Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (11 page)

20.
TB Felber, 1/9/39 in BA-MA RH20-8/1.

21.
Frodien, pp.95-6.

22.
Hartmann,
Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg: Front und militärisches Hinterland 1941/42
, p.131.

23.
Bannert, p.28.

24.
Henkel, pp.77-8.

25.
Frodien, p.165.

26.
TB Cohn, 13/8/40.

27.
Ibid., 14/11/38.

28.
Microcosm
, p.393.

29.
SD Meldung, 20/9/43, 16/12/43.

30.
Microcosm
, p.389 and IMT, xv, p.202 and
Völkischer Beobachter
, 29/8/44.

31.
SD Meldungen 29/4/43 and 2/9/43.

32.
Frodien, pp.98-9.

33.
SD Meldung, 6/1/44.

34.
Ibid., 13/12/43.

35.
Schlesische Zeitung
, 31/7/44 and
Schlesische Tageszeitung
, 31/7/44.

36.
Herbert Rühlemann, ‘Father Tells Daughter’ in IWM 02/23/1;
Microcosm
, pp.387-8, 400-1;
Less Than Slaves
, p.151.

37.
NMT, ix, pp.964-6.

38.
NMT, ix, p.1422 and Manchester, pp.574-81.

39.
SD Meldung, 21/2/44.

40.
After the speech Goebbels noted smugly in his diary: “Despite the seriousness of the hour, I believe that my stock among the broad masses remains as high as it ever did.” The account is based on
Völkischer Beobachter
, 9/7/44, TB Goebbels, 8-9/7/44, TB von Oven, 9/7/44. By contrast, Hitler’s final visit to Breslau in November 1943 – in the same hall – was a secret affair, only reported to the public several days after the event. The Führer spoke to several thousand officer candidates, an address he typically gave in Berlin’s Sportpalast, but moved to the Jahrhunderthalle because of Allied air attacks on the capital.

41.
Schlesische Tageszeitung
, 12/5/44.

42.
Based on
Schlesische Zeitung
, 31/7/44;
Schlesische Tageszeitung
, 12/5/44 and Terp, p.72.

43.
Schlesische Zeitung
, 31/7/44.

44.
Schlesische Tageszeitung
, 31/7/44.

45.
NA FO898/187, p.600.

46.
SD Meldung, 7/8/44.

47.
Schlesische Tageszeitung
, 30/7/44.

48.
Ahlfen, p.71.

49.
Bartold
is based on Bannert, pp.46-52, Hartung, pp.13-15; SD Meldungen 28/10/44 and 12/11/44;
Lausitzer Rundschau
, 8/1/05;
Gross Wartenberger Heimatblatt
, Nr.1, 1995; Noble, pp.108-09, 118-19; Becker, p.97; Grieger, p.4. Breslau’s civil servants, public employees and factory workers were not exempted from this massive undertaking. Every Tuesday and Friday they left their places of work, caught trains from the central station before 5am and were dropped off ‘near’ the digging sites – the reality was usually a two-hour trek on foot through the Silesian countryside before they could actually start work. It was after 10pm by the time they returned to the city. Their reward for their toil: stamps for bread, stamps for fifty grammes of meat and fifty grammes of fat, plus two or three cigarettes. See Becker, p.97.

50.
Based on Ahlfen and Niehoff,
So Kämpfte Breslau
, pp.13-14 – hereafter cited as
So Kämpfte Breslau
– and Becker, p.97.

51.
Gleiss, ix, pp.11-12.

52.
So Kämpfte Breslau
, p.18.

53.
Hartung, pp.20, 26.

54.
The rally in Breslau was mirrored across the Reich. Upper Silesian
Gauleiter
Fritz Bracht addressed “tens of thousands of people” in front of his headquarters in Kattowitz. “Now is it too late for our enemies,” Bracht assured his audience. “Now it has truly become a total, a holy war, one we have been forced to wage. It will end one day, suddenly perhaps. And the bells which will then announce peace to the world, will be the bells of German victory.”
Oberschlesische Zeitung
, 22/10/44.

55.
Seidler, p.126.

56.
Ibid., pp.130-2.

57.
Siebel-Achenbach, p.28.

58.
Mammach, p.61.

59.
Ibid., p.63.

60.
Seidler, pp.187-8.

61.
Mammach, p.68.

62.
Messerschmidt, p.466.

63.
Seidler, pp.287-8.

64.
Schlesische Zeitung
, 10/11/44.

65.
Noble, p.180.

66.
TB Goebbels, 9/11/44.

67.
For the rumours circulating at the end of 1944 see Frodien, p.116; Fritz Neugebauer, ‘Tatsachenbericht unserer Erlebnisse während der letzten Kriegszeit, 1945’, p.7 in IWM 95/4/1; and Hartung, p.31.

68.
Rühlemann, ‘Father Tells Daughter’, p.428 in IWM 02/23/1.

69.
Bannert, p.55.

70.
Dittman, Ursel, ‘Memoirs’, p.2 in IWM 07/15/1.

71.
Hartung, pp.38-9.

*
The arm of the Oder which flowed around the island to the north was filled in by the Prussians, but the name Dominsel stuck.

Chapter 2

The Bridgehead

Just one more leap is needed for final victory

Marshal Ivan Konev

T
he mortars rained down continuously on
Oberleutnant
Hans Jürgen Hartmann’s bunker. Here, more than 200 miles east of Breslau, was the “easternmost balcony of the German front” – a network of trenches stretching for more than seventy miles through central Poland to hem in the Red Army’s bridgehead over the Vistula. For more than three months, Hartmann and his comrades in Infantry Regiment 514 had manned positions at the north-eastern end of the salient. Germans called it the Baranow bridgehead, the Russians named it after the town of Sandomierz. It was a demoralising existence for the defenders. By the end of 1944, Hans Jürgen Hartmann’s nerves were shot. The sight of the shadowy ruins and empty trenches near the village of Łukawa, half a dozen miles north of Sandomierz, filled him with horror every time he carried out a night-time patrol. The turret of a Russian T34 tank slowly rusted away in one abandoned trench, now covered by a white blanket after the first light snowfall. To the
Oberleutnant
, war in the Baranow bridgehead seemed to be hibernating. There was rarely any shooting, let alone any fighting. “But appearances are deceptive,” the twenty-three-year-old wrote in his diary. “We cannot be frivolous for even one minute.” The moment one of Hartmann’s men stood up in the trench, his head visible above the parapet, a Soviet sniper would shoot. The officer had toyed with doing just that. That way, he admitted, “I would finally have peace.”

Christmas in the regiment’s bunkers had been “shitty”. All manner of gifts had been supplied: cigarettes, wine and schnapps. But the men did not feel like celebrating. In the half-light of bunkers lit by candles, the food turned cold. The wine stayed in the bottle. “Christmas songs, wrapping paper, Christmas this, Christmas that, the things scrimped and saved for at home – what does all that matter in our lonely, grey world of the trenches?” Hartmann wrote. The men talked long into the night, gathered around a small Christmas tree. They talked about their families, about the bombing of German cities, about the sporadic post – the bespectacled Hartmann had sent his family in Dresden his latest portrait; he had received no mail in return – about Christmases past, in peace and in war. “As far as was possible, we didn’t discuss the future,” wrote Hartmann. “What would I have been able to say to them?”

The mood at New Year was better. Yet nothing had changed. Still no post. No alcohol for eight days. “We’re now waiting, morning after morning, for that distant loud noise which could take place any day and signal for us the end of this unnatural calm,” Hartmann noted in his diary. “Yes, we expect the major Russian offensive to begin any day.”
¹

Half a dozen miles away in Sandomierz, Lieutenant Vassily Ivanovich Malinin could hear a handful of aircraft overhead in the night sky. It was rarely quiet in the historic small town which straddles the Vistula. For several weeks, the correspondent with the Soviet Sixth Army’s front-line newspaper,
Down With The Enemy
, had watched the build-up of forces: trucks and armour continuously crossed the bridges Red Army engineers had thrown across the river the previous summer and autumn. As they approached Sandomierz they passed posters pinned to trees or road signs, or erected by the roadside, proclaiming,
We will reach Berlin!
German artillery had tried to disrupt the build-up. Shells fell sporadically in Sandomierz’s centre. Russian gunners responded with heavier salvoes aimed at German lines half a dozen miles to the north. The infantry trained. They practised neutralising enemy bunkers and the art of street fighting. That would, one battalion commander told the journalist, “definitely come in handy”. Occasionally Vassily Malinin visited the front, staring across the eighty or so metres of wasteland between the Russian trenches and the foremost German lines. Bunkers, trenches, connecting trenches, all were easily identifiable. By day there was random fire from enemy mortars and machine-guns. By night, the Vistula landscape was bathed in artificial light by flares which the Germans launched almost without interruption from dusk until dawn. It was, Malinin observed, “a sign that they are afraid.” Tonight the light show had an aural accompaniment. Several German aircraft circled above Sandomierz, dropping bombs on the town. Many did not explode. “Hitler’s machine,” Malinin noted in his diary, “is beginning to stutter.”
²

It was five months since the Red Army had first crossed Poland’s great artery with the very last gasp of its great summer offensive which drove the Germans out of Byelorussia, out of Galicia, out of eastern Poland. It threw its forces across the Vistula at Magnuszew, three dozen miles south of Warsaw, at Puławy, seventy-five miles south of the Polish capital and at Baranow, another sixty-five miles upstream. For a month, the German Army had tried to crush the bridgeheads and drive the Soviets back over the river. The best they could achieve was to limit the Red Army’s foothold on the left bank of the Vistula – but that foothold was still enormous. When the front settled in September 1944, the bridgehead at Baranow was forty miles deep and followed the river for fifty miles; the smaller foothold at Puławy was a mere eight miles deep. Russian and German alike knew that these bridgeheads would be the springboards for the Red Army’s next push west, whenever it came.

Almost every day during the autumn, sound-ranging equipment and troops watching for muzzle flashes reported the arrival of fresh batteries at Puławy. The numbers,
Oberst
Paul Arnhold noted with concern, “rose to utterly overwhelming proportions”. But how, the senior engineer with LVI Panzer Corps wondered. Any attempts to throw a bridge across the Vistula here – anywhere between 200 and 300 yards wide – had been thwarted either by German artillery or by dive-bomber attacks. There were no ferries, no boats. Low-level aerial reconnaissance provided the answer: ‘underwater bridges’. Arnhold had first encountered them before Moscow – bridges whose roadway ran about six inches
beneath
the surface of the river. Every effort had been made to disguise the bridges – the wooden boards which served as the road were camouflaged. Such caution did not extend to the approaches, however; the build-up of traffic on either side of the river gave the locations away. Destroying these structures proved rather more challenging. Artillery found it difficult to hit the bridges. When they did, the damage was quickly repaired. The solution was mines, floated down the Vistula. The Navy was reluctant to give Arnhold the weapons, unconvinced that army pioneers could use them. Their reluctance seemed justified initially. The current carried the mines downstream initially, but then drove them towards the bank; they exploded long before they reached the Russian bridges.