Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (32 page)

Shortly before dusk on 16 February, more than fifty dots appeared in the sky above Breslau. As the sun began to dip in the west, the aircraft broke formation. “Huge puffed-out red mushrooms suddenly appear in the sky, falling slowly to earth,” wrote battalion adjutant Erich Schönfelder.

Dark shapes dangle on the ropes beneath these mushrooms, causing a great deal of consternation. The occasional person points to the sky at first with an expression of the surprise, then one of horror. Now hundreds are looking up to sky –
Landsers
and civilians. They stop walking, look up in disbelief at this strange sight, until from somewhere there’s the shrill cry of terror: “Paratroopers, red paratroopers! The Russians are using airborne troops to take hold of the airfield.”

Hugo Hartung and his comrades grabbed their carbines and began wildly shooting at the aircraft and the parachutes. “Cease fire,” their flak commander screamed. “You’re shooting at our planes!” Breslauers, too, quickly realized that the parachutes brought supplies, not death. “As quickly as the horror took hold, it’s vanished again,” Erich Schönfelder noticed. The canisters were scattered: some landed at Gandau, some drifted into the Oder a few yards away, and some landed near the Soviet lines – so close that German troops gathering them came under mortar fire. Breslauers cared little for the ammunition and weapons the canisters contained, but a rumour quickly flashed through the city: the post had been dropped and would soon be distributed. For most inhabitants, it was the first news from the outside world, from loved ones evacuated, in four weeks.
³⁰

The air supply of Breslau began encouragingly. For the loss of just seven aircraft and sixteen men in the first six nights of operations, 315 tonnes of supplies were delivered. The aircraft did not leave the fortress empty. They carried more than 1,600 people out of the encircled city, including Paul Arnhold. The pioneer officer had been joined at Gandau by his two comrades from their bitter trek from the Vistula to the Oder – neither man had been able to break through the Soviet ring around Breslau. Medics determined they should be flown out at the first opportunity. But they would not share the same aircraft as Paul Arnhold, there was no room. They accompanied the
Oberst
to the door of the Junkers 52 under heavy artillery fire. The pioneer officer was tempted to climb out as Rosseck and Feiner waved forlornly. When a salvo landed not fifty yards away, the pilot throttled the engine up and the transporter raced down the runway. “For all three of us, it was a sad departure,” Arnhold wrote. “I was not ashamed to wipe away a couple of tears.” The Junkers headed west for an hour. The sky suddenly turned blood-red – Dresden was still aflame, four days after the city had suffered one of the heaviest air raids of the war. The Junkers “flew over thousands of fires” before touching down west of the city. From there, the officer was put on a hospital train and sent to the spa town of Bad Elster. His convalescence would last just four weeks. Before the end of March, Paul Arnhold was back on duty.
³¹

On the western edge of Breslau’s defensive perimeter, Hendrik Verton and his
Regiment Besslein
comrades watched Soviet engineers with admiration as they tried to build a temporary crossing over the Weistritz in Deutsch Lissa. The SS troops emptied their machine-guns at the opposite bank. Tracer fire created an eerie impression as the shells hissed into the river. The Russians responded with heavy fire, enveloping the Germans in clouds of smoke and brick dust. Under this protective umbrella, the pioneers finished their bridge. By morning, a handful of assault troops gingerly crossed and formed a small bridgehead. They would soon be cut off.

Hans von Ahlfen had monitored the Soviet engineers on the Weistritz. He had allowed them to throw a bridge across the river. Now he committed his secret weapon. He sent pioneer
Leutnant
Hans Kohne with three remote-controlled miniature tanks – Goliaths – each packed with a 165lb explosive charge. With German artillery and mortar shells crashing down on the left bank of the river to drown out the noise the small tanks made, Kohne manoeuvred his Goliaths on to the bridge. When they reached the main span, the officer detonated them. Three flashes, then the makeshift crossing was enveloped in clouds of thick black smoke. It took an eternity for it to clear, but when it did Kohne could see that two stretches of the bridge had been destroyed and one of its pillars had crashed into the Weistritz.

The Soviet attack disrupted, Verton and his comrades booby-trapped the cellars of abandoned homes in Deutsch Lissa, on the right bank of the Weistritz, fixing hand-grenades to door handles “so that the Russians at least faced a little resistance”.
Regiment Besslein
fell back through the night – “the clattering of our gasmasks was the monotonous and ever-present rhythm of our march” – first through the deserted village of Stabelwitz, seven miles north-west of the city centre, bound for Schmiedefeld on the western edge of Breslau. After three weeks in the front line, the city offered sanctuary to the worn-out soldiers, a chance to wash and sleep properly for the first time in weeks. “To us,” wrote Hendrik Verton, “Breslau seemed a peaceful oasis in the middle of a hell of fire and death.” His company would quickly discover it was not.
³²

Werner Zillich and his
Regiment Schulz
comrades were enjoying a break after their labours on the edge of Brockau, five miles south-east of the city centre. The men were satisfied with their work. They had finished digging foxholes and the village was well fortified for the coming assault – the front door of every apartment or house in Brockau, and many of the internal doors, had been booby-trapped with mines. “If somebody opened the door, they would be blown into the air,” eighteen-year-old Zillich recalled. Now it was time for breakfast – and Brockau was richly stocked; its inhabitants had left behind copious supplies of preserved fruit and meat. One of the men fetched a pail filled with jam. And then ‘Stalin’s Organs’, the multiple rocket projectors, opened fire. “We could tell,” wrote Zillich, “that they were aiming for us.” The troops dashed for their foxholes. SS
Sturmmann
Zillich was too slow. The holes were full. He threw himself to the ground and waited for the onslaught to end. Eventually, it did. The men climbed out of their foxholes. One looked across at Zillich and called for a medic. The SS soldier stood up, bemused. “This lad still doesn’t notice anything,” his comrades laughed. A shell had smashed the pail of jam and splattered his coat. “They thought it was blood, that I was wounded,” Zillich recalled. “Terror and joy at the same time.” Shortly afterwards the men heard the crash of explosions coming from Brockau: Red Army troops were searching the houses – and paying a fearful price. “We do not know how many were killed,” Zillich said, “but all hell was let loose because there was no attack in the coming days.”
³³

Vladimir Gluzdovski’s attack faltered at Brockau, but elsewhere the first day of ‘Operation Breslau’ saw five outlying villages fall to his Sixth Army, among them Krietern, not three miles from the city centre. “Houses burn, a pungent mist hampers breathing and hinders vision. Eyes water,” wrote war correspondent Vassily Malinin, who took part in the village’s capture. “This merciless, bloody struggle for every house, for every floor continues. It’s not uncommon for the walls of houses which fall down to bury soldiers of both sides in the ruins.” After the lightning thrust from the Vistula to the Oder, Malinin realized that fighting in a city was an entirely different proposition. He found the roads blocked by stone barricades, houses blown up by the defenders to leave streets impassable. Each night at 8pm precisely, the apartment blocks and villas of affluent Breslau society were dynamited. Sometimes they were still occupied, but the inhabitants were given no time to gather their possessions. Furniture, clothes, family heirlooms, all added to the mountains of rubble. The Red Army responded in kind, blowing up walls and hauling guns through the breaches, then directing their fire at the German positions. In narrower streets it was almost impossible to determine from which window machine-gun or sniper fire came. An advance of two hundred yards was something to be celebrated. “Two hundred yards in the city, in street fighting – that’s a lot. That’s two, sometimes even three houses,” the war correspondent noted. For it seemed every house, every floor of every house, every room of every house, had to be contested. “If our soldiers don’t comb out the entire house – from attic to cellar – then we’re not certain the house is free.” There were veterans of the struggle for Stalingrad in Sixth Army’s ranks, but for most of Gluzdovski’s soldiers the initial fighting in Breslau’s suburbs was a new experience. They were men, battalion commander Captain Nikolai Nemakin remembered, who had mainly grown up in villages and fought in the open. “The labyrinth of streets and squares of a sprawling, burning city, full of acrid smoke and clingy soot which hung in the air everywhere seemed like out-and-out hell, something they had never experienced,” he wrote.
³⁴

The defenders of Breslau were also adjusting to their first exposure to street fighting. Lessons were brutal and bloody. After sporadically firing on Russian positions near the sprawling Südpark, Max Baselt’s
Hitlerjugend
platoon was subjected to a ferocious barrage. The mortars took a direct hit, so too the men bringing up crates of ammunition. When he returned from fetching ammunition, fifteen-year-old Baselt found his comrades either dead or wounded, their faces grey and covered with dirt. It was their own fault, the teenager reasoned. “Our stupidity! The best protection against being discovered is changing position quickly.” They had failed to do so – and paid the ultimate price. The gravely wounded were pushed to a field hospital in a wheelbarrow, the lightly wounded walked on foot. “Everyone is still stunned, hardly anyone speaks,” Baselt wrote. That evening, Baselt’s section leader held roll-call in the shadow of the imposing red-brick water tower which dominated the southern Breslau skyline. The
Unterscharführer
had started the day with eighteen men. Now he had nine.
³⁵

Otto Rothkugel and his companions in
Volkssturm Bataillon Peschke
were ordered to build machine-gun emplacements near the FAMO works on the western edge of the city. The Russians quickly observed their activity and began to plaster the goods station which served the factory. “As the house where we were billeted was close to it, our cellar shook and it felt like we were in a boat which was rocking,” Rothkugel wrote. “We were constantly afraid that the house would collapse and we would be buried under the ruins.” Sometimes there were lengthy pauses in the barrage. “Some of us thought about the end and called upon God to help even if at other times we wanted nothing to do with God.”
³⁶

In nearby Schmiedefeld, Hendrik Verton’s company took shelter in cellars as Russian artillery and mortars began to pummel the village.

We sat or stood in the dark cellar in silence. Shells crashed outside in quick succession. Now and then wounded
Landsers
staggered down the cellar steps and reported with horror that hell was raging in the street. In the end, soldiers from every branch of the armed forces were crammed in the cellar. Between the explosions, the wounded cried.

Russian infantry did not attack Schmiedefeld, but the barrage had left the village in ruins: houses were wrecked, the main street “had been ploughed up by numerous hits”. Once again the Waffen SS troops pulled out, this time halting in the grounds of the now abandoned and overgrown Linke-Hofmann works. “We now realized that we had to defend a city, because from time to time civilians cautiously entered the surrounding houses to save their most important items,” Verton recalled. “They would carefully lock their empty, but still intact, apartments as if that would save them.”
³⁷

A few hundred yards away, Hugo Hartung dug in on the railway embankment. His company received no instructions on entrenching. He and a comrade, an Upper Silesian farmer, dragged building material from nearby gardens to create a makeshift foxhole. A professor hauled a mattress to make his hole more comfortable. When the company’s battle-hardened
Unteroffizier
returned, he berated the reluctant soldiers. The positions were pathetic, while the red mattress was the perfect target for Russian aircraft. A mile away, the church in Neukirch “burned like a torch and the fires in the south-west of the city grew.” The gardeners’ huts where the day before Hartung’s company had found shelter were now ablaze. “The warm flow of embers blew pleasantly towards us on this bitterly cold night,” he wrote, while transport aircraft rumbled overhead, bound for Gandau airfield, a couple of miles to the east.

The following morning the Luftwaffe troops were pulled out of the line. They spent the day resting with a couple of civilians and several women in an inn “whose owner was still serving beer”. For the first time, the soldiers learned that the city was encircled and Dresden had suffered “a terrible air raid”. After twenty-four hours’ rest, the company returned to the embankment before first light on 19 February. From his foxhole, Hugo Hartung stared at a small mound of sand. He named it the Wendelstein after a crooked-peaked mountain in Bavaria. “I very much enjoy the sun rising up on my little Alpine peak,” he wrote. “Gleaming, it stands out against the dark-blue February sky.” He continued:

These wistful memories do not last long, however, because as the sun rises, the Russian artillery wakes up and shoots at our positions. One shell lands not fifty metres from us and causes a hail of splinters to fall on our foxhole. Rifle shots strike the tracks and the rain of gravel from the embankment which drums against our steel helmets after each impact is particularly unpleasant. A lark, the first this spring, provides the treble in this hellish concert. Unruffled, its chirps grow louder.