Killing Hitler (43 page)

After centuries of urban growth and development, Breslau by the early twentieth century had a population of over six hundred
thousand. The largest German city east of Berlin, it boasted all the accoutrements of the modern metropolis: parks, museums, theaters, cinemas, an opera, and a university. Its academic alumni boasted a number of Nobel laureates, including the chemist Fritz Haber and the historian Theodor Mommsen. It also served as the administrative and industrial hub for the surrounding province. In addition to all that, Breslau was home to a Jewish community of exceptional dynamism.

By early 1945, Breslau was still virtually untouched by the ravages of war. Located beyond the range of all but the most determined Allied aircraft, it had escaped serious material damage and had earned a reputation as “the Air-raid shelter of the Reich.” Accordingly, it had attracted numerous additional industrial concerns and administrative offices, swelling its population beyond a million. And though its male contingent had been decimated by five years of fighting and its Jewish community had been exterminated or forced into exile, little else in the city betrayed the horrors then commonplace elsewhere in Europe.

In February of that year, however, all that was to change. When the Soviets launched their renewed offensive from the Vistula bridgeheads on 12 January, Breslau became the target of the 1st Ukrainian Front. As the Soviet vanguard raced across the still-frozen earth of Poland, the Germans fell back in disarray and town after town was liberated. Within a couple of weeks the Silesian frontier was reached. Soon after that, on St. Valentine’s Day, Breslau found itself encircled.

The city had had some months to prepare for the expected siege. Despite lacking any natural or man-made fortifications, it had been declared a
Festung
or “fortress” late in 1944. Like its neighbors across eastern Germany, it was to be reinforced and defended to the last man. Cadres of
Volkssturm
militia were raised, the city garrison was reinforced, and concentric lines of defense were created on the outskirts. In late January, an improvised and hopelessly ambitious evacuation of the civilian population was attempted. Already on the fourteenth of that month, as news of the renewed Soviet advance reached the city, thousands of civilians had swamped the railheads. They were not permitted to leave
until the morning of the twentieth and then only in prescribed groups. First came the women and children. In desperation, and in temperatures of-10°C, some sixty thousand left on foot. The following morning, four hundred bodies were recovered and buried in the city’s parks. Countless more littered the roads to the south and west. Over the following days, the process was repeated again and again, as successive sections of the population were ordered to leave. It is estimated that in the initial evacuation a total of eighteen thousand individuals, mainly the very young and the infirm, fell victim to exposure.
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In all, some ninety thousand civilians were to perish trying to leave Breslau.

Inside the city, meanwhile, the Nazi administration was showing its teeth. The two hundred thousand or so civilians who remained were terrorized and went in fear of the hated military police. Labor battalions, formed to build the barricades, were often subjected to military discipline. Deserters, shirkers, and those simply lacking the right documents were shot out of hand. On one day, a group of thirty-six foreign women, probably forced laborers, was executed.
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Even the city’s deputy mayor became a victim, shot on the main square for cowardice after he had taken his wife and children to the comparative safety of Berlin. As one memoirist recalled: “It was getting more and more dangerous in Breslau, not because of the Russians, but because of our own people.”
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Some sought refuge in suicide. Over one ten-day period in a single district, more than sixty cases were reported. In one example, a number of families were found huddled around the stoves in their apartment block. They had gassed themselves.
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The preparations for Breslau’s defense demonstrated outright contempt for the fabric of the old city. Nothing was considered sacred. Church spires were transformed into machine-gun nests and the numerous bridges over the river were wired with explosive charges. Flak and artillery batteries were established in the parks and cemeteries, as well as in the botanical gardens and even in the grounds of the archbishop’s palace. In the southern suburbs, where the Soviet attack was expected, entire residential blocks were razed to provide material for the barricades and to clear a field of fire for the defenders.
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The task of clearing the
condemned buildings was carried out by squads of pioneers, who brusquely informed the inhabitants of their forced eviction and then proceeded to hurl everything they could out of the windows before setting off dynamite in the basements.

As the Soviet noose tightened, the wanton destruction in the city plumbed new depths. In March, the elegant Kaiserstrasse in the northern suburbs was sacrificed to make way for an airstrip. The street, lined with expensive villas, administrative buildings, and three churches, was cleared and then systematically razed with explosives. In the aftermath, as teams of forced laborers were brought in to clear the rubble, thirteen hundred of them were killed by enemy artillery and strafing attacks.
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The architect of this insanity was Karl Hanke. A former teacher and early adherent of the Nazi cause, Hanke was very well connected, having served for many years as Goebbels’s secretary and being close friends with Albert Speer. In 1941, after a spell as a frontline soldier, he had been promoted to the post of
Gauleiter
of Silesia, with his headquarters in Breslau. As the war neared its end in the spring of 1945, he emerged as one of Hitler’s most loyal servants, sharing the delusions, parroting the latest slogans, and ruling his city with an iron hand. When visited by Speer just before the siege began, Hanke was merciless. Walking through his own residence—an elegant eighteenth-century palace—he said: “The Russians will never get their hands on this…I’d rather burn it down.”
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When Speer protested and tried to talk him out of his vandalism, Hanke confessed that he “didn’t give a damn” about the city. His propaganda line was similarly unequivocal. Breslau was to be defended to the last man and to the last bullet. “Those who fear an honorable death,” he said, “will die in disgrace.”
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Yet, far from being viewed as a fanatic or a renegade, Hanke was officially lauded as a shining example to the rest of Germany. A Berlin radio broadcast on 14 April, for example, took a swipe at the “defeatists” and bemoaned the fact that “men like
Gauleiter
Hanke are lacking in the west.”
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Under Hanke’s leadership, Breslau stood firm against the Soviet onslaught. German forces defended doggedly as the fighting progressed from street to street, block to block, even room to
room. They scored a number of minor successes, retaking some Soviet positions and tying down large numbers of tanks and infantry. Yet, though they could hold the front line, they were powerless to defend Breslau from air and artillery attack. As the siege progressed, the city was pounded into submission as wave after wave of fighter-bombers circled unhindered above and the distant artillery found its range. At its peak, over the Easter weekend, the bombardment made life aboveground all but impossible. The few civilians who were not already living in their cellars were soon forced underground. The German military commandant was even obliged to abandon his bunker.
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By the time Hanke fled and Breslau finally succumbed—four days
after
Berlin—the city had been transformed into a moonscape of ash, rubble, and shell holes. Almost all of its churches had suffered extensive damage; many were burned out. Countless university and municipal buildings had been destroyed, including the university library. Elsewhere, it was estimated that some twenty thousand houses had been razed, and more than 70 percent of the city as a whole had been destroyed.
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As one man recorded, few districts escaped damage:

I went over the piles of rubble toward the Kaiser Bridge. Everything destroyed. Garve Street to Stanetzski Street: ruins; Mauritz Square: ruins; Brother’s Monastery: badly damaged; Brother’s Street: largely burned out; Tauent-zien Street, completely burnt out; my son’s house…burnt out down to the cellar. Not even a plank, just black walls.
¹⁴

The human toll was no less shocking. Though exact figures will never be known, it is estimated that German military casualties approached thirty thousand, with around six thousand killed, while Soviet casualties reached sixty-five thousand.
¹⁵
Breslau’s civilian deaths are thought to range between ten thousand and eighty thousand, with upward of three thousand suicides.
¹⁶

The destruction of Breslau did, of course, have some military and political rationale. With his armies fighting on a much-reduced
front, and with shortened lines of communication, Hitler could have had some genuine reasons for optimism in 1945, especially as he was facing an enemy that was now overstretched. His “fortress” order, therefore, foresaw the cities of the east as bulwarks against the Soviet tide. At best they would serve as the platforms for a German counterattack, and at worst they would be sacrificed to give Berlin breathing space to continue the fight. Moreover, the Germans and Soviets were locked in a bitter ideological struggle in which no quarter was expected and none would be given. German civilians in 1945 were reaping the whirlwind of destruction and brutality that their own soldiers had sown abroad. Now that they were defending their own towns, their own streets, and their own homes, they could scarcely be expected to surrender meekly.

And yet there was something more sinister to the exhortations to hold out and resist that emanated from Berlin. As one Breslau diarist noted with chilling accuracy: “They are not waging war against the enemy, they are waging war against their own people, against everything that is dear to them.”
¹⁷
Had he known the truth, he scarcely would have believed it. On 19 March 1945, Hitler had issued his so-called Nero Order. Following a preamble stressing the exploitation of every means with which to combat the enemy, he ordered:

All military transport, and communication facilities, industrial establishments and supply depots, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory, which could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable future for the prosecution of the war, will be destroyed.
¹⁸

Though it was couched in rational, military-strategic terms, the message of the Nero Order was brutally plain: nothing but scorched earth would be left for the invaders—or the survivors. As the inhabitants of Breslau would testify, Germany itself was to be destroyed.

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Hitler’s will to destroy provides one of the most grimly fascinating episodes of the Second World War. It had first been foreshadowed late in 1941, when the Führer had prophesied:

If one day the German nation is no longer sufficiently strong or sufficiently ready for sacrifice to stake its blood on its existence, then let it perish and be annihilated by some other stronger power…I shall shed no tears for the German nation.
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Considering that this statement was made at a time when German armies were still all-conquering and the specter of defeat had barely raised its head, it is tempting to dismiss it as mere bluster, uttered to shock or provoke a compliant entourage. However, by the late summer of 1944, when defeat was looming large for all those in Germany with eyes to see, Hitler’s determination to usher in the disaster of total collapse was undiminished. His prophecy of 1941 was fast becoming a reality.

The first concrete demonstration of the scorched-earth policy came in July 1944, when the destruction was ordered of all war industries in France and the Low Countries. At a time when German armies were desperately trying to prevent the Allied breakout from Normandy, precious manpower was to be diverted to the sabotage and demolition of coal and mineral mines, power plants, and industrial premises. Though this decree was largely honored in the breach, it was soon extended elsewhere—to Italy, Hungary, the Balkans, and finally Germany proper. Later that year, Hitler boasted that “no city will be left in the enemy’s hands until it is a heap of ruins.”
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By the spring of 1945, the measures had been intensified. Though the failed Ardennes offensive had spent what remained of Germany’s military reserves and defeat was only a matter of time, Hitler was still adamant that he would not capitulate. “Surrender is absolutely out of the question,” he raged, warning: “We
will leave nothing but a desert for the Americans, English and Russians.”
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Accordingly, all essential infrastructure—railway tracks, canals, telephone lines, and bridges—was slated for destruction. As Goebbels stated ominously: “If we go down, then the German people will go down with us.”
²²

Hitler’s armaments minister, Albert Speer, drew a stark image of what the scorched-earth edict could mean if it were followed to the letter:

No German was to inhabit territory occupied by the enemy. Those wretches who did remain would find themselves in a desert devoid of all the amenities of civilisation. Not only the industrial plants and not only the gas, water, electrical works and telephone exchanges were to be completely smashed. Everything, simply everything essential to the maintenance of life would be destroyed: the ration card records, the files of marriage and resident registries, the records of bank accounts. In addition, food supplies were to be destroyed, farms burned down and cattle killed. Not even those works of art that bombs had spared were to be preserved. Monuments, palaces, castles and churches, theatres and opera houses were also to be levelled.
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