Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (37 page)

But not everyone in Kletschkau faced the executioner. Maria Langner would survive the siege. The bunker sweethearts would survive – their ‘charms’ worked as well on the guards as they had done on soldiers in the cellars. Fifty-nine-year-old Hermann Babisch had no charms to deploy, but he was released after just ten days. The grocer was arrested on spurious charges – a neighbour had reported him for giving her uncle a clean shirt in place of a sweaty one, and the shirt belonged to an evacuated Breslauer. Cäcilie Babisch watched her father being led away by the Gestapo. She realized immediately his arrest was political, not criminal. Herr Babisch had never attended any Party meetings, nor hung the swastika flag outside his store.
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The misery of Kletschkau prison paled compared with that of the labour camps for foreign workers. Some 3,000, two thirds of them Poles, were interned in a former girls’ school in Clausewitzstrasse. The building was, wrote Paul Peikert, “like an anthill full of people”. The Catholic priest was allowed inside the camp in March to lead its inmates in prayer. “Every passageway, every stairwell, every room is completely occupied,” he wrote. “Young and old, young men and young girls, men and women next to one another.” The atmosphere was dank, stuffy, suffocating. No efforts were made to provide adequate sanitation for the 3,000 prisoners. Peikert struggled up the stairs to the fourth floor. “In every corner on the stairwell, in the corridors, in the rooms lie people, homeless, haggard, separated from their loved ones, and have had to do without the solace of religion.” The prison’s commanders had done everything in their power to prevent inmates holding services, but finally relented. The fourth-floor hall was full. At one end a temporary altar had been built with a cross, a painting of the Sacred Heart and a small picture of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, and adorned with flowers. After Communion, Peikert married a dozen couples and baptised two children before heading into the basement which served as both air raid shelter and hospital. “Arms and legs were amputated on a narrow bench by candlelight and in the glow of a Davy lamp, faces, skulls, stomachs were patched up and a vast number of splinters removed,” recalled Polish prisoner Irena Siwicka. On that same bench “festering bandages were changed, the injured were laid – their blood covered their rescuers and made them dirty. We were often so soaked in blood that our shirts stuck to our skin.” Children suffered the worst injuries. For them, Fortress Breslau was a vast playground. “And then someone would bring us these terribly mutilated little ones with their arms torn as far as their armpits, with their stomachs ripped down to their legs, with their intestines hanging out, with head wounds through which you could see their brains,” Siwicka recalled. It was, said Peikert, “a scene of misery and horror”. He offered the camp’s doctors – Hungarians, Bulgarians and Poles – his hands in gratitude. “Now I know what a camp for foreigners is.”
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Conditions in hospitals for the city’s German inhabitants and defenders were barely any better. The basements of convents, department stores, apartment blocks, city centre shops and public buildings served as first aid posts, treatment centres, hospitals. A red cross on a white flag hung above partially bricked-up windows often denoted their status, while patients – or, more accurately, casualties – were brought by ‘ambulances’: trucks, buses, even trams, their bodies painted white, red crosses in their windows. Martin Grunow was appointed chaplain for more than half a dozen hospitals by Hermann Niehoff. He did his best to visit each aid post at least once a week to care for the spiritual needs of the wounded. Of all the hospitals, none left as deep an impression as the one beneath the central station where only the most serious cases were treated. “There was a boy, not sixteen years old, whose open-mindedness and gratitude were touching,” Grunow recalled. “He repeatedly asked: ‘Herr chaplain, pray with me!’ How could this child stricken by sorrow pray?” Hugo Hartung spent four weeks in a cellar hospital near the Ring recovering from exhaustion and fever. Every room of the vaulted cellar was filled with the sick and wounded, stacked in bunks three beds high. The air was filled with the smell of blood and pus. At night, Hartung was kept awake by the cries of dying comrades. In the morning nurses would administer some drugs and the patient would quietly die. A few minutes later a small, stooped non-commissioned officer – patients called him
Totenvogel
, the bird of the dead – would wander along and collect the man’s personal effects. The empty bed was quickly filled. Occasionally, hospital staff would arrange a ‘weekend dance’: a keg of beer, a little music from a pianist and an accordion player. Even British and Russian prisoners joined in. “A funny world,” thought Hartung. “Maybe in a couple of days we’ll be the prisoners of our prisoners.”

Wretched though these makeshift cellar hospitals were, their squalor was surpassed by Breslau’s above-ground
Hochbunker
– tall bunkers – huge concrete structures dotted around the city. They served as gun platforms and command posts, their innards were used as air-raid shelters and, now, as hospitals. Hans Gottwald took cake, schnapps and cigarettes for comrades being treated in the five-storey Elbingstrasse bunker. “The air is hot and stuffy and almost takes my breath away. Thousands of wounded – mostly serious cases, amputees, head wounds and the like – lie packed tightly together. Like a maze inside. The passageways leading from the outside are like a snail’s shell and you can’t find your way.” The higher Gottwald climbed, the worse the air in the bunker grew. Finally, he found a friend from Oels, a goalkeeper with the local football team, with a severe leg wound. A blue piece of paper was attached to his feather quilt:
Ju transport
– evacuation out of the city by aircraft. Gottwald wished him good luck and slipped a bottle of schnapps under his pillow. “Hopefully, he’ll be lucky.” He was. The footballer survived the war.

Georg Haas never forgot the horrific scenes he witnessed in the Striegauer Platz bunker. He passed the operating theatre where doctors cast amputated body parts into a large zinc bath sporadically emptied by the nurses. One brushed past the Waffen SS clerk carrying a bucket. Haas could hear the pail’s contents sloshing around. A shiver ran down his spine. The “hopeless cases” were treated on the first floor – then it was not too far to carry the corpses when they died. Conditions were beyond basic. “Bare wooden beds, one on top of the other, hardly a mattress, straw sacks where a different poor devil croaked every day – sometimes even two or three in one shift. For most, musty blankets with dark, dried-up bloodstains.” Only at night did the trucks come to take the dead away – and they did not come every night. Georg Haas stumbled past dozens of stiff bodies next to the walls of the gloomy foyer. “Since there’s not enough space, the bodies of men who were ripped to shreds by battle and who died in the hands of overburdened doctors, have been piled up like sacks, one on top of the next, creating a gruesome barricade of stinking figures,” he remembered. “Pale faces with pointed noses and open mouths; cramped hands stick out from this wall of the dead and seem to want to grab at those passing by.”

For casualties being treated in the cellar hospitals there was at least the hope of fresh air. As he recovered, Hugo Hartung was allowed to stand at the door to the basement. The scene was almost serene. “It is wonderfully mild and the bushes have a green glimmer. Starlings build their home in a tree in the cloister courtyard. At this late hour, it is completely silent and the moon fills the sky. Only in the south do heavy black clouds of smoke rise.” A couple of days later, he walked gingerly around the city centre, dodging into doorways every time low-flying Soviet aircraft passed. “How much Breslau’s streets have changed already!” he wrote. “At every turn, shot-up and bombed-out houses.”
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The bombing – or bombardment – was constant. Soviet artillery regularly sent its ‘greetings’ to the city. By day, Soviet bombers attacked the city with seeming impunity. By night, Russian Po2 biplanes – their stuttering engines earned them the nicknames ‘sewing machines’ or ‘coffee grinders’ – strafed and bombed Breslau at low height, “as if they have all the time in the world,” fumed Georg Haas. Post official Conrad Bischof stuffed cotton wool in his ears each night to deaden the noise of the bombs and explosions. It normally worked, but one evening the crashing roused him from his bed. He cautiously shone a torch around his apartment – the boarding on one of the nailed-up windows had been blown away and he did not want to catch the eye of the Soviet aircraft flying no more than 300ft above the city. Air pressure had thrown a syrup drink around the room, plastering the walls with liquid. There was nothing he could do in the darkness. “I cleared the splinters from my bed and got in again, shoved cotton wool in my left ear and lay on my right side so that I didn’t hear our batteries shooting barely 100 metres away.” The bombardment was more ferocious on some days than others. Breslauers agree that Sunday, 11 March was particularly bad. Having been driven back from the edge of Gräbschen, and across Hindenburgplatz to the edge of Südpark, the Russians responded by subjecting the city’s southern suburbs to a ferocious barrage. Pharmacist Kurt Donnerstag counted more than five hundred sorties by enemy bombers as he tried to deliver medical supplies. His cargo never reached its destination. One bomb landed near his car, turning it into a heap of metal in an instant, shattering the jars of medicine and scattering bandages and cotton wool all over the street. The bombardment left the Strasse der SA one “heap of rubble” for a mile-long stretch as far as Hindenburgplatz,
Volkssturm
man Alfred Hardlitschke wrote to his wife. “If you could see Breslau – how it looks already.”
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It tore at the hearts of Breslauers to see their city destroyed. On his return from delivering a report, messenger Horst Gleiss passed the school he had attended just a few weeks earlier. “I stood in front of it, silent and full of mourning, and stepped over the ash, dust and ruins of the corridor to reach the first floor.” He could go no further, for the staircase had collapsed. He could see the remnants of the stained-glass window dedicated to the fallen of the First World War. A keen scientist, Gleiss could not resist peering into the laboratory. “Reduced to nothing. Nothing, simply nothing is recognisable.” Crestfallen, the schoolboy left in tears. His school had been reduced to a “desolate desert of ash and several brittle outer walls – so brittle they’re almost falling down.” What remained was “a sign of man’s senseless, cruel destructive nature”. Bitterly, Horst Gleiss was reminded of the Nazi slogan: ‘our walls may break, but not our hearts’. “Oh, you beautiful Breslau, how you have changed, how you have turned into a field of ruins and all because you are no fortress, you were merely turned into one with words,” Conrad Bischof lamented. To anti-tank gunner Lothar Reichel the city looked like “Sodom and Gomorrah before their downfall”.
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It was man’s, not God’s, wrath destroying Breslau. God was powerless. Protestant clergyman Joachim Konrad protested that artillery observation posts and machine-gun nests were being installed in church towers. His protests were brushed aside by the fortress’s blunt and uncompromising operations officer Albrecht Otto. “Every strategic point must be used in the interests of the defence.” As far as Paul Peikert was concerned, this was war for war’s sake. “This war has become the destruction of blood and worldly goods in the hands of a leadership for whom war is an end in itself and war now means the destruction of its own people,” he wrote. “No government has used the word ‘people’ more than this one. And never have the rights of the people been trampled upon more than by these brutes, even here in Breslau. In their eyes, only they and the enemy exist. The people are like air. They are tortured and bullied. They have merely become objects.”
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The “mania for destruction”, as Peikert called it, was infectious. Explosive experts sized up the
Staatsbibliothek
– state library – on Sandinsel, then told librarians the 800-year-old institution was earmarked for demolition. Its ruins – books and all – would create a ‘protective ceiling’ for a new fortress command post when the Liebichshöhe became threatened. Staff protested. Many of the library’s most precious items had been moved to safety before the siege, but there were still 550,000 volumes on its shelves. Niehoff eventually relented and allowed the books to be evacuated to the Annenkirche, across the Oder. At first 100, then 200 and finally 300 people began to empty the library, but so much activity on the otherwise quiet island attracted the attention of Soviet bombers. As the evacuation became ever more desperate, an overzealous junior officer piled up scores of books on the Oder embankment so they could simply be pushed into the river. They were saved, not out of any cultural sensitivity but to prevent the weirs being blocked.
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Three streets near the Hauptbahnhof were singled out for demolition. “Every floor is cleared out, windows smashed, furniture, or what is left of it, thrown into the street, valuable and simple decorations, priceless ornaments, sacred family heirlooms and family souvenirs, holy pictures and religious statues, prayer books and crucifixes, it’s all thrown into the street,” the priest wrote. “On top of that, cupboards and drawers are emptied and clothes, pieces of washing and beds, they’re all thrown into the street where they’re set alight.” For a day and night, the three streets burned. “Enormous clouds of smoke rise up into the sky and hang over the city like a sulphurous haze because of the mild weather,” Peikert recorded. “In the evening, the moon still tries to cast its silvery light over the city, but the sky is red from the glow of flames from a street which is completely on fire. What a tragedy this act of self-destruction of a people is, how each person trembles and shakes because of this insane act and yet no one can find the strength to stop it.” In this instance, the demolition served no purpose; the battle for Breslau would never reach the streets around the station.
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