Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (59 page)

For the first year in captivity, a handful of Breslau’s defenders enjoyed privileged status. Camp guards and officials respected any man who possessed a copy of the surrender terms. It had “a magical effect,” operations officer
Major
Albrecht Otto recalled. Any officer who showed them the document “was certain to be spared any inconvenience, especially the searching of baggage”. An irate German communist finally tore up Otto’s copy, while fortress commander Hermann Niehoff held on to his copy until the summer of 1946 when a camp official demanded he hand it over. “Comrade general, we urgently need your original copy for the archives!” Niehoff refused. He was frisked, his possessions thoroughly searched before the document was recovered. “These so-called conditions for an honourable surrender of Breslau are no contract,” a commissar scoffed. “They’re nothing more than
ruse de guerre
which succeeded.”
⁵²

Not least among the surrender terms ignored was clause number five – “The entire civilian populace is guaranteed security and normal living conditions.” The expulsions resumed in mid-February 1946. “Only ten per cent of Germans can stay,” tailor’s daughter Charlotte Pösel wrote. “The tumult is real now. Most people lose their nerves and sell their possessions at bargain prices.” Once again Annelies Matuszczyk watched “rivers of people with their meagre possessions on their backs or on handcarts head for the station. It’s a tragic sight.” Schoolboy Friedhelm Mondwurf and his family were ordered to wait at their collection point, the Clausewitz school on the western edge of the old town. Mondwurf’s family had nothing left, but other expellees clung on to their worldly goods. “Using hand carts, worn-out prams, old bicycles or simply tied-up blankets, everyone tried to save their last possessions,” he wrote. “The entire column repeatedly came to a halt because the wagons could not withstand the load or people simply collapsed under the burden.” They waited for a day and a half in the school. “Hunger and illness took people to the brink of exhaustion,” Mondwurf remembered. It was “like a lunatic asylum – there was everything from a violent clash to complete apathy.” Finally the expellees were escorted to the nearby Freiburger Bahnhof. “We were loaded into goods wagons like cattle prepared for slaughter,” the schoolboy wrote. “Packed tightly together, we squatted on the bare floor. The door was closed. Today I can still hear the click of the heavy iron lock which not only locked the door but also drew a line under an entire chapter in our lives. A dramatic journey to freedom began.” The Rothkugel family were transported in a cattle truck to Rabber in Lower Saxony in early March. Strangely, leaving Breslau after twenty-two years was a relief. “The fear which had constantly hung over us for the past year suddenly evaporated,” Otto Rothkugel remembered. “Like a heavy burden it fell from us and a joyful feeling of being free came over us.” It was not a typical feeling of joy, of course. “We had left everything which was dear to us, which we valued, had been left behind – forever. One chapter of our lives had come to an end and an uncertain future lay before us.” The Rothkugels put their faith in God. “The good thing which arose from the misery we had to endure was that our faith became even stronger, even more unshakeable,” Otto Rothkugel wrote. “They have taken everything away from us, but they could not deprive us of our faith. We took it with us.”
⁵³

They left behind a city still hideously scarred by war. “I will remember my stay in Breslau for a long time,” wrote one expellee from Upper Silesia who spent several days there in May 1946 waiting for a transport west. “From the window of our spartan attic we were presented with a view which you only see today in horror films: a sea of burned-out houses without windows where only horror lived, a forest of towering chimneys, blackened by soot, as far as the eye could see.” He killed time waiting by wandering around Breslau, especially its southern suburbs where the fighting had been its fiercest. The town houses in Ulica Ślężna (Lohestrasse) were still empty. “You could wander through deserted, plundered apartments – linked to each other by holes in the wall – for hours on end,” the refugee recalled. The names of the apartments’ former occupants were still legible on the doors. There were handwritten details of missing people, addresses, remarks, often scribbled in chalk on the walls. In one room there was even a field gun buried beneath brick dust and rubble.
⁵⁴
On a spring walk around the Holteihöhe by the Oder, Annelies Matuszczyk found steel helmets, gun parts and gas masks, the lawns still carved up by half-collapsed communication trenches and positions and uprooted trees hanging over craters. The park had been dug up twelve months earlier and turned into a makeshift cemetery. Breslauers were still leaving fresh flowers on graves; “We read the inscriptions on the wooden crosses, some of which have already weathered badly. There’s an eleven-year-old messenger next to a sixty-one-year-old
Volkssturm
man.” Most of the dead were born in 1927 – seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds – and on one side of the hill, two dozen men from one battalion all killed on the same day.
⁵⁵
Joanna Konopińska passed a German woman digging up graves near the Most Zwierzyniecki (Passbrücke). “My seventeen-year-old son is buried here somewhere,” she explained. “I would certainly recognise him – he has a small, initialled silver chain on his wrist.” The boy had stayed behind to build Karl Hanke’s runway while the rest of his family fled to Schweidnitz. “I will soon go across the Oder but the grave of my son gives me no peace.”
⁵⁶
She probably never found him; the bodies were soon reinterred in a mass grave.

Nature was proving more successful than man at eradicating the traces of war. Each spring morning Breslau was filled with life. The ruins had become home to thousands of birds who burst into song as the sun rose. “Wherever you look you see trees and hedges covered with small leaves, the lawns are green, the streets and environs are clean,” Joanna Konopińska wrote. Returning home from her studies at the university, Konopińska felt she was “riding into a different world” as her tram crossed the Most Zwierzyniecki and entered Biskupin (Bischofswalde). The suburb had been less ravaged than most in the city during the siege, but nevertheless staring out of the tram windows every day brought fresh changes.

The bomb craters in the street have been flattened out and, although there’s no asphalt or pavement, cars can already drive without the threat of their suspension breaking. There are so few cars driving in our city, however, that the streets have turned green like the Oder meadows in the spring sun.

An elderly woman buttonholed Joanna as she walked home from the tram stop. “Yesterday there were still two graves next to this house and there were three crosses on the pile of rubble,” she explained. “Today they’re no longer there. It’s a little more pleasant to pass through the city because you don’t run into graves everywhere. Don’t you think so?”
⁵⁷

The graves were disappearing and so were the Germans. By the summer of 1946, they were outnumbered six to one by Wrocław’s Polish settlers as the rate of ‘repatriation’ was accelerated. Sometimes daily, sometimes two or three times a week, sometimes only weekly, trains of Germans expelled from Silesia headed west, with anywhere between 1,480 and 1,750 men, women and children on board. Some trains headed for the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, others for the sector occupied by the British under Operation
Swallow
, among the latter one carrying priest Joachim Konrad. As the train pulled out of the Freiburger Bahnhof, the youth group of Konrad’s St Elisabethkirche burst into hymn:
Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott
– A mighty fortress is our God. “With tears in our eyes, we saw the towering spires fade into the distance – and with them our beloved Breslau home,” he recalled. “Would we see it again?” A week beforehand, Konrad had given his final sermon in his church, a bulwark of Breslau’s Protestant community since 1525. Quoting the Book of Genesis – “And the Lord said to Abraham: ‘Go forth from your country, and from your relatives and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you’” – the priest told his dwindling congregation: “When you see these trains of misery leaving Breslau, your heart stops. God has passed a harsh judgement on the German East.”
⁵⁸

The ‘trains of misery’ – each one with a number – continued throughout the summer and autumn of 1946. By the year’s end, more than 500 transports had rolled westwards. The last train of the year, number 514, pulled out of the Freiburger Bahnhof with 1,543 expellees aboard on the morning of 17 December. Only 1,511 passengers would reach the train’s destination in Lower Saxony. Its passengers – Germans evicted from across Lower Silesia as well as Breslau – had spent several days waiting in an unheated school building before being ordered to the Freiburger Bahnhof on 16 December where a train would take them to Germany. Of the fifty-five cattle trucks allocated to train 514, only sixteen were waiting. A few hundred refugees boarded, most spent the night on the open platform. The temperature dropped to -18°C. It was 8am on the seventeenth before the remaining carriages – again cattle wagons – arrived, and several more hours before the train was ready to depart. For the next five days, the train sluggishly made its way through Lower Silesia and Lower Saxony. There was no heating – except in the carriage reserved for the Polish guards – no straw, no lighting, no stoves, no medicine, and the rubbish and human waste from the previous transport covered the floor of each truck. Temperatures fluctuated between -15°C and -20°C. A layer of ice formed on blankets and on the sides of the carriages from the refugees’ breath. When the expellees woke in the mornings, they found their hair had frozen. Some found their feet had turned black during the night through frostbite. During the day, the ice on the roof melted and dripped on passengers. On only four occasions during the journey did the refugees enjoy a warm drink, or alight from the train for a call of nature; the rest of the time they used buckets provided in every wagon. In one truck, an elderly man kept spirits up, leading Christmas songs. By the second day of the journey, he was dead. His was one of nineteen corpses unloaded at the first halt, Maltsch on the Oder, just two dozen miles from Breslau. Seven more dead were carried off the train in Kohlfurt, a dozen in Mariental. The only medical assistance was provided by one Dr Loch, previously the senior doctor at Breslau’s St Joseph’s Hospital. Besides being overburdened, his wife was gravely ill (she died three days after the train arrived in the British zone), while Loch himself suffered a heart attack and frostbite to his legs. In other carriages, the expellees were left to their own devices. “I was called to help deliver a baby,” one woman recalled “I climbed over bundles and piles of luggage and found a woman. I moved towards her – nothing happened. I touched her. Nothing. Dead. I approached the woman who’d given birth. She was bleeding badly – it was a miscarriage. When I tried to make her more comfortable, I noticed that she had frozen to the floor in her own blood.”

By the time the train arrived in Hameln and Bückeburg in the British-occupied sector of Germany, thirty-two people were dead. Nearly 300 were admitted to hospital, where another twenty-six died. The transport quickly earned a name:
Todeszug 514
– death train 514. “Only after reaching the English zone did we feel that we were human beings,” one of the refugees recalled. “We got something warm for the first time in a fortnight. This was most welcome, but for those with frostbitten limbs, the suffering was only beginning.” Another – evidently oblivious to the horrors of Auschwitz, Gross Rosen, Fünfteichen – protested: “There’s not a single example in German history of such bestial treatment.” There was more measured condemnation from the local press:

In the past twenty months, many words have been used to convince the German people that this last war was waged and won by our adversaries to re-establish humane laws. In dozen of trials for crimes against humanity, insofar as they were committed by Germans, they have condemned to death or given strict prison sentences. Not least, they defamed the entire German people because, out of ignorance or a lack of principles, it allowed a degenerate caste to commit these crimes. The German people have willingly submitted to the just verdict of world opinion and entrusted themselves to the hands of the upholders of humanity.

Nothing came of the protests. But there was, at least, no repeat of death train 514.
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By September 1947, Polish authorities could claim the ‘repatriation’ of Breslau’s Germans complete. There were some left, of course, but the large-scale transports were over.
⁶⁰
Breslau had become Wrocław. Now, wrote student Joanna Konopińska, “a new chapter in our lives has begun”. She had been among the city’s first settlers. Back then “in the streets, on the trams, in businesses, everywhere you heard the German tongue, reminding us of the war and all the terrible things connected with it.” But no longer. “Wrocław becomes more familiar and more likeable by the day,” Konopińska recorded in her diary. “I have learned to love this city and cannot imagine that I could ever leave it again. I have a home, a job, studies and many new friends. I don’t know why Wrocław has grown on me so quickly. I only know that my fate is bound with it.”
⁶¹

Notes

1.
Thum, pp.69-70.

2.
Ibid., p.189.

3.
Gleiss, vi, p.138.

4.
Gleiss, v, p.1007 and Gleiss, viii, p.1507.