Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (8 page)

It wasn’t merely the deportation of the Jews which changed the demographics of Breslau as the war progressed. By the spring of 1944, nearly half a million Germans had been relocated from western and central Germany to Silesia, which quickly earned the nickname
Luftschutzkeller Deutschlands
– Germany’s air raid shelter. With the people came industry which also sought to escape the grasp of Allied bombers. Despite the Nazi’s much-trumpeted
Volksgemeinschaft
– national community – Breslau’s womenfolk did not welcome the influx of refugees, not least because they quickly emptied shops and stores of underwear and bedding.
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What Breslauers resented more, however, was the influx of foreign labourers – French, Russian, Polish prisoners of war, Czechs, concentration camp inmates – needed to fill the gaps left by Breslau’s men leaving for the front. There was no hiding these new arrivals: Poles wore armbands branded ‘P’ and carried identity cards with a pig stamped on the reverse; White Russians wore a badge on their upper left arm bearing their national colours, white, red, white; Ukrainians a blue-yellow badge with a trident, the coat of arms of the ancient state of Kiev under Vladimir the Great; and Russians were marked by a white-blue-red badge featuring the cross of St Andrew.
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None was the equal of a German – as Breslauers constantly reminded these captive peoples. They were infuriated when prisoners of war marching to and from camp did not make way for them in the streets. They were even more infuriated when they watched Russian labourers hanging around for fifteen minutes or more at a time doing nothing.
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Poles, Ulrich Frodien observed, were “treated worse than farm dogs. They had become fair game, whipping boys for every thug in the village police, worked until every last ounce of strength had been squeezed out of them, and despised even more than the lowliest German village idiot.”
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Foreign drivers on the trams – also branded by armbands – grew rather too close to the young Breslau women serving as conductors for the liking of many.
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Fraternisation with these foreigners was not merely frowned upon – it was a criminal offence; girls could be fined 10 Reichsmarks merely for drinking and dancing with Polish prisoners in a bar.
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A twenty-three-year-old housewife who befriended and then had an affair with an English prisoner, helping him escape, was jailed for four years, while a labourer who passed letters between a captured Soviet soldier and a female Russian worker – letters which were “hostile to the state” – was sentenced to two years in prison.
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The penalties for foreign labourers who transgressed were far more severe, however. Twenty-year-old Marian Kaczmarek laid track for the
Reichsbahn
, the state railway. After repeated beatings by his German foreman, Kaczmarek struck out. His temper cost him an additional six years of hard labour. The punishment was too mild for Breslau’s chief prosecutor; he imposed the death penalty.

Working on farms, on the trams, on the railways, all demanded forced or foreign labourers, but never in the numbers required by the armaments industry. A dozen forced labour and concentration camps grew on the periphery of the city to meet the demands not just of Breslau firms such as Linke-Hofmann and FAMO – producing parts for the V2 rockets and panzers, respectively – but other industry which began relocating to the area as the bombing of the industrial heartland of the Ruhr intensified. Three slave camps fed the Rheinmetall-Borsig ammunition works at Hundsfeld, five miles north-east of the city centre, which churned out three million electric fuses for bombs in 1943, as well as ten million rounds of 20, 30 and 37mm shells and some 6,000 electrical gun sights. Three decades later and living in the USA, the works’ director, Herbert Rühlemann composed a long-winded and rather self-satisfied memoir,
Father Tells Daughter
. Father did not tell daughter
everything
, however. Less-than-honestly, Rühlemann referred to the bulk of his workforce as
Gastarbeiter
– guest workers. Some were, but 2,000 were concentration camp prisoners, half of them women.
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Rheinmetall’s demand for labour paled compared with one armaments factory which began to take shape from the spring of 1942. The Berthawerk – named after the matriarch of the Krupp family – at Markstädt, sixteen miles south-east of Breslau, would produce up to 600 field howitzers and anti-tank guns every month, employing upwards of 12,000 people. One of its directors, Eberhard Franke, painted an almost idyllic picture of a true ‘workers community’: it was renowned throughout Lower Silesia for the quality of its food; its football team won the local league over four successive seasons; there were boxing matches at which the legendary fighter Max Schmeling officiated; there were libraries, musical instruments, films, radios provided for workers who formed theatre groups and staged variety shows for colleagues.
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The reality was far less idyllic. Nearly half of the Berthawerk’s employees were concentration camp inmates. After being woken at 4.30am, they trudged for fifty minutes each morning from the nearby camp at Fünfteichen, usually in broken clogs or with rags wrapped around their feet, then worked for twelve hours. There was no breakfast, no evening meal, just a bowl of soup at mid-day. If they pushed too forcefully for their daily meal, they were beaten with a rifle butt by a guard. They were beaten too if their work did not come up to scratch – usually with a whip of iron and rubber. When there were air raids, Germans sought refuge in the air raid shelters; forced labourers remained at their posts. “We were not slaves, our status was much lower,” recalled Tadeusz Goldsztajn, a Polish Jew who was sixteen when he arrived at the Krupp works. “The equipment in the shop was well maintained. We, on the other hand, were like a piece of sandpaper which, rubbed once or twice, becomes useless and is thrown away to be burned with the waste.”
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Given such treatment, it was hardly surprising hatred welled up in the
Ostarbeiter
– eastern worker. The security service intercepted one letter from a Ukrainian. “I submit to these Fascists, I have become their servant,” the writer sighed. “Oh, damn these years! I want my liberty, I want to fill my lungs with the fresh Russian air.” Each morning he bowed, humbly offered his hand to his masters and greeted them repeatedly. He longed for the day when the Red Army neared. “I’ll be one of the first to join the partisans or fight at the front,” he vowed. “I will be the first to shoot at their merciless hearts, those who laugh about the hardships faced by the Russian people. And all this will happen – sooner or later.”
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In the broiling heat, the sweat streamed down the faces of the several dozen standard bearers, holding their banners high between a sea of outstretched hands. As the bearers took their place on the stage, Joseph Goebbels entered the Jahrhunderthalle, followed by the luminaries of the Nazi Party in Silesia and senior Wehrmacht officers. The Propaganda Minister had spent the afternoon of 7 July 1944 visiting his wife Magda in a Breslau clinic, where she was recovering from an operation on her jaw. Otherwise, he found himself frustrated away from the capital. It was nearly impossible to obtain news from the Eastern Front. No news, he reasoned, would be good news.

As Goebbels fretted, the halls and assembly rooms of Breslau began to fill this Friday evening. All 12,000 seats in the Jahrhunderthalle itself. A sizeable crowd gathered outside in Scheitniger Park. The loudspeakers he’d had erected six years earlier would carry the minister’s words outside the confines of the huge domed building to other halls throughout the Silesian capital. State radio would carry them across the Reich – and beyond.

It was one of the Goebbels’ more measured performances. He looked relaxed, leaned with one hand of the podium, put his hands on his hips, his gesticulations were less frantic than usual. He left his audience in no doubt about the gravity of Germany’s plight. The enemy had launched a general offensive in the East and West with overwhelming superiority. “If we do not throw them back now, our enemies will wipe Germany – and everything German – from the face of the earth,” he told his audience bluntly. “The German people are in danger!”

Mention of the “aerial criminals”, the Anglo-American bomber crews with names such as Murder Incorporated who were “turning German cities to rubble and ash”, was drowned out by boos. “There will be retribution,” he promised, “and when it comes, not one tear will be shed in Germany.” The 12,000-strong audience rose from their seats, shouted, applauded, stamped their feet. It was several minutes before the uproar subsided and the minister could continue. When he did, he urged the German people to summon their strength for one final push. “The hour demands a total war effort by every individual and the entire nation, using all our spiritual and material reserves.” He continued:

We National Socialists have endured and overcome so many crises and hard tests in the history of our movement and the Reich that we have never doubted our success for a moment.

The best guarantee of victory is the Führer himself. We look to him with religious faith. He will lead the nation through all dangers and tests with a sure hand. His pledge is the same as ours: a struggle which a nation stands behind with utter fanaticism can never end in anything but victory.

The organ began to play the national anthem. Inside and outside the Jahrhunderthalle, Breslauers stretched their arms out again and sang with gusto. “There’s probably no one in the crowd who’s not carried away deep down in their heart and filled with belief in a positive end to this difficult struggle,” Goebbels’ secretary Wilfred von Oven wrote fawningly.
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Despite Goebbels’ assurances and von Oven’s observations, Breslauers were beginning to doubt the war would end in Germany’s favour. Outwardly, life in the city went on as usual. Every date in the Nazi calendar was still marked extravagantly with some form of rally or demonstration. There were the ‘Day of Duty for Youth’ and ‘Day of the Wehrmacht’ in March, the anniversaries of the Nazis’ flying and welfare organisations in April, there was a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power in the Jahrhunderthalle, each Heldengedenktag – Heroes’ Memorial Day – was commemorated on the fifth Sunday before Easter with guards of honour standing in front of Breslau’s war memorials while Wehrmacht and Party leaders laid wreaths and soldiers formed up on the Schlossplatz to listen to a speech by the city’s ranking general, Rudolf Koch-Erpach. April 20, Hitler’s birthday, was celebrated of course, but by 1944 it had become a normal working day. In kindergartens, teachers still put garlands on portraits of the Führer and lit ‘Hitler candles’, however, while children sang hymns of praise and listened to stories from the life of their leader. Flags flew in the streets, pictures and busts of Hitler were displayed in shop windows and in the evening, the
Ortsgruppen
celebrated as 13,000 Hitler Youths marched through the city’s streets, while there was a performance of Beethoven’s
Symphony No.9
in honour of wounded soldiers and workers in the armaments industry. With the arrival of summer, the outdoor swimming pools opened daily from 7am until dusk for bathers.
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The Cologne Radio Orchestra performed marches, dances and songs from the silver screen on the promenade by the Oder. The Liebich, Breslau’s famous variety theatre, offered
Melody of Love
, a quick-fire sketch show, while at the Circus Busch comedian Harry Zimmo entertained a 3,000-strong audience. At the Wappenhof, Germany’s largest open-air theatre by the banks of the Oder, patrons enjoyed a new drink, a honey-yellow apple pomace with a frothy head which tasted sweet and sour. It was particularly popular at Gandau airfield, so locals dubbed it
Fliegerbier
– airmen’s beer.
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As it had done the previous two years, the Nazi Party leadership organised the
Verwundetenfahrt
– trip for the wounded – to the historic town of Trebnitz, a dozen miles north of the city. There the famous Flying Trebnitzer light trains, festooned with cartoons and caricatures drawn by students of a local art school, took the men for a day out.
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In spite of the frivolity of the event with its marching bands and smiling girls, there was no hiding the cost of the war to Breslau. That same day the
Schlesische Tageszeitung
published thirty death notices of men killed in action: twenty-four-year-old
Unteroffizier
Gerhard Weiss, a soldier for five years, killed in Normandy;
Oberwachtmeister
Helmut Czembor, holder of the Iron Cross, killed in Italy during the battles south of Rome; twenty-one-year-old
Obergefreiter
Günter Kochner, killed in an air raid. “Anyone who knew him will understand our pain,” his grandparents eulogized.
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But most of the fallen listed in Breslau’s Nazi Party mouthpiece were killed on the Eastern Front – a front which was beginning to draw ever closer to the borders of the Reich. In mid-June, the German Army still held Byelorussia – Minsk, Vitebsk, Grodno. Six weeks later, the Red Army was at the gates of Warsaw and had crossed the Vistula upstream of the Polish capital at Pulawy and Baranow, less than 250 miles from Breslau. The collapse of the Eastern Front provoked alarm. “The Russians haven’t far to go now to the German frontier,” one Breslau housewife wrote. “If it gets very bad, there will be nothing left for us but the gas tap. We won’t let ourselves be deported.” She was, she said, not alone. “Many are of my opinion.”
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All manner of rumours circulated. Entire regiments had deserted. (They hadn’t.) Hitler had visited the front and sacked several generals on the spot. (He didn’t.) Some generals had not been killed in battle but had been executed. (They had not been.) Officers had fled the battlefield with their Polish or Russian mistresses. (They had.) Weary soldiers struggled back to German lines barefoot, without belts, tattered and torn, undisciplined. (They had.) “This retreat,” one person was overheard to say, “is one of the darkest chapters in German history.”
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Even the
Schlesische Tageszeitung
, conceded there was an “obvious crisis in the East”.
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Gauleiter
Karl Hanke still exuded confidence. On a visit to the historic town of Namslau, three dozen miles east of Breslau, he told the populace: “The war on the Eastern Front only interests me when the first Russians appear before Namslau.”
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As he spoke, thousands of Silesians were already preparing for the defence of their native soil.