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Overview
In January 1945, the Red Army unleashed its long-awaited thrust into Germany with terrible fury. One by one the provinces and great cities of the German East were captured by the Soviet troops. Breslau, capital of Silesia, a city of 600,000 people, stood firm and was declared a fortress by Hitler.
A bitter struggle raged as the Red Army encircled Breslau, then tried to pummel it into submission while the city’s Nazi leadership used brutal methods to keep the scratch German troops fighting and maintain order. Aided by supplies flown in nightly and their building improvised weapons from torpedoes mounted on trolleys to an armored train, the men of Fortress Breslau held out against superior Soviet forces for three months. The price was fearful. By the time Breslau surrendered on May 6, 1945, four days after Berlin had fallen, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians were dead, the city a wasteland. Breslau was pillaged, its women raped and every German inhabitant driven out of the city which became Wroclaw in postwar Poland.
Based on official documents, newspapers, letters, diaries, and personal testimonies, this is the bitter story of Hitler’s final fortress.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781844686308 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 32 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Happy Fusion
The war on the Eastern Front only interests me when the first Russians appear before Namslau
Gauleiter Karl Hanke
The passing of the old year and the start of the new had always been a cause for celebration for Breslauers. In the final hour, its residents converged on the Ring, at first a trickle, then a deluge, waiting tensely for the clock on the Rathaus to strike twelve. And when it did, the square reverberated to cries of "Prosit Neujahr". A choral fanfare sounded from the tower of the town hall. In the distance, the deep chimes of the bells of St Elisabeth and St Maria Magdalena churches could be heard. For fifteen minutes or so the crowd milled around, then began to drift away down the maze of alleys and streets leading from the square, bound for the suburbs. A few called in at Breslau's restaurants or bierkellers, but most went home.
Breslauers had celebrated Silvesternacht, as Germans call New Year's Eve, like this for as long as any of them could remember. But the final day of 1944 was different. Inhabitants stayed at home. They waited tensely for midnight, not to hear the chimes of St Elisabeth or Maria Magdalene, but to hear the words of their leader. At the end of this darkest of years for the Reich, perhaps he might offer hope, even assurances.
Fifteen-year-old Peter Bannert sat down to a festive meal with his newly acquired friends in a former school on the edge of the city centre. Bannert had arrived in the Silesian capital in the first days of December, summoned from the small town of Habelschwerdt, sixty miles away, by the regional Hitlerjugend leadership. They gave him the grandiose title Kriegseinsatzführer – war service leader. The reality was rather less grand: making a tally of uniforms and equipment in warehouses across Silesia. He was one of eighteen schoolboys billeted in the old Andersenstrasse school, now makeshift quarters for youths called up to serve the Reich. A twenty-year-old blonde, "who embodied the ideal of an Aryan woman" with her flaxen hair neatly plaited in buns, looked after the boys, providing meals and keeping an eye on the accommodation. Tonight she laid on a substantial spread to mark 1944's passing.
At his villa on the edge of Lake Bogensee, two dozen miles north of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels struggled valiantly to carve the roast goose on his plate into edible pieces. There was an awkward silence around the dinner table as the Propaganda Minister's guests, his secretary Wilfried von Oven, the wife of the Nazis' favourite stage and fashion designer Benno von Arent, and Breslau Gauleiter Karl Hanke played with their tough slices of goose. Finally, the master of the house broke the silence. "Tell me, my dear, is your goose leg as incredibly tough as mine?" Lively discussion ensued. It was, Hanke said, a good sign of Germany's food supplies that in the sixth year of war such an old goose could have survived to be served.
Later, hosts and guests retired to the hall and sat in front of an open fire. Joseph Goebbels was glad to see the back of 1944 – "the worst year of my entire life. I hope Fate will spare us having to endure another year like it." Karl Hanke assured him it would. He had mobilised all of his Gau, Lower Silesia, to dig an intricate network of fortifications – trenches and anti-tank ditches. "People in the East are convinced that we will succeed in holding the Soviets at bay in their impending offensive." As the clock approached midnight, the radio was turned up to full volume, while servants brought in several bottles of champagne. Through the receiver came the voice of veteran character actor Heinrich George reading Clausewitz's political will. As George came to the final sentence – "I would only feel happy if I found a glorious end in a magnificent struggle for the freedom and dignity of the Fatherland" – his words merged with the strains of the national anthem played on a violin. Twelve strokes brought 1944 to a close. With the final stroke, the iron clang of the Rhine bell in Cologne cathedral began and a choir sang O, Deutschland hoch in Ehren. Goebbels and his guests stood up. Frau Goebbels began to cry. Everyone raised their glasses and toasted each other.
Satiated by his meal, Peter Bannert listened to the evening's entertainment – stirring speeches by the boyfriend of his young maid, a senior Hitlerjugend leader. The youth read some Nietzsche, a few extracts from Mein Kampf. "I did not understand the content, but the rousing words left me awestruck." The small group downed several glasses of wine. Suddenly, the leader leapt up, pulled out his pistol and yelled: "I will defend my girlfriend and myself against the Russians with this weapon!" No one said a word. The silence was broken by the clocks of Breslau's churches striking midnight.
The radio's speaker reverberated to the sound of Hitler's beloved Badenweiler Marsch, before, at five minutes after twelve, the Führer himself spoke. For the next half hour it was a rather subdued – Goebbels preferred to call it "a firm and certain" – Adolf Hitler who addressed his nation. He offered his people no certainties, no specifics, no hopes of 'wonder weapons'. Germany, he assured them, would not lose the war because it could not lose the war. "A people which achieves so many incredible things at the front and at home, a people which suffers and endures so many terrible things, can never go under."
Adolf Hitler was right. The German people would not go under in 1945. But many of their cities would: in Berlin, one fifth of all buildings – one in every two in the city centre – were destroyed; in Dresden, a byword for devastation, two out of every five homes had been reduced to ruins; the figure in Hamburg was three out of five. And in one city, seven out of ten homes were devastated. That city was Breslau.
The name is thought to come from Vratislav I, but people lived there long before the Bohemians laid claim to the city. They settled there because the river which cut through the land was passable, fragmenting into rivulets which created a dozen islands, where two ancient trade routes intersected, the Amber Road from the Baltic to the Adriatic and the Via Regia from the Rhineland to Silesia. Vratislav either built or bolstered a small fortress on an island on the right bank of the Oder. By the beginning of the first millennium Bohemian rule had been usurped by Polish, and Wrotizla, as it was known, had grown beyond the original fortress to hold a population of around 1,000, including the city's first bishop. Wrotizla would fall under the rule of first the Poles, then the Piast dynasty for the next three centuries; but for Nazi historians the defining moment in Breslau's early history came in the year 1241 when the Mongols invaded. Inhabitants either fled west or withdrew to the fortified islands, razing the rest of the city. The Mongols invested Wrotizla briefly, then continued into the heart of Europe where they met the armies of Heinrich II – 'The Pious' – the city's Piast ruler, on the battlefield at Wahlstatt, three dozen miles west of Wrotizla. The battle and Heinrich's stand would enter Nazi mythology – they would frequently draw parallels between the Mongols and the 'Asiatic hordes' of 1945 – but the truth was that Heinrich's armies were slaughtered, their leader decapitated. The Mongols advanced no farther westwards, however; internal politics rather than Heinrich the Pious and his knights led the invaders from the steppe to return to the east.
In 1241 Wrotizla was destroyed and reborn. To the Nazis, 1241 was the year Breslau was born – they would celebrate its 700th birthday in 1941. In the wake of the Mongol invasion, Third Reich histories proclaimed, "Breslau was built anew by German settlers as a German city and has remained so until the present day." Latin and German became the sole official languages. The heart of Wrotizla – also known as Presslau, Bresslau and, for the first time, Breslau – shifted from the right bank of the Oder to the left. A large market square, the Ring, became the focal point of the new city; a new cathedral, or Dom, began to grow on the site of the old city, giving name to the land around it, Dominsel – cathedral island. As Breslau flourished thanks to trade between East and West, and goods from the Netherlands, Hungary, Russia, southern Germany, Prussia and Poland were exchanged at its markets, it earned the trappings of a great city and gained the title die Blume Europas – the flower of Europe – courtesy of the seventeenth-century Silesian historian Nicolaus Henel von Hennenfeld. The flower possessed a myriad of churches – the twin-towered present-day cathedral, built between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Elisabethkirche with the highest steeple in the city, the Gothic St Maria on the Sand on Sandinsel, the imposing Kreuzkirche with its steep roof and three naves; there was a university, a library holding maps, manuscripts and the oldest printed volume in the city, Statuta synodalia episcoporum Vratislaviensium; and in the Ring, the city's defining image, the Rathaus – the city hall. Built over a period of more than 200 years, the red-brick landmark is regarded as one of the finest examples of late Gothic architecture with a particularly ornate eastern gable featuring an astronomical clock and numerous pinnacles. On the south-facing façade stand two bays depicting life in the city in the fifteenth century, while the western gable is dominated by the 200ft tower. Below ground, in the Rathaus' great vaults, Breslau's most famous hostelry, the Schweidnitzer Keller, thrived.
While Breslau prospered, the city changed rulers frequently: Bohemia until the early sixteenth Century, the Habsburgs for the next 200 or so years, Prussia from 1741 until the formation of Germany 130 years later. Prussian rule began largely peacefully, but twice the city fell into the hands of invaders, first to the Austrians during the Seven Years' War, then to Napoleon's armies in early 1807 after a brief but bloody siege which saw much of the suburbs destroyed. Determined that Breslau would never again offer resistance to an invader, the French had the city's ramparts and fortifications pulled down. Walls can be broken, but not a spirit. Six years later, with Napoleon tottering after his mauling in Russia, Breslau was the wellspring of revolt. The city's university was the heart of the uprising. Volunteers who took up arms gave rise to Germany's national colours – black, red and gold. And in the Schloss, Friedrich Wilhelm III, issued a legendary appeal, 'An mein Volk' – to my people – which captured the mood of the 1813 perfectly. "This is the final decisive struggle for our existence, our independence, our prosperity," the king told his subjects. "There is no alternative than an honourable peace or heroic destruction."
At the time of Friedrich Wilhelm III's appeal, the city counted 70,000 inhabitants – and was growing rapidly. With the ramparts gone, Breslau began to expand beyond its former limits. Wide promenades, public gardens and fine houses dominated the suburb of Schweidnitz, south of the old town, while "high chimneys and the howl of machines" dominated Nikolai to the west. Even before the railways came to the city in the 1840s (the imposing Hauptbahnhof – central station – was built a decade later on what was then the southern edge of Breslau), Gottfried Linke was building his first hundred railway carriages. There was a thriving woollen industry. There were firms producing steam engines, powered by Silesia's rich seams of coal, mills, breweries, oil refineries, gas works, a fledgling chemical industry; there were firms producing clothes (more than thirty firms producing straw hats alone) and furniture, and paper mills on the banks of the Oder. The railways and industrialisation led to an influx of people from the countryside. By 1840, the city's population had topped 100,000. It doubled in the next three decades and more than doubled again by the turn of the twentieth century. It was a reasonably cosmopolitan population: a large Jewish populace and three Poles for every hundred Germans. They were educated at a growing network of public schools and, from 1910, a technical university. They travelled on an extensive tram network which spanned the Oder on a flurry of new bridges. They were treated at numerous new hospitals, while spiritual needs were catered for by a host of new churches – the neo-Gothic Lutherkirche which dominated the suburb of Scheitnig with its 300ft spire, or the rather less forbidding St John the Baptist in Kleinburg in the south of the city. Breslauers could survey their metropolis by climbing some of these church steeples, or from the top of the 140ft water tower in the south of the city and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial in the north. There was entertainment for the few – opera at the new Stadttheater, singing festivals, museums, sprawling public parks; and for the masses – the variety theatres such as the Viktoria, the circus, the zoo, and, by 1900, the first cinemas. Such distractions perhaps took the minds of the working classes off their wretched lives in the city's slums where conditions were fearful – and would persist as such well into the 1930s. Breslau's wealthy and poor united in 1913, as they did throughout the Reich, to celebrate the centennial of throwing off the Napoleonic yoke. They did so at a huge new exhibition ground on the north-east of the city centre. There were pavilions, gardens, a lake with a pergola, and at the heart of the site, the largest reinforced concrete building in the world at the time, the huge domed Jahrhunderthalle – Century Hall. Here up to 10,000 people at a time could watch sport or theatre, industry could stage trade fairs, and politicians could – and would – stage rallies.
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."
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hitler's Final Fortress"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Richard Hargreaves.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
Acknowledgements,
Abbreviations,
Maps,
Prologue: The Square,
1 The Happy Fusion,
2 The Bridgehead,
3 God Has Washed His Hands of this World,
4 The Reckoning Has Begun,
5 In Defiance of Death and the Devil,
6 The Breslau Method,
7 The Old Breslau Is No More,
8 Any Further Sacrifice Is a Crime,
9 The Land of the Dead,
Quiet Flows the Oder, 10,
Appendix,
Bibliography,