Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (61 page)

Former Breslauers sought to forge new lives in a Germany they no longer recognized. “At times you envy the many who fell back then for they did not experience what happened to Germany and to us,” sighed former company commander Wolfgang Chutsch who settled in Nuremberg. Many Silesians led a transitory life after being driven from their homes on the Oder. “After the war, we lived in Seidmannsdorf near Coburg, in Coburg, in Cologne, in Aachen, in Mannheim, in Hamburg, in Oldenburg, in Hamburg, in Hanover, and in Hamburg again,” one expellee recalled. As many as twelve million eastern Germans had been displaced by the war and expulsions. West Germans took them under their wing: various cities ‘adopted’ communities from the former German East – in Breslau’s case, Cologne. Today it is home to the
Breslauer Sammlung
– Breslau collection: paintings, coins, medals, books, the papers of Breslau poet and artist Karl von Holtei salvaged from the Silesian capital. But Cologne was not Breslau. It was not
home
. “Home is more than a piece of land on a map,” explained Horst Gleiss, who eventually settled near Hamburg. “It’s where I grew up, where I lived with my parents, where grew up, where I spoke my Breslau or Silesian dialect, from where I was torn. Such a wound never completely heals.”
⁶

The expellees formed numerous groups, organizations and associations to help establish themselves – and to lobby for the return of their homeland and their possessions. Each year, members of the
Landsmannschaft Schlesien
– Silesian cultural association – gathered in their thousands for a reunion, but also a political rally. Some 150,000 Silesians attended the 1971 event over three days in Munich. They heard their chairman, the journalist, author and politician, Herbert Hupka, declare: “Breslau is called Breslau, not Wrocław. We will not abandon Silesia.” Mimicking the words of the Polish national anthem, Hupka closed his address: “Silesia is not yet lost.”
⁷

Except that Silesia
was
lost.
German
Silesia at any rate. Communist East Germany – on instructions from Moscow – had been quick to recognise the new border along the Oder and Neisse. Bonn had not. Only with Willy Brandt’s policy of
Ostpolitik
did West Germany finally accept the re-drawn frontier in 1970. That was reaffirmed two decades later with a formal treaty between a reunified Germany and democratic Poland.

With changing political realities and the passing of the expellees’ generation, the cries of
Schlesien bleibt unser
– Silesia is still ours – are growing ever more faint. Some Silesians accept it. “The older I become, the more I think back to the home of my youth wistfully. I want to yet cannot forget it,” wrote one Breslauer who left the city at the age of fourteen. But he has no desire to return. “The family of my childhood and youth has long since gone, my Breslau, the home town, died an agonising death in the Easter fires of 1945 and its corpse was given away to foreign hands on 6 May.”
⁸

Most Breslauers, however, have felt drawn to the city of their birth – a journey possible for most only from the 1970s onwards. Only with the fall of Communism did Hans Eberhard Henkel entertain thoughts of going back. There was little in the southern suburbs he remembered or recognized. He made immediately for the Ring on foot, down the once-elegant ‘Schwo’, Schweidnitzer Strasse, now Ulica Świdnicka. He was surprised by how many German streets names had simply been translated into Polish: Ohlauer Strasse now Oławska, Liegnitzer (Legnicka), and the Ring (Rynek). “It seemed as if the new inhabitants wanted to link the German past with the Polish present, because otherwise Breslau could not be Wrocław.” Henkel was impressed by the “wonderfully restored” Ring, a sight to “stir the memory of any former Breslauer”. How often he had dreamed of seeing it once more. Now walking through it, it did not feel real for it was “no longer filled with Silesian life” – not
German
Silesian life at any rate. Wherever he went in the city, he was left with “an unsettling feeling of home”. He believed the Poles had failed to treat the city they had inherited in the manner it deserved. “For old Breslauers who visit the former capital of Silesia, it is a journey into the past which becomes present only in the memory, a dream of distant days between walls which have become foreign.”
⁹

To many, returning to the city was a cathartic experience. “It had always been my great wish to return to a land which was my first and therefore my true home, to a land with which I was never able to form a proper relationship, yet which remained alive through snippets of memory and chiefly through the stories of my parents,” wrote one woman who was driven from the city at the age of eight. “But there was something else: repeatedly before my eyes I saw moments when I was suddenly torn from places and people and – at the same time – from a happy and safe childhood. Thinking about it through the decades had caused me the same pain. Perhaps if I could revive wonderful memories in places from my childhood, I might escape the bad events I experienced to some degree.” The Ksoll family returned to Wrocław in the mid-1970s. The children barely remembered the city; they had been able to adjust to life in West Germany. But not Herr Ksoll. For three decades he had been unable to accept the loss of his home. “Only after we visited Breslau for the first time and my father said unequivocally that it was no longer ‘his’ Breslau, but was Polish Wrocław, did he feel at ease,” his children wrote.
¹⁰

Some of Wrocław’s Polish inhabitants also longed to return to their homes. “Of course I mourned my Lwów,” said Tadeusz Myczkowski. “For a long time I headed the Association of the Friends of Lwów. How often we longed to return. But now Silesia is my home, this is where I grew up, this is where my sons were born.” A fellow settler from the western Ukraine, Krzeslawa Maliszewska, added: “We understood what the Germans were going through because we were being resettled and they were being resettled. They did not deserve it and we too did not deserve it. But that’s the fate of history.”
¹¹

Fate overtook some of the men and women of 1945 and smiled on others.

Ferdinand Schörner
’s army group was the last major formation to surrender in the war in Europe – three days after the rest of the Wehrmacht. Hitler’s last field marshal fell into American hands, but was subsequently handed over to the Russians. They imprisoned him for twenty-five years for waging war on Soviet soil, a sentence later halved. He was released in 1958 and handed over to the West German authorities, who subsequently charged him with war crimes for executing soldiers without trial in the latter months of the war. Schörner spent more than four years behind bars once more, before living out his later years in Munich where he died in 1973.

Despite his dismissal as fortress commander,
Hans von Ahlfen
was re-employed almost immediately as the pioneer commander of
Heeresgruppe
B on the Western Front. He served less than three weeks; the army group was surrounded in the Ruhr pocket and surrendered in mid-March. Ahlfen spent two years in American captivity. Upon release, he turned to writing military history, including the story of the struggle for Silesia, until his death from a heart attack in 1966.

His successor
Hermann Niehoff
was not released from Soviet captivity until October 1955. Besides working as a consultant for the Düsseldorf chemical firm Henkel, he wrote numerous articles on the siege and, with his predecessor, the standard work on the city’s fall,
So Kämpfte Breslau
– How Breslau Fought. He died in the Rhineland in 1980 at the age of eighty-three.

Their adversary
Vladimir Gluzdovski
served at the prestigious Frunze Military Academy, the Red Army’s staff college before joining the staffs of various military districts in the USSR. He died in Moscow aged sixty-four in 1967.

At the war’s end,
Ivan Konev
was appointed the senior Soviet commander in Germany, then replaced his great rival Zhukov as defence minister. It was a post he held for four years until he fell foul of Stalin’s jealousy and was moved to command of a military district. Stalin’s death and Khruschev’s rise saw Konev back in favour. He was appointed defence minister once more, then Commander-in-Chief of the Warsaw Pact forces; he used the latter to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956. He retired four years later, only to be recalled briefly as the commander of Soviet forces in East Germany. Upon his death in 1973 aged seventy-five, he was afforded the highest honour by the Soviet Union, burial in the Kremlin’s wall. His body is still there.

Journalist
Boris Polevoy
became one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated writers and novelists. Sixth Army’s faithful diarist
Vassily Malinin
remained in the military after the war, rising to the rank of colonel.

Ulrich Frodien
became a journalist for the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
and
Münchner Illustrierte
before founding the photographic archive of the Süddeutscher Verlag publishing house in Munich which he ran for nearly forty years.

Hugo Hartung
spent a dozen days wandering through Silesia and Saxony on foot before being reunited with his family in Neustadt an der Orla, more than 250 miles west of Breslau.
¹²
He eventually settled in Munich where he became a theatre critic and novelist until his death in 1972.

Following four weeks recuperating from his bitter trek between the Vistula and Oder,
Paul Arnhold
returned to duty, fighting with a scratch German unit in Czechoslovakia. At the war’s end, he was about to be handed over by American troops to Czech partisans. He jumped from a moving car and, “after another adventure-filled march” fled Czech soil. In the chaos of post-war Germany, he spent two decades trying to track down the loyal comrades from his odyssey in January and February 1945 – without success. Arnhold was not disheartened. “A voice inside me tells me that I will see them again one day,” he wrote.
¹³

Waffen SS clerk
Georg Haas
became a probation officer. He also wrote a fictionalized account of the siege, which featured one Hendrik Velthove – a pseudonym for Dutch volunteer
Hendrik Verton
. Verton was freed on account of his wounds in September 1945. He lived in the ruined city, where he met his future wife Brigitte, until fleeing in 1946. In the west, he eventually established a floor-laying firm which thrives to this day. A return to his native Netherlands was impossible until the early 1960s, but Verton remained true to his ideological roots; he attended Waffen SS reunions, met former luminaries such as Kurt Meyer and Paul Hausser and even enjoyed a week in Madrid as a guest of Mussolini’s liberator, Otto Skorzeny.

Leo Hartmann
ended the war with an estimated forty-five tank ‘kills’ to his name. He spent more than four years in Soviet prison camps before being released. He joined the newly-formed Bundeswehr in the mid-1950s, finally retiring with the rank of
Hauptmann
. That allowed him to resume his original trade: law. He died in Würzburg in 1995 at the age of eighty-two.

Artillery observer
Klaus Franke
evaded capture at the war’s end and slipped out of Breslau. He finally made it back to his home on the Lüneberg Heath, via the Sudeten Mountains and Saxony, and became a fire-fighter.

Paul Peikert
was ‘repatriated’ from Breslau in 1946. He lived for just three years in Westphalia before dying in 1949. His diary was discovered by Communist authorities in the early 1960s. An edited version – removing any criticism of the post-war regime – has been published in numerous editions. Fellow Catholic priest
Walter Lassmann
was among the last of Breslau’s Germans to be expelled. He lived in East Germany until the mid-1960s before moving to the west, latterly serving the Catholic community of Paderborn. Once resettled in Görlitz,
Ernst Hornig
became Bishop of Silesia – the province was gone, but the title remained, serving what little of Silesia was left within Germany’s new borders. He supported repeatedly the rights of his worshippers under the Communist regime until he retired in 1964. His later years were spent compiling one of the great chronicles of the battle for Breslau.

Former union leader and
Volkssturm
man
Otto Rothkugel
settled with his family in Bad Essen in Lower Saxony where he lived beyond the age of 100.

As a former Party member,
Conrad Bischof
went through a ‘de-Nazification’ court in the British zone. He resumed his postal duties, but in Hanover, where he died from heart failure in 1961 aged sixty-seven. Another faithful chronicler of the siege,
Conrad Schumacher
, also resumed his pre-war career as a travel agent, this time in Hamburg. He too died in 1961.

Of Breslau’s young diarists,
Max Baselt
spent two years in prison camps near Voronezh and Gorki before he was released through ill health in early 1948. He became a customs official and, in retirement in Düsseldorf, a regular contributor to the expatriates’ newsletter,
Der Schlesier
.
Peter Bannert
was not released from Soviet captivity until the end of 1949. He became a history and geography teacher in Mecklenburg.
Horst Gleiss
became an expert zoologist, botanist and geographer in Wedel near Hamburg. He wrote more than 1,000 articles and, in 1975, founded the archive for memories, documents and photographs of the fortress. Those formed the basis of his ten-volume history,
Breslauer Apokalypse
– Breslau’s Apocalypse – which in turn has provided much of the material for this book.