Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (46 page)

As Breslau’s western front collapsed, so too its northern front began to crumble. But there was one final substantial obstacle to sweeping Soviet gains:
Infanterie Werk
41. For six weeks, the fort had served as a cornerstone of the northern front and command post of the local Party leader. He had fled, but not the garrison, whose domain grew ever smaller. Built as part of a chain of defences to protect Breslau a generation earlier,
I-Werk
41, as the men knew it, was a partially buried concrete fort in the middle of a copse four miles from the city centre. Five smaller strongpoints were spread around it in a semi-circle. But by April 1945 they had fallen to the Russians. Only the main fort was still held by the Germans, led by a hoarse fifty-nine-year-old
Hauptmann
. The aged officer was idolized by his men – probably because he did not mince his words. “As men in danger we are now dependent on one another,” he declared. “Death wandering around like a ghost on the battlefield doesn’t ask about either your background or your rank.”

It was to
I-Werk
41 that forward artillery observer Klaus Franke was sent after escaping the maelstrom enveloping the clock tower at the Linke-Hofmann factory on Easter Day. His initial impressions were unfavourable. “The terrain looks desolate,” he wrote. “Trees now tower above the ground only as stumps. Destroyed weapons lie around everywhere, between them the dead of friend and foe who cannot be buried.”

Two Soviet
shtraf
battalions were sent to storm
I-Werk
41. Three attacks were cut down by the defenders, leaving the approaches to the fortification littered with Soviet corpses. “The dead are tightly packed in front of the entrance – even one on top of the other,” Klaus Franke recalled. Inside the bunker he could hear the groans and the death rattles of Soviet troops outside. The defenders had been reduced to two officers and forty men, armed with a handful of
Panzerfaust
and a couple of magazines each. “The passages are full of men sleeping,” wrote Franke. “They lean against the walls, their machine-pistols between their knees, steel helmets hanging around their necks, sitting, dozing.” There was no food. The men shared a can of water, which tasted of petrol, and divided their last emergency rations. There was no hope of relief. The fort had no communications beyond its walls. Its sole medic could not cope with more than fifty wounded men. “There is only the slightest hope for most of them,” Klaus Franke continued. “There’s no medicine or expert treatment by a doctor to keep them alive. The mood is desolate as the men suspect that they will never see their homes again. Blood, blood everywhere, and by day no one dares set one foot outside.”

Eventually they did dare set foot outside. After nearly a week of fighting, the defenders of
I-Werk
41 decided it was time to break out. Just eight men – among them Klaus Franke – were fit enough to slip away from the fortification. When they did, they moved across a battlefield where the Soviet penal units had been cut down in swathes. “The effects of our artillery are terrible,” the artilleryman observed. He continued:

The men sink to their ankles in the soft ground. One foot steps in the stinking entrails of a man. Among the dead in the earth bunker you can already see some bleached bones. Limbs, separated from the torso, lie all around among pieces of equipment and smashed weapons.

Often they are kicked up to the surface by soldiers’ boots or else trampled further down into the dirt. You can’t go more than three metres without your feet striking one of these ghastly finds which weren’t visible at all initially. Even the puddles have been turned red a little by blood. The stench of pus and decomposition hangs over everything.

Nevertheless, this was the first ‘fresh’ air the men had smelled in a week. Anything, Klaus Franke believed, was better than the “pestilent stench, the eternal darkness of the bunker”.
³²

Hans Gottwald had already pulled out of Breslau’s northern front. His company had orders to regroup in the city for a fresh assignment. It was now ten days since Breslau’s black Easter and still the fires raged. Surely, thought the
Unteroffizier
, this was not the city he marched out of just a few weeks before.

I do not know Breslau any more. The bombardment at Easter was a terrible rampage. Entire streets have been swept away. Fires rage in the streets, charred window frames look at us dishearteningly. Civilians with clothes and faces blackened by soot stand amid the ruins and give us blank looks as we head for the front. Two dead
Landsers
lie at the entrance to a burning cellar. The wind which blows the smoke through the streets plays with their camouflage jackets which have been torn to shreds. No one worries about them, no one can worry about them. Each man has his own burden to bear.

Gottwald’s company was billeted in a former police barracks, home to “all kinds of scattered remnants from every possible unit”, comprising “bearded, ragged figures” who stood silently next to the walls and barely responded when anyone asked them a question. But then Hans Gottwald realized he too had become one of those bearded, ragged figures.

My tunic, my boots, my trousers are encrusted with dirt. Somewhere I find a brush, a knife and a flat piece of wood. Then some ‘cleaning’. After an hour I at least look like a soldier again. There’s something else I must put right. On my face there’s a bristly stubble. I barely recognize myself when I look in a fragment of a mirror. ‘I look like a tramp,’ goes through my head. Am I actually any different? I manage to do something akin to shaving on the bottommost cellar step. In the distance, artillery, bombers and ground-attack aircraft rumble in the clear sky. There’s no sight of German aircraft far and wide. The Soviets can drop their bombs without any problems. In between you can hear the rat-a-tat-tat of the guns of Russian ground-attack aircraft. Our flak does not shoot any more. A fortnight ago you could still see little clouds of exploding flak shells in the sky occasionally. But the gunners have long since used up all their ammunition. Not too far from here house-to-house fighting rages. You can clearly hear the rattle of small arms fire.

There had been talk amongst the men of a breakout attempt to reach German lines south of Breslau on the slopes of the Zobten. No such luck. The company was being committed to the workers’ district of Pöpelwitz. They had left the northern front imbued with “a tiny glimmer of hope”. Some men had even begun to sing. Now, they were demoralized. House fighting. “If I had known all that was still waiting for me, I don’t know if I’d have had the strength to take one more step forwards,” Gottwald wrote later. “You get the feeling that everything is slowly, but surely, coming apart. We are moving towards a certain end. No
Landser
doubts that any more.”
³³

Gottwald’s feelings were shared by many of Breslau’s defenders in the aftermath of the Easter onslaught. They fought on, but they realized no one would come to rescue them, despite the promises and assertions of their leaders. Easter 1945 did not merely change the face of Breslau, it extinguished the faint hopes, however improbable, to which men clung. The diaries and letters of the city’s defenders in April 1945 are filled with nothing but despair. “My love, I will never forget these Easter days,” one
Gefreiter
wrote to his wife. “I hardly believe any longer that we’ll see each other again; we must leave that to the kind fate of heaven. The Russians are already in my beloved home. I only hope that you, my dear, are not in danger. I can tell you, my dear wife, that I am utterly desperate. It really would be for the best if all of us heard and saw nothing more of this world.”
Volkssturm
man Willy Merkert was similarly pessimistic. “We no longer believe in relief any more,” he told his family. “We can still hold out for a few more weeks, but sooner or later the decision will occur in the Reich before we surrender. At worst, we’ll scrape through, if all else fails. Half of us will go under. We expect only death or captivity.”
³⁴

When he wrote home, Merkert and the rest of his company were contesting the huge grounds of the abattoir on the eastern edge of Pöpelwitz. The fighting was as dogged as any house-to-house encounter, as one veteran Waffen SS officer tried to explain in a letter to his son, serving with the
Volkssturm
:

We manoeuvred the
Sturmgeschütz
into position behind a wall thirty metres from the Russians. Pioneers blew a hole in the wall and nine shots smashed into the Ivans’ position on the first floor of three houses. We couldn’t go into the cellars to root them out as the buildings were still on fire. As the storm troops advanced I had to go with them. Ivan had been driven from two houses by shelling, but he continued to shoot from one. We threw our hand-grenades through the windows, but the Russians threw them out again. We suffered one casualty (wounded) as a result. I suffered a small wound on my right hand (only a flesh wound) and a large splinter bounced off a hand-grenade in my right trouser pocket, thank God. Something like that only makes you more angry. As we were unable to get those swine out of the rear rooms even with our
Panzerfaust
, the
Sturmgeschütz
fired six more rounds and I stormed the ground-floor rooms with my men wielding hand-grenades and revolvers. The Ivans not dealt with – there were still seven of them – skedaddled down the street. Two were knocked out by a flanking machine-gun.
³⁵

Despite the ferocity of the struggle for the abattoir, the men could still find something to raise a smile. “Willy, here in the slaughterhouse is the right place for us,” a comrade told Merkert. “All that’s left to do is turn us into mince and send it to our women in cans – the herd of sheep is right here.” The ‘herd’ had begun the battle for the abattoir 120 men strong. Now Willy Merkert’s company numbered just forty-five men. The remnants were exhausted, so tired that they could sleep in their foxholes despite Russian shells impacting a few yards away. It drove some of them mad, but not Merkert. “I merely thank God that I have a certain couldn’t-care-less attitude and am unflappable,” he assured his wife. He was killed by a shot to the head a few days later.
³⁶
Hans Gottwald was holed up in a cellar a couple of blocks away in Pöpelwitz, dragged into the house fighting he had so feared. It was every bit as horrific as he had imagined it to be:

I’m woken around 8am. Every bone in my body hurts and shivers go right through me. I quickly come to my senses, however. My first glance is at the cellar window. We worked well last night. We neatly cleared away all the bricks. I am nervously waiting for 10am. Will it be like yesterday and the day before? I can hardly wait until 10am. My nerves are extremely taut. I pull my last packet of cigarettes from my jacket pocket and smoke nervously. Dirty and unshaved, we look like pigs. Our faces, out of which peer bleary, reddened eyes, are almost black. 10am at last. Nervously I scan the ground in front of us. There! Like yesterday. A mass of men again storm across the gardens towards us, accompanied by a hail of machine-gun fire. They evidently believe we have cracked under the strain of the hand-grenade barrage, because today they’re attacking rather boldly and swiftly, without lying down. From a range of 100 metres, our machine-gun rattles away. In an instant, 200 rounds are fired. Devastating effect! Many fall down, others run away. Murder, plain murder, flashes through my mind. And for what? Deep down I feel sorry for those chaps there who are rolling around in their own blood. I cannot stand this any more. Every day murder! Dreadful. But where’s the end to it?

The men enjoyed an eight-hour reprieve until late in the afternoon there was a distant rumble. Gottwald stared out of the cellar window and saw a Soviet tank no more than 150 yards away. It ploughed through the wall of a house, then turned its barrel towards the German troops’ hideout. Gottwald yelled: “Take cover!” and the men threw themselves on to the cellar floor. “There’s the devastating crash of a tank shell – the awful bang almost leaves us deaf.” When the initial shock of the impact passed, the men realized they were unharmed. Thanks to an incline in the street, the tank’s shells either struck the ground fifty yards from the cellar, or the façade of the house above. “We’ve been spared,” thought Gottwald as a thick cloud of dust filled the cellar. For half an hour the Soviet tank sent shells into the earth or into the house wall. The men in the cellar held cloths and rags to their mouths as they struggled to breath. Then the tank gave up, turned on its heels and drove away. “Once again, we can breathe a sigh of relief.”
³⁷

One mile away, Leo Hartmann manoeuvred his ugly
Sturmpanzer
IV, armed with a high-velocity 75mm cannon from a Panther tank, towards the allotments of north-west Breslau. Soviet armour had smashed its way across the railway embankment under a heavy artillery barrage. Through his binoculars the young
Leutnant
could see several green-brown self-propelled guns armed with powerful 152mm cannons. Outgunned, Hartmann used the element of surprise. A flash, a bang, a thunderous crash and the first Soviet gun exploded. “Right next to the tank was another one, and one more a little further on,” he recalled. “Ever more steel monsters came into view. I couldn’t collect my thoughts at all. When I’d fired all my ammunition, several Russian tanks burned like torches – five of them at the hands of my gun.” A second
Sturmgeschütz
joined battle, knocking out a Soviet tank on the railway embankment, thirty feet above the battlefield. After restocking his ammunition, Hartmann returned to find yet more enemy tanks had appeared. He saw off two of them, his comrade destroyed five pieces of armour. “In the heat of battle, I hadn’t realized that the Russians were also shooting,” Hartmann wrote later. “It was a really mad day.” Their aim was poor, for they destroyed no German tanks. They did, however, wreck the
Sturmpanzer
’s radio antenna.