Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (48 page)

The
Hochbunker
in Elbingstrasse was still in German hands, and still treating casualties, as Hans Gottwald learned. Conditions had deteriorated immeasurably since he visited comrades a month earlier. Except that now he was a patient, not a visitor, shot in the left arm. “A wall of heat and stench hits me,” he wrote. “I can hardly breathe. There’s groaning and crying everywhere.” He was shown to a small concrete room lit by candles where he found “bloody canvas sheets lying around. There are wounded everywhere as well, waiting for things to happen. No one speaks. Every now and then two medics come and haul a wounded man out, depending on the seriousness of his wounds. Apparently, I’m ‘lightly wounded’, so I have to wait a long time.” Gottwald waited several hours until he was operated on, then he was taken to the top floor of the bunker to convalesce. “The heat and stench become more and more unbearable,” he recalled.

There’s very little oxygen in the air. There’s the most terrible misery everywhere. The gravely injured groan and hallucinate thanks to the fever. There’s still a place on top of a bunk bed. Here and there one space is created as dead bodies are carried out repeatedly.

I’m lifted up into the upper bed. Right next to me is the concrete roof of the shelter. ‘No one can recover here’ I think to myself. ‘Just be grateful that you’re still alive and that you’re cared for to some degree.’ I’m given another painkiller and then I’m left to my fate. Drinking water has to be brought all the time – the thirst of the wounded men is tremendous. I fall into a state of semi-consciousness. The syringe and the pill have had an effect.
⁴⁸

For Gottwald and fellow sufferers in the Elbingstrasse bunker, or in any of Breslau’s cellar hospitals and first-aid posts, there was no longer any hope of evacuation. Despite all the exertions, despite the 3,000 killed in its construction, no aircraft were landing on the runway Karl Hanke had needlessly driven through Scheitnig. The last wounded had been flown out of Breslau on 7 April, the final flight into the fortress by an ‘Aunt Ju’ occurred the following night. Only Heinkel 111s, Me109 fighters and gliders still carried supplies to the beleaguered city. On a good night, they might deliver sixty tons of ammunition. But good nights were the exception. Some nights barely one ton of supplies was landed or dropped. And after the night of 29/30 April, nothing. The last glider to touch down in Breslau did so shortly after 3am on the thirtieth. Struck by flak, it crashed in a cemetery, its cargo wrecked, but its pilot, one Erwin Thies, safe.
⁴⁹

By now, Breslau was in the full grip of a Silesian spring. By day, temperatures topped 25°C. The cherry trees were in bloom, so too the small almond trees; young birches were a vibrant green, lilacs were starting to bloom. The first blossom had already fallen, blanketing parts of the city, adding colour to an otherwise desolate scene. In the suburbs, the trees buzzed with life. Every branch was filled with singing or whistling birds, while in the city centre some Breslauers picked posies to adorn their cellars. Others gathered spring flowers and laid them on the mounds marked with small wooden crosses which littered the city’s promenades, lawns, parks, church grounds, roadsides – they could even be found amid the ruins of houses. Mail was delivered sporadically – at least until the final week of April – although it took upwards of forty days to reach the fortress. The cinema truck still showed films and newsreels to troops enjoying a few hours out of the line. Some women hung eiderdowns out of windows in the morning to air them, others clambered over the rubble with shopping bags in search of food. Sometimes they found it. A store in Posener Strasse, a short distance from the fortress’s western front, opened at the end of the week, although it could offer patrons nothing but
Ersatz
food on ration coupons. Soviet artillery fired into the city sporadically. It was rarely aimed but rarely did it not demand sacrifices. “The sun draws people out of the damp cellars into the open,” Waffen SS clerk Georg Haas observed. “Children play by the roadside or search out plants coming into bloom. A smouldering shell crater often shows where just a few moments earlier the cheerful laughter of children rang out.” The wildest rumours were seized upon. Haas’s comrades were sent to find a spy, a Russian artillery observer believed to be directing Soviet guns on to targets in the heart of the Breslau. The Waffen SS troops found no spy, despite wasting an afternoon searching lofts and abandoned apartments. They did find a deserter, a half-starved
Volkssturm
man who asked hesitantly whether Stalin had entered the city. “Only one rumour can make us hold firm,” wrote Haas, “the rumour of imminent liberation.” From some of the city’s spires, soldiers could make out the distant peak of the Zobten on clear days. “Over there, do you see, there on the Zobten, is Schörner’s army,” a comrade assured Haas. “Soon, perhaps as early as tomorrow, it will advance to liberate us. Until then, we have to hold out …”
⁵⁰

The same rumour swept through the cellar hospital in Reusche Strasse in the old town where Hans Gottwald was now convalescing. Some men even claimed they could already hear the distant thunder of cannon. Others rejoiced at the news of the death of President Roosevelt, convinced that it changed everything. Gottwald preferred to chat with a young nurse, Nora, who used to sit on the end of his bed. Occasionally, he would climb the cellar steps to sample the fresh spring air. A bomb landed in a building several yards away – evidently one of the fortress warehouses, because hundreds of packets of Casino brand cigarettes were strewn around the street. Lightly-wounded men rushed out of the cellar to collect as many packs as they could hold. “Who knows what’s going to happen?” thought Gottwald. “We can always use cigarettes.”
⁵¹

Seizing those cigarettes was plundering, of course, but Breslauers were beginning to test the limits of Nazi authority. People openly distrusted the daily military communiqué. They listened to German-language broadcasts from the BBC – the cellars of the opera house positively echoed to the sound of news from London. They heard that Berlin was encircled, that American and Soviet troops had shaken hands on the Elbe at Torgau. In Zimpel and Bischofswalde, at the eastern end of the pocket, scores of women openly challenged their masters, demonstrating outside the
Ortsgruppe
headquarters. “
Wir wollen keinen Krieg
!” they chanted – we don’t want war – or “
Unsere Männer hier
!” – bring our men here. The deputy Party leader appeared, demanded the women disperse, said they were stabbing the soldiers in the back. The crowd laughed and waved strips of cloth and handkerchiefs at the Soviet bombers circling overhead. The authority of the Party had been challenged – and the Party responded. Troops were ordered into Zimpel to break up the demonstration. Several women were arrested. Some accounts say eight were subsequently shot, others seventeen, others still around one hundred.
⁵²

Nor was any clemency shown to deserters. One was brought to Hugo Hartung’s company command post: a worker, a father who had decided his family needed him more than the fortress did. Hartung’s commander asked the man why he fled. The deserter was silent. “The man has a good face and a decent bearing,” Hartung noted. “He knows that his fate is sealed.” There was only one topic of conversation in the dramatist’s cellar: ‘afterwards’. After the war was over, after the Nazis were gone. “But what will become of us?” Hugo Hartung wondered.
⁵³
It was a question asked repeatedly in the ruins of Breslau. “We felt the impending end, but deep down we were torn violently between fear and hope,” priest Konrad Büchsel recalled.
⁵⁴
Horst Gleiss saw signs of hope. “Everyone knows it but no one dares say it,” he recorded in his diary. “The Second World War can only last a few more days. We have survived so far and the chances of getting through the final days as well aren’t bad.”
⁵⁵
Other defenders saw nothing but ruin ahead. “Forgive me, Erich, if as your youngest brother I’ve done anything shitty in your life and, if you still can, then pray for me, the heroic defender of the infamous fortress Breslau,” one soldier, Heinz Liedtke, pleaded in a last letter to his sibling.

We sit in Breslau like rats in a trap and wait for the end. I’ve already lost hope that I’ll get out of this shit sometime. We fight, drink out of despair (if we manage to organize something to drink) and lead a debauched life with whores of various nationalities – there’s no shortage of them here. Yesterday I received a pass for a couple of hours and went to find Aunt Trude. All that’s left of her house in Königsplatz is a burnt wall. Our fire parties probably did that. No one knows what happened to our aunt and the rest of the tenants but it seems to me that we’ll never see her again. I’ll probably meet the same fate in this [damned] fortress.
⁵⁶

There is no record of Heinz Liedtke after the end of April 1945. Within a week most of his comrades would be in captivity and the Hammer and Sickle would fly above the ruins of Fortress Breslau.

Notes

1.
Hartung, pp.76-7 and Gleiss, iii, p.985.

2.
Peikert, pp.281-2.

3.
Franke, pp.5-21.

4.
Gleiss, iv, pp.201-3.

5.
Peikert, pp.282-4.

6.
Gleiss, iv, p.26.

7.
Peikert, pp.282-4.

8.
Van Aaken, pp.208-9.

9.
Based on Hartung, p.77 and Hugo Hartung, ‘Ostern 1945’, in Hupka, Hubert (ed),
Breslau: Geliebt und unvergessen
, pp.73-4.

10.
Haas, ii, pp.128-31.

11.
Gleiss, iv, p.58.

12.
Peikert, pp.282-4.

13.
Based on Gleiss, iv, p.55, Gleiss, viii, p.869, Bannert, p.81 and Haas, ii, pp.128-31.

14.
Gleiss, iv, p.109.

15.
Ibid., iv, pp.172-3.

16.
Based on Gleiss, iv, pp.55, 119, Gleiss, iii, p.991 and Hornig, pp.160-1.

17.
Gleiss, iv, p.158.

18.
Based on Gleiss, iv, p.173, Becker, p.143 and Peikert, pp.284-7.

19.
See Gleiss, iv, pp.55, 165, Hartung, pp.77-8 and Gleiss, iv, pp.121-2.

20.
Gleiss, iv, p.173.

21.
Ibid., iv, p.118.

22.
Ibid., iv, pp.121-2.

23.
Gleiss, iv, p.243, Van Aaken, pp.208-9, Becker, p.143 and Hartung, pp.78, 79.

24.
Die Grosse Flucht
, ZDF documentary, 2001, Episode 3, ‘Festung Breslau’, Peikert, pp.284-7 and Grieger, pp.23-7.

25.
Gleiss, iv, pp.201-3.

26.
Ibid., iv, p.113.

27.
Documenty Nr.227.

28.
Bannert, pp.81-4.

29.
Gleiss, iv, p.296.

30.
Ibid., iv, p.297.

31.
The battle for the blind institute is based on Gleiss, iv, pp.297-8, 323,
So Kämpfte Breslau
, pp.77-8 and Majewski, pp.109-10.

32.
Franke, pp.61-2, 65-6, 95-6.

33.
Gleiss, viii, pp.988, 1055.

34.
Gleiss, viii, p.963 and Gleiss, iv, pp.450-1.

35.
Gleiss, iv, p.651.

36.
Ibid., iv, pp.631-3.

37.
Gleiss, viii, pp.1034-5.

38.
So Kämpfte Breslau
, pp.80-2.

39.
Ibid., p.77.

40.
Konev, p.124, 162 and Gleiss iv, p.980.

41.
Majewski, pp.98-9.

42.
Gleiss, viii, pp.827-8.

43.
Ibid., viii, pp.1032-3.

44.
BA-MA RH2/1914/31 and
Völkischer Beobachter
, 13/4/45.

45.
Documenty Nr.200, 239 and Nr.241.