Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (23 page)

13.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, pp.601-2.

14.
Dragunski, pp.220-1.

15.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, pp.603-4.

16.
Arnhold, pp.15-16.

17.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, pp.604-5.

18.
Arnhold, pp.17-19.

19.
Based on Echolot, i, p.150 and
Die Grosse Flucht
, ZDF documentary, 2001, Episode 3, ‘Festung Breslau’.

20.
Documenty Nr.4 and Gleiss, i, p.100D.

21.
Echolot, i, pp.236-7.

22.
Arnhold, pp.17-19, 26-31.

23.
Ibid., pp.17-19, 26-32.

24.
OKW Communiqué, 14/1/45.

25.
Frodien, pp.97-8.

26.
Echolot, i, p.242.

27.
Hinze,
19 Infanterie und Panzer Division
, pp.793-4.

28.
Gleiss, vii, p.582.

29.
Ahlfen, p.52.

30.
Asmus, ix, p.41-2.

31.
Paul,
Endkampf
, pp.56-7.

32.
Asmus, ix, pp.41-2.

33.
Arnhold, pp.59-70.

34.
TB Goebbels, 15 and 17/1/45.

35.
Rudel, pp.160-2.

36.
Echolot, i, pp.574-5.

37.
Pravda
, 17/1/45.

38.
Rogall, pp.47-8.

39.
TB Goebbels, 20/1/45, Schenk, p.359 and Hargreaves,
Blitzkrieg Unleashed
, pp.271, 274.

40.
Dollinger, p.288.

41.
Scherstjanoi, p.296.

42.
Knopp,
Grosse Flucht
, p.163.

43.
Gleiss, i, pp.362-3.

44.
Polewoi, pp.150-2.

45.
Schwarz, p.36.

46.
Knopp,
Grosse Flucht
, p.163.

47.
Echolot, i, pp.468-70.

48.
Gleiss, ix, p.56.

49.
Waage, pp.11-12.

50.
Hartmann,
Zwischen Nichts und Niemandsland
, pp.610-11.

51.
TB Goebbels, 20/1/45 and Schenk, p.360.

52.
Echolot, i, pp.463-4.

53.
Rogall, pp.48-9.

54.
Echolot, i, pp.667-70.

55.
TB Goebbels, 15/1/45.

56.
Rogall, pp.208, 210-11, 213.

57.
Based on
So Kämpfte Breslau
, p.19, Gleiss, vii, pp.83, 102 and Becker, p.86.

58.
Ozanna, pp.166-8.

59.
Frodien, pp.114-16.

60.
Ruhlemann, pp.436-7.

61.
So Kämpfte Breslau
, p.90.

62.
Hartung, p.52.

63.
Echolot, ii, pp.569-71.

64.
Van Aaken, p.159.

65.
Peikert, pp.25-7.

66.
Echolot, i, p.799.

67.
Frodien, pp.116-17, 122-3.

68.
Ozanna, pp.166-8.

69.
Echolot, i, pp.657-8.

70.
Frodien, p.118.

71.
Schimmel-Falkenau, p.163.

72.
Frodien, pp.118-19.

73.
Gleiss, i, p.208.

74.
Henkel, pp.11-12.

75.
Schlesische Tageszeitung
, 20/1/45.

76.
Van Aaken, p.189.

77.
Gleiss, i, pp.204, 215.

78.
Gleiss, i, p.218.

79.
Echolot, i, pp.799-802.

80.
Waage, p.12.

81.
Henkel, p.13.

82.
Echolot, i, p.805.

83.
Ibid., i, pp.799-802.

84.
Neugebauer, pp.9-11.

85.
Van Aaken, pp.189-91.

86.
Based on Neugebauer, pp.9-10 and Echolot, ii, pp.103-4.

87.
Based on Grieger, pp.7-8, Becker, p.106, Knopp,
Grosse Flucht
, pp.161-2 and Peikert, p.31.

88.
Becker, pp.107-10.

89.
Based on Becker, pp.104-05, Peikert, p.30, Echolot, i, pp.798-9 and Dittman, pp.5-7.

90.
Based on
Völkischer Beobachter
, Munich edition, 29/1/45, NA FO898/187, p.226 and Haack, pp.23-4.

91.
Becker, p.105.

92.
Frodien, pp.128-9.

93.
Frodien, pp.129-31, 132, 138.

94.
Dittman, pp.5-7.

95.
Henkel, pp.13-14.

96.
Echolot, ii, pp.82-3.

97.
Frodien, pp.140-54.

*
Today the site of Katowice International Airport

Chapter 4

The Reckoning Has Begun

So much inhumanity everywhere, senseless inhumanity

Captain Grigori Klimov

S
ome time on Sunday, 21 January bill posters began to appear on advertising columns across Breslau. Their message would soon be repeated in its newspaper and over the wire radio.

Men of Breslau

Our
Gau
capital has been declared a fortress. The evacuation of women and children from the city is under way and will soon be completed. Everything possible will be done to care for women and children!

Our task as men is to do everything which is necessary to support the troops fighting. I call upon the men of Breslau to join the defence of our fortress. The fortress will be defended to the last.

Who cannot bear arms must use all his strength to help with public services, with supplies, with maintaining order.

Men of the Lower Silesian
Volkssturm
who successfully fought against Bolshevik tanks on the edge of our
Gau
have shown that they are prepared to defend our home to the last. We will be no less ready.

Hanke
¹

Henceforth the city would never be simply Breslau, always
Festung
Breslau. One by one, the towns and cities on the Eastern Front were also declared fortresses – Königsberg, Poznań, Schneidemühl, Danzig, Küstrin, Frankfurt. They would fulfil the role of fortresses of old: surrounded, they would tie down enemy forces, hindering the Russian thrust westwards. They would hold out until relieved. Except that no
Festung
had ever been relieved. All had fallen. Karl Hanke had signed Breslau’s death warrant.

Breslau in January 1945 was a fortress in name only. It had not been a bulwark for more than a century, since Napoleon tore down the city walls. “Breslau is no fortress,” Red Cross volunteer Lena Aschner commented. “It is lost. Everyone knows it. The people, the Wehrmacht and the SS.” A Party diehard disagreed. “We must sell our lives as dearly as possible,” he admonished Aschner.
²

And so in the third week of January 1945, Karl Hanke and his fortress commander began summoning what forces they could. The
Gauleiter
drafted every male Breslauer aged sixteen to sixty into the
Volkssturm
. Johannes Krause went even further, demanding
every
inhabitant of the city aged ten and above help “the final preparations for the battle for your home city”. Those final preparations meant gnawing at the very vitals of Breslau. Trees were felled, bushes pulled up, rubble, monuments, wrecked vehicles, overturned trams piled up, barbed wire laid across streets to form makeshift barriers. “Even the dead have no peace in their graves,” electrician Hermann Nowack noted as gravestones were uprooted to feed the barricade moloch. “It’s one of those tragicomedies – these barricades actually hinder our movements more than they put a stop to the Soviets,” wrote schoolboy Horst Gleiss. On the right bank of the Oder trams went no further than the Scheitniger Stern. Beyond there, Breslauers needed special passes – and a good deal of agility – to negotiate the forest of fallen trees blocking the streets. Tarmac and paving slabs were ripped up so foxholes five feet deep could be dug for soldiers and
Volkssturm
to combat Russian tanks with
Panzerfaust
. “Russian tank crews will need just fifteen minutes to get past such a barrier,” one
Landser
sneered. “Fourteen minutes to stop their belly laughs, one minute to push the junk away.” All sixty-four bridges over the Oder and its tributary, the Weide, were prepared for demolition, their approaches mined. Slogans were daubed on the walls at every street corner: ‘Every house a fortress’, ‘If you retreat, death will march towards your home’, ‘Today the front is everywhere – fight against the cursed spirit in the rear’.
³

Across Breslau, across Lower Silesia, forces began to muster to defend the
Gau
capital.
Unteroffizier
Hans Gottwald and his Grenadier Regiment 51 comrades were enjoying an evening at the cinema in Liegnitz, forty miles west of Breslau, when the film was interrupted and the men were ordered to return to barracks. By morning, the regiment was rolling towards Breslau against a tide of refugees, the sound of weeping children the only noise coming from the columns. The army trucks bumped down dirt tracks, finally coming to a stop in the suburb of Opperau, five miles from the heart of Breslau. Here there was more noise – from carts being packed, from stables being emptied, from yet more weeping children. The soldiers tried to offer the inhabitants reassurance. “You’ll be back home again in a couple of weeks!” they called out. Stony, disbelieving faces stared back at them. Hitler Youth Manfred Preussner and his comrades were dropped off at a school in an open truck where they received Wehrmacht uniforms and weapons. Preussner was delighted. “Finally what we’d dreamed about since childhood had come true,” he wrote happily. “We were proper soldiers at the age of sixteen.”
⁴

Every day new
Volkssturm
were sworn in – and almost every day Karl Hanke addressed them, sometimes in a square, sometimes in a courtyard, sometimes on Schlossplatz, sometimes as many as 2,000 at a time. His watchword? “Harm the enemy wherever possible!” The enemy was on foreign soil, men in the
Volkssturm
knew “every nook and cranny” of Breslau and its suburbs. “Use each night to creep up on the enemy and harm him!” the
Gauleiter
urged, invoking the memory of Erwin Rommel by repeating the late field marshal’s battle cry. “
Meine Herren
, there is no shame in dying for Greater Germany. Attack!” The freshly sworn-in soldiers would shout a few ‘
Sieg Heils
’ for their Führer, sing the national anthem, then march off to the front.
⁵
Among them was Otto Rothkugel. Having seen his family leave the city, the retired union official reported to his
Volkssturm
company. An aged Italian rifle was thrust into his hands, plus ten rounds of ammunition. There was no instruction, no order. The company, Rothkugel observed, was “a shapeless mass. Everything looked so disorganised. And on the opposite bank of the Oder were the Russians.”
⁶