Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (7 page)

“Breslau gets even with the Jews,” screamed the
Schlesische Tageszeitung
, the Party’s mouthpiece in the city. “Their synagogues are nothing but heaps of rubble.” Many of the city’s residents felt deep unease, even anger at the events of
Kristallnacht
. Ulrich Frodien’s father flew into frequent fits of rage. “But like everyone else, he did nothing, he remained a Party member and only clenched his fist in his pocket,” his son observed. As for Ulrich, he continued to faithfully serve the
Deutsche Jungvolk
, the junior wing of the Hitler Youth, as “a brainless twelve-year-old, showing no sympathy, bone-headed and naive,” parading through the streets of his home city singing “the most horrible rabble-rousing anti-Semitic slogans”. It was, Ulrich Frodien realized years later, the ideal way to “educate the ‘manpower’ which it would need for the coming war.”
¹⁵

Breslau’s road to war did not end with preparing the mind, of course. Just four days after the stretch of Autobahn was opened, a new military unit was formed in Breslau, 28th Infantry Division. The city was the headquarters of
Wehrkreis
VIII – Military District VIII – the administrative centre responsible for training and equipping divisions raised in Silesia such as 18th Infantry in Liegnitz, 5th Panzer in Oppeln, as well as the 28th and 221st Infantry and a myriad of supply, training, replacement, signals and other units in the
Gau
capital. After the fallow 1920s, work in the city’s principal industries picked up to meet the demands of rearmament. The workforce of the Archimedes steel works trebled. The world-famous Linke-Hofmann factory produced locomotives and railway carriages, while its former motor vehicle wing, now the
Fahrzeug und Motoren Werke
– Vehicle and Motor Works or FAMO to everyone in the city – produced tank chassis as well as tractors, trucks and other road vehicles. Rearmament, conscription, huge public construction projects. All helped to eradicate the spectre of unemployment for all but a handful of the 600,000-plus Breslauers by the end of the decade.

And so on the eve of war, this metropolis on the Oder was vibrant once more. During the spring and summer, the promenades along the river were a popular destination for thousands of Breslauers, especially on Sundays. The cafes, restaurants and beer gardens along the river buzzed with conversation and music. “In that respect,” one proud resident recalled, “Breslau competed with Vienna.”
¹⁶
Breslauers enjoyed some of the finest sports facilities in Europe courtesy of the Hermann Göring Sportfeld, even if the city’s sporting teams were rather second-rate. They might visit an exhibition or watch a circus performance in the Jahrhunderthalle, or perhaps stroll around the zoological gardens opposite. In the evening, the Ring remained the focal point of city life with its restaurants and bierkellers. The 1,300-seat Stadttheater and even larger Schauspielhaus offered opera and high-brow entertainment, while the masses could catch a film at one of more than three dozen cinemas.

To visitors, the
Baedeker
tourist guide enthused, Breslau presented “a happy fusion of historic, attractive ancient culture and Silesian down-to-earth nature with the vibrant features of a big city”. The guide particularly recommended the Monopol in the old town with its forty
en suite
rooms for up to 10 Reichsmarks a night, or the Savoy, close to the Hauptbahnhof, offering the same facilities for a similar price. Budget travellers could find a room for the night in one of Breslau’s hostels for a little over 2 Reichsmarks. Most would come by train – the express would bring them from the capital in a little over three hours for just short of 18 Reichsmarks. The wealthy might come by Autobahn – or even by air. There were two flights a day to the capital in summer, one every weekday in winter, from Gandau airfield, four miles west of the city centre, as well as services to Warsaw, Stettin, Berlin, Prague, Dresden and beyond. The old airport building which resembled a village hall had been replaced with a huge brick structure, five-storey tower and a hangar large enough to accommodate the four-engined Junkers G38 airliners of the day. Despite such improvements, the field itself still needed 250 sheep to keep the grass short.

But like everywhere else in the Reich, the inhabitants of ‘happy fusion’ had surrendered their freedoms. Every facet of this life was either controlled or monitored by the arms of the Nazi Party from the regional leader, the
Gauleiter
, to the
Kreisleiter
– responsible for a town or parish; the
Ortsgruppe
, overseeing Party affairs for up to 3,000 households – there were more than 90 such offices in Breslau;
Zellenleiter
, responsible for up to eight city blocks; and finally, the
Blockleiter
, whose domain covered between forty and sixty homes. Boys aged ten and above were compulsory members of the
Deutsche Jungvolk
and from the age of fourteen moved into the
Hitlerjugend
, while girls joined the
Jungmädel
and
Bund Deutscher Mädel
respectively. Workers joined the sole trade union, the
Deutsche Arbeitsfront
– German Labour Front – and enjoyed excursions, holidays and other activities through the Nazis’ leisure organisation
Kraft durch Freude
– Strength Through Joy – which even ran Breslau’s Gerhart Hauptmann Theatre. On top of the
Party
apparatus, there was the
state
apparatus, the
Sicherheitsdienst
security service who monitored public opinion among other duties, or the secret police, the Gestapo. The latter arrested Joachim Konrad, priest of St Elisabethkirche near the Ring, on at least three occasions, and even banned him from speaking throughout the Reich. He was regularly summoned to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where officials showed him the thick file they had compiled, listing “all my ‘sins’ against the Third Reich”. The ban would eventually be lifted and Konrad allowed to return to his home city; he would serve it, and its people, through its most bitter days.
¹⁷

War came to Breslau inevitably, if reluctantly. In the closing days of August 1939, a constant stream of vehicles and troops moved through the city, bound for the Polish frontier barely twenty-five miles away where men of the labour service erected barbed-wire fences in the face of the Polish ‘threat’. The soldiers marched silently, no songs accompanied the thud of boot upon tarmac. “We had to tear ourselves away from what we clung on to with all our strength: family, job, home,” remembered Breslau student and reservist artillery officer Hans Thieme, recalled to the colours. “The days which followed were possibly the most challenging of the entire war emotionally.”
¹⁸
Breslauers watched the soldiers march past without saying a word. Diarists Walter Tausk and Willy Cohn could find no appetite for war among the citizens of Breslau. “There’s none of the patriotic enthusiasm of August 1914,” Cohn noted. “It’s more a silent despair.” Shops filled with hoarders desperate to fill their pantries before rationing took effect. Police moved through the city handing out instructions telling residents to maintain a black out at night and keep buckets filled with water handy. Women on the trams talked openly about fleeing the city for the safety of the countryside and withdrew their savings from the banks. Tausk bumped into drunk soldiers on a final fling before heading off to the front. Their boisterous behaviour was too much even for Breslau’s ladies of the night who disappeared into their apartments and locked the doors. The troops, Tausk observed, “are depressed, morose, show no enthusiasm for war, and rage inside against Adolf. In the barracks at Karlowitz, young men as well as the old reservists say: ‘He can pick up his things and go, we’ve had enough of it.’”
¹⁹

Silesia served as the springboard for the thrust on Warsaw. The staff of Army Group South could be found in Neisse, forty-five miles south of Breslau, the specialist dive-bomber unit of Wolfram von Richthofen seventy miles to the east near Rosenberg, and in the city itself, the headquarters of Eighth Army. “If war is necessary now,” its chief-of-staff Hans Felber enthused, “then let’s grit our teeth and take a leap into uncertainty!”
²⁰
If Breslauers did not necessarily share his enthusiasm, few shed a tear for Poland’s demise. Still smarting from defeat in the World War, “most Silesians did not like this new hostile neighbour in the East, this Polish state,” Ulrich Frodien remembered.
²¹

War with Poland was brutally swift – the first troops began to return from the front before the end of September. The following summer, the city’s own 221st Infantry Division was welcomed home after victory over France. It had played a minuscule role in the triumph, but it still marched through the streets of Breslau where it was “showered with flowers and gifts. Every street and the buildings on them were decorated with garlands and flags. There was not a single soldier, not a single vehicle without a floral decoration. Everywhere the men were welcomed by cries of ‘
Heil
’ from the populace, which frequently chanted rousing choruses such as ‘We thank you.’”
²²
But for boys like ten-year-old Peter Bannert, the war had been a huge let-down. “We were in a high spirits, but we were soon disappointed,” he recalled. “Life seemed to go on as normal and no enemy aircraft could be seen in the sky.”
²³

And so it would be for the next five years, more or less. Breslau was not untouched by war – nowhere in Germany was – but beyond the range of enemy bombers, the city was less affected than almost any other in the Reich. There were restrictions – on travel, on food, on personal liberties – but otherwise life went on as it did in peacetime. On Sundays, the
Hitlerjugend
would parade through the streets singing anti-Jewish songs before marching into the Jahrhunderthalle to the sound of tympani and fanfares. Each Wednesday and Saturday, Ulrich Frodien pulled on the uniform of the
Jungvolk
, and from the age of fourteen, the
Hitlerjugend
. He was “always in uniform, always in a column”. Some boys found it a chore, some spellbinding, but putting on that uniform invariably made Breslau’s youths slightly cocky. Riding home on the tram to Karlowitz, three miles from the city centre, Hans Henkel watched a group of boisterous Hitler Youths climb on board. One youth stared through the glass partition at the passengers, most of them elderly. “That’s right,” the boy yelled. “The cemetery fodder sit down while Germany’s future stands.” There was an awkward silence in the carriage, then an elderly gentleman stood up, approached the cock-sure youngster and slapped him in the face. Striking a
Hitlerjugend
in uniform was a criminal offence, but no one intervened.
²⁴

The lively nightlife for which Breslau was renowned continued, although the strict black-out meant that trams and cars drove through the streets with their lights dimmed and the streetlamps were out; Breslauers wore luminescent badges to avoid bumping into each other in the dark. The restaurants, the theatres, the bars, the cinemas remained open. Most weeks, Ulrich Frodien headed into town to catch a film. He particularly enjoyed historical dramas, of which there were many:
Ritt in die Freiheit
, the story of a 19th-Century Polish uprising against the Russians,
Der Grosse König
, an award-winning biography of Frederick the Great, or
Ohm Krüger
, an account of the Boer War laden with anti-British vitriol. And before each main feature, the
Wochenschau
, the weekly newsreel, a pot pourri of events at home – engineers at work in Silesia’s steel mills, large-scale Nazi ceremonies, submariners skiing in the Alps – and events at the front – the bombardment of Warsaw, mountain troops in Narvik, the fall of Paris. Frodien watched the newsreels avidly, but it was only years later that he realized how sanitized a picture of war they presented. There were shots of “carefully-erected birch crosses with a steel helmet on top, pretty nurses and recuperating soldiers in the hospitals,” or graveside ceremonies with heroic speeches and guards of honour. But of the dead themselves, nothing. “No shot-up panzers, no shot-down aircraft, no bombed flak position,” he recalled.
²⁵
What propaganda tried to hide, life could not. Willy Cohn was struck by the large number of women walking around Breslau, their faces covered by black veils. “All widowed by the war – most of them not reported in the newspaper,” he observed in his diary.
²⁶
And occasionally, there were direct reminders of the war raging across Europe. In mid-November 1941, Breslau was bombed in broad daylight. The sum total of seven bombs fell on the city (one of those was a dud), but ten people were killed. The
Schlesische Tageszeitung
immediately branded the Soviet attack a ‘terror raid’ aimed at defenceless civilians. “In fact, the attack was aimed at the Hauptbahnhof – and struck very close to it,” Willy Cohn noted. At least one bomb landed in the station, tearing both legs off a woman. “War always affects the innocent but this air raid is also proof that the enemy is now catching up.”
²⁷

The enemy was not catching up quickly enough for Willy Cohn. One week after that entry in his journal, he was arrested with his wife and two children. They joined a train carrying another 1,000 Breslau Jews to Kaunas in Lithuania. Before November was out, the Cohn family had been exterminated. Walter Tausk too. He was also shipped to Lithuania with the first transports. Over the coming eighteen months, trains would leave for camps at Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec in Poland and Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia under what was cynically called the ‘Jewish Resettlement Action’. By the summer of 1943, the authorities could proclaim Breslau
Judenrein
– cleansed of Jews.
²⁸