There was another encounter with a high-ranking Nazi official that was not so sociable. It happened because of complete carelessness with a weapon. There was thoughtlessness, because of impatience, and it all ended in tragedy. We were about to take over new quarters in the Zimpel district. The responsible district officer accompanied us to garages that had corrugated iron doors. In attempting to open one that had stuck, he attacked the door with the butt of a fully loaded machine-pistol, without its safety catch on. It exploded, as expected. Our sergeant-major received the full load in his intestines and within seconds was dead on the spot. We pounced on the man, taking his weapon away from him, shouting and cursing at him. That should not have happened, not to our sergeant-major. He was a man loved by his men, who fulfilled his duty as ‘mother of the company’ and who, above all else, had come through the whole of the Russian campaign without a scratch. His death was a very bitter affair for us, very bitter indeed.
It was only a matter of time we knew, before Gandau was taken over by the advancing Russians. Hitler also knew. He kept his eye on the situation in Breslau and personally gave directions. One was that another provisional landing-strip be made in the centre of the city. For this plan, all of the houses between the Kaiser and Fürsten bridges in the proximity of the Schneitzniger Park, had to be demolished. Tramlines, telephone poles, iron girders, as well as the mountains of rubble from the houses on the Schneitzniger Stern had to be transported away. It also included every thing from the mighty Luther and Canisius churches. That meant that all of it had to be removed by hand. Part of it could be used for barricades, but the rest had to be removed. Thousands of women and youths were conscripted for the work. They toiled by day and by night to fulfil that project.
And the Russians? They were very quick to find out what was going on in the middle of Breslau, in the Kaiserstrasse. The project was therefore the target of attack from ground-attack aircraft, which spat machine-gun fire and dropped fragmentation bombs on to the civilian labour-force, leaving a bloody trail behind them. The death toll was enormous, increasing daily during the month of March. That project was to be the main cause of death for the Breslau inhabitants, being estimated by the priest Ernst Hornig at 10,000!
The Russian advance on Gandau, and the continual bombardment during March, meant that it could only be days before they took the aerodrome. We knew that, but it did not take place until early in April. Until then, the faithful Junkers had carried out their duty in the supply of everything that the fortress had needed. It was on 4 April that the supply-line was finally severed. It was a day of heavy bombardment from the air, and heavy artillery fire from the ground, until finally Soviet tanks rolled into the aerodrome and took possession. The defence of the air traffic, incoming with supplies, and outgoing with the wounded, had been protected for as long as was humanly possible. It had been the largest and most worrying task of the fortress Commander-in-Chief, who wrote in his diary on 24 March 1945:
The supply-line for Breslau has become extremely difficult to protect because of increasingly heavy anti-aircraft guns and search tights. On 15 March, from a total of 55 machines that had tried to land, only half of the machines managed to do so. Despite this, 150 of our wounded were flown out, most of the machines being able to take 20 of the wounded per flight. Inside three days, 150 planes were able to drop ammunition overboard, small arms and mail for the troops using Versorgungsbomben.
Versorgungsbomben were not bombs at all, but supply-canisters attached to parachutes. They fell to a large extent behind enemy lines, into marshland and on to the roofs of the houses. Then it really was not worth breaking your neck in order to recover them. We did however recover some, complete with parachute, for the red, soft silk was readily worn by the lads as a scarf tucked into their shirts. The anger, the disappointment, and the frustration were great when we opened them one after the other. There were 50 altogether, each holding two Panzerfäuste. Firstly we found that the detonators had failed. Secondly, the Panzerfäuste held no explosive substances! We could not imagine why. We just could not understand. The disbelief turned to anger at such shoddy work. We could not believe that it was simply human error. Was it then deliberate? Was it then sabotage? Were secret saboteurs at work in the homeland? As a result, pilots doing their best to bring us much-needed weapons were losing their lives, in waves, in the line of duty, on extremely dangerous sorties.
When we found ourselves in that emergency situation our frustrated minds brought invention to the fore. After all, why did we have the FAMO engineers at hand. From the original employees totalling 8,000, there were then only 680 left in Breslau. They consisted of workers, technicians and engineers and they were there for our problems. They gave us their technical know-how and their time. Working both by day and by night, they replaced what was missing. I must stress that they worked miracles. All made a supreme effort to give us what we needed. For instance we had more than enough new machine-guns, but all without their locking units. The FAMO men constructed this complicated lever-arm from just an illustrated spare-parts catalogue, just as a locksmith would do. Despite bombardments and coming under artiltery fire, the men worked ‘like the devil’ in the partly-destroyed factory. They not only restored small arms, but even tanks as well. The finest achievement of all was the armoured train that they produced in fourteen days and nights of hard work.
From an old chassis, they reconstructed a ‘rolling fortress within the fortress’ which was strengthened with steel plating and armed with 2cm and 8.8cm anti-aircraft guns. It chugged its way right into the middle of the Russian lines. From pure fright this iron Trojan recouped many a lost position for us. Soviet magazine-fed rifles were re-designed to use German ammunition. Because we needed tracer pistols, the FAMO men produced them newly made, from an old existing model that we had given them. The Russians had no equivalent of the FAMO men and were left with the useless newly delivered weapons dropped by our parachutes.
For the defence of a particular railway embankment, a pyramid-shaped shelter was produced from steel tank plating, as a machine-gun nest for a rifle squad. It proved to be very efficient indeed. Their work was interrupted more than once because of damage to workshops. Provisional ones had to be erected elsewhere. The epilogue to the super-human efforts of those men, for whom nothing was impossible, was sadly, that 13% of the remaining employees died as a result of enemy attacks.
Another example of stamina from the inhabitants, was shown by a group of skilled workers at an old factory in the Wilhelmsruh part of the city. They produced grenades with the most primitive of materials. Explosive material from Russian ‘duds’, plus steel splinters, were used to fill 8.8cm anti-aircraft cartridges. The men were then producing as many as 200 to 300 per day. Due to their efforts, we caused heavy losses for the Russians, even when 15% of the hastily produced grenades were also ‘duds’! The soldiers on the front also had ideas, stemming from the new experience of house-to-house fighting. They needed new fighting tactics in an overwhelming experience for which they had had no training. One of those ideas came from the hazards of collecting fresh supplies of ammunition and rations. We had to cross a large and dangerous junction which caused us to lose many men to snipers.
The Russians just waited for us to make a move. We scratched our heads for ways to fool them and came up with the idea of hanging washing lines, with carpets, runners and curtains etc, to obstruct their view. The camouflage washing-line worked so well that we made more of such screens, in every imaginable direction, to draw attention away from our runs. We felt safe enough to hang banners with the message, “The SS Regiment Besslein fights here to greet the ‘Ivans’!” That pledge was adhered to by the Regiment.