Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (17 page)

Long after nightfall this Saturday, orders were suddenly handed to Hans Jürgen Hartmann: fall back to the regimental command post in a manor house in Grochocice, just half a dozen miles away. It was midnight by the time his company was ready to move out. By then, the area was under heavy Soviet artillery fire. “In the darkness, there were only the milky stars in the moonless sky and the weak glow of light from distant muzzle flashes and shells landing.”
¹⁵

Hartmann had no idea of the scale of the catastrophe which had befallen his army. Fourth Panzer Army was disintegrating by the hour, its armoured reserves, 16th and 17th Panzer Divisions, simply bypassed, the only substantial natural barrier, the Nida, crossed. There was a hole forty miles wide and twenty-five deep in the army’s front. It would never be closed. Before the night was out, the Russians would complete the German Army’s destruction on the Vistula.

The ground near Zwolen, a dozen miles west of the Puławy bridgehead, rumbled and trembled “like an earthquake” under the weight of thousands upon thousands of shells. A “continuous roar” surrounded
Oberst
Paul Arnhold in the small hours of 14 January. It was impossible to make out the muzzle flashes of the Russian guns because “a single red glow of fire marked the course of the curved front”. The east wind whipped up an impenetrable wall of dust and smoke, blinding German artillery observers. Their guns fired back blindly. Paul Arnhold had been at Verdun. He had been on the Somme and in Flanders. Nothing compared with the barrage he was experiencing now. Every telephone line was wrecked. Heavy losses were reported. The bombardment paused briefly, then resumed, leaping into the depths of the battlefield to pummel any reserves LVI Panzer Corps was trying to bring up. Now was the moment for the waves of Red infantry to swarm forward. “But they did not come – at least not towards us in the Puławy bridgehead.”
¹⁶

Hans Jürgen Hartmann was struggling to orient himself on a hilltop west of Chrapranów as he tried to locate his regimental command post. “Nothing at all in every direction except lightly rolling empty fields as far as the eye could see,” he fumed, save for a village spread out before them which was under Russian artillery fire. Hartmann summoned his platoon leaders. They would have to go through the village – “back into hell” – to reach their command post. Sporadic shellfire was already landing on the men’s position, unsettling the horses hauling the company’s carts. Hartmann led his men from the front but barely had he set off than the entire hillside was subjected to a ferocious enemy barrage. He heard a cry, saw fire, was thrown around and then slammed into the ground. As he regained his senses he was surrounded by blackness, the smell of powder, moaning, whimpering, screaming. He stood up slowly. Then man next to him had half his skull missing. A second was covered in blood and groaning “My stomach, my stomach.” Three
Landsers
were just charred corpses. Slowly Hartmann began to feel a sharp pain in his upper left thigh – and something damp, blood.
¹⁷

Beyond Zwolen, Paul Arnhold watched the landscape swarm with Soviet tanks. Zwolen was the key to thwarting any Soviet breakout at Puławy: five roads met in the town, the most important of them leading west to the city of Radom. Arnhold’s pioneers had laid 20,000 mines around the town.
Sturmgeschütze
self-propelled guns were dug in on the approaches to the town. Anti-tank guns were fixed in concrete at road junctions. And two dozen miles to the rear, on call when the battle came, there should have been Tiger and King Tiger tanks. There was no fuel for such large-scale reserves. They were scattered around the front piecemeal. Even then, they were crippled by a shortage of fuel. “They formed the steel skeleton of the Vistula front,” Arnhold recalled, “but only a stationary one. If they had fired all their ammunition, if their turrets would not move, then their crews could only blow them up in the worst case.” For now, the
Sturmgeschütze
were picking off the enemy tanks “one after another” – the German gunners knew the terrain and the distances precisely – but “for every shot-up T34, two new ones appeared”.
¹⁸

In Breslau, 14 January was
Opfersonntag
– the Sunday of sacrifice. The city’s 600,000-plus inhabitants were expected to surrender whatever clothes they could spare: uniforms, shoes, boots, but also textiles, underwear, anything which might aid the
Landser
. It was only the beginning of the sacrifices which this Sunday would demand.

That afternoon, Party functionaries began knocking on doors across the city – an action repeated in towns and cities in every eastern
Gau
of the Reich: the first wave of the
Volkssturm
was being called up. Fourteen-year-old Hans became the latest member of the Illmer family to be called up. There were no uniforms for boys, only men. “The trousers had to be turned up three times,” his nine-year-old brother Jürgen recalled. “His tunic could have served as a coat and his coat reached the heels of his boots. His cap – that was his headgear – stretched from the bridge of his nose to behind his collar.” Under any other circumstances, the Illmers would have laughed. Jürgen felt envious initially, his mother cried constantly. Teenager Christian Lüdke felt proud to be wearing a uniform. “Now I’m a soldier,” he boasted to his parents. His mother cut him short. “Oh God, now they’re taking the children as well.”
¹⁹

It wasn’t merely the
Volkssturm
stirring in Breslau. So too were the garrison troops and labour service. The time had come – too late, of course – to resume work on Karl Hanke’s fanciful barrier of ditches, trenches and hastily-erected pillboxes which would shield the Silesian capital. Except that now work was taking place not along the old German-Polish border but on the edge of Breslau: in Weide, just four miles from the city centre, or Lohbrück, a mere three miles from the Ring. Senior lawyer Max Warzecha was ordered to build fortifications along a small tributary of the Oder, the Lohe. The temperature never rose above fifteen degrees below zero. Most of the men fell sick, including Warzecha who was struck down with a heavy cold. As for the work, it was fruitless. “The ground was frozen solid,” the lawyer recalled. “Pickaxes broke.”
²⁰

Other steps to prepare Breslau for the impending onslaught were more practical – and successful. The city’s hospitals began to transfer their patients west. Attractive young sisters from the
Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt
– the Nazi welfare organisation – dressed in their smart brown uniforms with white aprons and bonnets sat “for hours on end” drinking coffee in the carriages of hospital trains, while volunteers from the German Red Cross toiled in temperatures of twenty degrees below zero. This was how Red Cross sister Lena Aschner spent her fiftieth birthday: lifting stretchers carrying groaning people from morning until almost midnight. “My hands are blue with cold and torn to shreds,” she wrote, her work done. “My arms ache, my eyes are barely open.” The hospitals had been emptied.
²¹

The strongpoint at Zwolen held out for a good twenty-four hours. It was not lack of numbers, not lack of fuel, not lack of shells which brought about its downfall, but orders from above – and not orders to retreat. No, a handful of self-propelled guns were ordered to leave the safety of the position and hold open a line of retreat for German troops falling back from the perimeter of the Puławy bridgehead; Arnhold’s pioneers would close the barrier through the minefield when the last German armour passed. In the confusion of night and fug of smoke and haze lying over the battlefield, ten Soviet tanks slipped through the gap, followed by mounted infantry who held the barrier open. “The result,” Paul Arnhold recalled, “was indescribable chaos. In the darkness, friend and foe could no longer recognise each other.”
²²

The fall of the strongpoint was repeated across LVI Panzer Corps’ front, which simply melted way. Entire units were at best regarded as scattered across the Polish landscape, at worst simply written off. “Displaced troops wandered around the terrain, looking to link up with others or heading for the rear in the hope of finding a unit again,” Arnhold remembered. The
Oberst
was given fresh orders: head for Radom to rally the men. He did, gathering nearly 600 troops and half a dozen
Sturmgeschütze
, resolving to block the road to Tomaszow with this makeshift formation.
²³

Perhaps the official communiqué from Hitler’s headquarters had Arnhold’s unit in mind when it referred to “strong German combat formations” offering the enemy “bitter resistance”. The missive played up Soviet losses – 245 tanks destroyed in a single day – and skirted around the subject of German casualties. It was, the communiqué insisted, still a “defensive battle”, just one which had “shifted” from the Baranow bridgehead to the Vistula, Nida and the southern foothills of the Holy Cross Mountains near Łysa Góra.
²⁴

It was mention of Łysa Góra, 200 miles east of Breslau, which electrified Ulrich Frodien’s father. Herr Frodien, a former army doctor, had taken his son into the Lower Silesian countryside, convinced fresh air and hunting in the Silesian countryside were the best convalescence for the eighteen-year-old; Ulrich’s thigh had been smashed, his head and chest peppered with shrapnel following an artillery strike on the Eastern Front the previous autumn. Until now that front “had always seemed a world away” to the inhabitants of Germanengrund, two dozen miles north of Breslau, but not now. Young Ulrich watched as everyday life in the village broke down:

Fear and helplessness spread through the village. Every office, every authority, every arm of the Party – if they were still contactable by telephone – remained silent or was as good as useless. Every man aged fifteen to sixty-five was called up by the Wehrmacht or
Volkssturm
, the women were completely left to their own devices. They had to face every decision alone.
²⁵

Twenty-five miles away, the housewives of Oels were celebrating the pig slaughter festival as they did every year. “It’s a little oasis in the desert-like austerity of the war,” enthused Erna Seiler. Boiled belly pork, sauerkraut and wellwurst – boiled pork sausage, a Silesian delicacy – were particularly tasty. “But the shadow of the Russians, growing closer by the day, weighs heavily upon us,” the thirty-eight-year-old confided to her diary. The owner of the sub-post office burst into the festival. The Party leadership was holding an urgent meeting on the situation. “They’ll probably talk about the evacuation of specific villages,” Seiler noted excitedly. They did not. “There’s no talk whatsoever of leaving,” Erna Seiler wrote. “On the contrary, we’re told it’s the anxious types who talk about packing. They should be ashamed of themselves for spreading disquiet among the populace. The Eastern Front holds and will continue to hold!” The
Frauenschaft
, the Nazi Party’s organisation for women, was more interested in debating how to celebrate Shrove Tuesday on 13 February. Long before then, Oels would be in Russian hands.
²⁶

Despite the assertions of Nazi Party functionaries, the Eastern Front was
not
holding. There no longer was an Eastern Front, not a continuous German line at any rate, just pockets of German units scattered across some 7,000 square miles of central Poland. Konev lunged along the Vistula towards Kraków and Upper Vistula with his left flank, towards Breslau and the Oder with his right, while his right-hand neighbour – and bitter rival – Georgy Zhukov pushed his 1st Byelorussian Front towards Łódź, Poznań and the lower Oder. Some
Landsers
struggled westwards in the wake of the Soviet armour, others were simply overrun. Command was paralysed. Near Radom, 19th Panzer and 6th
Volksgrenadier
Divisions had lost all communications with the outside world. They were in danger of being overwhelmed – but their commanders would issue no orders to retreat for fear of “getting it in the neck”.
²⁷
Other leaders were prepared to make independent decisions. The remnants of 17th Panzer Division were surrounded in a forest outside Kielce, led by their thirty-seven-year-old commander, Albert Brux. The Silesian was a brave man – he held the
Ritterkreuz
with Oak Leaves – but not a foolish one. He summoned his staff and gathered his men around him, then ordered them to lay down their arms. After interrogation, his captors showed him around the battlefield. “What remained of the division was a cemetery of men and vehicles,” he lamented. “Piles of metal skeletons scattered on the roads – this was all which was left of my panzers and armoured cars.”
²⁸
Generalmajor
Max Sachsenheimer – at thirty-five the second youngest general in the German Army – and his 17th Infantry Division suffered no such fate. Sachsenheimer was struck by the morale of his men as they fought their way back from Puławy, still singing the national anthem as they went into battle. “Each man fought doggedly, for himself and for his comrades, to beat a path back to Germany,” Sachsenheimer recalled. He watched as the heaviest Russian tanks, Josef Stalins, were destroyed by
Panzerfaust
right in front of him. But it could not go on like this. Ammunition and, above all, food was running out. Hunger sapped the men’s strength while Sachsenheimer’s artillerymen blew up gun after gun “after the last shell was fired” as the Soviet ring tightened. Some of the 17th Infantry broke out – “a forest,” Sachsenheimer wryly observed, “proved to be very useful”. But as a coherent fighting unit, 17th Infantry Division ceased to exist. “From this moment on, every man was on his own.”
²⁹
Signaller
Oberfeldwebel
Helmut Reiche found himself somewhere near Kielce with thirty men and no contact with the rest of Panzer Grenadier Regiment 90 – or any other German unit. “In our situation, there are two choices,” he decided. “Captivity or smashing our way through. There’s no question of the former.” Reiche and his comrades moved by night, stealing food from the homes of Poles. Each morning there were fewer and fewer men at roll call. They found the Polish landscape teeming with individual
Landsers
or small clusters of German soldiers trying to make their way west. They also found signs of battle: dead German and Russian soldiers, an abandoned German field ambulance, its patients dead.
³⁰
Walther Nehring somehow managed to keep his XXIV Panzer Corps intact, pushing it westwards, seeking the path of least resistance. Like a rolling snowball, Nehring’s ‘wandering pocket’ accumulated dispersed German units as it barrelled across Poland. “Only if we all stayed together could we reach our goal, while breaking up into individual groups meant death or captivity,” the general wrote. Among the units gathered by Nehring were elements of 20th Panzer Grenadier Division. “The strange thing was,” wrote its commanding officer,
Generalleutnant
Georg Jauer, “that despite all our worries and concerns, we never felt that we would die in the pocket. Each man trusted the next man, and everyone gave his all.”
³¹
It took ten days for Nehring’s corps to batter its way back to German lines after a 150-mile odyssey. And sometimes it was bluff rather than blood which aided escape. One senior NCO hollered “like a general” at a
Major
directing traffic at a bottleneck to let his vehicle through. The bluster succeeded. Elsewhere, several grenadiers wore Polish clothes over their uniform. A Russian field kitchen asked them for help. While the cooks yelled, the signallers pushed. They were even rewarded with a little food for their exertions. After that, the Germans vanished into the night.
³²