Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (19 page)

The first of these wretched columns began to file through Breslau on 17 January. Red Cross volunteer Lena Aschner watched as the refugees crossed Passbrücke, near the Jahrhunderthalle.

The overloaded small hand carts and sleds wobble between the carts and horses. A small, heavy-laden sled overturns. Amid the chaos, its owner tries to right it. The column cannot stop. Onwards, only onwards. She struggles in vain to put her legs between the overturned sledge runners, she cannot stay up, falls down crying for help and grabs on to another cart. Everyone tumbles over, screaming in confusion.

Frau Aschner and her friends helped the woman up. Her entire calf was torn, her leg broken, blood running down it in torrents. Yet she didn’t want to go to the nearby clinic for treatment – she would lose her place in the trek. Aschner handed her some bandages. With a tired, tear-stained, smeared face she thanked her then returned to her place in the column and continued on her way. Another woman passed, her heavily-laden cart falling apart under the weight. She kept slipping and falling over. It was too much. She grabbed the heavy sack of bedding on the cart and threw it into the road, screaming “Let the shit lie there, I don’t give a damn anyway.” The bundle joined sacks, packages, suitcases, broken carts and sledges lining Uferstrasse. A few Breslauers handed out coffee, but the refugees took no more than a couple of gulps before rushing back to their carts to resume their journey. “Nobody stops if they’re injured on the way – they’re bandaged up,” wrote Aschner. “Everyone hurries on their way. Their strides are tired, weary, their faces wealthy, grey, tear-stained. They can hardly still move their feet forward. But onwards.”
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Office worker Max Hamsch was returning home when he was drawn to strange noises: slurping, trampling, crying. The sight presented to him was one he had never seen – and would never see again: a herd of cows filling the entire road, stretching out of sight, escorted by a few soldiers, elderly farmers and prisoners of war. “Blood’s already flowing from the udders of some of the poor creatures because they cannot be milked,” Hamsch observed.
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Schoolgirl Ursula Scholz also remembered the cries of pain from the unmilked cows. The sixteen-year-old had been ordered to help at the nearby Freiburger Bahnhof, reuniting children and mothers, hauling luggage, distributing food. As she headed there, the streets were already filled with a “ghostly column” of refugees. Aside from the bellowing cattle, the only sounds were “the shuffle of footsteps of utterly exhausted people who totter next to their carts, the occasional crying of a child, the clattering and snorting of horses”. Abandoned dogs accompanied the trek, howling and barking. “How much longer,” wondered the schoolgirl, “can we still lie in our warm beds before the fate of life on the country lanes with temperatures twenty or twenty-three degrees below overtakes us?”
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The wounded Hans Jürgen Hartmann pondered the same question. The junior officer had been taken first to his regimental command post, then to Kalisz, and finally to an overcrowded hospital in Poznań, surrounded by “lacerated, groaning, stinking bodies”. He spent two days there, watching surgeons and nurses overwhelmed by the number of casualties, orderlies constantly carrying “heavy stretchers back and forth with the dreadful wrecks of men”, before the hospital was evacuated. There was no luxury of a hospital train for the wounded officer, but an unheated passenger train which hurried through the night. “An icy wind sweeps over the light snow on the fields and penetrates into our compartments through cracks in the windows,” Hartmann recalled, unable to sleep. The faces of his comrades haunted him: “Steinberg, Iglhaut, Schmidt, Kober, Treder, Jonny, Greiner and Teige – Iglhaut especially, groaning covered in blood and Steinberg, his skull horribly smashed in half.” He stared out of the window at the endlessly flat terrain. “Unless there’s a miracle, soon Russian tanks will roll over these tracks too,” Hartmann reasoned, “and this land too will go down in a sea of blood and futile tears.”
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By the early afternoon of 17 January, the Red Army vanguard was less than five miles from Kraków. The city possessed some of the most comprehensive defences of any of the Reich’s bulwarks in the East – far more robust than those shielding Breslau. There was nothing to hold them, or Kraków itself: 3,000 soldiers, police officers and Party functionaries, most unfit, with no heavy weapons and only a handful of
Panzerfaust
. The garrison commander,
Generalmajor
Hermann Kruse, had no intention of defending the city – and told Hans Frank he should evacuate Kraków. The Governor General wasted no time in following the general’s advice. Shortly after 1pm, a column of vehicles and trucks packed with documents and looted
objets d’art
, left Wawel Castle “in the most wonderful winter weather and brilliant sunshine”, led by Frank in his Mercedes.
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It was growing dark as battalion commander
Hauptmann
Georg Christian Kreuter arrived in Łódź. There was little of his battalion left, to say nothing of his division, 25th Panzer. During the night much of its armour had been blown up after running out of fuel, while Kreuter had been wounded in the arm during fighting in the Pilica valley. He asked his commander,
Generalmajor
Oskar Audörsch, not to take him to a hospital – “it seemed too risky” – but to the central station. There Kreuter found “all hell let loose”, especially when the air raid sirens sounded for the second night running. One woman wailed hysterically, unnerving everyone around her. And yet trains were still running to Poznań and Breslau, and a commuter train was waiting in the sidings. The officer decided to leave Łódź immediately, forcing his way with difficulty into an overcrowded carriage. Around 9pm, it pulled out of the city.
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Georg Kreuter had made the correct decision. As his train lumbered through Łódź’s suburbs, the first Russian tanks were already in Zgierz and Aleksandrów Lódzki, little more than half a dozen miles from the city centre. Their appearance provoked panic among the remaining German populace. Too late, the authorities tried to evacuate Łódź. But the telephones no longer worked. Most officials had fled. The garrison had fled. Many Germans never received the order to leave. They left on their own initiative. On foot. By night. Through the snow. With Red Army tanks breathing down their necks. “The scenes of flight remained burned into the memory of everyone who witnessed them,” recalled mayor Hans Trautwein.
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The Wehrmacht communiqué still talked of the battle in the “great Vistula bend”, of “bitter resistance” from German units striking in the rear of the Soviet armoured spearheads, but really, as
Leutnant
Wilfried Nordmann realized, “it was a simple race with the Russians”. The thirty-five-year-old lived on no more than three hours’ sleep every night and a couple of slices of bread daily during the retreat. “So you see how much eating as well as sleeping are more habits than necessities,” he observed drily. Each time Nordmann and the remnants of his
Werfer
rocket battery believed they had escaped the Soviets and grabbed a couple of hours’ sleep, the cry ‘Tanks’ would wake them – and the retreat continued. Nowhere did a German unit make a stand. “We actually waited for someone to say, ‘As far as here and no further’”, Nordmann recalled bitterly. “But wherever we went, the senior staff had already cleared off so that the poor
Landsers
were left entirely to their own devices.”
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What attempts there were to halt the Soviet advance were at best piecemeal, at worst simply steamrollered. Two first-rate divisions, the
Hermann Göring
and the
Brandenburg
, were hastily transferred from East Prussia to central Poland. Committed before they were ready, they were caught up in the tide of German troops fleeing west. At least their ranks were filled with trained soldiers. Not so the
Volkssturm
. Joseph Goebbels received pleas for men from across the Reich’s eastern provinces. All he could offer them were militia. “Once again the hour has come when we must scrape together our forces from all four corners of the Reich and hurl them at the threatened places.”
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Poznań’s
Volkssturm
was one such formation hurled at a threatened place. The place was Ostrów Wielkopolski, eighty miles north-east of Breslau. As the men stepped off the troop train, Russian rifles were thrust into their hands and they were ordered to safeguard the roads in and out of the town. At least half of them had never served before. They certainly had no idea how to use the handful of
Panzerfaust
they’d just been issued with; instruction was hurriedly provided during a brief pause in marching. When they finally took up their positions outside Ostrów, nothing happened apart from heavy artillery fire from both sides. After a night in the open, the
Volkssturm
men were ordered back to town to embark on a train once more. As they crossed the tracks, they were caught by heavy machine-gun fire; one company and a platoon were all but wiped out. Another platoon approached the station building in front of which was a tank; its leader was certain the tank was German – certainty reinforced by the crew’s gestures. When the
Volkssturm
troops were just 100 yards away, the tank opened fire. The platoon was wiped out. Another
Volkssturm
company was still holding the road into Ostrów when tanks appeared in its rear. The men assumed they were German. They were not. At point-blank range, machine-guns and anti-tank guns opened fire. Only two men survived the bloodbath: one who pretended to be dead, another who was badly wounded.

What was left of the battalion rallied in woods outside the town. The men were despondent. Of 350 troops originally sent to Ostrów, only 200 were left. “The Bolsheviks chased us around like rabbits on a hunt,” seethed Otto Albrecht, formerly Poznań’s superintendent. He filed a complaint to his political masters:

It was a crime to send us so untrained and so unskilled in war against our worst enemy, the Bolsheviks. The battalion went into combat completely untrained. There was just a handful of men who knew how to use Russian rifles, no one knew how to use the machine-gun at all, to say nothing of the
Panzerfaust
. No one knew how to use the
Panzerfaust
before it was explained to us shortly before we went into action. And this is the only weapon which a simple soldier can use successfully against a tank.
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Thirty miles to the south, soldiers were beginning to occupy the fortifications of the Bartold line, built with so much sweat by Silesians the previous autumn. The codeword
Walküre
– Valkyrie – flashed around the scattered units of
Wehrkreis
VIII, and training units, militia, garrison troops, and reservists were alerted. The school for non-commissioned officers in Frankenstein was emptied, Luftwaffe cadets at Schöngarten airfield abandoned their training and formed companies of soldiers. Anti-aircraft gunners protecting the Berthawerk were ordered to prepare their 88mm flak guns for ground combat. Soldiers were posted at railway stations and road junctions to round up any retreating troops, irrespective of their rank, and form them into a makeshift battalion for Breslau’s defence. And on the Bartold line,
Volkssturm
men with aged rifles and just eight rounds apiece stood guard next to an anti-tank ditch thirty feet wide and five feet deep. Despite all the toil of 1944, the fortifications were still incomplete. To strengthen Karl Hanke’s great barrier, they began unrolling barbed wire.
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One hundred miles south-east of Breslau, military chaplain Joseph Ozanna was riding a tram in Beuthen, one of the cities in the sprawling Upper Silesian industrial conurbation. Two women climbed on and began talking excitedly. They had just succeeded in fleeing from Częstochowa, fewer than forty miles away. “A Party member in uniform screamed at the women and threatened to arrest them for spreading false news,” the priest wrote. The women, not the Party official, were right. Joseph Ozanna returned home immediately, determined to move his family to safety.

At first he walked, then ran down the country lane leading to Golassowitz, three dozen miles south of Beuthen. “You must get away with the children,” he told his wife Christa breathlessly. “I will go to my mother,” Frau Ozanna decided in a flash. Her mother lived in Breslau.
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Ulrich Frodien and his father were also making for the Silesian capital. They drove as quickly as the roads, covered by a thick blanket of snow, would allow. They passed goods trains, crammed with German refugees from central Poland – the Warthegau district, colonised after the 1939 invasion – “naked fear and deep despair etched on their faces,” the young soldier recalled. “These first German refugees made a deep impression on me. What was the point of sacrifices and toil at the front if our own people now had to flee?”

It was late on 17 January by the time their car entered the Silesian capital, its streets pitch black “apart from a blanket of snow which glistened wonderfully thanks to our car’s headlights”. Barely had they returned to their apartment than the telephone was ringing – constantly. “Are you still there?” Friends, family, patients asked. “Are you staying in Breslau or leaving?” “What should we do, what should we take with us? “What’s the best way to get out of the city?” “Is the front holding, what have you heard?” “The Müllers have already fled.”
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From the window of his office in the Rheinmetall-Borsig works in Hundsfeld, Herbert Rühlemann watched “an endless stream of horse and wagon, hand-drawn carriages, bicycles and people” moving westwards. They moved slowly, but never stopped. It was sufficient to unnerve the armament plant’s director. He climbed into a works car with a colleague and drove south along the Oder. They stopped after about ten miles of negotiating lanes buried by snow, but oddly devoid of traffic, when they reached a bridge spanning the river.
Volkssturm
men stood guard, with orders to blow the crossing if it was threatened. Rühlemann and his colleague drew the same conclusion: “working would come to a stop in less than a week”. They resolved to send their families west.
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