Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (40 page)

Except that Breslau already was turning into nothing but a cemetery. The death toll in Paul Peikert’s parish never fell below 63 every day in mid-March, and reached as high as 131. In a ten-day period, he counted more than 950 casualties, two-thirds of them soldiers. But where to lay them to rest? All the municipal burial grounds had either been captured by the Russians or lay too close to the front line to be used. Parks and green space took their place. Horst Gleiss watched as the grounds of the Odertorbahnhof, a stone’s throw from his Benderplatz apartment, were dug up and turned into mass graves. There was nothing respectful about the process. Corpses, the fourteen-year-old wrote, were delivered. “
Ja
, delivered! The word is perfect for the method of transportation. During the night dead bodies arrived on trucks, most were unloaded in the dark and almost without exception were covered with earth before dawn.” The first dead received coffins. When they ran out, wooden boxes were hurriedly built. They ran out too. Brown wrapping paper was laid over the layers of corpses. In the end, it too ran out. Horst Gleiss and fellow Hitler Youths were ordered to help with the burials, although in the darkness, the boys frequent failed to shovel a child’s hand, fingers, an adult’s arm or a piece of scalp into the grave. Often morning came before their work was complete, or before families could identify the dead. The bodies were simply left in the open. “The sight was terrible because hardly any of the bodies was intact,” Gleiss recalled. Paul Peikert was asked to bury a housewife killed when the post office bank was hit. “Her body was torn to shreds. Her hair was there, a leg there, her bowels there, so that her remains cannot be recovered.” What remained of this forty-seven-year-old woman was laid to rest in the coffin of a child. Former teacher and committed Nazi Hermann Krätzig was killed and buried within an hour. The sixty-one-year-old and other aged
Volkssturm
men took it in turns to supervise work details from the foreign labour camp in the Clausewitz school clearing rubble in Clausewitzstrasse. Soviet air attacks resumed. A bomb landed next to Krätzig, burying him beneath the rubble and killing nine foreign workers at the same time. Within twenty minutes, Hermann Krätzig’s body had been recovered. Within an hour he had been laid to rest in the garden of a nearby home. A simple board was erected to mark his grave.
⁵⁴

Brief funeral services were held in the basements of the homes of the dead. Mass burials were blessed by the clergy. The dead were always laid to rest between 6.30 and 8am, a period most likely to be free from bombing and shelling – but not always. Paul Peikert buried two men from
Regiment Schulz
. “Because of the loud thunder of guns, the prayers were barely audible.” Seven shells landed close to his church in the middle of the brief service. The final act of burial was invariably a desolate affair. Rarely were family members present. Rarely did the priest know anything about the body he was blessing. “I often stood there on my own with the gravediggers or graves officer,” recalled Martin Grunow. “And yet I could still pray and bless these graves.”
⁵⁵

A dedicated ‘graves officer’ on the fortress staff tried to collate details of fallen soldiers so news of their death could be passed on to their next of kin. That was why Hans Gottwald found himself crawling through a ditch in Lilienthal on Breslau’s northern outskirts. After heavy fighting for the nearby
Infanterie Werk
, or
I-Werk
, 41 fortification, the dead were carried by night to Lilienthal. And there they were left, unburied. When the fighting relented, Gottwald was sent to check the dog tags of the dead. “It’s an awful mission, but orders are orders.” He inched his way for more than 300 yards through the trench until he reached a cluster of trees. And there he found the corpses of twenty-five men. “A shiver runs down my spine and I have to wait until I am capable of carrying out my task,” he wrote. Having regained his nerve, he checked the bodies, each one “cold, waxen and covered in blood”. He unbuttoned the collar of every man, found their dog tags and recorded the details on a slip of paper. Gottwald found half a dozen comrades, including one
Unteroffizier
with a splinter in his throat. He spent an hour among the dead, then slipped back towards the ditch to return to his unit. He washed, ate, slept. And then that night he was back in Lilienthal collecting the dead for burial in a cemetery. A horse and cart took the cadavers away. “They lie like cattle on top of each other and the cart jolts through the night,” Gottwald recalled. “These men did not deserve that.” And then a thought struck the young
Unteroffizier
. “Perhaps the day after tomorrow I too will be lying on such a vehicle.”
⁵⁶

It was not merely experienced soldiers like Hans Gottwald who were dispatched to identify the dead. A
Volkssturm
commander ordered Horst Gleiss to help when two women staggered into his cellar covered in blood. In the street the schoolboy found that a shell had crashed into the stone pavement just a few feet from three people, killing them and a white horse grazing on the foliage on the opposite side of the road. The corpses were covered in dust, mutilated beyond all recognition.

To judge from what’s left of the clothes, it seems to be two women and a man. Blackish pools of blood seep across the granite pavement between the bits of bodies and the stone chunks of wall. The cranium of one of the two women has vanished as far as the bridge of her nose. Pieces of her scalp with strands of long black hair are scattered all around for many metres. Her limbs have been torn in several places and have similarly been scattered far and wide.

My task now is to identify the mutilated dead. For me, as ever still a sensible young boy, that’s not easy work. As I bend over the riddled male corpse to unbutton his jacket which is covered with plaster, I realize that it is the
feldgrau
tunic of a soldier. Beneath it a brown shirt appears. Only Party dignitaries wear this combination. But this isn’t someone from our command post, is it? With my trembling hands I take the identification papers from the left breast pocket of the lifeless body. The leather wallet is strangely still undamaged and just as warm as if I’d taken it from my own coat pocket.

The body did indeed belong to a man Horst Gleiss knew: his local Party leader.
⁵⁷

The city’s clergy tried as best they could to keep proper records of the burials. “If families of the dead return to Breslau one day, then we can at least tell them where their dead relatives are,” said one priest. The Party took rather less care over the dead. Paul Peikert passed a small mound of earth covered by pussy-willow branches. He assumed an animal had been buried there. It was actually an elderly man whose body had been left for nearly a week in his apartment before the
Ortsgruppe
had come to collect it. “This irreverence towards the dead is exactly the same as the disregard for personal dignity, something which is fundamental to National Socialism,” Peikert seethed. He ordered the badly decomposed body exhumed and laid to rest in a grave on hallowed ground.
⁵⁸

It was not so much irreverence for the dead as indifference. “We got used to the sight of corpses a long time ago,” recalled sixteen-year-old Ursula Scholz. Former union official Otto Rothkugel saw a farmer’s cart fully laden with corpses, frozen by the February frost. “All of them lay on the cart, completely naked.” The
Volkssturm
soldier was unmoved. “This sight no longer arouses any particular horror in you because day in, day out, you have nothing but destruction and devastation around you. A human life counts for nothing here. On my travels through the city I encountered people who’d been killed by air raids, lying around in the streets like some rubbish tossed away, because no-one worried about it.” There was only one rule in the fortress, wrote Rothkugel, “the instinct to survive”. Every day, Horst Gleiss remembered being “constantly confronted with death”. He walked past “soldiers sitting on a bank without heads because the blast of a shell had ripped off their skulls,” or was ordered to “pick up a young, dear seventeen-year-old girl, torn into little pieces” by a bomb minutes after the two had sat side-by-side in an air-raid shelter. As a fourteen-year-old, Gleiss struggled to understand what was happening. “These are things you cannot forget,” he shook his head sixty years later.
⁵⁹

Houses would often lie in ruins except for their chimneys; Breslauers huddling next to them at the moment of impact would often survive. But not always. Ursula Scholz passed a ‘levitating’ dinner table with a family sitting lifelessly around it. The bodies were unharmed, but the air pressure from the blast had shattered their lungs.
⁶⁰
Being buried alive was far more common – living in the cellars offered little protection against a direct hit. The five-storey home occupied by the Grollmus family collapsed during one bombing raid. Five people were killed instantly, but rescuers could hear the faint cries of one of the Grollmus children, twelve-year-old Elisabeth. It took them nearly thirty hours to dig the girl, her legs crushed, from the rubble. A few days later Catholic priest Walter Lassmann visited her in Josef’s Hospital. “Herr Minister, why don’t my parents and Helmut and Eva Maria visit me?” she pleaded. “I took her small hand in mine and broke it to her that her papa and mama, little brother and sister were already in heaven,” Lassmann wrote. “She looked at me with tears streaming down her face and didn’t say a word. I had to leave her alone with this great heartache and I suspected then that she would soon follow them into eternity.”
⁶¹

It was hardly surprising that many Breslauers – soldiers and civilians – grew increasingly fatalistic as the siege dragged on. “We are all going under, no one will get out of here alive,” one soldier from Brandenburg wrote to his wife. “The devil gets all those who began this game. We are the losers. Even an idiot knows that it’s all over, but they still order us to continue dying.” For many the burden became too great. “Where can we still go?” some asked. “Not this side of the Oder, not the other side of the Oder. The best thing to do is jump in the Oder.” Some reports suggested as many as 120 Breslauers took their own lives each day, others that only a few committed suicide. The best estimate is that some two to three dozen people preferred death by their own hand than by other means
every day
the city was encircled – between 2,000 and 3,000 suicides during the eighty-two day siege. Alfred Hardlitschke, a Great War veteran and now the reluctant leader of a
Volkssturm
platoon, was determined to survive for the sake of his wife Kläre and their children Edwin and Erich, both serving at the front, but he doubted that he would ever see them again. “Death constantly passes me by,” he wrote. “It’s a miracle that I’m still alive.” He penned farewell letters to all three. “If I do not have the opportunity in my hour of death to bid you a final farewell, then I want to do it like this,” he told his wife. The strains and stresses of war had led to clashes and “harsh words” in the Hardlitschke household. Alfred told Kläre to forget all that. “Instead, let us think about how we loved each other when we were young, how happy we were watching our children grow up, how we looked after each other and went through joy and grief.” To his elder son Edwin he pleaded forgiveness for treating him harshly as a child. “If you have children one day and have to do school work with them, then do not do it the way I did it with you. Teach them with love and kindness, so that you do not spend your whole life blaming yourself for being too hard on this child or that child.” The younger Erich was a chip off the old block – “furious and hot-tempered”. His father counselled: “You must try to control yourself. If you have children one day then what I’ve said to Edwin counts for you too.” He ended his valedictory letter: “And now, my boys, thank you for the joy you have given me and a final farewell.”
⁶²
Alfred Hardlitschke was killed leading his
Volkssturm
platoon in battle on 19 April.

Hardlitschke survived two months longer than the idealistic former student Karl Oertel. He had begun the year convinced that 1945 would be the year of decision – in Germany’s favour, of course. After ten days of battle, he was exhausted, unable to sleep, yet still “full of confidence”. Another seven days and his mind was preoccupied with thoughts of home and heaven. A week later the machine-gunner’s company was ordered to halt Russian armour which had penetrated the village of Wasserborn, five miles southeast of Breslau’s city centre. “Are we going to make it again?” Oertel asked his friend. For the first ten minutes the counter-attack went well. “At that moment, there was very heavy shell fire directed at us, the first three men, one shell every metre,” Oertel’s friend recalled. The men were unable to move. The order remained: machine-gun to the front. “We carried out the order and suffered losses as a result,” the soldier wrote to Oertel’s family in Hamburg. Suddenly the philosophy student had cried: “Machine-gunner Oertel knocked out!” Those were his last words. Blood streamed down the left side of his face. Three fingers on his left hand were lacerated. “He knelt on his right foot, his head leaning over, his machine-gun in his right hand, as he entered eternity.”
⁶³

Karl Oertel’s passing sounded almost peaceful. But then it seemed that everyone killed in fortress Breslau died a peaceful death, died instantly, died without suffering. Post official and
Volkssturm
company commander Alfred Klose wrote a letter of condolence to the widow of one of his employees:

Dear Frau Rothe!

A sad event has made me write this letter to you.