Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (3 page)

Prologue

The Square

Every front had always seemed a world away

Gefreiter
Ulrich Frodien

T
he standard-bearers appeared first. Like every one of the 150,000 participants, they had arisen with the first rays of light this Sunday morning, mustering in streets and squares across the city. In the north, men and women from Bavaria, Württemberg, East Prussia and from native soil, from Silesia. In the east, the boys of the
Hitlerjugend
and girls of its female counterpart, the
Bund Deutscher Mädel
, formed up alongside ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland, just over the Czech border. In the south, athletes from Franconia and the Ostmark – Austria, the newest addition to the Greater German Reich. Berliners held high the city’s coat of arms, a bear. Danzigers raised shields. There were the red banners of the
Reichsbund für Leibesübungen
, the Nazi sporting organisation, and the black and red flags of the Sudeten Germans. From the north of the Reich, track-and-field athletes dressed in red shirts and white shorts clasped their running shoes in their hands. There were ethnic Germans from Romania, the men in embroidered white shirts, the women in bright dresses with long ribbons fluttering from their headdresses, carrying colourful bouquets of wild flowers. Men of the labour service, the
Reichsarbeitsdienst
, shouldered their spades.

The thunder of three cannon echoed across the sandy parade ground, bidding the thousands of spectators take their seats on the seventy-feet-high temporary stands erected around the square, the
Schlossplatz
. One thousand feet long, the square was bordered on its narrower west side by the
Landeshaus
, the government building, to the south by trees which lined the banks of the old city moat, and on its broader west side by the ninety-seven-year-old
Stadttheater
where the works of Lorking and Wagner had been performed this past week. On the north side stood the building which gave the square its name, the Schloss or palace. The rather austere stone façade belied the grandeur which lay within – the fine rococo-style state rooms, the sprawling ballroom with its fine chandeliers. Here Frederick the Great had assembled a library to match that at his palace of Sanssouci in Potsdam, here he had governed, here he had pondered, here he had composed music. Here Frederick William III had awarded the first Iron Cross and issued his legendary appeal ‘
An mein Volk
’ (to my people) calling on them to cast off the Napoleonic yoke. “There is no other way out,” the king told his subjects, “than peace with honour or glorious defeat.”

Today there would be no speeches, no appeals in the Schlossplatz, just a carefully-choreographed procession by 150,000 athletes as the week-long
Deutsche Turn und Sportfest
(German athletics and sports festival) reached its climax. From 7am until almost 10 pm each day, sportsmen and women from every
Gau
(district) of the Reich had locked horns at the newly-renamed
Hermann Göring Sportfeld
, a sprawling complex of football stadia, athletics tracks, tennis courts, hockey pitches, a boxing ring, swimming baths, and a vast open arena surrounded by grandstands, all built a decade earlier three miles east of the city centre. Gerd Hornberger had upset the form book in the hundred-metre sprint, crossing the line in ten and a half seconds, a fraction ahead of his Eintracht Frankfurt teammate Manfred Kersch and thirty-three-year-old favourite Erich Borchmeyer, victor at four of the past five German championships. In the women’s events, Käthe Krauss added gold in the hundred-metre and two-hundred-metre dash to her Olympic bronze medal, while world and Olympic record holder Gisela Mauermeyer proved unbeatable once more in the discus – and took gold in the shot putt as well. The hosts’ few triumphs had come in the water: Hartmann in the hundred-metre breaststroke, the men’s hundred-metre crawl and backstroke relays, the coxless fours, the folding canoes.

The Sportfest was a triumph of Aryan strength and Nazi organization. Every minute of every day, every procession and parade, every performance of dance and gymnastics was minutely choreographed and arranged. A town of tents – more than 100 each housing forty boys as well as 170 wigwams for a dozen girls apiece – grew up around the sports ground, a sea of streamers, banners and flags fluttered in the east wind. Seemingly every hour special trains had pulled into the main railway station, the
Hauptbahnhof
, on the southern edge of the city centre, carrying guest athletes from throughout the Reich and beyond. Early on Tuesday, July 26, 800
Volksdeutsche
– ethnic Germans – from Estonia and Latvia arrived. From Hungary fifty, from Romania 400, from Memel 100, from overseas – Argentina, Chile, Brazil, South West Africa, Venezuela, Canada, the United States – 450. And at the classical-styled
Freiburger Bahnhof
on the western edge of the historic city centre, the never-ending arrival of Sudeten Germans. “Breslau is like a giant magnet,” the Nazi Party organ
Völkischer Beobachter
proclaimed. “With magical power it draws all Germans under its spell. They come here from all over, driven by the calling of their blood and their heart.”
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