that the Russians and Poles do not murder senselessly, as our Waffen SS and Gestapo did in the occupied territory to the horror of the entire world. But the outcome is still the same.”
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And the war continued to claim its victims, too. Walter Lassmann was asked to consecrate a grave on the railway embankment in Ohlewiesen on the south-eastern edge of the city. Three children found a
Panzerfaust
while playing and set it off. All three were killed instantly. The two German dead were buried in the cemetery, the third child – the ten-year-old son of a Russian officer stationed in Breslau – was laid to rest where the accident occurred, according to Russian custom. At least two hundred people were killed or injured after stepping on mines around Steinstrasse, where there had been particularly bitter fighting. The room which served as a hospital for SS trooper Hendrik Verton and other wounded prisoners near Universitätsbrücke was severely shaken by a tremendous series of explosions. The makeshift ward was turned upside down. Plaster fell off the walls. The water level of the nearby Oder had fallen, exposing shells, grenades and
Panzerfaust
tossed into the river after surrender. In the summer heat, they had detonated.
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Death by starvation. Death by disease. Death by suicide. Plundered and pillaged. Raped. Beaten. Murdered. Forced to pawn their possessions. It was hardly surprising, as one observer noted in the summer of 1945, that “emotionally, the Germans in Breslau are slowly dying.”
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To Paul Peikert, it seemed that the Almighty was passing judgment:

The future of our people appears to be an unparalleled life of suffering and sacrifice. What has the despicable Nazi regime done to the German people? Now we must atone for the atrocities and crimes which this regime committed as it smashed and trampled on God’s laws.
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At the end of June, Hugo Hartung was led with a group of prisoners towards the city centre, across Hindenburgbrücke then along Matthiasstrasse where “smashed apartments lie open like dolls houses. The family portraits are still on the walls, there are tidy kitchens, high up and inaccessible, a polished black piano, exposed to downpours and the cool nights, out of tune and silent”. Hartung crossed Universitätsbrücke and glanced at the Sandinsel where there were “only the bleak remains of once-perfect beauty”, then he walked past the partially ruined university and its wrecked music hall. “Where once an organ sounded, where a Viennese string quartet played its sweet yet melancholic melody, death and Fate have prevailed and destroyed beauty which seemed created for eternity.” He stared at the ruins of the Matthiaskirche where just six months earlier his children had looked in wonder at the mangers. Then a blanket of snow had covered the city. Now Breslau was buried beneath a layer of dust and ash and the streets were filled with a sweet smell of burning. The Ring no longer pulsed with life. The streets running off it were dead too. A handful of people moved down Schweidnitzer Strasse, once Breslau’s principal shopping street. “Shop windows have just one thing on display to passers-by: ashes and the remains of charred beams.” His beloved opera house still stood. Only slightly damaged. “They’ll perform in it one day,” Hartung convinced himself.
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The former chief dramatist at the opera house had spent the eight weeks since surrender in a prison camp-cum-hospital in the northern suburb of Karlowitz. He had still not recovered from the exhaustion and fever which had dogged his later days in the fortress. For that reason, he was released – a fate shared by fewer than one in twenty of Breslau’s defenders, mainly the elderly and infirm. The rest spent several weeks at Fünfteichen and Hundsfeld – in all some 300,000 prisoners passed through the two transit camps, 15,000 at any one time – before being moved on. Food was meagre. Sanitary conditions were dreadful. Yet otherwise life in Fünfteichen and Hundsfeld was basic, not inhuman. Former Hitler Youths received schooling from their former teachers, minus text books. Choirs were formed, performing everything from hymns and opera to popular tunes from films. In one of the barracks at Fünfteichen, there was political instruction in the ways of the new Europe from members of the National Committee for Free Germany; portraits of Paulus and Seydlitz – two generals captured at Stalingrad who had subsequently turned against the Nazi regime – hung on the wall. But at the end of July, rumours began to circulate through both transit camps. The barracks began to empty. In Hundsfeld, Hans Gottwald watched groups of 400 or 500 men at a time form up, then march out of the gate every few days and be loaded on to trains. “There’s a rumour that they’re going to East Prussia to gather the harvest,” wrote Gottwald. “We don’t believe it.” Prisoners were never told where the trains were heading. They knew only that they “went east, not west for the reconstruction of our homeland,” Erich Schönfelder observed. They were sent to the Caucasus, to Karelia, to the Ukraine, to the Don and the Volga. The method of transport was almost always the cattle truck. The journey might last eleven days or in some cases eight weeks. A fortunate few were released, like
Volkssturm
man Otto Pohl, whose weight had dropped seventy-two pounds in captivity. He did not relish his new-found freedom. “I am one of the poorest of the poor because the Russians took everything from us,” he wrote to a friend. “I possess only what I have on me. It is very bitter at the age of fifty to start all over again.”
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As Hundsfeld and Fünfteichen emptied, Kletschkau prison in the heart of Breslau was filling up once more, under new ownership. Ex-Nazis, saboteurs, dissenters and dissidents and criminals were locked up – in most cases without trial. As many as 8,000 people were held in a jail intended for 500 prisoners. Perhaps as many as one in three never saw their families again. There were six men in each cell measuring eight square yards. On the floor were three straw mattresses – two prisoners had to share each one. A bucket sufficed for calls of nature; it was emptied each night through the barred window. There was no heating. In the winter, numerous inmates suffered, or died from, frostbite. Hundreds more went hungry, for the only food was a watery broth which was so weak the prisoners did not need to use the spoons the guards gave them. Whenever the cart brought fodder for the prison horses, the inmates would rush it and eat what raw potatoes they could grab before the driver’s whip forced them away. It was not the only beating the prisoners suffered. Inmates were forced to call out their names and numbers in Polish; any man who did not received thirty strokes to the face. “Not a day passed without a cell door being flung open and someone being kicked out,” one recalled. “Every day we asked ourselves if we’d get out of this house of torture alive.” Eighteen-year-old Hubertus Kindler remembered how the guards “beat the soles of my feet with sticks. The pain was terrible. At first I cried, but then I could not feel anything any more. My feet were so swollen that I could not run any more. I crawled around the cellar on my hands and knees and was still trodden upon.” Kindler was thrown in Kletschkau prison for laying a mine – he claimed it was a slab of beeswax. A military court sentenced him to execution as a saboteur. He awaited his fate in Wing 2a – death row. “Shots repeatedly echoed along the corridors,” he wrote.