'Hitler's Final Fortress'
The desperate measures employed by the Nazis to defend Breslau in 1945 , even as it is surrounded by the Red Army without hope of relief
Few things encapsulate the state of Nazi Germany in the last year of the war as the conditions inside Hitler’s ‘Festung’ cities. These were ‘Fortress’ locations that would hold out against everything sent at them in desperate battles to divert Allied troops from the main front. They were intended to be surrounded and simply fight on and wait until the ‘miracle weapons’ brought ‘final victory’ to the Germans.
They were really futile exercises in a Nazi fantasy that resulted in wasted lives and unnecessary destruction. They meant untold suffering for civilian residents as much as anyone else. However, large numbers of Germans believed in the fantasy and kept fighting to the end.
One of the best accounts of any of these locations is Hitler's Final Fortress: Breslau 1945. Using a wide variety of contemporary accounts, Richard Hargreaves builds a detailed picture of life inside the historic city as it was reduced to rubble.
The following excerpt describes how an ‘airbridge’ kept the besieged city supplied:
There was only one way to escape the hell of Breslau: evacuation by air - but only for the wounded. At night ambulances ferried casualties from the hospitals and aid stations to Gandau, then waited until the Junkers had departed. Some pilots would take twenty-eight, perhaps even thirty-two wounded. No Ju 52 - or Tante Ju (Aunt Ju) as the men called them - ever left Gandau without injured troops aboard. But if the aircraft failed to turn up, the ambulances would return the men to their hospitals.
Company commander Wolfgang Chutsch was taken to Gandau on three occasions. On the first, the Ju52 due to carry him out of Breslau was full. During take-off it careered into a crater, flipped on to its nose and exploded, killing or severely burning every occupant. On the second, the Russian barrage prevented any aircraft touching down. Finally, in the small hours of 3 March, a Ju 52 took him to Dresden. The aircraft behind and in front of his Aunt Ju were both shot down. Chutsch’s Junkers was hit eight times by flak and more than 120 times by small arms fire.
More than 5,000 casualties were flown out of the city. The flights in brought food, mail, medicine, ammunition, light field guns, sometimes replacement troops. The ‘air bridge’ to airfields around Dresden and Breslau was the fortress’s lifeline. “Without air supply,” Hans von Ahlfen wrote, “Breslau’s long struggle would have been unimaginable.” Ahlfen and his successor Niehoff needed forty tons of supplies delivered every day. The three-engined Junkers 52, backbone of the Luftwaffe’s transport fleet, was the favoured machine thanks to its two-ton payload.
That was if the Aunt Ju landed. If it chose to drop its supplies by parachute, each aircraft could only deliver 1.3 tons. Worse still, fortress staff reckoned half the canisters parachuted into the city would fall over enemy lines, while those which did land on the German side were frequently plundered.
The Heinkel He III could carry even less, and it could only drop supplies, not land at Gandau. While only twenty Ju 52s were required to support Breslau each day, it would take forty-five Heinkels to deliver the forty tons of supplies. And that was discounting the effects of the enemy and the weather. There were at least ninety medium and heavy Soviet anti-aircraft batteries ranged around the Silesian capital, plus a good hundred searchlights.
The approach of an aircraft provoked “hundreds of tracer and flak shells racing skywards - an instant firework display to shoot down our aircraft,” recalled chemist Hans Hoffmann. Vassily Malinin watched German aircraft “caught between the beams of searchlights over Breslau. Seconds later they began “dragging trails of smoke and fire behind them before crashing on the edge of the city. “Several enemy aircraft were shot down tonight,” the war correspondent noted. “But some succeeded in fighting their way through to the city.”
On the ground at Gandau, small-arms fire and artillery added to the fliers’ difficulties. As soon as the aircraft started their engines up again, mortar fire began from Red Army positions barely half a mile from the airfield. “Comrades who had flown supplies to Stalingrad said that the defences at Breslau were much stronger,” one Ju 52 radio operator recalled.
On 17 March he and his Ju 52 attempted to drop canisters of mail and medicines over the city. Low cloud thwarted any hope of landing at Gandau. The Junkers flew on to the sports fields of the Friesenwiese. Immediately Russian light and medium flak opened fire,then the searchlights captured the transporter. The pilot dived, climbed and banked to get out of them. The supply canisters were thrown out of their racks, smashing holes in the roof and scattering their contents around the fuselage. All thoughts of a drop were abandoned. The pilot turned for Dresden. It was nearly dawn when the Ju 52 touched down. Its crew “found a hole the size of washbowl in the left tailplane, countless bullet holes in the elevator and fin as well as in the rear of the fuselage.” They also learned that four other crews were missing. A fifth had nursed its badly damaged aircraft home.
The air supply of Breslau had reached its turning point. Until mid-March, for every eight Junkers sent to Breslau, seven returned. But thereafter losses rose alarmingly. In the second half of the month, two in every five Aunt Jus never reached the city. It could not continue: if such losses persisted, the Luftwaffe warned, it would run out of aircraft by the first week in April.
The shortage of aircraft was compounded by the fact that Gandau was rapidly becoming untenable. By the end of the first week of April, it would be in Soviet hands.
But by then, the Silesian capital had another airfield. For half a century the red brick Lutherkirche had dominated the skyline of eastern Breslau. Built to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Martin Luther’s birth, it took the city’s Protestants ten years to raise the funds and three to erect their new house of worship, a near replica of Berlin’s Lutheran church. More imposing than loved, the neo-Gothic Lutherkirche possessed the tallest spire in the city and excellent acoustics for its 1,400 worshippers. The latter lived in four-, five- and six-storey apartment blocks in the surrounding tree-lined boulevards which converged on one of Breslau’s great intersections, the Scheitniger Stem. All would be flattened in the coming weeks as Karl Hanke bludgeoned a Rollfeld - runway - one mile long and at least 300 yards wide through the suburb.
Every day from 23 March until early April, Polish forced labourer Alexsander Szniolis was roused at 4am and marched through the streets to Scheitnig. There, Szniolis and his fellow prisoners - Poles, Italians, Frenchmen - found “an anthill of about 60,000 people from all the four comers of the earth and from all of Breslau” . They also found every house “burning like a torch - the street was so hot that we could barely breathe” .
The prisoners tore down walls, usually still glowing from the heat, and piled the bricks up. An army of workers - most of those toiling on the Rollfeld were Germans, not foreign prisoners - carried the rubble away in carts and tipped it on the edge of the burgeoning runway, where it was levelled, while beams, planks, tram rails, even candelabras were used to reinforce barricades in nearby streets.
This, according to the Party, was Ehrendienst - honorary service. “It was more slave labour than honorary service,” Helga Schliepkorte, an evacuee from Dusseldorf, bitterly recalled. “Any delay, any slacking, any extended break, any non-compliance when it came to carrying out the work resulted in draconian punishments.” Schoolgirl Ursula Scholz was lucky. She found an accommodating Feldwebel who realized the war was lost - and acted accordingly and allowed the women in his charge to work every other day.
The Red Army was not so forgiving. It would not allow work on the new runway to proceed unhindered. Shelling was regular, although those building the Rollfeld “soon became skilled in telling which of the shells whistling towards us would land nearby, so that we only took cover occasionally,” Helga Schliepkorte remembered. Ursula Scholz heeded the advice of soldiers who told her to throw herself to the ground if caught in the open amid shellfire. “There’s no need to walk upright when the air is full of iron.”
Soviet aircraft, especially fighter-bombers, also ‘visited’ the runway daily. Their bombs and cannon ploughed up the ground so painstakingly flattened and sent workers rushing to the side. Often they did not make it. The appearance of the enemy aircraft provoked panic and caused workers to group together out of fear, providing the airmen with “rich pickings” . Six young women alongside Helga Schliepkorte, none older than eighteen, collapsed as a fighter-bomber strafed the flat red runway. Several of Schliepkorte’s colleagues were buried alive during one bombing raid. The workers spent sixteen hours trying to dig them out. “We got there too late,” wrote Schliepkorte. “They had all suffocated.”
Days, weeks of toil, of brutal treatment, of constant attacks, gnawed at the nerves of those building the Rollfeld. “We sleep like hares, our eyes open,” former electrician Hermann Nowack recorded in his diary. “And we wait for death.” Nowack survived. Not so an estimated 3,000 fellow workers. Their bodies were tossed into a mass grave in nearby Scheitniger Park. “No plaque records their names,” Helga Schliepkorte bemoaned two decades later. “They died without names. Many of them are perhaps still sought by their relatives today.”
And yet at the time the housewife believed the sacrifices were worthwhile. She remembered how “everyone did their best, for no one wanted to admit that Breslau was lost” . Their efforts were largely in vain. Records are vague, but very few transport aircraft ever set down on the Rollfeld after it was completed in early April.
Twenty-three-year- old Werner Grund did use the new runway - on a one-way mission. Grund was towed to the edge of the city in a small DFS 230 glider. Six and a half thousand feet above Breslau, a crewman on the He III tow plane flashed a green torch and the glider was released. The bomber crew turned for home, relieved, for Soviet fighters were reported. Werner Grund looked for a place to land, He chose the new runway.
As I got lower, I saw bombs exploding and houses burning. The two-centimetre flak was too high. I pushed the sliding window back, threw my headphones out and put on my steel helmet. The searchlights hadn’t got me. Below, I saw a burning house. The glow of fire illuminated a field as big as a children’s playground. I selected it as an emergency landing ground.
The houses were getting worryingly close as I lined up the approach. I steered the glider down. It dropped like a piano from the fifth storey. As I approached I saw six landing lights - Kaiserstrasse. Three metres above the ground I was ready to land. Tail wind and breathtaking speed prevented any mishap. I gently touched down but for some reason the undercarriage broke off and I landed on my runners, roughly twenty metres past the burning houses.
I climbed out of the glider. Not a soul, just ruins and blazing houses. Then a figure appeared and called out: “Don’t shoot!” - he’d heard me flicking my rifle’s safety catch off. I was glad to have escaped once again. The glider was immediately unloaded and pushed into the burning house. I reported to a Leutnant in the shelter. The duty doctor was relieved that nothing had happened to me.
The atmosphere was depressed. All of them wanted to know when the ‘relief’ would come. What could I say to that?
Grund was offered a glass of schnapps and a plate of stewed fruit which he ate while bombs fell outside. After spending the night in the besieged city, he was flown out in a tiny Fieseler Storch reconnaissance aircraft.
© Richard Hargreaves 2011, Hitler's Final Fortress: Breslau 1945. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd.
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