Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (45 page)

As for the human cost of Breslau’s Easter apocalypse, there are no accurate figures. At least 130 soldiers and civilians were buried on 3 April alone, but days later the victims of the two-day Soviet onslaught were still being recovered. At dawn on the third, Gertrud Hassenbach had returned to Mauritiusplatz in search of her thirteen-year-old son Ebi, serving as a messenger with the local
Ortsgruppe
. The square was on fire. The
Ortsgruppe
building was on fire. Frau Hassenbach buttonholed anyone passing through Mauritiusplatz. No one knew anything about her son. It was the same story when she returned to the square that evening. The next morning, she and daughter were back, this time to begin clearing away the rubble. The bricks and stones were too hot. Thursday came and still no news of Ebi Hassenbach. The heat had subsided sufficiently for his mother to begin clearing the rubble away using hoes and spades. After struggling for several hours, the opening to a window had been created and Gertrud Hassenbach climbed inside with a friend. “We were faced by a wall of heat from the cellar,” she remembered, but they pressed on regardless, and found the room where her son usually slept. “It was eerie in there,” she said. “Everything was black with smoke. To me it seemed like an oven.” Ebi’s bed was made, his sheets folded, pillows stacked, just as he had left it. But Ebi himself was not there. His mother left the room and climbed out of the window.

Suddenly a single thought weighed down on me:
You have not found your child and your angst, tormented by anxiety, will continue. Perhaps Ebi is still alive and urgently needs your help. Take heart and search the entire cellar
. I re-lit the lamp and climbed back into the cellar. When I reached the central passage – which was still glowing – I saw Ebi lying there. I recognised him immediately from his shoes and socks and saw his head. His hair was not burnt, but his head was completely black. I was so depressed yet grateful to God that I had found him and that evidently he had been killed immediately by a bomb. I held up a sheet and laid it out next to him and tried to put him on it. His head fell to one side and when touching him I noticed that his ribs were broken. Now I called the man who had helped me with the digging to help again and we carried Ebi in the sheet to the window. The rescue was very difficult as the window was very high and there was still rubble in front of it. After many attempts, we succeeded. We borrowed a cart from the monastery and took Ebi home. His father made him a final bed, a small coffin.

Thirteen-year-old Ebi Hassenbach was laid to rest in the front garden of the family home on the evening of Saturday, 7 April under a birch tree which he had climbed just a few years before. Four soldiers carried the small coffin, while Walter Lassmann presided over the last act of the boy’s short life. A volley resounded over the fresh grave as the sun dipped beneath the horizon with a blood-red hue. Gertrud Hassenbach remembered the last time she had seen her son alive, six days earlier. “In front of my eyes his face came alive once again as he said his goodbye and turned to us once more with a face which helplessly and sorrowfully seemed to formally plead for tenderness,” she wrote. “Everything within me has been shaken up and turned upside down. Will a comforting light come to me in this dark time? I try to pray and to bow to divine will. But it is so unendingly difficult.”
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Breslauers speak only of Easter 1945 in terms of horror and refer to the bombing almost exclusively as a ‘
Terrorangriff
’ – terror raid. But the attacks – at least those of Easter Sunday at any rate – were not intended merely to strike fear into the heart of every inhabitant of the city. They were intended to smash the fortress’s western front. Hand-in-hand with the bombardment came a massed assault on German lines by three divisions, supported by motorized infantry and at least one regiment of tanks. The lunge into Breslau’s western suburbs would seize the airfield at Gandau, the FAMO and Linke-Hofmann works, then smash through the inner defensive ring and reach the edge of the old town near the Freiburger Bahnhof.

And on Easter Sunday, Sixth Army advanced exactly as planned. The German front in the west of the city caved in. The main railway line, running north to south on an earthen embankment, was the last major obstacle barring the Red Army’s progress into the heart of the city. Soviet troops established a toehold on the right side of the line in Mochbern, where there was particularly bitter fighting in the village cemetery, while a little over a mile away in Popelwitz, the Russians were swarming across the allotments and fields of the Viehweide. In the nearby Westend barracks, Hermann Niehoff conferred with the ashen-faced regimental commander, Walter-Peter Mohr, recently decorated with the
Ritterkreuz
for his leadership in Breslau. “Is this the end?” Niehoff asked. “There are no more reserves, just two
Volkssturm
battalions which consist of very young men,” Mohr told him. Niehoff threw them into the battle. It was enough – for now – to tip the balance in the defenders’ favour. By nightfall, German soldiers stood once more on the railway line in Popelwitz.
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There was no longer any distinction between boys as messengers and boys as soldiers. Hermann Niehoff may have ordered his commanders to treat the youths of Breslau “as if they were their own children”
²⁷
and later claimed that he wrestled with his conscience daily about the struggle for the city, but by April 1945, boys of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen were simply
Menschenmaterial
– manpower – sorely needed to bolster the ever-thinning ranks of Breslau’s defenders. And so it was that on the night of Easter Day, Peter Bannert and his comrades were ordered west to help defend Gandau. They spent the night digging foxholes in gardens and allotments near a guesthouse. By first light, they were convinced that, despite their makeshift positions, they were safe. The Soviet lines were just yards away. Enemy aircraft would surely not drop their bombs – except that the Russians had evacuated their trenches during the night. Only Germans remained dug in amid the allotments and gardens. For several hours, a hail of bombs shook the ground. When the barrage finally ended, messengers were sent out across what was now a field of ruins. The boys tried to haul a platoon leader out of his foxhole. They pulled only his upper body free; the rest remained in the hole.

The Hitler Youths fell back from the allotments and took up positions around the guesthouse. From its cellar, fifteen-year-old Bannert heard – and felt – a rattle which shook the earth. “We stared out of the cellar windows,
Panzerfaust
at the ready,” Peter Bannert recalled. “But in the scrub, the iron monsters were hard to make out. They stopped at some range, fired at our position and turned around.”

Brown figures dashed through the guesthouse’s gardens. Bannert’s comrades fired carbines and machine-pistols, while he fired his
Panzerfaust
– but not directly at the advancing Soviet troops. The head of the weapon had to strike something solid to explode. The schoolboy aimed the
Panzerfaust
at a corner wall so splinters would rip into the enemy soldiers. Next to the guesthouse, a flak gun directed its barrel groundwards and fired repeatedly. “With every shot my eardrum vibrated, the sweet smell of gunpowder smoke drifted up my nose,” Bannert wrote. When the gun had expended its ammunition, the guesthouse was evacuated.
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The spirit of these boys impressed hardened campaigners like paratrooper Rudi Christoph, fighting alongside Hitler Youths for the first time. For three days Christoph’s
Fallschirmjäger
had clung on to Gandau airfield. A nine-hour barrage on 4 April finally unseated them. Soon there were fifteen enemy tanks in the paratroopers’ rear, opening fire on the German troops from a range of barely 200 yards. The
Fallschirmjäger
did the unexpected. They charged at the Soviet lines. “With machine-pistols under our arms, we fired at the Russians who were paralysed with fear,” Christoph recalled. “Before they knew it, we were through them and away.”

Their numbers depleted – several dead, some wounded and many missing – the companies of paratroopers regrouped. They occupied a new position which would be the focal point of the battle for the next three days and nights, the home for the blind.
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With the outward appearance of a school or college, Breslau’s institute for the blind was a commanding four-storey structure which dominated the southern edge of the city’s Westpark. From its fourth floor German artillery observers could – and did – watch the movement of Soviet troops now swarming over Gandau airfield. Max Baselt’s Hitler Youth mortar unit was told wave after wave of enemy soldiers were moving across the airfield. It fired every round it had in response. The Soviets responded with overwhelming force, plastering the park, the institute, the public cemeteries opposite, forcing Baselt, like Christoph before him, to fall back towards the blind home. He spent the night listening to the sound of engines and rattling tank tracks.
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A few hundred yards away on the other side of the park, Leo Hartmann was enjoying the silence of the battlefield. That afternoon he’d been ordered to halt the Soviet armour bearing down on Westpark. But with what? Only his
Sturmgeschütz
was available. He set off anyway, heading down a dyke which ran along the Oder, past the open-air swimming baths, until he reached the edge of woods and could see the pioneer barracks beyond them. There he noticed the outline of a tank. “Given the situation, it can only be a Soviet one,” he determined and fired several shells at it. The vehicle did not burn, but nor did it move again. Hartmann continued towards the village of Cosel, from where there was the unmistakable sound of engines and considerable movement. “Several high-explosive shells were sent in the direction of the noise,” he wrote. “There was silence once more.”

The wet dawn of 5 April found Max Baselt furiously digging a foxhole in the grounds of Westpark with his small infantryman’s spade. His work was unfinished when Soviet artillery concentrated their effort on the park. It was a familiar story. When the barrage lifted, on came the Red infantry again. The German machine-guns had either been knocked out or run out of ammunition. Baselt’s carbine jammed, so too did many of his comrades’. Hauling their wounded, the company of Hitler Youths withdrew towards the blind institute.

Leo Hartmann was summoned to the cellar of the institute to receive fresh orders. During the night, his
Sturmgeschütz
had been joined by a second. A junior officer told the bespectacled gun commander that Soviet armour was bearing down on the blind home through the park and had to be stopped. Hartmann agreed, although his reasons for offering a spirited defence of the Gandau district were not entirely altruistic. All
Sturmgeschütze
ammunition had to be flown into Breslau. It could be dropped by parachute, of course, but three out of four canisters invariably ended up in Soviet hands. The longer the airfield could be used, the longer the guns could fight.

Max Baselt’s Hitler Youths joined a platoon of paratroopers in a water-filled ditch 250 yards from the blind home. There was a brief respite, but then Soviet infantry attacked head-on. Soviet bombers and ground-attack aircraft circled overhead before aiming for the German lines. Baselt watched “a carpet of bombs” dropped above the heads of his comrades: the enemy aircraft released their payloads too late. The bombs landed among the attacking troops.

After Soviet infantry came Soviet armour. Two tanks nosed into a copse in Westpark, one a self-propelled howitzer with a long barrel. The paratroopers at Baselt’s side readied their
Panzerfaust
. “Suddenly a double bang, the assault howitzer is hit and burns,” the surprised teenager wrote in his diary. “Now it’s the second tank’s turn.” Max Baselt turned around to see two
Sturmgeschütze
.

Leo Hartmann had left his assault gun behind and crawled up to an uprooted tree from where he could see an enemy self-propelled gun moving through a cutting. Hartmann returned to his gun and made immediately for the hollow. “The Russian had already spotted us and began to lower his barrel, which had been aimed at the trees,” Hartmann later wrote. “He was too late. With the crash of our gun – almost painful to the ears yet always somehow reassuring – I saw a fiery red flash just to the left of the barrel. The first shot had hit home.” Some Hitler Youths guided him to the second enemy tank. Hartmann directed several shells at it.

Despite the loss of their armoured support, the Russian infantry resumed their assault. “Anyone who still has a working gun fires for all it’s worth,” Max Baselt wrote. His squad leader jumped on to the edge of the ditch with his assault rifle, firing short bursts in rapid succession, while a comrade took carefully aimed shots, loudly reporting each successful kill: six, seven, eight. It was enough to halt the Soviet advance.

Two desperately-needed
Sturmgeschütze
and a ragtag bunch of paratroopers and Hitler Youths could not hold the blind institute indefinitely. Thanks to flanking fire from heavy machine-guns, Soviet infantry finally penetrated the ground floor. Their foe continued to occupy the other storeys. “We fought bitterly for each stairway, each room,” Major M M Gordiyenko remembered. More than thirty years later he could still picture the institute – “a large building with spacious cellars” – when he closed his eyes. In one room he found fifteen German troops. He called on them to surrender. They responded with machine-pistol fire. A
frontovik
squeezed into a pantry, found a hole in the wall and tossed in several grenades. When the smoke settled, just one German staggered out, dazed but somehow unscathed. All his comrades were dead or gravely wounded. The institute fell. And with it Gandau was finally lost.
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