Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (39 page)

Each afternoon, regimental commander Fritz Reinkorber ordered one of his men to the rear for two hours’ rest in the company command post, where coffee, cakes, beer, cigars and cigarettes were provided. National Socialist Leadership Officers arranged entertainment courtesy of the fortress’s film truck or the five-piece ‘bunker band’ which performed a mix of classical music and easy listening. On the other side of the front, the Vachtangov theatre and orchestra from Moscow staged numerous concerts and shows – sometimes just a few yards from the front line – entertaining as many as 10,000 troops during the siege. “The visits by these dear guests, these actors depicting art and beauty, was a signal of the end of the war for which we yearned,” war correspondent Vassily Malinin wrote. For the most part, soldiers created their own entertainment. Albrecht Schulze van Loon and his company of paratroopers enjoyed a couple of days’ rest in the vault of the Dresdner Bank in Tauentzienplatz, where there was a gramophone and a large record collection. Van Loon rifled through the discs, then invited his men to a concert. “Until deep into the night, we listen to Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms,” he wrote. He picked out Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture
. “We look at each other and understand that the music captures exactly what we’re living through.” And then the finale: Haydn’s
Kaiserquartett
. “It is completely silent and we are not ashamed of our tears,” the officer wrote. Hugo Hartung’s company was sent to a restaurant on the edge of the city centre to recover after one month’s fighting around Schöngarten airfield and Breslau’s western suburbs. “In the evening we celebrate with a proper party,” the theatre director wrote.

Each of us is handed a bottle of red wine and as one of Breslau’s best-known sausage manufacturers lives in our guesthouse, we’re given vast quantities of wonderful meat – including excellent warm sausages.

We drink and sing. Our medic, Pflanzl, the well known bass from Dresden’s state opera, sings folk and homeland songs in his beautiful deep voice, which receives thunderous applause from the civilians present, including a pretty deaf-mute girl.

The party was interrupted on a couple of occasions by Russian air attacks. When the raids became too severe, the partygoers decamped to the cellar. “Even down in the narrow, damp, cold cellar passageways the loud merriment of our colourful, motley assortment does not die down.”
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Occasionally, more formal events were arranged. The paratroopers staged a ‘comradeship evening’ in a tram depot. It was a black tie affair – and somehow the
Fallschirmjäger
found dinner suits, or rather black panzer uniforms to which were fixed Luftwaffe insignia: lapels, braid, the eagle and decorations. After a smart march, the regimental band reverted to sentimental tunes while their comrades “got stuck into the fire water,” Rudi Christoph recalled. “Bottle after bottle was emptied and several comrades were convinced that the earth was spinning.” The paratroops were allowed to sleep off their hangovers until noon the following day “and then the old routine began,” Christoph bemoaned.
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More typically, life out of the line meant a good bath, a good meal and a good sleep. Sometimes it afforded a change of clothes. Reinhard Paffrath’s company of
Fallschirmjäger
rested in the cellar of an abandoned apartment block. The men raided the closets of the empty homes, not for personal gain but for comfort on the battlefield. Fine silk scarves were particularly coveted, but any clothes could be cut into strips and wrapped around the throat beneath the paratrooper’s camouflage jacket. The extra layer protected the men’s skin from dust and dirt. “We had three days’ rest,” Paffrath recalled. “Eat and sleep. Eat and sleep …”
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Throughout the battle, the besiegers sought to undermine the morale of the besieged. The city’s streets were littered with leaflets, some aimed at the civilian populace, others at the
Volkksturm
– “Hitler’s last cannon fodder” – urging them to cast off their armbands, throw away their weapons and return home, and others still at soldiers:

Hitler is your enemy!

Get away from him!

Soldiers!

Hitler is your enemy

He began this war of plunder against the world and brought the hatred and wrath of all nations down upon Germany as a result of his crimes.

Hitler is your enemy

In this criminal war against the freedom-loving peoples of the world he has senselessly killed or turned into cripples millions of Germans, he has made millions of German women widows, millions of children orphans.

Hitler is your enemy

He has brought war to the heart of Germany, abandoned German towns and villages to destruction from the air and on land and is now devastating all of Germany.
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Written propaganda was complemented by a constant verbal barrage. At night Russian loudspeakers urged the defenders of Breslau to desert, to give up the struggle. Music, slogans, promises: peace, de-lousing, good food, sex: “Come over to us, one hundred naked Caucasian women are waiting for you in a sky-blue bed”; “You will be free to go home immediately after the end of the war”; “Comrades, we are not after your blood.” Sometimes, Soviet propaganda was quite specific. At the beginning of March, the Russians hijacked the frequency used by the
Deutschlandsender
. At 9pm, just as German state radio did every night, the news was broadcast in the same voice, in the same tone. As the news ended, there was a special announcement: “And now we bring important news for the brave soldiers and comrades in
Festung
Breslau. The hour of liberation has come. Several panzer divisions, battle-hardened in the East, have smashed through the enemy’s encircling ring. Come to the south of the city to shake hands with your liberators!”
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Breslauers did not come.

There were some who
were
tempted by Soviet offers. Metalworker and
Volkssturm
man Max Stock – fluent in Russian thanks to spending several years in a prison camp during the Great War – encouraged six comrades to desert. Most of Klaus Franke’s comrades rejected calls to desert. Soviet promises sounded “awfully attractive,” the forward artillery observer wrote, but the men knew it was “too good to be true”. Franke watched a comrade grab a megaphone. “You over there, keep your mouth shut, come here if you want it. We’ll kick your arse!” Other troops were dissuaded by the increasing repression in the fortress. Deserters had long since faced the death penalty. Now, the fortress command ruled, their families would now also be punished, “forfeiting their wealth, freedom or lives” for the sins of their husbands, brothers, fathers.
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The propaganda onslaught reached its climax ahead of a Soviet attack. “You’ll hear a Strauss waltz now – and tomorrow morning you’ll hear Stalin’s organ,” a Russian voice proclaimed. Over the loudspeakers, German classical music and folk songs:
Blue Danube
,
Donna Clara
,
Wiener Blut
, the
Schwalbenlied
,
Als wir im August hinausgezogen sind
. “When we sang these songs among comrades, in the bunker or in some tent in Corsica, these melodies stirred a feeling of home and you felt an invisible ribbon and believed you were close to those you love at home,” Klaus Franke recalled. “Coming from over there, they sound sad. The longer Ivan persists with his racket, the more rage and the will for revenge grows within the assault troops. And so clever propaganda completely fails in its objective and achieves the opposite of what is intended.”
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Men on both sides could not escape the anniversaries which their respective regimes were so fond of celebrating. Russian troops commemorated the Red Army’s twenty-seventh birthday on 23 February. Front-line commanders in Breslau celebrated with high-spirited banquets and toasts of vodka after reading out the words of Joseph Stalin to their men. “The nearer we are to victory,” the generalissimo warned, “our vigilance must be even greater and our blows against the enemy even heavier.”

The defenders of Breslau had already marked the anniversary of the Nazi assumption of power and the twenty-fifth birthday of the Nazi Party programme. The next date in their calendar was Sunday, 11 March, Heroes Memorial Day, when Germany paid tribute to her fallen. Before dawn, soldiers,
Volkssturm
and Hitler Youths left their units around the city and made for Karl Hanke’s headquarters in the Oberpräsidium. Upwards of 150 men and boys were ushered into the ballroom, where the
Gauleiter
waited for them, accompanied by Hermann Niehoff. A Hitler Youth choir sang the soldiers’ traditional lament,
Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden
, before Hanke read out a brief speech. Hermann Niehoff’s address was rather longer – but his words could have come straight out of the mouth of the
Gauleiter
. The men of Fortress Breslau would have to “stick it out”, their commander told them, “even if in the end the city was nothing but a field of ruins”. Fortunately, Niehoff assured his audience, Breslau would be relieved – although the date of the city’s relief, Conrad Bischof noted, was vague. “It could be ten to fourteen days, but it could be even longer.” Until that day, Hermann Niehoff concluded, “we pledge to the Führer that we in Breslau, that trusted old barrier in the East, will prove ourselves as fanatical warriors.”
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As the speech ended and the men saluted the fallen, Hermann Niehoff pinned decorations to some of them – one incentive to keep the men fighting. The fortress commander was keen to reward
Volkssturm
men for their deeds with decorations which younger, more able men would have to strive much harder to attain. Karl Hanke liberally handed out decorations to FAMO workers for sustaining the war effort. The tank killer was the hero of Fortress Breslau, darling of the Nazi press, and he was richly rewarded. Peter Bannert remembered an arrogant seventeen-year-old who strutted around the city, a fresh Iron Cross pinned to his chest, a
Panzerfaust
on each shoulder. ‘Panzer Karl’, as the boys dubbed him, belonged to no unit. He enjoyed free range to hunt Soviet tanks anywhere in the fortress. For any man – or boy –who destroyed six enemy tanks with a
Panzerfaust
or other close-quarters anti-tank weapon, there was the promise of the Reich’s highest military honour, the
Ritterkreuz
– Knight’s Cross. The first
Ritterkreuz
recipient in the fortress destroyed no tanks, but he was a native Silesian, a veteran company commander, wounded seven times in battle.
Leutnant
Richard Wolf received his medal in hospital, where he gave an ‘interview’ to a
Schlesische Tageszeitung
correspondent; Wolf’s words were most probably written by a propagandist. “If we hold on doggedly, then the enemy will not advance one metre,” the
Ritterkreuz
winner proclaimed. “Despite the heavy burden we bear at present, I am convinced that we will be victorious!”
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It was a slogan repeated by the National Socialist Leadership Officers. “We must fight for victory, which Fate cannot deny us if there is a god above us in whom we believe,” declared the fortress’s senior military ‘commissar’
Hauptmann
Herbert van Bürck, a thirty-five-year-old district lawyer, an urbane, educated man. He was also a committed Nazi. After being wounded on the opening day of the campaign in Russia, van Bürck had resumed his pre-war profession as a lawyer, this time on the staff of Hans Frank in the General Government. That service had come to an end in the summer of 1944 when he was thrown into prison, suspected of involvement in the 20 July attempt on Hitler’s life. His experience at the hands of the Gestapo evidently did nothing to diminish his belief in National Socialism. Subsequently released and employed on the fortress’s staff, van Bürck issued ‘advice’ to the Party activists in the ranks of the
Wehrmacht
and
Volkssturm
to maintain fighting spirit every few weeks. “A soldier cannot be left to his own thoughts,” he warned. “Even the most stupid of soldiers will at least think about his fate or that of his family, consciously or unconsciously, in addition to thoughts about the fate of the entire German
Volk
.” It was down to the Nazi commissars to “raise morale” and lead “in a deliberately-stirring manner”. They told their comrades that the eyes of the Reich were upon them, that newspapers across Germany were filled with stories of heroism from Breslau, that barely a day went by when the fortress was not mentioned in the military communiqué, that even if letters from the city had not reached loved ones evacuated in January, they would know that Breslau stood firm. And if they gave up the struggle? Germany would go under. “Soldiers here in the East must understand that if we capitulate, we are lost,” van Bürck warned. “Failing in battle means the end of our people and the end of the Reich. What poverty and torment we are suffering now is nothing compared with the fate which we will face if we capitulate.” The Russians would deport “German slave workers to Siberia in their millions”; every family would be torn apart by “deportation and slavery”; children would be snatched from their parents, “deported and educated as Bolsheviks”; in a Bolshevik-run Germany “the shot in the neck will rule”; “German women will be raped, violated, murdered by beasts in human form.” In short, if the Red Army triumphed on the soil of the Reich, “the German people as an organic, living community will be literally murdered. Germany will become nothing but a cemetery.”
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