We made the assaults of the Russians harder with every day that went by and they began to make tactical mistakes that were to our advantage. Even General Niehoff began to scratch his head, wondering at his Russian counterpart. In his account, printed in on 5 February 1956, he stated that he had never understood why Major General Vladimir Gluzdovski had always attacked from the south. When it had been seen that a supposed combined attack from both the west and the north was planned, he had so easily broken the belt of defence around Breslau. The Russian radio messages were never disguised. They were heard, translated and therefore delivered a mass of information for the military leadership in the city, which was also to our advantage.
We could also ascertain many a mistake from enemy behaviour, an attack from them never being a surprise. For instance, we always knew of an assault when they were seen to collect together on the front-line, were loud in their actions, and hasty in their chaotic organisation in the combat zone. The moment that we heard the ‘neighs’ of their shaggy steppe ponies, always to be found in front of their anti-tank guns, we knew what was about to happen. From our experience on the Oder, ‘forewarned is forearmed’. That one advantage evened up the many disadvantages in which we found ourselves.
CHAPTER 17
The Last Battle
We were approaching Easter and the cold winter weather had disappeared. The layer of white powdery snow, which had covered the rubble of the city, was now a horrible sooty black. The besieged city had been unusually quiet for the last couple of days. It was as if newly wakened ‘Mother Nature’ had called ‘Halt!’ to the madness of the war. It was welcome, but portents hung in the air. Was it the lull before the storm? The Red Army had been forced to alter their opinion that they could take Breslau in ‘passing through’ on their way to Berlin. It had taken far too long and had engaged the whole of their army for weeks. The situation simply had to change. The atmosphere in the palace of the Crown Prince of Oels, the headquarters of the Russian Commander-in-Chief, could be cut with a knife. Stalin was calling for ‘Attrition’ and ordered an immediate ‘end’ to Breslau. That name had become ‘a red rag to a bull’ and Marshall Koniev was made responsible for a ‘decisive battle’.
Once more we were to hear those scratchy loudspeakers spewing verbal poison over the population, promising heavy air raids over the Easter period. Rumours circulated that Breslau was to be the Easter present for the Russian high command. The inhabitants were very uneasy. Our intelligence and reconnaissance reported heavy massing of troops to the west, giving the German General Staff a very clear picture of what was about to happen and fulfilling General Niehoff’s worst fears.
The author (far right) with two comrades in Breslau, April 1945
The front to the west was under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Mohr and his battalion. They had watched the massing of Russian troops for days. Two parachute battalions were hastily called up, as reserves behind the threatened front-line. They were to be a reception committee in case of an eventual breakthrough at that point. They had to stop the enemy advance to the centre of the city.
It was deathly quiet on Easter Saturday. It was still and filled with tension, until 6 o’clock in the evening when the bombardment came. On the stroke of six, the Russians heralded their intentions with a bombardment, the like of which General Niehoff had only experienced at Verdun in the First World War, and then during the Second World War at the Baranov bridgehead. I think that I can speak for everyone, when I say that none of us, but none, from the commanders down to the privates, will ever forget that Easter in Breslau, where we were kept on our toes and in battledress for forty-eight hours. The Soviet artillery regiments pulverised buildings one after the other, with their 28cm shells. At the same time, squadrons of planes showered their bombs over the already-burning city. A glimmer of hope came, but lasted only seconds. We saw German bombers, clearly, with the swastika on their tails. But they too threw a carpet of bombs on us. They were captured war-booty, along with fully-loaded goods trains packed with our bombs. Ash and soot rained down on everything that lived, and of course we were not alone in that experience.
The inhabitants of other large German cities had seen whole residential areas disappear in fire, night after night. But for the people of Breslau it was a ‘hurricane’. There were heavy bombardments from the air, and on the ground, heavy artillery, mortars and ‘Stalin organs’, all firing at once. Our one sense of forewarning had been taken away from us. With so much deafening noise, our ears could not be attuned to the movements of the enemy’s close combat detachments. It was impossible. We could not assess how far they had advanced into the city. Any minute a trigger-happy ‘Ivan’ could jump out at us from the cellars. They came in numbers of ‘ten to one’. We had ‘companies’ consisting of only 25 men. Our Regiment had been reduced by 70%. At West Park and the Institute for the Blind, close combat detachments were at their strongest and were supported by snipers. Our machine-guns showered the attackers without mercy and some who had been hit fell only metres away from us. We threw our last hand-grenades at them, to receive a hail of Soviet grenades as payment in kind. At the harbour a strong group of Red Guards drove a dozen or more German soldiers into the harbour basin. With the courage of the desperate, we gradually moved to where the parat roopers were grouped around the Institute for the Blind, fighting off the approaching Soviet infantry. The pounding of machine-guns was without pause, drowning out the raw cries of “Urrah!” We received the order to counter-attack. I was convinced that the inferno was one that I would not survive. Our platoon leader was the first to fall. We had no other choice but to slowly retreat under enemy superiority. We stumbled over mountains of stone as, metre by metre, we retreated in clouds of biting smoke. Surprisingly, the Soviets did not attempt to follow, the single bullets whipping around our helmets being scattered, did no harm.
A drawing by the author, made shortly after the end of the war, showing a scene from the fighting in Breslau, during April 1945
Once more we survived. I was whole. I had escaped a final trip to hell once more. Only then did I see that there was no longer a stone standing anywhere amongst the surrounding houses, which in that part of the city, had been spared until now. I looked at skeletons of houses with blazing roofs and beams. I could hear the crackle of flames. From somewhere I heard the ghostly banging of a shop door swinging to and fro in a plateau of soot and ash. Standing with amazing grace, in the middle of that desolation, was a beautiful tree, covered in spring blossom. It was a sight that one rarely saw so early in the year.
A black mushroom-shaped pall of smoke hung over Breslau. It could be seen as far away as Zobten, the mountain to the south-west of the city. Anyone who saw it, and the burning torch of the city, from the darkness to the borders of the Sudeten mountains, could be forgiven for thinking that the city had met its end. It hadn’t, not quite.
It seemed as if the night into Easter Sunday did not want to end. Dawn should have broken, but it couldn’t, for black smoke blanketed the earth, obstructing its path. Early that morning, again on the stroke of six, another firestorm of shellfire was to be heard and lasted for six hours. It was a repeat performance of the day before. Another spring day, when it rained death out of the sky from Soviet bombers that systematically bombed what was left of the residential areas, square metre by square metre. In between, one heard the exploding rounds of the artillery also in that area, combined with the rapid whining of the ‘Stalin Organ’, erasing Breslau from the face of the earth.
One tram, still able to run to the very last minute, from the ring-road to Richthofen Platz, was blown to smithereens. Of all days, it was on Holy Easter Sunday that the Church of Marie on Sand island received a direct hit, the first of the Breslau churches. That was followed by a hit on the Cathedral. It dominated the city with its twin towers that burned like giant candles.
It was around midday that the Soviets ploughed the earth around our positions, and Russian tanks stood in front of the command post of that sector
’s commander. By a miracle we kept them at bay, for the time being, in the worst of the fighting. They had warned us via their ‘flying leaflets’ and scratchy tannoy that they would try to force a capitulation of Silesia’s capital.
Easter Monday was also to be a black Monday in the history of Breslau. Air raids started at eight o’clock in the morning and carried on throughout the day, without a pause. Like a forest-fire, flames spread, enveloping the cultural buildings of historical and architectural importance. All of them were destroyed. In Neumarkt there was not one house left standing. The Museum of Art was reduced to a pile of stones. In the Botanical Garden in Lichterloh, not only the conifers gave fuel to the fire, but an ammunition bunker too. Everywhere one looked it burned, making it impossible to stay outside in that inferno for any length of time. Like the blossoming tree, and in spite of the wrath of those Russian invaders, Breslau’s symbol and crest, the City Hall, still stood unmarked. Built in the late Gothic period with resplendent oriel bay windows, it seemed to say “stand fast”! For Breslau was always a German centre. It will always remain German, even when foreign races live within its walls.
This Breslau, late on Easter Monday, was a tragic sight. It was nothing but a ruin. The beautiful river promenade on the banks of the Oder was a maze of trenches. Everywhere one looked, from Gneisenplatz to Lehmann, was a ruin, a ghost of its former self, including the completely burnt-out Grammar School. The lovely facade of the Oberland Courthouse had wounds from heavy artillery shells, the Seminar of the University too. The Church of Elizabeth had grazes from shrapnel in the stonework of its Baroque facade, but still stood tall. A bomb had gutted the inside of the Bartholomew Church, whose graveyard housed the many graves of female members of various institutions. The Exhibitions Halls were also devastated. The “Hundred-Years Hall”, with its giant dome, still stood almost undamaged. It was the largest in the whole of Germany. Within its walls, 10,000 people could be accommodated.
Hendrik Verton (right) and Rechnungsführer Georg Haas, 11. Kompanie, Regt Besslein, pose with a Bugatti racing car in Breslau, 1945
There was an intense and unbearable odour in the air. It came from damaged sewers and drains, and mixed with the stench of decomposing bodies. There was no one who could help, neither workmen to repair the sewers, nor undertakers to bury the thousands of dead. So the dead remained on the streets. The hospitals, full to overflowing, had wounded lying on stretchers, anywhere there was space, even in the cellars and bunkers. On Dome Isl and, uncountable wounded lay on stretchers in the open, under fire.
When we were relieved from our positions at the Institute for the Blind, I made my way from the line of battle and wandered into a cellar. It was filled with civilians, the old, and mothers with their children tightly pressed against them, as if in the thunder and lightning of a storm. All were hunched together, fear engraved into their faces as they sat on ledges around the cellar walls. The cellar was in a large block of rented flats, and as usual supported with wooden posts. There was an older man, who was the air-raid warden. He was in the uniform of the German Railways. I was in the uniform of one of the ‘front-swine’ which awoke a sense of trust and protection in them. I was therefore bombarded with questions. My uniform was not at its best! It was dirty, crumpled and covered in soot and ash, and I was not able to hide the fact that I had just come from the combat-zone. It was natural that I was asked, “how near are the Russians?”
The house swayed and the cellar floor rose and fell under the blast of each explosion. The noise was deafening. After a while we all looked like ghosts, dusted in white distemper from walls and ceiling, like an unwanted shroud. There was no electricity. The only candle giving us light was extinguished time and time again from the air pressure from exploding bombs, as they fell nearer and nearer.
I was the only soldier in the cellar and I had to hide my feelings. Enduring an air raid in such a confined space was not something that I was used to. Such a bombardment as this, even in the main line of resistance was something that I had never experienced. At least when outside, one was armed, and active. Here in this cellar I was not, and so I tried to hide my fear. I made myself useful, as a waiter, handing each one a piece of the traditional crumble and poppy-seed cakes that the women had baked, ready for the Easter celebrations. This action produced weak smiles from starched and stony faces, but didn’t reach the frightened and staring eyes of their distraught owners. I wanted to leave that suffocating place but couldn’t for the crescendo of the falling, whistling bombs was continuous. There was hardly a pause in which I could escape. Spontaneously, loud praying began. “Holy Mary, Mother of God.” Then someone lost his nerve and shouted “Hold your tongues!” The cellar was full of chalk and loosened mortar dust. Mixed with the biting stench of explosives wafting through the cellar ventilators, it was suffocating.
I realised that there seemed to be a lessening in the raid. But still there were a number of low-flying Soviet planes with trigger-happy machine-gunners. I wanted to leave and return to my unit. At last I dared to take a look and saw a dying city, in unending agony, waiting for the next bombardment. It must have been pure unadulterated lust on the part of the Soviet pilots, to fly over the defenceless city as if they owned the sky above Breslau. There was no fighter-bomber resistance, nor any anti-aircraft fire. How long it had all lasted, no one really knew. But it was twilight enhanced with the light from flames.
I made my way back to my unit, with the very strong impression that Breslau was one giant glowing smithy. It was only possible for me to walk in the middle of the road. The houses were licked with flames on both sides of the road. It became a zig-zig obstacle course for me. Then a house suddenly collapsed. The road and I were enveloped in a giant cloud of dust and flying stones which reached to the other side of the street.
Some hours later, a church bell, high in its belfry, was heard to ring out the Easter message over Breslau. But it was not rung by bell-ringers. The sheer waves of heat, from the burning city below, gently nudged the bell into movement. It was no ‘happy Easter’ message, but a death-toll.
The storm of fire would not die, for it was fanned through every glassless window like a giant bellows. The waves of heat blew sparks and glowing particles of wood high into the air, where they nested on the roofs, to create a new fire. There seemed to be no end to Marshall Koniev’s ‘decisive battle’, for during the night, we heard that familiar and unmistakable sound of engines belonging to ‘sewing-machines’. Who could forget those Russian biplanes? They too had the treat of flying over the broken city of Breslau and making sure that it didn’t rise from its knees. They fired tracer ammunition into the already burning buildings.
There was an eerie peacefulness over the city next day, 3 April. The polluted air stank of burning buildings. Gentle rain began to fall. After experiencing the demon in modern explosive techniques, one realised what a God-sent peacefulness was, and how determined nature could be. Here and there, undamaged tulips and hyacinths poked their heads through the rain-washed earth, heralding the spring. They bloomed alongside yellow forsythia, now black, having been burnt to charcoal. At dawn, soldiers and civilians alike, armed with shovels and an assortment of rakes etc, went to work, feverishly looking for the dead and the living under the rubble. The corpses were wrapped in sheets, curtains, even brown packing-paper, without ceremony or consideration of male or female, officer or private. But some were wrapped in flags, for tenting was too costly. What of the usual gun salute? The explosions of time-bombs had to suffice for that.
Crowds of inhabitants who had survived the Easter inferno, went about looking for a new shelter over their heads. Some were overjoyed when, standing in front of a pile of rubble which had been the former home of friends or family, they found a scribbled message in chalk on the stones to say they were alive, and where they could be found.
We were asking ourselves why the Russian high command had used this tactic of attack on Breslau? The answer was easy. It was an example to the Western Allies. The desired
result being that when Russian infantry and tanks could not succeed, ‘carpet’ or ‘blanket’ bombing could! Breslau had to be razed from the surface of the earth. It had to be another Stalingrad! The Red Army had sealed Breslau’s escape routes. There was no escape for man nor mouse, and that was the way they wanted it. Attrition, to the last man.
The Russians had reached parts of the centre of the city. But not even with Siberian guards and the enormous numbers of Mongolian sub-machinegun squads could they break the last German defenders. The decisive battle was still not over. General Niehoff reported later that two battalions of the Waffen SS Regiment Besslein had caused the enemy heavy losses, with their excellent performance, and above all their endurance, during that Easter attack. Their commanders were named, being Captains Roge and Zizmann, the same Zizmann for whom I was messenger at the beginning of the fighting. He was wounded during that Easter attack.
The threatened and unavoidable end of the capital was not destined to take place just yet, for through a stroke of ‘luck’, a rather daring Russian officer pushed his ‘luck’ a little too far. He and his tank were captured. One could suppose that the Russian was under orders, just as we were, never to have his combat orders or his map of operations on his person, which could be of help to the enemy or show the secret co-ordination grid-map. This one did, however. As was to be expected the Russians based all their operations on this grid, consisting of numbers and letters of the alphabet. The garrison’s staff could never previously have deciphered messages such as “the attack is to be directed in the direction of F6”, or the operations commander report that “the spearhead has reached lines H3 to B5”. Confirmation came in seconds by quick reference to this map of the Russian commanders themselves — but for our radio-operators who were listening in, without a copy it was a puzzle.
In the Fire of the Eastern Front Page 23
