Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (36 page)

This was the world paratrooper Rudi Christoph entered near Hindenburgplatz as the second week of March began. As the men took up their positions, Breslauers handed them chocolate and wine, overjoyed they had come to defend their district. The
Fallschirmjäger
had been in the fortress for nearly a fortnight now, but some had yet to receive their baptism of fire. “On quiet days we’d practised house-to-house fighting, so it didn’t seem so bad,” wrote Rudi Christoph. His mood changed when his unit was ordered to counter-attack.

The sight which greeted us was depressing. Entire blocks were shot up and burned out and the ruins eerily towered into the heavens. Lighting wires, trees, pylons, street lamps, advertising pillars lay shot-up in the streets and several heaps of rubble, which had once been a house, blocked the road. We came ever closer to the front line. There was the dull rumble of artillery, and in between the mocking ‘giggle’ of machine-guns. A terrible fever seized us. So it looked like fighting in houses and the street! Houses burned brightly and lit up the streets despite darkness setting in. A beautifully tragic sight – had things not been so serious.

After an hour’s fighting, two sister companies were exhausted. Christoph’s, held in reserve until now, was thrown into the fray as night fell. The paratroopers moved down burning Körnerstrasse, one side occupied by German soldiers, the other by the Red Army. From barricaded cellar windows, the Soviets raked the street with “furious machine-gun and rifle fire”.
Panzerfaust
and hand-grenades were repeatedly launched at the enemy-held cellars, but one machine-gun post doggedly held out until a self-propelled gun was called in to silence it. “One step closer to victory,” thought Christoph – but still Körnerstrasse was not in German hands. There was one final assault by the paratroopers, this time using flamethrowers which, wrote Christoph, “lit the path to the ‘eternal hunting ground’ for the Ivans”. With the foe eliminated, the
Fallschirmjäger
fell back to the opposite side of the street and rested in the cellars after a six-hour battle. “A solemn calm descended and we only heard the crackle of the burning houses,” said Christoph. “Our heroic platoons looked suitably depleted – we finished the battle with one officer and fifteen men and retired for a short rest in the proud knowledge that they had carried out their orders to the last man. Sleep – that was our only wish after this battle because we had to be fresh for other days.”
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Around the corner in Victoriastrasse, Reinhard Paffrath gathered his paratroopers on a pile of rubble in the entrance of a ruined home. Just five days before, the street had been relatively intact. Now, the homes were little more than façades with the occasional stairwell still standing. The first floor was propped up with beams and rubble, but every few minutes, enemy mortars landed on the ceiling. It was only a matter of time before the rubble gave way and the roof collapsed. But Paffrath was trapped. Sniper fire pinned his small group down. He held up a helmet and stuck out a boot to test the rifleman’s accuracy. The sniper took the bait. When a Soviet ground-attack aircraft strafed Victoriastrasse, the officer convinced himself that the sniper – like the paratroopers – would be distracted. He was not. When Paffrath leaped across the street and jumped through the door of a sweet shop, a bullet just missed his backside and struck the doorway, shattering blue and white tiles. He used the near-miss to estimate the sniper’s location, fired at every window and hole in the wall, and was never troubled by the Russian sharpshooter again.
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Back in Körnerstrasse, Rudi Christoph was still in the front line after thirty-six hours without rest, trying to drive the Soviets back to the next block in Neudorfstrasse. After a dawn attack, the paratroopers had seized one side of the street before running into an impenetrable wall of fire.

We took up defensive positions in the cellar of a burned-out house and waited for the Ivans to come at us. There was a tropical temperature of around 65°C thanks to the burnt coke and coal. Apart from the heat we noticed that the Ivans still occupied the opposite end of the house above our heads and dropped several hand-grenades right in front of us, or raised the temperature with their flamethrowers. Each one of us was seized by thirst and yet more thirst on the evening of this first day in our tropical paradise…

Thanks to the tremendous heat and dust we soon no longer looked like people. Our faces and hands were covered with a layer of dust and dirt. It stopped only around our mouths and eyes. We were soon overtaken by a sluggish tiredness as a result of the constant heat. Our only wish was to satiate our thirst and to be allowed to sleep. We had to wait three days for such luxuries. We waited day and night for Ivan to attack, but apart from his daily greetings, everything was quiet.
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Among the apartments Rudi Christoph was contesting in Neudorfstrasse was one owned by Lothar Reichel. “I don’t know whether our house is still standing,” the former teacher wrote to his mother. “I’ve not been there for a long time and there’s been all sorts of damage and destruction in the city.” The anti-tank gunner was committed in Lilienthal, a few miles north of his home, “up to our knees in water – storms and rain, cold nights.” He had received no post from outside the fortress. “Our modest exchange of letters remains one-sided,” he wrote a little despondently. “In three short weeks it will be Easter; will we be free by then?”
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Ferdinand Schörner believed so. “If you take the fight to the Bolsheviks,” the general brashly declared, “they can be beaten under every circumstance.” Ferdinand Schörner had taken the fight to the enemy. And he had beaten him – after a fashion. 1st Ukrainian Front intelligence officers had warned against dismissing the German Army out of hand: the Fritzes were not demoralized, they were not undisciplined and they were “still capable of fighting with great determination”. The warning went unheeded. ‘The iron Ferdinand’ caught Third Guards Tank Army by surprise, smashing through its lines with two panzer corps on either side of the market town of Lauban, seventy-five miles west of Breslau. A few days after the breakthrough, the two corps linked up in the Queis valley, a handful of miles beyond Lauban. The town itself was liberated, as were a few square miles of Silesian soil, and more than 250 Soviet tanks, plus fifty guns and countless vehicles, were destroyed. Lauban barely merited the title ‘battle’ but was trumpeted by the Nazi propaganda machine with headlines proclaiming, ‘Fighting spirit certain of victory in Silesia’ and ‘The hour of our victory will come.’ Three days after Lauban’s liberation, Joseph Goebbels visited the town, where he was welcomed like a conquering hero. Swastika flags had been hastily hung around the ruins of the main square, the walls of its houses burned black. A small platform had been erected next to a wrecked T34 to allow the propaganda minister to address the troops who had retaken Lauban. “You have succeeded in bringing our infernal foe to a standstill, in driving back the Bolshevik beast,” Goebbels told them. “I know that this is only the beginning. It is the beginning of their end and downfall and the beginning of our mighty victory. The hour before sunrise is always the darkest; but soon the sun will shine brilliantly over Germany again.” Goebbels drew his confidence from Ferdinand Schörner, “a born leader”. In a few weeks, the general assured the propaganda minister, he would liberate Breslau.
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Schörner will come
. It was the hope which sustained Breslauers – and it was a hope which quickly faded. “The eternal wait,” FAMO employee Carl Völkel recorded in his journal on 10 March. “Death and ruins everywhere. Nowhere are we safe and we just wait.” A week later: “Eight weeks have passed. We believed that the catastrophe would end, but we here in Breslau are in exactly the same spot as we were on day one.” And on 4 April: “Always the same. We hope from day to day. Peace is tangibly close and yet nothing happens.” Völkel’s terse diary entries capture the bitter daily existence of Breslau’s civilians as well as do any of the city’s more erudite chroniclers. His fifteenth wedding anniversary passed with him besieged, his wife and children safely in Bavaria. Neither husband nor wife celebrated. Frau Völkel had no idea where her husband was, let alone whether he was dead or alive. “May God grant that he’s healthy and alive for the sake of me and the children,” she prayed. He was alive, but he was beginning to lose hope. “We face ruin,” Carl Völkel wrote. “I am braced for anything.”
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Elderly electrician Hermann Nowack appreciated the irony that all the finest apartments and homes were empty, the tightly-packed workers’ districts still heavily populated. He appreciated it until he was uprooted from his apartment in Bohrauer Strasse to a new ‘home’ on the right bank of the Oder in the first week of March.
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In moving, Nowack joined Breslau’s ever-growing underground community. In the basements of larger apartment blocks there was space for perhaps fifty beds. Stoves were set up, fed by coal since the city’s gas supply had long since failed. It was basic, but as Ernst Hornig observed, “ordinary cellars with a little strength, heating and water connections were now more important and more desirable than the finest apartment because survival depended on them.” The priest was a regular visitor to these cellar communities. All Breslau’s clergy were. Basements became places of worship – the city’s churches were no longer safe. “People asked for words to strengthen and lift them up,” Hornig remembered. “There was silence as soon as the clergy spoke and even those who never attended church listened attentively.” It reminded him of the earliest days of the Church when Christians also met underground, “for different reasons, persecution”.
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The Party leadership would celebrate the sense of community –
Volksgemeinschaft
– fostered in the bowels of Breslau, but Hermann Nowack saw little evidence of it. If he left his possessions in his suitcase in rooms above ground, they would be covered in ash and dust. If he left them in a cellar while he worked – cooking, chopping wood, sewing buttons, cleaning clothes – they would quickly be plundered. “I sometimes think I must be going mad,” he wrote. “On the one hand, you fear for your life, and five minutes later the green-eyed monster has awoken in people.”
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For the most part, it was not valuable items which disappeared,
Volkssturm
man Willy Merkert realized. “We don’t want to grab valuable furniture, silver, expensive radios, carpets, wardrobes from apartments because they’re not worth anything any more. We look for what we can use, eat the finest stewed fruit and drag what we need to our cellar.”
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Despite the threat of execution, looting grew more and more prevalent. So too did orgies. Alcohol and sex were the roots of most transgressions. Where there was the one, there was invariably the other. Hermann Nowack found food and drinks lined up on the table of his local Party headquarters, transplanted to the basement of an electricity company. It was if “victory was being celebrated”.
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Each morning, junior officer Erich Schönfelder watched gaunt sixteen-year-old boys emerge from the cellars with young girls in tow. “A lost youth,” he wrote. “Who would want to condemn them?”
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There was less forgiveness for older women who succumbed to avarice and temptation, the
Bunkerliebchen
– ‘bunker sweethearts’ – driven to seek sexual gratification out of fear of death. Dressed brightly, with artificial flowers in their hair, these women forced their way to the front of cellars, sat longingly on window ledges singing popular tunes, talked of orgies, enjoyed brief flings with soldiers and batted their eyelashes at any passing male. Their lust grew stronger as Breslau’s plight worsened.

Such women often ended up in the prison in Kletschkaustrasse, alongside political prisoners like Communist Maria Langner, imprisoned for four years for helping a deserter. Langner sneered at the bunker sweethearts – “the most repulsive vermin in the fortress and their numbers grow like flies around a rotting carcass” – who joined her in a 190-square-foot basement cell with twenty other women. The windows were smashed, so by night the women blocked the holes with mattresses which they aired during the day in the courtyard. For several days, however, the mattresses remained in place, the cell shrouded in darkness, as the legs of a dead British soldier – probably an escaped prisoner of war – lay in front of the window. “I met him during the final hours of his young life when he went for a walk,” Langner recalled. “He was maybe twenty-three, extremely attractive, had a noble profile, neat dark hair, and in his eyes was a look of horror which no longer understood anything.” His executioner was an SS officer “either already or still drunk” at 6am when he began his daily killings – as many as 250 prisoners were executed during the siege. “Once he’s finished his quota of shootings for the day,” Langner wrote, “he has breakfast then continues drinking until he falls asleep in his armchair.” His men were sadistic. Sixteen-year-old shop assistant Cilli Steindörfer was left in the cells for three days with festering wounds, and only then was allowed to exercise in the prison garden. Cilli had been captured by the Russians when they overran her block. A veteran Red Army major took pity on the girl and looked after her – but not for long because the block was recaptured by German troops who wounded the girl during their counter-attack. They were convinced she was a spy and handed her over to the security service for interrogation. Now, as Cilli bent down to pick a couple of daisies, a guard shot her in the back of the neck.
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