Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (43 page)

Long before dawn on Easter Day, Paul Peikert hurried to take confession in St Mauritiuskirche on the eastern edge of the city centre. There were scores of soldiers, as well as parishioners, already waiting for him.
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Two miles to the west, Klaus Franke sat with his comrade Hans on the third floor of the clock tower in the Linke-Hofmann Werk. It was the fifth consecutive night the two forward artillery observers had spent in their perch, scanning Breslau’s western approaches with field binoculars. Though not particularly high, their vantage point thirty feet up allowed them to see as far as Deutsch Lissa, four miles away, and Leuthen, nearly eight. By day they watched
panje
carts, trucks, carts, limbered artillery, tanks, columns of marching soldiers, cyclists, a continuous stream of traffic. By night, they could only hear the vehicles and the occasional shout from a driver. There was the occasional flash of a muzzle, the dull roar of a gun firing, the whistle of a shell. Otherwise, Franke recalled, the nights in the tower lasted an eternity. He smoked constantly and rummaged in the pockets of his camouflage jacket for his emergency rations. The night of 31 March/1 April was no different – until a thin strip of light in the east announced the coming day. At the same time, 4.45am, the western horizon also lit up, as if “one thousand fire-breathing throats” were being cleared at once. After the flashes came the thunder, an awful howling and hissing. “The ground shakes and the iron flying around in the air clinks and clanks,” wrote Franke. “All hell has broken loose and the earth is like an inferno.” His comrade reached for the field telephone. “The enemy barrage began at 4.45am on a scale never …” The line went dead. Franke reached for the wireless and tapped out a message to headquarters:
4.45am. Barrage of an intensity never known before. Continues. Observation impossible
. The response was almost immediate – and to the point:
Hold on till dawn
.

The barrage was intensifying. “It’s as if a mighty volcano has erupted,” Franke wrote. “Bubbling, caustic smoke and gunpowder fill the air. The hurricane with its crashing and exploding grows worse by the minute. It really is raining deadly iron.” The clock tower shook and seemed to sway under the succession of explosions. Then a direct hit on the floor below the two observers. The men were stunned momentarily, their ears ringing, brick dust and smoke filling the observation post. Another shell caused the second floor to collapse, the stairs were ripped from their steel supports. The air was so thick it was almost impossible to breathe, but neither man left his post.
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Confession in St Mauritiuskirche lasted fifteen minutes longer than expected. There were simply too many soldiers for Paul Peikert to absolve. Mass finally got under way a little after 6am. It was far from a typical Easter Mass. There was no celebration of resurrection, to prevent the service dragging on too long. Nor was there the usual resurrection procession, because of the threat of air attack. It was the last service Peikert held in the church.

Outside Peikert’s church, thirteen-year-old Eberhard ‘Ebi’ Hassenbach tenderly waved at his family. As long as he could still see his mother, father and sister, he waved. The Hassenbachs had risen at the crack of dawn to go to confession, then to take communion at St Mauritiuskirche’s Easter service. As the service ended, Ebi Hassenbach bade his family farewell. A few weeks before, the lively, talkative teenager had been called up as a messenger by his
Ortsgruppe
in eastern Breslau. At first he returned home each night after his duties, but following promotion he no longer came home. He had briefly visited his family on Good Friday. His appearance shocked his mother Gertrud. “Before he was so trusting, how happily he chatted,” she recalled. “Now he barely spoke a word, he was distracted, ate little and only wanted to sleep.” When he did speak, Ebi’s words were devastating. “
Mutti
”, he simpered to his mother, “I am completely broken.” Frau Hassenbach railed at the regime. “What have they turned our happy, carefree children into?” Enraged – and emboldened – she went to the
Ortsgruppe
and demanded her son’s release from duties. A Party official brushed her away. “You too must make a sacrifice.”
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Paul Peikert made his way to an overcrowded air raid shelter in Klosterstrasse where the occupants awaited high mass. As Peikert prepared himself next to a temporary altar, the first bombs began to fall from 340 Soviet aircraft. Within half an hour, five one-ton bombs landed around the shelter. One destroyed St Agnes seminary. The second landed in a mass grave, just thirty feet from the cellar, where a week before Peikert had buried ten victims of the bombing. Eight of those dead were vaporized – with their coffins to boot. The third bomb destroyed the neighbouring house, burying eight inhabitants alive. They were never recovered. The fourth ploughed up the church garden, gouging out a crater more than sixty feet across and more than twenty-five feet deep. The fifth struck the ill-fated seminary. Each time one of the bombs exploded, the cellar and the building above it shook. The candlesticks on the altar were knocked out. People jumped up, convinced they were about to be entombed.
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Wilhelm Saffe and his wife left their cellar in Rosenthaler Strasse to walk to mass at Bonifatiuskirche in nearby Benderplatz. Barely had the couple taken their seats when the first Soviet bombers appeared overhead. Mass continued. The walls of the small church shook, but its young priest remained calm. So too his choir, who “did not stop for a moment, not even when a hail of bombs seemed to herald the end and the congregation cried with terror in unison”. A brief pause in the bombing allowed the worshippers to flee across the road, through the grove opposite – except that nothing remained of the small copse. “The fine trees lay strewn on the ground in every direction,” Saffe remembered. The cadavers of horses lay next to their wrecked cart. It was, wrote Wilhelm Saffe, “ a scene of misery”. As the couple reached the edge of the desolate copse, the bombing resumed. “Aircraft. Get into the next house!” Saffe yelled at his wife. She disappeared into the nearest building, he went into the house next door then scurried down into the cellar as the first bombs fell. Another pause and the Saffes left their temporary shelter for their home. “Wheezing, dead tired, still bundles of nerves, we struggled down the stairs to our cellar – but we were home,” a relieved Wilhelm Saffe wrote.
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Paul Peikert took advantage of a brief respite in the barrage to return to his vicarage, passing a smashed cart, its horses dead, its driver dead on the wagon, and two huge craters which had ripped up Klosterstrasse. As he grabbed breakfast in his home, the bombers returned. Peikert rushed into the vicarage’s air raid shelter. “Waves of enemy aircraft passed over the city continuously, dropping their fatal payloads,” he recorded in his diary. “The lights in the air raid shelter went out repeatedly. Everything went dark when the enemy bombs exploded and huge clouds of dust and gunpowder were whipped up so that it became completely black all around us. The walls of the cellar shook and we thought that the vicarage itself had been hit and it would soon collapse on top of us.” After a few minutes, the clouds of dust dispersed and the occupants of the cellar realized a neighbouring building had been hit.
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Soldier Theo Klose was thrown off his motorcycle and immediately ran towards the nearest cellar. He stumbled down the stairs where he found distraught Breslauers sheltering from the barrage. The scenes, he remembered, were indescribable. “Children screamed, women cried. The cellar walls shook.” The house above suffered a direct hit from a mortar and began to burn. Those in the cellar did not want to leave, but Theo Klose did. He felt his way up the cellar stairs and reached the street. It was aflame, his bicycle reduced to a pile of scrap. He ran down the road, throwing himself to the ground repeatedly as long tongues of flame licked out of blazing houses. “I don’t know how often I did so,” Klose recalled. “I only know that my whole face was battered and I eventually ended up in a public air raid shelter.” It too was filled with screaming, crying Breslauers.
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During a pause in the bombing, Hugo Hartung and his company of convalescing troops were ordered to leave their posts near Matthiasplatz on the right bank of the Oder and head to Antonienstrasse in the old town, a journey of no more than a mile. Hartung and his comrades never reached the river. As they left the square, the barrage resumed. “It must be a joy for the Russian airmen to wander around in this endless, deep, bright blue sky,” the theatre director wrote. “No German flak, no fighters pester them. The sky above Breslau is theirs.” The soldiers hugged the walls of buildings, kept their heads down and rushed into cellars for cover every few minutes. After two and a half hours, the soldiers decided to return to their quarters. There was no hope of crossing Universitätsbrücke alive. The men returned to their basement in Matthiasplatz. Early in the afternoon, an elderly couple and a young woman tottered into the cellar; they were the family of Hartung’s sergeant. His father tried to explain what had happened in halting sentences. “Just imagine a large shell,” the aged gentleman stuttered, “landing in the very next cellar. It was a better cellar than ours. That’s why there were more people in it. We were just about to move there ourselves, but my wife could not find the cake. And when she found it, it happened. Right in the neighbouring cellar. And there were at least twenty people inside.” His wife put the rescued Easter cake, decorated with small red and green marzipan eggs, on the table, then offered to make coffee – not
Ersatz
coffee, but
real
coffee – for all the cellar dwellers. “At this hour, there are identical scenes in more than one Breslau cellar, sometimes with real coffee, sometimes with
Ersatz
coffee,” Hartung observed. “There’s not cake and gâteau everywhere, but in some places there’s music from the radio or a gramophone if there’s still electricity despite the bombardment.” With or without music, there was a constant soundtrack: the drone of bombers, growing louder or fading, interspersed with the distinctive ‘chug’ of the ‘sewing machines’. “Everywhere the ground moves, doors crack, lights goes out, ceilings and walls are torn,” Hugo Hartung wrote, “yet this coffee hour at Easter remains one of the comforting illusions during our downfall.”
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Waffen SS clerk Georg Haas took shelter in the cellar of a church on Klosterstrasse. Two girls with dirty faces beneath black helmets stood guard at the shelter’s iron door. Occasionally, there was thumping from outside, but the basement was full. No one else was admitted. With each impact, dust and mortar trickled from the ceiling, covering the shelter’s occupants with a layer of grey. The heat grew worse by the minute. Children whimpered, mothers cried, some suffered hysterical screaming fits and tried to get out, trampling over other occupants to reach the door. They clawed at the iron door before finally giving up, their hands bleeding. Those at the back of the cellar began to inch away from the stone wall, now scorching hot from the fires raging outside. An old woman screamed: “We’re all going to hell. The cellar. The house. The entire city. All to hell.” She tried to reach the door, tripped and fell, smashing her head against a box. No one tried to help her up.
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Underground for years, Breslau’s Communists chose Easter Sunday to reveal their true allegiances. As many as 125 white flags appeared across the city. If they were seen by Soviet aircrew – and there is no evidence they were – they were ignored.

The only thing most Breslauers could do this Sunday was remain in their cellars and pray as the entire city was “carpeted with bombs,” as one anonymous chronicler wrote. His – or her – account continues:

The air is filled with continual roaring, howling, bursting, there’s the thunder of aircraft and the whistling of shells. On top of that, there’s shelling from the south, east and west. Death has a rich harvest and celebrates with orgies of destruction. The bunker seems to rise up and fall back down with a crash. The building shakes like a mortally wounded animal. We are stunned by the air pressure and put our hands over our ears so we don’t have to listen to this terrible, hellish symphony any more, and ram our fists into our mouths so we do not scream out of mad anxiety. Some fall to their knees and pray or mumble some incomprehensible noise to themselves. Some seem powerless out of horror. And everyone’s face is ashen and looks very old. Hundreds of aircraft seem to be over our block alone, turning in circles continuously, and in the distance we can hear the endless, endless roaring, rising and falling, the melody of death.

During the pauses, we rush out at the risk of our own lives and search for those buried alive in neighbouring houses. But we find no survivors among the ruins. They are all dead. And those who are able to save themselves crawling through the cracks. They are dirty, ragged, cut – more animal than human. The whites of their eyes, filled with terror, stand out in their blackened, scratched faces. They can still feel the breath of death and are mad with fear.
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It was 5pm when the bombing finally relented and Paul Peikert cautiously emerged from the air raid shelter in his vicarage. It was time for vespers, but there were no parishioners for Peikert to receive; none dared leave their cellars and shelters. The priest’s only visitors were two officers, who talked at length about the day’s events. They reckoned 5,000 bombs had fallen on Breslau on the holiest day in the Christian calendar.
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Night fell a little before 7pm, but there was no darkness in Breslau this Sunday, for aside from the full moon the sky glowed “red in the reflection of the flames,” junior officer Erich Schönfelder observed. The sight was at once captivating and horrifying. After spending the day sheltering in a cellar, Peter Bannert and a comrade somehow felt drawn to the Ring and St Elisabethkirche. They climbed to the top of its 300ft tower and looked out silently over “a single sea of flames” before descending the steps depressed, while on the fortress’s northern front,
Feldwebel
Gerhard Schwingel watched a comrade sit in his foxhole, his back to the enemy, “reading the newspaper and admiring the magnificent fireworks”. Those still in the air raid shelters, bunkers and cellars had no concept of what was happening to their city, only that it was terrifying. In the church cellar in Klosterstrasse, the growing sense of panic was palpable. The acrid smell of burning penetrated gaps in the wall and the shelter’s heavy iron door. Children coughed and began to cry. There was repeated hammering on the shelter entrance from outside. Those at the front of the shelter could hear a few broken sentences. “Fire! Out! The street’s on fire! Save …” Until now, two girls had stoically guarded the door, allowing no one in or out. Now, one of them cracked. “We’re burning! Get out of here! We’re burning!” She threw herself against the door. Her actions sparked panic. Everyone in the shelter rushed for the door. Fists flew, bodies fell, a disabled veteran tried to clear a path to the exit with his crutch – until someone kicked his artificial leg away; he fell and was trampled by the crowd. The iron door was unbolted and the cellar’s occupants rushed up the steps, down a hallway and into Klosterstrasse. Perhaps they wished they had not, for the street, Georg Haas recalled, was “just one huge sea of flames”. Clothes caught fire; people threw themselves on to the torn-up pavement trying to put them out. “Shells roar over this place of horror and bring death and destruction to those who believed they had escaped the flames of hell,” wrote Haas. “Embers threaten to suffocate your breath. The noise of howling shells, crackling flames, collapsing roof trusses, the constant explosions and shrill cries of people make your eardrums shake.” He watched people thrown to the side of the street by the blast of a shell “like paper tossed in an autumn storm”. A few of the more fortunate ones, like Georg Haas, escaped the fire, stumbling past the blackened façades of houses, deformed corpses and burned out vehicles, finally finding refuge in a shelter.
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