Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (30 page)

Probably believing they would get some food and delighted to see people again, they faithfully came to the ditches begging, but the first bullet was already hurtling into their fur. It barely grazed the thick fur and a small stream of blood ran red. The second bullet struck it in the middle of the head. A spurt of blood as thick as an arm shot from its nose and mouth, it swayed, fell down, one last twitch and it was all over. The other brown bears stood there upright but retreated back to their caves when they saw and heard this sad occurrence. Only by using sticks, and a great deal of cunning and guile could they be enticed out again. Another tranquiliser bullet, a shot to the head, sometimes one more as a
coup de grâce
and the awful groaning and howling ended.

The execution squad moved on to the polar bears. The zoo’s director could no longer watch. He turned his deathly-pale face away, tears streaming down it, as his life’s work was systematically destroyed. Kraeker continued:

The moaning cries of the mortally-wounded animals shattered the silence. All the white bears rolled slowly into the ditches with last spasms. Now the rest of the Asian black bears stood in front of us, begging us, pleading with us. It didn’t work. We went to the lions, leopards, tigers and hyenas. The same sad drama. They were slain up close and personal. They tried to defend themselves against the carbines by beating their large paws. These regal animals lay dead in front of us. There was no other solution available to us.

Perhaps the Russians knew what was afoot, for as the killing party moved through the zoo, the district was bombed heavily. The exhibition hall in the grounds of the Jahrhunderthalle, opposite the zoological gardens, burned. And in the zoo itself, gaps were torn in the aviary fence. Its exotic occupants fled, seeking sanctuary in Scheitniger Park. For days afterwards, the otherwise bleak and lifeless park was coloured by these bright birds, whose songs at night brought a touch of spring to life in the fortress.
¹³

On the opposite side of the city, boys from two
Hitlerjugend
battalions, 55 and 56, mustered excitedly in the hall of Dietrich Eckart School. Today there was a ‘comradeship evening’ – a feast of cake and cocoa. Their leader Herbert Hirsch insisted they use ‘
Du
’ rather than the more formal ‘
Sie
’, whatever the rank. And tonight the highest rank of all was present, the head of the Hitler Youth, Artur Axmann. The
Reichsjugendführer
had struggled against a torrent of refugees heading west on Silesia’s roads, but finally his staff car arrived at the former girls’ school, now a makeshift headquarters for Hirsch’s teenage soldiers. Axmann was impressed. “They created an outstanding impression, mentally and physically,” he wrote, and Hirsch assured him that his boys had “received good training”. That ‘good training’ comprised intense physical instruction in a nearby park and instruction in the use of first the rifle, then the
Panzerfaust
. The youngsters gathered on a railway embankment and watched as several anti-tank weapons were fired. At least one
Panzerfaust
exploded prematurely, killing one boy and wounding several others. Artur Axmann learned none of this – but he was left in no doubt that Breslau was a city under siege. Throughout the two hours he spent with the boys, Soviet Po2 biplanes dropped bombs constantly. “Although we all agreed not to let anything disturb us, whenever the monotonous droning stopped – replaced by a hissing-buzzing noise – we ducked automatically,” sixteen-year-old Manfred Preussner recalled. The festivities over, Axmann left Breslau that evening to continue his visit to
Hitlerjugend
units defending Silesia. He narrowly escaped capture by Soviet tanks on the Autobahn outside Breslau.
¹⁴

Just a few miles to the north, Soviet forces were now bearing down on Hendrik Verton’s SS unit in Deutsch Lissa. The town was deserted – not just every civilian, but every soldier had pulled out, save for Verton and his comrades. They had one final duty to perform before they too abandoned Deutsch Lissa: to cover the last bridge spanning the Weistritz, the sole natural barrier opposing the Red Army west of Breslau. At midnight, the SS troops crawled into the cellars of houses along the river to take shelter as pioneers destroyed the crossing. “There was a deathly silence,” wrote Verton. “The eerie calm was just like New Year’s Eve, a few minutes before midnight.” Then there was a deafening explosion which shattered the calm. In the cellar “we heard stones and bricks raining down in the streets for several seconds”. When the troops emerged from the cellar the bridge had gone and “the roofs of houses looked like a hurricane had passed. Doors and window frames lay scattered in the streets and gardens between pieces of glass.”

It was another day before the Russians attacked Deutsch Lissa. For more than twenty-four hours, the SS troops stood guard along the right bank of the Weistritz, bailing their foxholes out with their mess tins. At first light on the fifteenth, the Red artillery opened fire, first with individual shells, then growing into a barrage as the day became brighter and brighter. “We awaited the end, shaking in our foxholes,” wrote Verton. “The pungent smoke from the explosions forced its way up our noses. Howling shells flew over our foxholes and splinters whistled in every direction. The earth shook, lumps of sand and stones drummed on our steel helmets.” No one was wounded – only direct hits on the foxhole could do that.

We never got a single second to orientate ourselves [Verton continued]. But in this hurricane of fire the Russians could not attack either.

You couldn’t defend yourself, you only wanted to crawl even deeper below ground. You forgot about the cold and sleeping. We felt the air pressure of the shells roaring low over our foxholes. The enemy barrage lasted an eternity and I believed the world was going under.

I didn’t know what was happening to my comrades. It seemed unlikely that my neighbours on my left or right were still alive. When there was a sudden pause in the barrage, I dared to peer cautiously over the edge of my foxhole and noticed that the terrain had become ghostly. Acrid swathes of grey smoke hung over the cratered landscape. My right-hand neighbour was torn apart next to his foxhole. I called the man on my left and a steel helmet cautiously lifted out of the ground. Thank God he was alive and unharmed.

As the guns fell silent, the coarse cry of ‘Urrah’ carried through the haze as Russian infantry swept across the Weistritz plain – and over a bridge their pioneers had thrown across the river. “Dark figures appeared everywhere in front of us on the white, snow-covered landscape,” Verton recalled. “Wide-eyed we watched the approach of the superior enemy.” The SS unit’s left flank caved in, leaving Verton’s platoon cut off. “There was no other choice left to us than to sell our lives as dearly as possible,” he wrote. Verton’s machine-pistol glowed as he fired round after round. The Soviet infantry were slowed, but not stopped. “There were only a very few comrades left, standing or sitting – unprotected – on the edge of their foxholes, firing their last rounds. Death was so near now. I no longer had any hope. Life unwound at a furious pace.” Suddenly, the platoon leader pointed excitedly at a stream which meandered through open ground to a nearby copse. The men left their foxholes and plunged into the icy water, holding their weapons above their heads. Machine-gun fire whistled over their heads, but every man who left his foxhole along the Weistritz made it safely to the wood and from there to the village of Saara. The exhausted soldiers sought food in the farmhouses on the edge of the hamlet. They found an elderly woman sitting in her kitchen wrapped in blankets, a black cat on her lap. “We wanted to take this old farmer’s wife with us, but she refused to leave.”
¹⁵

In a flurry of snow, the Soviet pincers – Sixth Army from the west, Fifth Guards Army from the south-east – locked around 10am on Shrove Tuesday, 13 February, in the village of Domslau, eight miles south of Breslau. The pincers did not lock tightly, however. In places, the encircling ring was barely two miles thick initially – as the remnants of 269th Infantry Division discovered that evening. The 269th had done its job. It had parried the Soviet advance when Breslau’s defences were weakest. Now it was needed elsewhere. Its artillery and support vehicles had already been sent south before the gap closed. The fighting troops, however, had to bludgeon their way out on the cusp of February 13-14. Ten
Sturmgeschütze
supported their bid for freedom. The bulk of the infantry made it, but not the armour. It found its path blocked in Gallen, ten miles outside Breslau. “The village,” recalled assault gun commander
Leutnant
Leo Hartmann, “was riddled with anti-tank guns and mortars”. At dawn on the fourteenth, the six remaining
Sturmgeschütze
fell back past burned-out vehicles. The guns were ordered to support the defence of the city. The spare crews were ordered to slip through the ring of encirclement on foot. “I don’t know how many succeeded,” Hartmann wrote. “I did not.” He swam through the icy waters of the Lohe then spent a day lying motionless “soaked to the skin” in no man’s land between German and Russian lines just four miles from the city centre. He was found by the
Volkssturm
and carried to a field hospital before rejoining his unit, the grandly-titled
Panzerjäger Abteilung Breslau
– Breslau tank destroyer detachment.
¹⁶
A dozen or so miles away, what was left of 408th Infantry Division began to fall back towards the city. The troops passed through the village of Leuthen, empty save for one elderly woman who refused to leave the place of her birth. She not merely remained in Leuthen, she reported the Red Army’s progress to
Generalmajor
Max Sachsenheimer and his scratch force. The reports were alarming. Sachsenheimer’s men were cut off. Breslau was encircled. Germany’s second-youngest general received orders to surrender all his field guns, all his vehicles, all his flak to the city’s garrison, then break out. Fourteen hundred men set out on foot in three groups that night. Some clashed with Red Army troops on the Autobahn bridge at Kostenblut, others on a country estate. Some 800 men escaped. The rest were either dead or abandoned the attempt and joined the defenders of Breslau.
¹⁷

There were no more concerted efforts to break out of the Breslau
Kessel
– cauldron – but there was one determined attempt to break
in
. Paul Arnhold had now been on the move for four weeks – but at least he was on native soil. He had passed through the village of Freyhan, forty miles north of Breslau, in the first week of February. From there the officer and his two companions had wandered west to the forests east of Trachenberg, then east to the farmland outside Trebnitz, and finally west once more to the banks of the Oder near Auras.

The approaches to the river were still covered in snow. The three men used white bed sheets as camouflage but they could not silence their footsteps – crunch, crunch, crunch. A handful of Russian troops stood guard on the Oder, but preferred singing to shooting – “they’d probably been at the schnapps again,” Arnhold observed. Occasionally flares arced over the river, there were sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire, but otherwise the
frontoviki
were paying little attention to the Oder. As Monday, 12 February turned to Tuesday, Paul Arnhold and two
Landsers
, Rosseck and Feiner, struck out across the river in a raft.

Full of desperation, we thrust our paddles into the water as if we were at a rowing regatta – we didn’t worry about splashing or anything else for that matter. All that mattered was our poor, naked lives.

In fact, we were naked aside from the shrouds wrapped around us. We had to do it – we just had to. Thanks to our manic efforts, our eyes were popping out of heads and our veins on our forehead were as thick as fingers. But the raft was too heavy to be propelled through the swirling current into open water using our little paddles. It almost looked as if we were driven back again despite our insane efforts.

As the trio reached the main flow of the Oder, the noise of the paddles thrashing around in the water finally triggered the Russian response. One flare, then another. Both fell into the river, hissing. Three more flares, then five, six, seven. “It became as bright as day – in fact brighter than day – along the entire river,” Arnhold recalled. “There was nothing we could do other than play ‘dead rabbits’. Someone saw us and fired his machine-pistol in our direction. Then three, four, six machine-pistols fired and a machine-gun joined in.”

Rosseck went into the water, then Feiner and finally Arnhold. “When I went into the cold water between two ice floes, I was certain that now everything was over,” he wrote. “All too often these past few days I had imagined what would happen if we were forced to swim in the icy water again. I had dismissed such thoughts as nightmares. And now we were in the water again!”

The Russians aimed most of their fire at the raft, which quickly sank, while the three men negotiated the ice floes in a desperate struggle to reach the left bank. Rosseck was hit, but Arnhold hauled him to a sandbank. As the two men set foot on it, Russian artillery began shooting. “The fire never relaxed,” Arnhold wrote. “The Russians seemed to be enjoying the change and fired everything they had.” The pair crawled and swam through thirty feet of river and bushes before a mound finally offered some shelter.

I fell down here with the wounded Rosseck and – just like him – could not get my breath back at all. More dead then alive, we lay here in our underpants and shirts, wet, with every limb shaking from the cold and excitement. We would perhaps have stayed there, croaking miserably, because we could not find the strength to stand up. Our spark of life was so close to being extinguished.