Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (51 page)

Near the Hauptbahnhof, Peter Bannert was waiting for the two Soviet emissaries to return. Two hours earlier, the Hitler Youth and his comrades had guided the blindfolded Tchitschin and Jachjavev from the front line to the central station where a car took them to Niehoff’s headquarters. Now the Soviet officers returned, minus blindfolds. Trailing behind them was the fortress commander, the red stripes on his trousers, denoting he was a member of Germany’s lauded General Staff, clearly visible. “We were speechless,” Bannert recalled. “Never had I seen a proper general so close up.” The boys hurriedly presented arms. Niehoff stopped and put his hands on the helmet of one of Bannert’s comrades. “Young men, thank you!” he said softly. “You won’t understand the walk I’m making now. But later you’ll realize that it was right.” With tears in their eyes, the Hitler Youths accompanied the group until it had safely reached Soviet lines.
²⁶

In the north of the city, Soviet troops had already taken advantage of the cease-fire to row across the Oder. All afternoon inflatable boats, dinghies and motor launches moved to and fro between the Russian- and German-held banks. The Ivans played folk songs on their accordions, talked with the few Breslauers who emerged from their cellars, even chatted with their foe. “Perhaps everything won’t turn out as badly as National Socialist propaganda reported,” wondered Horst Gleiss, sent by his commander to investigate the reports of fraternisation. “The Russians are not inhuman barbarians, murdering beasts, are they?”
²⁷

Hermann Niehoff was driven to the south-western edge of the city and a smart detached house in Kaiser Friedrich Strasse in the suburb of Krietern. Here, in the Villa Colonia, Vladimir Gluzdovski had made his headquarters. Staff officers stood smartly to attention in the garden as the German general passed them. The fortress commander was shown into a room where a good dozen Soviet generals, among them Gluzdovski, were standing around a large table. An orderly brought in a tray of glasses and schnapps. Gluzdovski invited the German officer to drink and passed him a glass. Niehoff declined. The Sixth Army commander grabbed the glass and quickly downed the contents. Niehoff nodded and emptied the fresh glass handed to him. Smiles flashed around the room.

Now Gluzdovski’s deputy, General Panov, handed the German a document, the terms of surrender. The conditions were far more lenient than Niehoff could have dared hope. The sick and wounded would receive medical assistance from the Soviets; the security of Breslau’s civilians was “assured”; soldiers would be fed, treated well and be allowed to keep decorations and personal possessions. They would also be permitted “to return home at the end of the war”. At 6pm Hermann Niehoff put his name to the document of surrender. “It was my fault that I, as an honourable soldier, believed the word solemnly given by our enemy,” he said ruefully a decade later.

The last act of Hermann Niehoff’s leadership was to issue an order of the day:

Comrades!

Citizens of Breslau!

For three months in the encircled fortress you have done your heavy duty and achieved ‘the miracle of Breslau’, unparalleled in the history of this war!

Loyal to the order the Führer gave me and believing in salvation from outside, I demanded you take up the defensive struggle. Now I no longer expect help from outside, and I can no longer bear responsibility for further bloodshed and continuing our heroic fight! With a heavy heart, but with a feeling of loyalty towards you, I have asked the enemy for a cease-fire. Negotiations are now under way. Continue to show your confidence in me by maintaining your iron discipline and calm. Only in this way can I direct your fate for the best. I remain at your side as I have promised you!

Niehoff, Fortress Commander
²⁸

Until now, one man in the room had remained silent, Vassily Klokov, the army’s commissar. He turned to Niehoff. The chatter stopped. “The Soviet Sixth Army will move into Breslau around 9pm,” he said icily. The German general was aghast. There was no way his troops could be disarmed in an orderly fashion in little more than two hours. There would be chaos, clashes, men needlessly killed. Niehoff protested. The commissar cut him off. “Marshal Konev has orders from Moscow to announce the occupation of Breslau tonight.”
²⁹

The
Schlesische Tageszeitung
had already passed into history. Now the city’s wire radio station broadcast for the last time. At 6.45pm the loudspeaker columns around Breslau spoke for the last time: “I am finishing my work, I am finishing my work.”
³⁰

In the
Volkssturm
bunker on the Benderplatz, the men of
Ortsgruppe Schiesswerder
gathered for the final time. The commander told the men and boys that the fortress had surrendered and the Party and all its apparatus were being disbanded. The courtyard became a bonfire as files, documents, membership books, certificates went up in flames, while Party badges, medals and decorations were cast into a small stove. Horst Gleiss burned his
Jungvolk
uniform, his
Hitlerjugend
badge and a portrait of Hitler. Only his precious diaries did not go on to the pyre.

I was neither a soldier nor did I belong to the
Volkssturm
. I take off my
feldgrau
tunic which I’ve worn for sixty-eight days and throw it away in Benderplatz. Under my uniform I have always worn a shirt. For a long time I stare at the grey-green jacket which has accompanied me for almost ten weeks on my dangerous journeys. I know it’s not a long time but to me it seemed like an eternity …

‘Now it’s all over’, I think on my way home to my mother. ‘My ideals are destroyed, Germany lies in ruins. What will the Russians do with us? Will they kill us all in revenge because we defended ourselves for so long? Will they deport us to Siberia? Even if they let us live and leave us in our homes, will we ever escape the misery if all the nations who were involved in the war with us demand reparations? How will things turn out?’ For me a world has collapsed, a world in which – and for which – I lived, a world which made me happy and proud. I feel like a defenceless sacrifice, delivered, for better or worse, into the hands of our mortal foe.

These fears torment me as I pass by the graves of 2,000 soldiers and civilians in Benderplatz. When I get home I am once again a schoolboy in a checked shirt, short trousers and knee-length socks. No-one in our household wonders why I’ve taken off my
feldgrau
jacket. To everyone, I had always been the schoolboy, to some I was also an abused child or the caricature of a soldier. And I really was that as well.
³¹

Artillery observer Klaus Franke was one of four hundred men – gunners, mortar troops,
Landsers
,
Fallschirmjäger
gathered in a large cellar. The soldiers were in defiant mood. “Betrayed and sold out,” one veteran
Unteroffizier
snarled. “We’re not thinking about chopping wood in Siberia.” A paratroop officer climbed on to a stool to address the men:

Men! Comrades! I’ve been a soldier now for ten years, six years of those in action. I’ve known many of you for a long time. I came to know many more good comrades who are no longer among us. They made the supreme sacrifice in this struggle, believing in a better future, believing in our common idea. It is not our fault that this will never come true. We have done what we could. I thank you for your constant readiness to act in fighting which was often hard. I have nothing more to say now. Do what you can reconcile with your honour towards your fallen comrades and your consciences.

There was silence in the cellar. The officer raised his voice. “Germany is lost, Europe is going under and there’s no longer a place on this earth for an old
Fallschirmjäger
captain.” He reached at his hip, withdrew his pistol, aimed it at his head and pulled the trigger. His body toppled off the stool and landed at the feet of the men he had commanded just seconds before.
³²

“Don’t let your heads drop now,”
Leutnant
Erich Schönfelder’s company commander urged his troops. “You’ve survived the period of the fortress, you will survive captivity too. We’re all in the same boat.” Some of the men interjected. “We don’t trust the Ivans,” “We didn’t fight for this,” or “It’ll be years before we return from Siberia – if we return at all.”
³³

After firing their last shell,
Oberleutnant
Albrecht Schulze van Loon’s paratroopers mustered around their company commander. “Whoever wants to go his own way is free to do so,” van Loon told them. No more than one third of his men did. The rest gathered at the rallying point, minus their weapons, and marched off. It had been a sultry day. Now the rain began to fall. “We move through the rain, over anti-tank ditches, past ruins and burning houses,” van Loon wrote. “The heavens weep – it rains cats and dogs and no one can tell what is rain and what is tears.”
³⁴

Leo Hartmann’s commander addressed his men in the courtyard of a prison and told them the fortress had surrendered. The
Sturmgeschütze
crews had no intention of letting their guns fall into Soviet hands. They drove the vehicles repeatedly around the block in first gear until the pistons seized up through overheating. With their weapons rendered useless, the men marched down Frankfurter Strasse into captivity, past a burned out Stalin tank, the last victim of the
Panzerjäger Abteilung Breslau
.
³⁵

Some men headed into captivity singing the old marching song,
Die blauen Dragoner, sie reiten
– the blue dragoons, they ride. Rarely had the refrain – “The way back to our homeland is long, so long, so long” – held such meaning. Max Baselt’s heavy company marched down the Strasse der SA, where Soviet soldiers formed a guard of honour. “
Gitler kaputt
,” they yelled at the troops marching into captivity. “
Breslau kaputt
.
Woina
(war)
kaputt
.” The Germans stared at the rubble of this once fine boulevard. They passed Südpark on their left, stripped bare. Only now did the ruins give way to opulent villas, still intact. Finally, some five miles from the city centre, the column halted in front of the gates of an old sugar factory in Klettendorf, now a makeshift prison camp. “Captivity: a bitter fate after 83 days encircled, after being in the fortress 105 days and nights during which we worried – and hoped,” Baselt thought. “Grit your teeth and get on with it. We are prisoners.”
Volkssturm
soldier Otto Rothkugel was struck by the sudden silence which had descended over the city – “something strange, because for weeks it had thundered continuously”. He stood outside his house in the northern suburb of Rosenthal and watched lines of German soldiers heading out of the city towards Trebnitz. It was a ragged, disorganized, endless column. Hitler Youths played the accordion and sang while men without weapons marched or rode on horse-drawn carts “in a never-ending column”.
³⁶

Like the rest of his comrades in 135th Rifle Division, commissar Aleksander Parszynki waited impatiently for the Germans to appear. All evening long, the men had stared into Breslau’s western suburbs, but the rain and darkness were impenetrable. “Finally we heard a commotion coming from the city centre,” Parszynki recalled. “Out of the darkness a German column emerges in several large lorries – an infantry battalion, disarmed.”
³⁷

Elsewhere, there were uneasy encounters between victor and vanquished. A column of German artillerymen marching out of the city passed a column of Soviet soldiers marching into Breslau. A Russian leapt out of his column and wrestled with the artillery commander,
Major
Frohnert, determined to rip the German Cross in Gold from the left breast of his jacket. Suddenly a Russian officer grabbed his man by the collar, punched him in the face and shoulder, thrust him back into the column and apologized to the German major.
³⁸

The first Soviet troops began to filter into the west of the city shortly after nightfall. They were, Ernst Hornig remembered, as cautious as Breslau’s civilian inhabitants. “They were evidently looking to make contact with the populace, were friendly and affable in conversation with civilians as far as they could make themselves understood.”
³⁹

In the Ring, Party leaders stripped off their uniforms and drove off in over-loaded cars. The dissolution of the Party meant the dissolution of order. Soldiers and Hitler Youths smashed their way into the storerooms of Breslau’s merchants and helped themselves to vast quantities of wine, schnapps, tobacco, cigars, flour and sugar. Civilians joined in the looting. With his master gone, an apprentice butcher handed out sausage, smoked meat and ham to customers for free – better that than let them fall into the hands of the Russians. Otherwise, supplies of alcohol were emptied to prevent Soviet troops drinking themselves into a stupor. The gutters of Breslau flowed with wine. “There was a strange mood that night,” recalled teacher Klemens Lorenz, “a mixture of fear and gallows humour.”
⁴⁰

By late Sunday evening the atmosphere in the Villa Colonia had completely changed. Now Sixth Army’s commissar had departed, the generals and staff officers talked openly. They buttonholed Hermann Niehoff with every possible question: was Hitler really dead? Could the fortress still resist? Was Hanke still in the city? The Russians ushered their guest into the dining room and to a candle-lit table filled with cold dishes, seafood, meat pies, appetisers and bottles of vodka.
“Gospodin
[
Herr
] general, please have the best seat!” Gluzdovski insisted. A glass filled to the rim with vodka was handed to Niehoff as his Soviet counterpart toasted the defender of Breslau: “Heroic garrison … The fight is over … Yesterday’s enemy, tomorrow’s friend. No hatred but a policy of alliances … I drink to the health of the commander of Breslau!” The evening grew more lively, Niehoff more subdued. In the end it became too much for the German general, who asked to retire to bed.
⁴¹