Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (6 page)

Six thousand people attended the hall’s opening ceremony. Some 100,000 would visit the inaugural exhibition. But the hopes of prosperity the Jahrhunderthalle embodied would be dashed within eighteen months as Germany went to war. In peace, the city had been the home of VI Corps. In the summer of 1914, the troops marched through northern Luxembourg then wheeled left to bear down on the Marne with Germany’s Fourth Army. Those who fell in the march on Paris were the first of around 10,000 men of Breslau to fall at the front, but the European conflagration demanded equally great sacrifices at home. Over the next four years, prices rose as much as 400 per cent. More than half Breslau’s schools were commandeered for military use. Gottfried Linke’s locomotive works – now renamed Linke-Hofmann – focused its efforts not on the railways but on aircraft, building scouts, fighters and finally four-engined leviathans, thanks not least to the work of prisoners of war, a practice it would repeat a generation later. By the war’s end, Breslauers were expected to survive on fewer than two ounces of meat a week, a solitary pint of milk, five pounds of potatoes, four ounces of green vegetables and half a pound of flour. Those were the official figures; they were rarely met in Breslau. Nearly half the city’s population relied on soup kitchens. Weakened by an inadequate diet, the populace succumbed to starvation, to tuberculosis and, in the closing weeks of 1918, the global influenza pandemic which killed 1,000 of Breslau’s inhabitants in a single month at its peak.

Even before the Armistice in 1918, Breslauers threw off the vestiges of Wilhemine rule. Authority collapsed. Troops fuelled the popular uprising rather than quelling it. On the same day that the Kaiser abdicated, a people’s council of Socialists and Liberals took charge in Breslau in what their leader, Paul Löbe, called, “a quiet revolution. No human life had been sacrificed and no damage had been done.”
⁵

If the revolution of November 1918 was bloodless, the years which followed were not – and Upper Silesia was the flashpoint. It was one of the industrial powerhouses of Germany, responsible for a quarter of all its coal, eighty per cent of its zinc, one third of its lead. But two out of three of its inhabitants were Poles, not Germans, and they wished to join the re-born Polish state. Allied leaders in Paris suggested a plebiscite to determine Upper Silesia’s fate, but its Polish populace was not prepared to wait that long. In August 1919, a general strike turned into a widespread uprising. It lasted only a week. More than 20,000 German soldiers were dispatched to put it down – which they did, brutally. As many as 2,500 Poles were executed in the aftermath of the revolt. They rose up again twelve months later – and again were put down. Only in March 1921 were Silesians able to go to the polls. A gerrymandered result ensured that Upper Silesia remained German. After six weeks of tension, Upper Silesia exploded again. The third uprising was the largest, longest and most brutal. Some 70,000 Polish ‘volunteers’ seized eastern Upper Silesia. In response, some 25,000 German ‘volunteers’ marched against them. In pitched battles, notably on the dominating heights of Annaberg, 1,000ft above the right bank of the Oder forty miles north-west of Katowice, the German volunteers prevailed. The Allies intervened before the German troops could press home their advantage, finally forcing an uneasy peace upon Upper Silesia in the summer of 1921.

Breslauers did not take kindly to the Polish uprisings. In the summer of 1920 they smashed the Polish consulate, a Polish school and a Polish library, among other buildings. Three out of four of the city’s Polish inhabitants fled Breslau. There was unrest too when nationalists seized power in Berlin in March 1920. The workers of Breslau went on strike. Troops appeared in the streets accompanied by armoured cars, ostensibly to maintain order (which included arresting the city’s police chief). The regional president, Wolfgang Jaenicke, appealed for calm. “Any drop of blood which is spilled here by Germans fighting against Germans is spilled unnecessarily.”
⁶
Despite Jaenicke’s plea, some blood was spilled in Breslau during the revolt – known to history as the Kapp Putsch – but in Silesia, as in Berlin, the coup collapsed in less than a week.

Breslau of the 1920s was a city of contrasts. There was the unrest and upheaval of revolt and riots, yet the Linke-Hofmann works was producing 4,000 locomotives and carriages every year. Hyperinflation crippled the city’s economy. As September 1923 began, a single American Dollar could buy ten million marks. By the month’s end that had risen to 160 million marks. German currency lost value by the hour. Riots erupted once more. And yet at the same time, the face of Breslau was changing: huge new headquarters were erected for the police and the post office savings bank. A sprawling sports complex was laid out on the north-eastern edge of the city. The exhibition grounds around the Jahrhunderthalle hosted trade fairs and ‘
WuWa
’, a display of modernist architecture and fittings for the home and office. The city trebled in size as it incorporated outlying villages or sprouted new suburbs, such as ‘new town’ of Zimpel, the workers’ quarters of Pöpelwitz and Westend. As well as creating a new Breslau, the city’s ruling Socialists – supported by one in two voters in 1921 – tried to erase traces of the old Breslau. Kaiserbrücke was renamed Freiheitsbrücke. Kaiser Wilhelm Platz became Reichspräsidentenplatz. Platz der Republik replaced Schlossplatz, while one of the founding fathers of this new republic, Friedrich Ebert, had Tiergartenstrasse named in his honour.
⁷
The names would be in place barely a decade.

On the afternoon of Monday, 30 January, 1933, six-year-old Ulrich Frodien sat with his mother on the edge of his bed and watched two workers struggle to raise a huge flag on the pole of the post office in Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse. A breeze suddenly stirred and the swastika banner billowed in the wind. Frodien’s mother hugged him. “This is a wonderful day,” she told her son with tears in her eyes. “A day you must always remember, for from today a new, much better era begins for Germany. Hardship and misery for so many people will finally end. Justice will reign once more. A wonderful future is in store for you – all of us, together.”
⁸

Only five years before, just one in every hundred Breslauers had supported the National Socialists. But Breslau suffered more than most towns and cities in Germany during the economic crises of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Wages were lower. Unemployment was higher – it trebled in the second half of the decade. By January 1933, one in ten Silesians was out of work. The Frodiens had fared better than many fellow Breslauers – the master of the house was a doctor. Yet the effects of the worldwide depression were not lost on young Ulrich. “The illusion of the ‘roaring twenties’ cultivated within recent decades only applies to an extremely small group in the witch’s cauldron of Berlin,” he recalled. Almost half Frodien’s classmates attended school barefoot “until the first snow fell,” many were undernourished and to most owning a bicycle was but a dream. The six-year-old became friends with a boy from an unemployed family who lived in a Breslau cellar ‘apartment’. There were no windows – the only light came through a grill; four children shared a single bed – and a single threadbare blanket. Such conditions were commonplace; nearly one fifth of all apartments in the city comprised a single room. The Nazis courted them – “Our last hope, Adolf Hitler!” exhorted bill posters of a haggard, unemployed family, pasted around Breslau in the autumn of 1932 – and the Nazis succeeded. In the spring of 1933, more than half of Breslauers voted National Socialist.
⁹

The Nazis set about putting their stamp on the city immediately. Civic posts, such as the regional president and mayors, were quickly filled with Party members, but the tentacles of National Socialism soon extended into every sinew of city life. In civic administration, in the post office, in the university, where lecturers extolled the virtues of Aryan art and literature and students greedily tossed ten thousand “dirty and disgraceful volumes” on to a pyre, “eradicating the un-German spirit” and destroying books “which poison the soul of the German people” in the process.
¹⁰
School lessons began and ended with the
Hitlergruss
– the Nazi salute – the holy cross was replaced with portraits of the Führer and pupils learned the history of the swastika through five millennia. Every anniversary, every National Socialist milestone was commemorated: the death of the nationalist Leo Schlageter, the anniversary of Frederick William III’s appeal in 1813 to rise up against Napoleon – never commemorated in the 120 years before the Nazis seized power – there was a memorial day for Silesia’s SA, and, of course, Hitler’s birthday on 20 April and the failed putsch in Munich each 8 November. A propaganda office was established and, in time, 1,000 loudspeaker columns carrying the
Drahtfunk
public address system would announce every triumph, every victory with a fanfare from Liszt’s
Les Preludes
.

The
Sturmabteilung
relished their new-found importance. These youths in uniform swaggered around the city, posing, stamping their feet, showing off the machine pistols, revolvers, truncheons hanging off their belts. They held tattoos, torchlight processions, they paraded by night through the Platz der Republik – soon to regain its former name of Schlossplatz. Other streets and squares would revert to their pre-1919 titles, or earn new ones: now it was Horst Wessel Strasse running past the Jahrhunderthalle with Adolf Hitler Strasse leading off it, while the main artery leading out of the city to the south became the Strasse der SA. Honorary citizenship was granted to Nazi grandees – Göring in October 1935, Goebbels in August 1937, and Adolf Hitler, naturally, as early as March 1933.

Hitler was an infrequent visitor to the Silesian capital, especially after he came to power, and his appearance in Breslau was always attended by a higher goal. The 1938
Sportfest
highlighted the plight of the ‘repressed’ Sudeten Germans, one year earlier it was the ‘enchained’ Austrians fêted at the annual festival of German singers when Breslau, Joseph Goebbels noted was “swimming in a sea of joy”.
¹¹
The city was in equally festive mood in late September 1936 when the 1,000th kilometre of Autobahn – ‘the roads of Adolf Hitler’ – was ceremoniously opened by the Führer. The road, so the Nazi Party organ, the
Völkischer Beobachter
opined, “gives Silesians fresh assistance in the struggle against poverty in this ancient German land.”
¹²
The reality, as Jewish teacher Willy Cohn perceived, was that the Autobahn was actually “an instrument for preparations for war, propelling the world even more quickly towards a terrible catastrophe”. The masses, Cohn sighed, “do not see that”.
¹³

Breslau had the largest Jewish community in Germany outside Berlin – not, Ulrich Frodien remembered, “those unpopular stereotype Eastern European Jews with their kaftans and sidelocks” but men and women fully integrated into the city’s society. Fewer than half were practising – but that did not spare them from Nazi repression and persecution. Almost immediately after the seizure of power, Breslau’s Jewish stores were boycotted. There were burnings of ‘Jewish-Marxist’ books. Jews were forced to salute the swastika flag of every passing SA troop marching through the streets. Hitler Youths filed through the city singing “Set fire to the synagogues”. They were driven from professions and public service. Relations between Jews and non-Jews were forbidden. “Many Jews had belonged to my parents’ circle of friends, something so normal and everyday in middle-class society in Breslau that it was considered natural.” But now, Frodien observed, “people distanced themselves. Friendships and relationship were discreetly ended.” The Frodiens too began to disown their Jewish friends, “submitting to the
Zeitgeist
”.
¹⁴

Occasionally, however, their consciences were pricked, never more so than on the morning of 10 November 1938 – the day after
Kristallnacht
, ‘the night of broken glass’. As ‘retribution’ for the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jew, a pogrom was unleashed across Germany by the authorities. Heading to school near the Freiburger Bahnhof, Ulrich Frodien frequently had to climb off his bike to avoid the broken glass strewn across the streets from smashed shop windows. “The shops were wrecked, all their wares smashed, scattered, trampled upon.” The New Synagogue in Wallstrasse, a fine, imposing building with a Romanesque dome, was ablaze. “The fire-fighters were standing around doing nothing,” Frodien observed. “It struck me that they were restricting their efforts to protecting the surrounding houses; they let the synagogue burn.” By the time Walter Tausk, a veteran of the Great War and a Jewish convert to Buddhism, arrived in Wallstrasse, the synagogue was “nothing but a smoking ruin,” its dome had already collapsing. Tausk was shocked. “The closer I got to the centre, the more desolate the scenes of senseless destruction: cigar stores robbed, their contents smashed and tossed all over the place.” When items in furniture stores could not be wrecked, they were scratched using shards of glass. The streets filled with curious Breslauers. Police formed cordons, but only to protect them from being struck by things being flung out of the ransacked businesses. A few in the crowd muttered their disapproval, only to be taken away. Nearly 2,500 Jews in Breslau suffered the same fate on 9 and 10 November, arrested by the police, SA, SS or Gestapo. By the time the ‘retribution’ ended, one synagogue had been burned down, two more demolished, some 500 Jewish shops and three dozen Jewish-owned businesses wrecked. Yet, as Jewish teacher and historian Willy Cohn observed, “We are still not at the end and there are surely even worse things to come.”