Read Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 Online

Authors: Richard Hargreaves

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #Military, #World War II, #Russia, #Eastern, #Russia & Former Soviet Republics, #Bisac Code 1: HIS027100

Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (10 page)

I swear this holy oath by God that I will be unconditionally loyal and obedient to the Führer of the Greater German Reich, Adolf Hitler. I vow to fight heroically for my homeland and would rather die than give up the freedom – and with it the future – of my people.
⁵⁵

Afterwards, these new warriors marched through the Silesian capital. “The march pasts created an image of very large reserves of men still capable of fighting,” one Propaganda Ministry report observed. “This fact not only had an effect on the populace and soldiers, for whom it is an added incentive in battle, but has also shown dubious foreigners that the German nation is still strong.”
⁵⁶The reality was rather different. Photographs show mostly aged Breslauers, some portly, some thin, all wearing caps and hats, some smiling, some looking pensive, some looking doleful. The
Volkssturm
man had every reason to feel doleful, for the force he had just been sworn into was a desperate last throw of the dice. Far from emanating strength, calling up old men and boys showed that the Reich was morally bankrupt. The Soviets showered Silesia with leaflets lampooning the
Volkssturm
, not the “mightiest wonder weapon of the Reich”, rather an army of “grandfathers driving tanks and young lads with pistols”. It continued:

Hitler wails, Himmler threatens

As if they’ll still get a response.

Himmler’s levy cannot

Save Hitler’s Reich any longer.
⁵⁷

It could not. For Hitler’s Reich could not even equip this ‘storm’ it had summoned. Each man had to provide his own clothes: either dyed Party uniforms or a weatherproof suit, plus shoes, a coat, rucksack, blanket, flask and canteen. He received a black-red arm band with the inscription ‘
Deutscher Volkssturm: Wehrmacht
’. Training was equally rudimentary. Instructors were ordered to dispense with lengthy lectures and move straight to the practical demonstrations. “No long-winded explanations but exercises with the weapons! No tedious talk, rather training of the mind and body.”
⁵⁸They should “arouse the love of shooting which exists in every German man. You can only learn to shoot by shooting, and learn to shoot well by shooting a lot. It doesn’t matter how you shoot, rather that you hit.” Where there were insufficient weapons or ammunition, the men were to resort to practising “digging trenches, establishing an all-round defence with barriers, camouflage, understanding the terrain”.
⁵⁹Volkssturm
commanders – almost all Party leaders – were expected to follow their Führer’s example. “Strive to live, to fight, to believe like Adolf Hitler.” They were expected to listen to the older men in their charge “who have already experienced so much in life”, to praise rather than chastise. “Appeal to the men’s hearts so that they will go through fire for you. One word of encouragement and you will see for yourself that each man will do his utmost to improve his efforts.” The commander must use every opportunity to “promote love for our people and for our Fatherland” as well as “the most fervent hatred of the enemy”.
⁶⁰

Within a month, there were more than forty
Volkssturm
battalions across Lower and Upper Silesia. Each one should have been equipped with nearly 650 rifles – a carbine per man, two dozen grenade rifles and three-dozen light and heavy machine-guns, but the experiences of
Breslau-Land 3 Battalion
were typical. For 600 men, most dressed in civilian clothes, there were around 100 captured Russian, Italian and French rifles with just fifteen rounds apiece.
⁶¹The one weapon which they possessed in abundance, however, was the
Panzerfaust
– armoured fist – a small hand-held anti-tank weapon. It was cheap, easy to use standing up, kneeling or lying down, and effective, capable of penetrating up to eight inches of armour. Its use demanded nerves of steel – the target could be no more than 300ft away – but instructors told their men not to be afraid of the steel colossi from the East:

The T34 takes 13,000 hours to build, weighs 20,000 kilogrammes, 15,000 kilogrammes of high-grade steel, and costs 182,000 Reichsmarks.

It can be destroyed by a
Panzerfaust
which takes fifty-three minutes to build, weighs six kilogrammes, 4.9 kilogrammes of steel and costs eight Reichsmarks.

What else does it need? An iron heart, a well-aimed shot. Do you still believe in the superiority of size?
⁶²

The men were shown training films. There were booklets, the
Volkssturm
’s own newspaper
Der Dienstappell
– Call of Duty – filled with instructional material, there were posters and pamphlets such as
Panzerknacker
– tank cracker – packed with cartoons, sketches, slogans: ‘work together like a football team’; ‘if you’re well camouflaged, you’re half-way there’; ‘better sweat than blood’. And there were short rhymes to learn:

Der schwerste Panzer geht in Brand

Nimmt Du die Panzerfaust zur Hand
!

The heaviest tank goes up in flames

When you grab the
Panzerfaust
!

Slogans began to appear on the façades of Breslau’s buildings – ‘Never capitulate in the face of anything!’ ‘Germany will and must be victorious!’ ‘There can only be peace if we are victorious!’ ‘It is better to die heroically than be a traitor of the Fatherland!’ ‘We will give the enemy hell for every metre of German soil, and fighting in the ruins we will win a new life!’
⁶³– while the
Schlesische Tageszeitung
published the
Song of the Lower Silesian Volkssturm
:

Comrades, do you hear the fanfares,

With their old familiar battle cry

Always in times of crisis and danger

Called us to arms and were heralds of victory.

Once again the storm signals howl.

Once again the bells sound in the tower,

Once again the flags billow like blazing torches.

People go to battle.

Comrades, grab your rifles

Panzerfaust
and hand-grenades at the ready.

The enemy wants to lay waste to our land and
Volk

We want to deny him defiantly.
⁶⁴

As the year drew to a close, the city’s propaganda leader, Dr Schulz, tried to assure his masters in Berlin that Breslauers felt “greater confidence and hope in a favourable outcome to the war.”
⁶⁵Schulz’s assurances flew in the face of all the evidence on Joseph Goebbels’ desk. Some people, even in the Party, were beginning to lose their heads, he acknowledged. They no longer believed his propaganda machine. They no longer believed claims that the Russians would slaughter civilians. They did believe that Budapest would soon fall, that the situation at the front was “very threatening”. By the end of 1944, the propaganda minister realized, large sections of the German public, “wanted peace at any price”.
⁶⁶The people of Breslau clung to the wildest of hopes, almost all involving Silesia’s patron saint, Hedwig, buried in Trebnitz, fifteen miles north of the city. People who hadn’t been to church in years, who criticised the ‘reactionary’ clergy, suddenly began praying at Hedwig’s grave for salvation – and she had appeared to them. Just like the Mongols in 1241, the apparition said, the Red Army would suffer a decisive defeat on Silesian soil and Germany would be saved. Others claimed they had seen the saint in the skies above Breslau, stretching her arms over the city. That was why, they said, it had not been bombed. Such rumours spread rapidly through the city – and throughout Silesia – because, Ulrich Frodien observed, “apart from this, they heard nothing but catastrophic report after catastrophic report.”
⁶⁷

Frodien was right. There was little to cheer Breslauers as 1944 drew to a close. The air raid sirens now sounded on average once a week – instead of once every two months – although no more bombs fell. Besides sending thousands of Breslauers to dig, Karl Hanke had ordered those left behind to work ten-hour days – and had cancelled leave. All but a handful of newspapers and journals had been culled, and those which survived – the Party’s own
Schlesische Tageszeitung
was among them, naturally – invariably ran to no more than four pages. Since September 1, all theatres, variety clubs, cabarets, orchestras, circuses had been closed, their artists and employees sent to the
Ostwall
, to factories, to armament works. Touring the workshops of the Rheinmetall-Borsig plant in Hundsfeld one day, works director Herbert Rühlemann found a sixty-year-old actor pushing a carriage around on the production line. The man smiled at Rühlemann and told him – convincingly – that he loved his new job. “We should not forget he was an actor,” the engineer observed, “and a good one.”
⁶⁸

The city still possessed some of the attractions of a metropolis. After summer and autumn in the small provincial town of Neumittelwalde, Peter Bannert revelled in life in a big city. There were bouts at the Jahrhunderthalle, there were trams, cinemas, and, above all, beer. On Sundays, the Hitler Youth and his comrades would head into the city for a feast – meat salad, broth, sausage, beers, all for four marks apiece.
⁶⁹Lower Silesia’s farmers would take a break from looking after their herds and head into the city for a holiday of a day or two. Surplus animals and poultry should have been surrendered to the state. But a vibrant black market thrived in the city – geese, sausages, chickens, pig fat, all were readily available for the right price, or with a little haggling. One farmer ‘paid’ for his stay at the small Dresner Hof hotel near the central station with a dozen geese. It was not unusual. The owner’s daughter recalled that her mother “hardly bothered” with ration books. “By 1944, barter had reached the height of perfection.”
⁷⁰

As 1944 turned to 1945, Hugo Hartung found himself back on duty at Schöngarten airfield, half a dozen miles west of the city centre. The forty-two-year-old had been granted leave to enjoy the festive period with his young family. Like many Breslauers that Christmas, the Hartungs sought reassurance from the church. The focal point for Protestants was the twin-towered cathedral where “more Christmas candles burned than ever”, while Catholics headed for the imposing Dorotheenkirche with its steep roof, or the Matthiaskirche in the heart of the university quarter, kneeling before the altars in ever greater numbers. Heavy snow fell – so heavy that the trams no longer ran and the electric wires around the Ring arced, bathing the Rathaus in an eerie green light for an instant. Hartung’s children were entranced by the magical sight and by the mangers in the churches, but not the theatre director or his wife. They were seized by a feeling of anxiety walking through the narrow alleyways of the old town which “strangled our throats such that we were barely able to speak”. Returning to Schöngarten had done nothing to lessen that anxiety. The tension “was by now becoming unbearable”. Hartung and his comrades were all too aware of the Soviets’ “mighty concentration of troops and material”. Their offensive “had to be unleashed any day”.
⁷¹

Notes

1.
Bannert, pp.54-57.

2.
Hitler’s speech and New Year in the Goebbels household based on TB Oven, 31/12/44; TB Goebbels, 31/12/44 and 1/1/45;
Schlesische Tageszeitung
, 2/1/45.