Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (18 page)

Paul Arnhold and a handful of men crept through the fields of the Pilica valley trying to avoid the Russian columns – with headlights on full beam, so secure did they feel – pushing west. The
Oberst
had been unable to hold the road to Tomaszów Mazowiecki with his scratch force and fled in a staff car, until it was shot up by Soviet armour which overhauled the retreating Germans. Arnhold had no map – he used the stars to guide him as he trudged “hungry and half frozen” through deep snow, through thicket, through clearings, somewhere south of Tomaszów, occasionally crossing a road in darkness in the gaps between the Soviet convoys. But roads were a trifling obstacle compared with the icy Pilica, anywhere between 120 and 200ft wide here. Most of the river was frozen, save for a central channel, but Arnhold sought a stretch where there were islands; the ice there was thicker.

He found none, but on the edge of Tomaszów he found a farm surrounded by a wooden lattice fence. That, the
Oberst
determined, would serve as a makeshift bridge. He and his pioneers began dismantling it, then slid it over the ice. Several figures came out of the farmhouse and called out in Russian. The pioneers did not respond. The Russians opened fire. The Germans dropped the fence and simply ran over the ice – until the ice ran out and they plunged into the Pilica. It wasn’t far to the opposite bank, no more than a couple of strokes, but Arnhold’s thick coat “became as heavy as lead” in the river; the ice was too thin to support the officer’s weight. So began, says Arnhold, “a desperate fight, a struggle with my last ounce of strength against the end, either at the hands of a bullet from a machine pistol of a dozen shooters or by drowning in the icy waters of the Pilica.” Finally he found ground beneath his feet and climb out of the river as erratic tracer fire struck the far bank. He was joined by four comrades, one who had left his boots behind in the thick Pilica mud. The soldier cut his soaked coat into strips and wrapped them around his bleeding feet so he could continue on his way. The pioneers were cold, wet, barely able to focus because they had not eaten in days, but there was no thought of stopping because they would freeze to death.

With every step their boots squelched, the water in their sodden coats froze – so stiffly that when Paul Arnhold tripped in the dark, a piece simply snapped off. The men’s teeth chattered constantly from the cold – a snow storm now added to their misery – and tension. “The cold went right through us – to our feet, legs, our entire bodies,” the
Oberst
remembered. “The damp began to freeze. Death by freezing accompanied our every step. There was no point arguing with it. That uncompromising certainty never loosened its grip on us. It spurred us on, allowed us no break.”

Finally they stumbled across a cottage whose elderly inhabitant allowed them in and even fed them. The pioneers dried their clothes by the open fire, but food and warmth made them drowsy. They fell asleep. “I suddenly woke up because my feet felt as if they were on fire,” Arnhold recalled. “When I drew them back, it was already too late: the soles had been too close to the embers and had caught fire. In that short space of time, they warped so badly that I felt as if I was standing on a pipe.”

They rested for a couple of hours until the first signs of dawn, then it was time to leave. Their clothes and boots were still wet. For the first few steps shivering and goose pimples went through the pioneers’ bodies. But what, thought Paul Arnhold, were goose pimples compared with the “threatening spectre of the Bolsheviks breathing down our necks?” He hobbled through the deep snow in his burned shoes, every step painful. Just one thought possessed him and his comrades: reach the Oder. But the Oder lay 150 miles away.
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The blame for this catastrophe was not Adolf Hitler’s. Or at least the blame for this catastrophe was not Adolf Hitler’s
in Adolf Hitler’s eyes
. As ever, he blamed others for his own arrogance and ignorance. He blamed the low morale of the troops at the front – especially the officers. He blamed his generals for failing to warn him about the Soviets’ strength. Above all, he blamed Army Group A’s commander Josef Harpe, who was promptly sacked. In his place, Ferdinand Schörner, Hitler’s favourite, a general whose ability was invariably overshadowed by his ruthlessness and fanaticism. “I think Schörner can do it,” Joseph Goebbels wrote. “He will put right the desolate state of affairs caused by Harpe. We will leave no stone unturned in making the necessary forces available to him.”
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Already dispatched to halt the Red Army advance were the tank destroyers of
Oberst
Hans-Ulrich Rudel specialist ground-attack unit,
Schlachtgeschwader
2, transferred from Hungary to Silesia. Germany’s most decorated warrior, Stuka pilot, tank destroyer
par excellence
and sole recipient of the
Ritterkreuz
with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds, found the situation at Udetfeld
^*
outside Katowice confused – and confusing. Ground crew told Rudel Russian tanks were just two dozen miles from Częstochowa – or perhaps they were panzers trying to break through to the west. Within twenty minutes, Rudel’s wing was airborne and flying low over Częstochowa. A tank was moving along the main road, a second, then a third. They looked like T34s, but Rudel was convinced they had to belong to 16th or 17th Panzer Divisions. He circled the city. No mistake. They were T34s with infantry mounted who now began to take pot shots at the German aircraft.

Tram cables and tall houses made it difficult for Rudel to manoeuvre for an attack but he nevertheless left three tanks ablaze courtesy of his Stuka’s cannon.
Schlachtgeschwader
2 continued east following a railway line and main road. It wasn’t long before they came across more Soviet armour rolling west, closely followed by a column of lorries carrying infantry and supplies, plus several anti-aircraft guns. The terrain here was far better suited to tank destroying – no obstructions to hinder the Stukas’ movements. At last light Rudel’s unit set down on the runway at Udetfeld, out of ammunition. They left behind eight shot-up Russian tanks.

Until now Rudel and his comrades had almost regarded the destruction of enemy tanks “as a kind of sport”. But no longer. “I am seized with an uncontrolled fury at the thought that this horde from the steppes is driving into the very heart of Europe.”
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Despite Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s intervention, Częstochowa could not be saved, as wounded soldier Wolfdietrich Schnurre discovered. The holy city had largely been evacuated as the twenty-four-year-old
Landser
was taken to the military hospital, with Częstochowa already under enemy fire. Only a few surgeons and medics remained – and most of those had drowned their sorrows with alcohol. For the first time in weeks, Schnurre was treated to a shower, then a proper bed. The soldier slept soundly and dreamed vividly of “roaring claps of thunder and raging lightning.” He awoke. It was no dream. With tank shells exploding all around, two orderlies carried the soldier to the station and put him on a train. It was the last one to leave Częstochowa.
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The Red Army was now just 100 miles from Breslau.

One by one the towns and cities of Poland were falling to the Red Army: Kielce, 15 January. Częstochowa and Radom, 16 January. Warsaw, 17 January.
Pravda
proclaimed 400 towns and villages liberated in the first three days of Konev’s offensive. “Glory to the outstanding men of the Red Army!” the official Communist Party organ trumpeted. “Forward under the victorious banner of Lenin and Stalin, to the West!”
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The Nazi empire in the East crumbled as quickly as the Red Army advanced. Four days into the offensive, the first orders were issued to evacuate the great city of Łódź – renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis in honour of the Great War general who captured it. As the wheels of the civic apparatus began to turn, there was a sound rarely heard in Łódź: the air-raid siren. For an hour, Soviet bombers pounded the city, paralysing the tram network, overwhelming fire-fighters and the German administration. No evacuees left Łódź that night. The first train only departed the following lunchtime.
³⁸

Bombs also began to fall on the ancient seat of the Polish kings. That aside, life in Kraków was still remarkably normal. The trams ran. The black market thrived. Cinemas and restaurants were still open. But outside the city, all was not normal. Police and soldiers stood guard on the roads leading from Kraków to ensure no one left without permission.

The Army had already abandoned Kraków; the sacked Josef Harpe had fled with his staff, but the city’s Nazi overlord conducted business as usual – for one day at least. In the magnificent coronation hall – ‘the hall of columns’ – of Wawel Castle, Hans Frank held a farewell dinner for three dozen members of his staff. Five years before, Frank had been ‘crowned’ ruler of the rump of Poland as its Governor General in a suitably tasteless Nazi ceremony. Hans Frank was not a king. He was a god. “There is no authority here which is higher in rank, influence and authority than the Governor General,” he proclaimed. He was as good as his word. He had ruled his domain as brutally as any tyrant in history. And now as his rule crumbled, he was overcome by self-pity. “I stood alone in the great coronation and congregation hall with its panoramic view over the wonderful old city and thought about the path which had brought us to this point.”
³⁹

In the face of this inexorable advance, as many as five million German civilians fled. They fled because civilians always flee in the face of an invader. They fled because memories of Russian actions in the German East a generation before were long. But above all they fled because they feared the ‘Mongol onslaught’ coming from the East. The German soldier called his foe ‘Russki’ or ‘Ivan’ out of grudging respect. The best the Nazi propaganda apparatus could manage was ‘Bolsheviks’. More typically the newspapers and newsreels branded the Soviets an ‘Asiatic horde’, ‘Mongols’, ‘beasts’. It had proof they were ‘beasts’, too: in November 1944, the Red Army had seized, then been driven out of, the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf. The returning Germans found numerous dead civilians – the actual figure is disputed – “almost every one of the murdered in a bestial fashion,” a
Volkssturm
soldier recalled.
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War reporters, photographers, foreign correspondents, newsreel cameramen all descended on Nemmersdorf, while Germany’s newspapers were told to warn their readers that if the Red Army overran the Reich “the systematic and terrible murder of every single German would take place and Germany would be turned into one big cemetery”.
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The newspapers obliged – and struck terror into the heart of every inhabitant of the German East.

The cities of the occupied East emptied first – Łódź, Kraków, Kalisz, Poznań and their satellite towns and villages – then the border settlements of Silesia. They called it
die grosse Flucht
or
der grosse Treck
– the great flight or great trek – an exodus of millions in temperatures of twenty degrees below. Farmers limbered their carts and wagons, but most people moved on foot, pulling hand carts, carrying suitcases, rucksacks strapped to their bodies, mothers cradling babies as they tried to hold on to the hands of older children. There was little order, almost no organisation. Party officials who had insisted such a never day would never come, often fled hastily, leaving the people to their fate. Sixteen-year-old soldier Hubertus Kindler and his comrades watched as a column of Nazi dignitaries, their wives dressed in fur coats, their vehicles filled with every imaginable item, passed a line of refugees. The Party leaders stopped only to force the poor refugees to move their carts out of the way.
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It was left to fellow Silesians to offer these people aid. Breslauer Hanne Hübler was staying with her family in a village inn in Friedrichslager, Upper Silesia, when the first refugees appeared on the lane outside the hostelry:

Weeping and crying came from the carts, some horses fell down, and in front of our window, two cars collided, overturning one, a grandmother fell so badly that she was carried into the restaurant with a battered face.

The refugees rushed inside and huddled around the oven while the innkeeper and his wife did their best to provide coffee, soup and milk. “Our hearts trembled seeing so much misery, illness and loneliness all in one place, for this trek of refugees was the first shock to seize our hearts,” wrote Hübler. One tearful woman pleaded for help warming her two children. The youngsters were carried to the oven, while their mother kissed and stroked them. They did not move. “Your children are frozen,” a
Volkssturm
doctor curtly pronounced. Wailing, the woman threw herself on top of the corpses. Finally she was wrenched from them. Her face racked by agony, she had to watch as they were laid to rest by the roadside – the macabre ceremony made worse by the time it took to dig the frozen earth. Hers were not the only victims of this trek; two babies had frozen in their nappies as they lay in the carts. “We had the greatest sympathy for the poor unfortunate creatures,” Hanne Hübler recalled, “but we didn’t in the slightest think that the same fate would overtake us as well.”
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The treks moved at two, three, perhaps four miles an hour. They were frequently passed by Soviet armour bound for the Oder. Journalist Boris Polevoy was moved by the sight of “a column of women, elderly people and children, pulling their possessions in hand carts and prams, or pushing bicycles with bundles hanging from them.” Younger children clung to their mother’s backs or were cradled in their arms, older ones held on to their hands. It reminded the thirty-six-year-old of the autumn of 1941 when his wife had fled the city of Kalinin with the couple’s seven-month-old son in almost identical circumstances. “Now it was the Germans’ turn,” the
Pravda
correspondent observed. “Such a sight did not provoke gloating among the soldiers. They looked upon this sad column with sympathy.”
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Frequently, however, the Red Army showed the refugees no mercy. “Russian aircraft dived at our trek repeatedly,” wrote one Upper Silesian. “The horses ran away, there were many dead and a child was lost in the confusion.”
⁴⁵
Hubertus Kindler came across the remnants of a trek mauled by Soviet tanks. What was still warm gave off steam in the cold, while the survivors stood by the side of the road crying, unable to comprehend what had happened. “It was terrible to look at,” he recalled. “People, animals, beds, household effects, hay, straw, oats. They had simply shot at everything, even the horses, at everything which moved.”
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