Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (38 page)

In fact, the Soviet assault on Breslau had miscarried. The ferocity of the fighting surprised even hardened campaigners such as Vassily Malinin. “The fighting doesn’t pause even for one hour,” he noted in his diary. While there was “joyful, victorious news” from every other front, in Breslau “the fighting’s hard and stubborn. The enemy does not want to surrender. He doggedly occupies every street, every house.” The war correspondent watched two Soviet machine-gunners haul their gun through water so they could bring it to bear on a German bunker guarding a factory. From behind a brick wall they directed their fire at the machine-gun nest and wiped it out. Their comrades took the works from the rear, standing firm in the face of a counter-attack by three dozen German troops. Anti-tank and field guns were called up to drive shells into houses until their walls collapsed, while self-propelled guns knocked out German guns hidden in barricades and provided cover for advancing infantry. After five days’ fighting, Malinin and his comrades were given an hour’s rest. “There’s rarely an hour like this these days in this city. The men sort out their weapons and uniforms, wash, write letters home with the promise that they will soon return triumphantly.”
³⁰
Lieutenant Sergei Kravshenko could not fail to be impressed by the morale of his troops on the eve of battle. Some of his men had defended Odessa in the opening months of the war, although Kravshenko had only led them since the late summer of 1944. They did not need to be told an attack was imminent. “The soldiers had a nose for something,” Kravshenko recalled. The signs were obvious. The regiment redeployed. Artillery observers moved up to the front line. Guns were camouflaged. Additional supplies of hand-grenades were brought up. In the final hours before an assault a few
frontoviki
wrote letters. More exchanged addresses with comrades. “If something happens to me, write to my …” One of Kravshenko’s men picked up his accordion and played the popular folk song
Ogonek
. “How many of those men who had fought with me for the past seven months would see tomorrow?” the young officer wondered. “Dying is never pleasant – especially not now when the end of the war is within reach.”
³¹
The proximity of the war’s end was a common theme. It drove some men onwards. “We’re all in a good mood,” artillery commander Vitalij Babarykin, a major at just twenty-one, wrote to his family. “Now the entire world knows that the end of Fascism is near. Forever! We knew that this day would come from the very beginning. Understand, my love, what we feel, we veterans of this war, who have dealt the enemy a knockout blow, the enemy who began this war. There is justice yet.”
³²
For other
frontoviki
morale was sustained by the 1st Ukrainian Front newspaper,
Za chest’ Rodiny
(
For the Honour of the Fatherland
), and Sixth Army’s
Na rozgrom vraga
(
Down With The Enemy
), which were distributed every day among the troops.
For the Honour of the Fatherland
photographer Dmitri Baltermants was ordered to Breslau to capture images of combat. He joined a pioneer unit, took a handful of staged photographs, then heard the strains of Tchaikovsky coming from a ruined house. He quietly entered the room, whose outer wall had vanished, and found a handful of
frontoviki
gathered around a piano played by a second lieutenant. None of the men heard Baltermants come in, or noticed him taking his photograph. He took scores of images that day, hundreds more in the battle for the Silesian capital, but none possessed the power of a photograph Baltermants titled simply
Tchaikovsky, Germany 1945
.
³³
It was not the task of front-line newspapers to capture the beauty of battle, but to carry men forward into battle, playing up the role of the Communist Party and its members in the vanguard of the struggle, of course. Political officers read out letters sent by strangers in the Motherland. Lectures were held on street-fighting, while
Down With The Enemy
produced a weekly sheet containing the latest advice on subjects as varied as the use of armour, night fighting, reconnaissance and smoke screens. “Move as quickly as possible!” one leaflet advised.

Danger threatens with every step. It does no harm to toss a hand grenade around every corner, then advance! A burst from a machine pistol at the rest of the ceiling. And advance again! The next room, hand grenade! Turn around – another hand grenade! Spray the corners with your machine pistol! Do not hesitate! If you are already in the heart of the building, the enemy can try a counter-attack. Don’t panic! You have already deprived him of the initiative – it is in your hands! Cling on to your hand grenade, your machine-pistol, your spade with even greater determination.
³⁴

Yet no amount of lectures, no article in a newspaper could prepare any man,
Landser
or
frontovik
, for the daily realities of the battle for Breslau. Otto Rothkugel was convinced he was prepared “for every eventuality”. The
Volkssturm
man kept a second gun in reserve – his rifle frequently jammed because of the dust in the cellars – plus a hand-grenade. But there was one eventuality the
Volkssturm
man had not prepared for: fire in his cellar. Soviet mortar shells plastering his unit in Hohenzollernstrasse set fire to tinderdry crates in the men’s basement. “We were all but smoked out because we could not clear the growing smoke,” he recalled. There was no water to extinguish the flames – or to wash away the dust and dirt of battle for that matter. The
Volkssturm
troops tore at the crates to break them up and throw them out of the cellar. Even so, many of the men, including the forty-seven-year-old Rothkugel, needed treatment for smoke inhalation. He slept for two solid days and nights. When he returned to his company, its original 150 men had been reduced to just 80. Fighting in a cellar while fires raged in the building above was commonplace. SS company commander Franz Budka continued to shoot at the enemy in the building of an insurance firm opposite his strongpoint in Augustastrasse. Bare-chested, he ordered a chain of helpers to pour buckets of water on him and his men so they could withstand the otherwise unbearable heat. Even when a house or a block finally fell to the Red Army it was not secure. Explosive charges, packed inside old bomb cases or empty acetylene and hydrogen bottles, were frequently buried under coal or junk in the cellars. When the Soviets occupied the building, the booby traps were detonated electrically. At least 200 such charges were laid. “The enemy was invariably completely surprised and the effect was considerable,” one pioneer commander recalled. “One five-storey house went up in flames in a few seconds.” It was not the only dirty trick the fortress engineers used. More than 5,000 ‘brick mines’ – wooden boxes containing explosive and covered with red and white-yellow brick dust – were strewn amid the rubble. Indistinguishable from bricks, they were carefully laid at night by fishing lines from skylights, windows, balconies.
³⁵

Engineers from the former FAMO works fashioned all manner of makeshift weapons such as a machine-gun mounted on a three-wheel chassis protected by a steel-plate shield. Wheeled around a corner to fire a few short bursts, it was then hurriedly withdrawn to safety. Then there were ‘sniper huts’ – pyramid-shaped steel ‘huts’ dug into the railway embankment near Pöpelwitz to provide troops with protection.
³⁶
FAMO’s genius for improvisation reached its apotheosis in mid-March. On Tuesday the twentieth, the men of
Regiment Hanf
were being hard pressed by a Russian rifle regiment, supported by artillery, in Klein Mochbern on the western edge of the fortress. By nightfall, the Germans were undisputed masters of the village. The small victory was delivered by a new weapon – “the scourge of the Russians” – an armoured train.

For three weeks, some four hundred FAMO workers had toiled day and night in an abandoned railway depot to turn railway carriage chassis into an armoured train, mounting four 88mm flak guns, one 37mm flak, and four 20mm flak, plus a couple of machine-guns. It devoured men – six drivers and firemen, nearly three dozen railway workers to maintain the track, plus seventy troops to man the guns and a communications cabin. It was sluggish, pretty inflexible and presented a target to the enemy “as big as a barn door”. But in the hands of a skilful commander – flak
Oberleutnant
Paul Poersel – the
Panzerzug Poersel
, Armoured Train Poersel, bolstered the defence of the nearby airfield at Gandau “with brief, surprise attacks, suddenly opening fire with as many barrels as possible”. It destroyed at least half a dozen enemy tanks and three aircraft before being withdrawn from the west of the city as Soviet troops closed in on the airfield. It was sent to the northern perimeter where it fought equally valiantly, but at a cost. For every three men who served in the armoured train, one became a casualty.
³⁷

Most of the weapons defending Breslau were far more rough and ready. Soviet troops attacking the junction of the Strasse der SA and Augustastrasse were convinced they were out of the range of German fire until hand-grenades began landing in their midst. Teenagers used schoolboy tricks to attack their foe, catapulting grenades into the Soviet positions at what became known as Hitler Youth Corner.
³⁸
German paratroopers contesting the railway yard at Schmiedefeld went even further. They filled small fist-sized transparent bags with a yellow-green corrosive lye – the colour earned the ‘weapon’ the nickname ‘piss bags’. These worked like tear gas – but longer exposure to the lye could destroy the lungs. Several bags were tossed into the cellar of a signal box, the last Soviet strongpoint which needed wiping out. “We could hear groans all night long,” Reinhard Paffrath recalled. “The next morning it was quiet.” The occupants of the cellar had been killed by the bags’ contents.
³⁹

Some Soviet accounts claim the defenders of Breslau fired torpedoes mounted on wagons at strongpoints. The Red Army certainly used a rocket packed either with flammable liquid or explosives and fired these ‘land torpedoes’ along the ground or on rails towards German positions. The defenders responded with ‘combat barricades’: camouflaged 88mm flak – which also had a legendary reputation as anti-tank guns – built into several barriers. They were used sparingly, but to devastating effect. Whistling down a narrow street on a flat trajectory, the flak shells tore attacking infantry, guns or armour to pieces. A 15cm artillery piece in the heart of the city caused Russian armour advancing into the western suburbs “no end of trouble”. Soviet bombers attacked every building around Matthiasplatz, but they never found the gun. After every firing, it was hauled back into the entrance of a large house and hidden from view.
⁴⁰

For Breslau’s defenders, the Soviet sniper posed an ever-present threat. Luftwaffe
Stabsgefreiter
Herbert Richter and his comrades found themselves pinned down near Hindenburgplatz. “As soon as one of us moved, there was a bang,” Richter recalled. A sixteen-year-old boy gingerly searched the kitchen of an apartment for food. It was still stocked. He crawled up to the cupboard, pushed the door open, using it for cover as he stood up to grab a jar from a shelf. One of the glasses slipped from his hand. The boy tried to catch it. For an instant he left the cover provided by the door. “There was an immediate bang from a window in the house opposite,” Richter remembered. “The boy yelled out and fell down.” He was killed instantly. The sniper’s bullet had struck him in the forehead.
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The Soviet 76mm – the ‘crash boom’, nicknamed for the noise it made – “gnawed at the nerves” of German infantry,
Sturmgeschütz
commander Leo Hartmann recalled, thanks to the sharp whip-like crash of its shells between the rows of houses which suggested the ‘crash booms’ were much closer than they actually were. Rooting out these guns was never easy: their rapid firing rate meant the sound of the shell leaving the barrel could easily be confused with the simultaneous sound of it travelling through the air. And so Leo Hartmann climbed out of his gun, took a binocular periscope with him and hid behind a corner to observe his target, then showed his gunlayer precisely where to aim. “After that we prepared our gun to fire, drove like mad around the corner and just a few seconds later our first explosive shell was roaring down the street,” Hartmann wrote. “No Russian dared to remain at his gun in the face of our fire-spewing
Sturmgeschütz
and we could coolly finish off the enemy anti-tank guns.” Occasionally the Soviets built dummy positions, but to little effect. “The blast from our shells exploding blew the straw mat camouflage off the real gun,” the
Sturmgeschütz
commander smiled.
⁴²

Leo Hartmann had learned to adapt to the fighting in Breslau. So too did his fellow defenders. They learned that the fighting would often subside at midday as the Russians stopped to eat. They learned that the fire extinguisher was often as important as a rifle. They learned that many enemy shells were duds – notes were often attached by the German prisoners forced to produce them: “We cannot do any more for you, comrades!” They learned that each evening they would receive food, ammunition, orders. “For a while we got used to this strange way of life,”
Gefreiter
Gerhard Saches remembered. “We no longer thought about death or the devil. The same old shooting with rifles, machine pistols and machine-guns became the norm.”
⁴³
And they learned that eventually they would be pulled out of the line to recuperate.