Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (25 page)

Gross Rosen was “crammed to overflowing”. Höss sent any prisoners who arrived by train westwards. A few scraps of food were tossed their way. “Dead SS men lay peacefully in the open cars between dead prisoners,” the
Obersturmbannführer
recalled. “Those still alive sat on top of them, chewing their piece of bread. Terrible scenes, best not described.” It was time, Rudolf Höss decided, to put a stop to the evacuations. He headed for Breslau and the regional SS commander, Ernst-Heinrich Schmauser. Schmauser merely handed Höss a message from Heinrich Himmler: not a single healthy prisoner should remain in any concentration camp in Silesia.
³¹

Himmler’s orders were not carried out to the letter. When Konev’s troops liberated the Auschwitz complex on January 27, they found nearly 350,000 men’s suits and more than 800,000 items of women’s clothing. They also found almost 8,000 men, women and children alive. Boris Polevoy made his way through a group of about 200 men “all wearing the same canvas jackets, striped trousers, peakless caps and wooden-soled plimsolls”. They were, the journalist observed, “wretched, a pale green, yet with a bashful, disbelieving smile etched on their emaciated faces”. One of them broke ranks and dashed into a field, grabbed a handful of snow and put it in his mouth. Several others followed his example. Others slid down a narrow, icy gutter. When the first one slid and fell over, those following rolled over him. Liberation had brought out the child in these grown men, Polevoy realized. “Everyone laughed, happy like schoolboys on their way home.” Most prisoners surrounded their liberators, hugged them in tears. But Vassily Petrenko, commander of 107th Rifle Division, also remembered a large group of apathetic people simply standing around, neither laughing nor crying. The youthful general toured the camp, still littered with the detritus of life and death: clothes, suitcases, spectacles, toothbrushes, seven tonnes of women’s hair. “What sort of people commit such unimaginable crimes?” Petrenko asked himself. His men demanded retribution. “We will not take one more German prisoner,” they told their commander. “We must destroy them like rabid dogs for the crimes they have committed.” Polevoy branded the camp “a factory of death”, its fields “soaked in human blood and fertilized with human ash”, its survivors martyrs. “The Red Army saved them – and dragged them out of hell.” Auschwitz’s liberators “had a feeling that we had done something good,” Lieutenant Ivan Martynushkin recalled. “A very good deed, that we had somehow fulfilled our duty.” But four years of war had rather inured the
frontovik
to such sights. “I had seen the destruction of villages,” Martynushkin continued. “I had seen the suffering of our own people. I had seen small children maimed. There was not one village which had not experienced this horror, this tragedy, these sufferings.”
³²

Martynushkin’s reaction was typical of men and women brutalized by the war in the East. Normal feelings of empathy, of compassion, of basic humanity had been numbed, suppressed. When an elderly German woman whined tearfully at Russian field surgeon Nina Sakova: “I have lost two sons in Russia,” the doctor snapped. “And who is to blame? How many have
we
lost?” The Frau began to speak. “Hitler …” Sakova interrupted her. “It wasn’t Hitler alone. It was your children, your men as well.” The old woman fell silent. Sakova felt no sympathy. “My mother starved during the war,” she then said. “My brother lay in hospital, badly wounded. In our family, only the women are left.” Mikhail Koriakov watched a junior officer walk up to a herd of cows being driven along the lanes of Silesia. He unsheathed his knife and stabbed one of the beasts in the base of the skull. Its legs gave way, the animal fell down and the rest of the herd stampeded, bellowing madly. The officer wiped the blade on his boots and rejoined his comrades. “My father wrote me that the Germans had taken a cow from us,” he told his fellow officers. “Now we are even.” Captain Grigori Klimov passed the corpse of a young woman lying in a ditch, the lower half of her body naked, a beer bottle between her legs. Hundreds of his fellow Russian soldiers passed the body. Not one thought to move it to one side or bury it. He shook his head. “Where did just retribution end and crimes begin?” Klimov asked himself. “So much inhumanity everywhere, senseless inhumanity …” In years to come, the officer felt the wrath of the German people, but he could not apologise. The Germans, he said, “can ask God for a reckoning.”
³³

This blunting of emotions perhaps explains, but does not excuse, what happened to the populace of Silesia at the hands of the Red Army. So too, perhaps, does sexual frustration. “We were young, strong,” one
frontovik
admitted forty years later. He’d been without a woman for four years, so too had many of his comrades. There were simply not enough
Fräuleins
, he lamented. And so ten men raped one German girl. They seized twelve-year-olds. “If they cried,” the soldier recalled, “we’d hit them, stuff something in their mouths.” Decades later he could not understand – or justify – his crimes, but in 1945 all he feared was whether Russian girls learned what happened in Germany. “We felt ashamed in front of them.” The men of the Red Army had been starved of sex for years, one Russian major admitted. “So sex-starved,” he continued, “that they often raped old women of sixty, or seventy, or even eighty – much to these grandmothers’ surprise, if not downright delight.”
³⁴
But there are few expressions of delight to be found in the testimonies of the countless victims …

But above all it was alcohol which fuelled the rape and murder, the senseless destruction. And there was plenty to drink in Silesia. “There’s schnapps and spirits,” one 1st Ukrainian Front soldier from Krivoj Rog wrote, “we drink every day, each man as much as he needs and as much as his heart desires …” Many
frontoviki
drank to forget. As one soldier wrote home, “it’s impossible
not
to drink here. It’s hard to describe all that we experience here. If we’ve had a drink, it’s easier.”
³⁵
But alcohol also made it easier to kill, to loot, to rape, to ignore orders. Discipline, particularly behind the front line, broke down. One drunken Russian tank commander killed two gun crews by firing into his own ranks. Soldiers rode around on stolen bicycles. Some replaced their caps or helmets with bowler or top hats. Horse-drawn carts headed east packed with all manner of household furnishings. “The men in the first wave barely had enough time to collect the watches and jewellery,” wrote Captain Mikhail Koriakov. “The second wave, supporting the advance, was less in a hurry – the men had time to go in for girls. The men in the third wave never found any jewellery or untouched girls, but they combed the town and packed suitcases.” Ivan Konev attempted to curb the excesses. “This has nothing to do with fighting,” he raged. “All it does is destroy precious items.” The marshal promised severe punishment for acts of arson or senseless destruction. Looting had to cease immediately. Guilty soldiers faced being sent to penal units. Commanders who failed to halt indiscipline would be “called to account.”
Red Star
, the official newspaper of the Russian Army, joined in the condemnation of the atrocities. Having stoked the anger of the
frontoviki
just days before, it was now urging restraint. “If the Fascist two-legged beasts had the nerve to rape our women in full public view and to plunder, then it does not mean that we must do the same. Our revenge is not blind, our anger not unreasonable.”
³⁶

To many Silesians, the Russians’ revenge
was
blind, their anger unreasonable. “What fate do the Bolsheviks have in store for our people and you, my love?” one junior officer defending Silesia asked himself. “Women and mothers would be raped, disgraced, deported to Siberia – that’s if they don’t just let them starve or exterminate them.” If anything happened to him, Breslau
Volkssturm
man Hermann Krätzig told his wife Margarete, “then pray that I have not fallen into enemy hands. Protect yourselves, my beloved, from this dreadful fate. The enemy knows no humanity.” The atrocities played into the hands of the Nazi propaganda machine. It had warned the German people an Asiatic storm threatened them in the East. Now the prophecy was being fulfilled. The Russians, Joseph Goebbels noted, “act like barbarians in the conquered region. Stalin has probably modelled his method of torture on Genghis Khan’s column.” There could be no more talk of mercy, the propaganda minister decided. “The German people must defend their lives – and any method of doing so is just.”
³⁷

Any method
was
used. But they were not just. In one Silesian village, Russian soldiers were found sitting at tables in German kitchens dead after gorging themselves on poisoned schnapps, cucumbers, bacon. There were numerous instances of captured Russian soldiers being executed on the spot by their German foe. “You cannot still call on us to take prisoners!” one
Landser
told his commander after seeing the corpses of raped women. Female Soviet soldiers were often shot. “Each one of us always had a bullet left for ourselves – better to die than to go into captivity,” one battlefield nurse recalled. One of her friends was taken prisoner. “When we re-took the village two days later we found her: her eyes were gouged out, her chest cut open. She was impaled on a stake.” In the frost, her body had been entirely frozen, her hair turned grey. Signaller Vladimir Archipov came across the bodies of twenty comrades who had been taken prisoner by German troops. They had been quartered, their eyes gouged out. “So when our lads had taken prisoners, they gave them a good thrashing,” he wrote home to his family. “Today some SS troops were captured. They were beaten by our lads because of their SS uniforms. They were made to feel our hatred.” They were not the only ones. Ambulance driver Pavel Chochlov found the villages of Silesia littered with the corpses of German officers and men; in one perhaps fifty
Landsers
who had surrendered then shot to a man “on the orders of a Russian officer”. After one particularly bitter struggle for a village involving Chochlov’s regiment, enemy troops filed out of the houses. “Don’t shoot them yet,” the Siberian’s commander told his men. “They’ll all be rounded up, then we’ll shoot them.” He was as good as his word. As the final German soldiers were driven out of the last house in the village, they were lined up and shot. One female Red Army soldier admitted that any captured Germans “were not shot dead – that would have been too easy for them. We stabbed them like pigs with spears, chopped them to pieces.” This was not hearsay. It happened. “I saw it with my own eyes,” she recounted forty years later. “I waited for the moment when their eyes bulged with pain.” They bulged, and she felt no mercy. “They burned my mother and my young sister at the stake in the middle of the village.”
³⁸

This was
Pravda
’s celebrated “flame of war” raging across Silesia in January 1945. “Silesia is the forge of Hitler’s Germany,” the Communist Party organ told its readers. “Without metal, machines, fuel, grain no one can fight. Soviet troops have halted all industrial activity in Silesia and seized an important part of the land. Germany’s eastern lands have turned into a battlefield.”
³⁹

Russian killed German. German killed Russian. And now in Breslau, German killed German.

In the fading light of Sunday, 28 January, a large crowd began to gather outside the Nazi Party headquarters in Albrechtstrasse. They watched as the city’s finance director, Dr Wolfgang Spielhagen, was led out under armed guard. An educated, civilized man, Spielhagen knew that Breslau’s fate was sealed and sent his wife, Eva, and their daughters, Gisela and Sonny, to the safety of Berlin. He too sought work in the capital, but there was none at the Ministry of the Interior. Browbeaten, he returned to Breslau to resume his duties. Instead, he was arrested on the
Gauleiter
’s orders and charged with cowardice. Punishment was swift – and barbaric. The finance director was tied to a recording truck which then drove around the Ring. It stopped in front of a statue of Frederick Wilhelm III. Spielhagen tried to speak but a volley from a dozen
Volkssturm
men felled him. Still the official was not dead. A Party stalwart strode up to the dying man and fired several pistol shots into Spielhagen’s head. The corpse was wrapped in a few blankets and tossed in the back of the truck. Karl Hanke quickly issued a proclamation to the people of Breslau:

The deputy mayor of the city of Breslau,
Ministerialrat
Dr. Spielhagen, informed the mayor of the capital of the
Gau
,
Gauamtsleiter
Leichtenstern, that he was moving to Berlin to look for a new post.

On my orders
Ministerialrat
Dr. Spielhagen was shot dead by a
Volkssturm
squad in front of Breslau Rathaus.

He who fears an honourable death dies in disgrace!

The news was subsequently relayed by state radio in Berlin. It was the first Frau Spielhagen heard of her husband’s demise. She never received official notification of his death.
⁴⁰

The murder – for that is what it was – of Wolfgang Spielhagen had nothing to do with honour or disgrace. It had everything to do with Karl Hanke flexing his authority – and eliminating any potential foes.

“He left his Lower Silesian homeland as a miller’s assistant and returned as
Gauleiter
.” So eulogised the flagship journal of the Third Reich,
Das Reich
, about the man charged with leading the defence of Breslau. Like most of the Nazi hierarchy, Karl August Hanke was a nobody who became a somebody courtesy of fate and favouritism. Born the son of an engine driver in the small western Silesian town of Lauban in August 1903, he left his native land before he turned seventeen to serve in the rump of the German Army left after the Great War. He lasted no more than a year in the ranks before enlisting at a millers’ school in Saxony to learn a trade. The young Hanke then mastered the miller’s art, working in Bavaria, the Tirol and his homeland, before moving to Berlin to teach the subject at a technical school. It was in the German capital that Hanke joined the Nazi Party. He rose rapidly through its ranks: within three years he was the senior Party official in west Berlin, a position which made his job at the technical school untenable. It was in Berlin that he forged his two most important relationships, one with architect Albert Speer who found Hanke “uncomplicated but intelligent and highly energetic,” the other with Joseph Goebbels – which would have fateful consequences. The
Gauleiter
of Berlin and future propaganda minister selected Hanke as his adjutant. In time he would rise through the ministry to become its under-secretary. He soon became appalled by his master’s philandering – and the slight to Goebbels’ wife, Magda. Hanke was a couple of years younger than Frau Goebbels, tall, with a goatee beard to disguise his youth, and thinning swept-back black hair sitting on a high forehead. He oozed energy, yet was quiet, almost shy, possessed a dry sense of humour and deep-set eyes “filled with life”. By the summer of 1938, the simmering relationship between the minister’s wife and his deputy was threatening to boil over. Hanke was besotted and talked of marriage, listing Goebbels’ indiscretions – as many as forty – and rounding up scorned actresses to testify against his master. Frau Goebbels took her grievance to Hitler, who forbade any divorce, ordering the Goebbels couple to reconcile their differences. Karl Hanke pursued Magda for another twelve months – in vain. Distance finally brought the affair to an end. In August 1939 as a reservist
Leutnant
, Hanke joined an armoured training unit which accompanied 3rd Panzer Division into Poland as a reservist
Leutnant
. He remained in the army throughout the winter, now assigned to another panzer division, the 7th, as adjutant to its commander, one Erwin Rommel. Hanke presented Rommel with the
Ritterkreuz
for his exploits in France in the spring of 1940. Erwin Rommel was set to repeat the favour. He recommended Hanke for the same decoration; the
Leutnant
had routed a French counterattack single-handedly when it threatened 7th Panzer’s advance near Avesnes. (He had also saved his commander’s life by machine-gunning French bicycle troops when Rommel blundered into them.) But the future Desert Fox promptly withdrew the citation when Hanke crassly pointed out he was senior to his general thanks to his Party status. That Party status would now elevate Karl Hanke to the post of
Gauleiter
of Lower Silesia when the unwieldy province was split in January 1941 and the out-offavour existing leader, Josef Wagner, sidelined.