Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (27 page)

The word of God proved far more potent than the words of Adolf Hitler. At nightfall on Sunday, 28 January, Breslauers filed into St Barbarakirche on the western edge of the old town. The church was overcrowded, understandably, as worshippers from every parish in the city and every denomination had been invited to a united service. The priests told the huge congregation they would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them in their hour of need. “We do not wish to be hindered by any false fear,” they declared at the end of the service. “We seek help and advice in common prayer and concentration on the word of God, in whose hands all fates are safe.”
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The Church was a clear threat to Nazi authority. Relations between the Church and the Party had always been uneasy. Now they began to disintegrate. Nazi thugs repeatedly attacked one priest for refusing to leave the city. Joachim Konrad protested. That night he was woken by the thud of rifle butts against his door. “A group of suspicious-looking characters forced their way in, threatened me, swore in the most vulgar manner and stole my telephone.” After that, he spent the nights elsewhere. At the end of January, every priest was ordered to leave the city – ostensibly for their own safety, in reality to eliminate any challenge to Party rule. The priests revolted. They refused to leave. Now, more than ever, they were needed: the wounded needed comforting, the dead burying, the people moral and spiritual support. A deal was struck. Thirty-five Catholic and nine Protestant ministers were allowed to remain.
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They would serve as the city’s soul and conscience throughout the siege.

To Paul Arnhold, Breslau still offered salvation. The pioneer officer’s party of stragglers from LVI Panzer Corps was reduced to just three men, moving by night through the forests and woods of Poland, through undergrowth, over streams, grabbing rest and food from isolated cottages. They stumbled across one dwelling in a copse, “wonderfully warm although it also smelled of old people who had lived with cats for many years”. The soldiers didn’t care about the smell, only about warmth and food. The elderly Polish occupants brought out a foul-smelling potato stew. The men refused to eat it. “Experience told us that even in the poorest cottage there were better things kept hidden somewhere for the winter,” the pioneer officer wrote. The soldiers threatened the couple, who opened up a hole in the ground and pulled out two loaves and some salted meat. “We could not contain ourselves and attacked it like wild animals,” Arnhold recalled. “We paid the price for doing so; a short time later we brought it all back up again. Our weak stomachs could not cope with something like that any more.”

The soldiers grabbed some sleep and tried to clean themselves after a fortnight on the run. “We carefully removed our boots and shoes,” Paul Arnhold wrote.

What was left of our socks and foot-cloths had gone hard from dried blood and pus. My soles were just pus-filled flesh, but the worst pain came from inside. As I’d been running for three weeks on soles which were burned and warped, my metatarsal was horribly inflamed. When I stood up, the pain coming from it was unbearable. In addition, my ankles had swollen badly where the top edge of my boots rubbed with every step. Our feet were a pathetic sight. In normal times, no one would have believed it possible that we could run even one more step.

As darkness came, the three soldiers set out for the Oder, perhaps still sixty miles away. “As we left, the two elderly people signed the cross behind us. Their eyes were filled with sympathy and a little sadness; they probably gave us only a very slight chance of surviving.” The
Oberst
had now been on the move for three weeks:

Three weeks by day and night in snow and ice, hungry and hunted like wild animals. None of us had washed or shaved for three weeks. We had not changed our clothes for three weeks. We had worn our uniforms for three weeks. During the ‘bathe’ in the Pilica they had been soaked. Then they had frozen solid in the icy storm, and then we’d been hunted and harried in our wet gear. We huffed and puffed for three long weeks through undergrowth covered in snow and over vast expanses of snow. The uniforms were torn a thousand times by the brittle frozen branches and thorns. Ten days after our swim in the Pilica, our clothes were still damp.

My beard, with its many silvery-grey streaks, had grown so thick that my hands could reach into it. We’d not been able to wipe our arses for three weeks. But what’s the use of telling this to someone who hasn’t experienced it? That little scrap of
Pravda
was more important for our [Russian] Machorka cigarettes than a civilisation which wouldn’t have suited us anyway. For three weeks we’d been living like creatures in the jungle, ready to kill anyone who stood in the way of our progress, and ready to kill anyone who refused to give us food. Our mindset had become so primitive that we could no longer think of anything other than food and getting to the Oder. There were only three of us left now.

Never did we want to raise our hands in the air! Never! If we’d fired the last round and thrown the last hand-grenade, then we would have smashed the enemy’s face in with our bare rifles!
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Feldwebel
Karl-Heinz Wolter also sought the left bank of the Oder. Rather than slip through, the signaller and his comrades in the Hermann Göring Division – one of two first-rate units transferred from East Prussia and caught up in the maelstrom of retreat in Silesia – intended to punch their way across the river. The nearer the Oder, the more awful the sights. “Dead Russians lie around in heaps, between them women wearing shawls,” Wolter wrote. “Death caught up with them at their guns and anti-tank guns. The hard frost and white snow meant the dead had not changed at all – it was as if they were still alive. It is terrible.”

The signaller’s vehicle had to swerve around a motorcycle and sidecar, blocking a junction. Wolter wanted to scream at the two riders. He just about contained himself. “When we pass near to them, I see from their almost white, waxen faces, that they are dead, killed. Their stance on the motorcycle did not recognise death. The cold has only slightly changed them.”

Pioneers had thrown a bridge over the Oder near Steinau. Its approaches were strewn with the cadavers of horses, their stomachs bloated, shot-up vehicles and other abandoned equipment. On the bridge, the engineers valiantly stood in the pontoon boats to ensure the makeshift bridge, its sleepers and boards bound by rope, could take the strain.

The left bank of the river offered little comfort to Wolter and his comrades. Soviet artillery filled the air with iron. Its harvest was rich. “Dead soldiers, dead horses and smashed guns line our route of advance,” the
Feldwebel
wrote. He continued:

I see a dead artilleryman. His horse stands in front of him, its head lowered. Both soldier and horse are still bound to each other by the reins held by the stiffened hand. The animal stands on three legs, a foreleg was half shot away.

Only very occasionally have I been moved as I have been by this image of the dead gunner and his wounded horse.
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Thirty miles upstream at Peiskerwitz, trainee Waffen SS non-commissioned officers grappled with the Red Army. The SS men had arrived in Silesia just six weeks earlier, but the training at Deutsch Lissa, eight miles west of Breslau, abruptly stopped when the Red Army reached the Oder. Now, in the darkness of 28 January, the SS troops marched towards Peiskerwitz to eradicate the Russian bridgehead. It was a daunting prospect, for the sky over the village,
Untersturmführer
Hendrik Verton recalled, was “blood red”, flashes lighting up the horizon constantly with each shell fired by the Soviet barrage, while wounded or distraught German troops ran away. The Dutchman and his comrades pushed through copses under heavy mortar fire, finally reaching a forest beyond Peiskerwitz, just short of the Oder dam. “The flash of fire of exploding shells cast the snow-covered forest in an eerie light,” wrote Verton. “Dead Russian sharpshooters hung in the trees – we were never entirely sure whether they were not simply playing dead.” The screams of the wounded reverberated around the trees, while the SS troops could hear the Russians on the opposite side of the dam cursing and moving their mortars into position. Verton’s company commander gave the order to attack. With a loud hurrah, the company rushed up the steps in the side of the dam and stared down at the Russians, who had wrapped white sheets around their earth-brown uniforms as camouflage. There was a brief – and wild – exchange of fire before the SS fell back “silently or screaming”, leaving their dead on top of the dam, dragging some of the wounded, leaving the others to crawl to safety. Peiskerwitz was ablaze. “Shadows jumped past the flames – we weren’t sure whether they were friend or foe,” the Dutch volunteer recalled. The decimated company sought shelter in farmhouses, sheds and cellars and enjoyed their first cigarette of the battle. The baggage column brought up food; its place on the wagons was taken by the dead, hauled away into the night.

Hendrik Verton spent ten days at Peiskerwitz. “The young unshaven faces of my chums were thin now and angular, our uniforms gave us no warmth. Outside was grey, only grey,” he wrote. In the grey of dusk, it was impossible to tell where the heavens ended and the firmament began. “It matched our fighting spirit.” Verton’s unit had lost a hundred men in the fighting for the village. No more than two dozen SS troops marched out of Peiskerwitz.
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As they did, a thaw was setting in. The virgin white snow of January was turning to a dirty grey blanket in February. As the snow receded, the ghosts of the past fortnight appeared: the half-frozen corpses of Verton’s comrades. There were far worse sights in the ditches, fields and roadsides of Silesia. The thaw revealed as many as 80,000 corpses, victims of the flight from the Russian advance. Special burial parties were sent throughout the
Gau
to find and bury them.
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The fighting had yet to reach the heart of Breslau, or even its suburbs, but it was consuming the villages which ringed it on the left bank of the Oder. The airfield at Schöngarten, just seven miles west of the city centre, was becoming untenable as a base for aircraft: ground-attack planes on the standings were pounced upon by Soviet fighters, which scattered ten bombs across the field and caused more damage to the barracks than the aircraft, leaving rolls of paper, pencils, pens and other stationery strewn across the field. Schöngarten’s commanders heeded the warning and evacuated the base. Two days later, the last aircraft were flown away in a snowstorm, the Junkers transport aircraft kicking up huge clouds of fine snow as they started up. Just Hugo Hartung and his company of reluctant soldiers were left at the airfield. They had one final duty: to offload a transport of wounded being flown in that night. “We stand for hours freezing at the edge of the runway and wait for an aircraft landing,” the theatre director wrote. “We can hear it circling in the snow clouds above us.” The men fired flares but to no avail; the pilot could not find Schöngarten in the storm. After a while a ball of flames lit up the night: the aircraft had crashed with all its crew and its passengers.

There was no longer a need for Schöngarten, but there was for its men. After priming the five-ton bombs left behind so the airfield could be blown up, the stragglers received orders to join the Breslau garrison and defend the city. It did not go down well with the men, who decided to plunder Schöngarten’s stores before leaving. “It is like the land of milk and honey,” Hartung wrote. There were vast supplies of food and cigarettes. The cattle and pigs were slaughtered. “We find so much meat in our soup or in our stew that’s often too much for us.” The men felt guilty. “We do not like it either when we hear that refugees are starving in the streets.”

Hartung’s company received its baptism of fire a few days later in the village of Kriptau on the south-western edge of the airfield. As they moved down the road, the men passed the first corpse, a Luftwaffe man, his eyes wide open. They collected his weapons, removed his dog tags, but did not bury him. As for Kriptau, it was devoid of any Russians until late in the day when the rattle of tank tracks sparked panic. An inexperienced non-commissioned officer simply ran away, back to the airfield. A Hitler Youth, serving as a bicycle messenger, was killed by a shell splinter, a popular Berliner was killed by heavy machine-gun fire. “The confusion reaches its climax during the night,” Hartung wrote. He was sent with another reluctant soldier, the former chief producer at the opera, to observe the Russians from the edge of a forest. Flares continually rose into the sky. The two men could hear the Russians talking, their shrill whistles piercing the night. No one came to relieve the two observers. “So we lie, almost frozen stiff by the cold, for six long hours on the edge of this eerie forest.” In the small hours, another tank scare. Russian armour fired at the centre of Kriptau. One of the NCOs fell into a cesspit out of fear. With Soviet tanks on three sides, the men had orders to fall back to the airfield. They had achieved nothing.
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The skirmishes at Peiskerwitz and Kriptau were repeated in Breslau’s outlying villages. And always the defenders fell back towards the city.
Leutnant
Wolfgang Chutsch was sent with a makeshift company to re-take the village of Gerlanden, a dozen miles southeast of Breslau. Chutsch was an artilleryman recovering from wounds suffered in the Carpathians the previous autumn. He was ordered to Breslau not as an artilleryman but an infantryman. He was put in charge of a company of
Volkssdeutsche
, ethnic Germans from the Black Sea, 120 of them in all. “They only spoke broken German – slowly.”

Gerlanden had witnessed ferocious fighting. Several houses were wrecked and in the centre of the village the body of a
Leutnant
hung over a fountain with his head down, just touching the water. There were more dead nearby: numerous
Landsers
sprawled on a dung heap. A few of Gerlanden’s elderly residents dared to emerge from their hiding places. Cattle and pigs, terrified and in many cases wounded by the recent fighting, scurried around. “We gave some of them the
coup de grâce
and enjoyed some meat as a result.” Chutsch’s company spent a couple of days clashing sporadically with Russian troops in the next village, Zottwitz, and living on a diet of cigarettes and meat – the latter courtesy of the animals slaughtered in Gerlanden. Of the sixty-six men the artilleryman had led into battle, three quarters were casualties thanks to Russian machine-gun and sniper fire. Wolfgang Chutsch was one of them, wounded by shrapnel from a Russian shell which missed his heart by two inches.
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