Ursula, nineteen years old, a telephone operator in the Breslau telephone exchange and a BDM Gruppenführer, knew all of this. She appeared in the Command Post of General Niehoff, offering her services in destroying this bridge with explosives. The offer moved General Niehoff, for what more could prove the desire of this ‘Silesian’ to defend her home city? It would however have been totally irresponsible of him in allowing it. So he told her that her work in the telephone exchange was also vital and that was where she should return. It was just four days later that General Niehoff learned that the bridge had been destroyed, only charred wooden remnants for posts being all that could be seen emerging from the water. Ursula? Had she not taken “no” for an answer? It was to prove so. Research revealed that she had found an explosives expert and with feminine wiles had convinced him that she could learn everything that could be learned about this material and its uses. She learnt quickly, in days, what usually took engineers weeks, if not months. She was not alone in her work, for two other BDM girls accompanied Ursula on her mission to the western front-line. They swam under a drifting paddleboat using the flow of the river to bring them to the bridge. It lay immediately behind enemy lines, and there they completed their mission.
Whether she, whether they, lived to see the success of their mission is not known. Nothing more is known about Ursula and her friends. Did they die in the explosion? Were they killed by guards when trying to return to the city? Even today nothing more is known and their fate that cannot be pursued. Their sacrifice must however, never be forgotten.
Other women and teenage girls within the fortress, also gave ‘over and above their call of duty’, especially in the now-overfilled First Aid posts, and military and civilian hospitals. Nurses and auxiliaries worked day and night under the worst of conditions, showing civil courage and garnering achievements beyond human expectation. It was an incredible talent and invention when literally hundreds of people, including patients from sanatori ums, mental institutions etc, had to be evacuated from these sometimes burning buildings and under fire from the artillery.
In bunkers, three above ground and four underground, and the ten hospitals in Breslau, an eighteen-hour operation programme was the order of the day. The flow of casualties was unending. I had cause to visit one of the above ground-bunkers, in the search for a friend of mine, who had been wounded when we were fighting in Augustastrasse and whom I found after a long search. I found him eventually in the round, concrete and steel six-storey bunker at Striegauer Platz, which I could only describe as a catacomb of death. Originally it was to be used as an air-raid shelter for the in-habitants, but the building, which was without windows, had been used for the wounded since the siege began and housed as many as 1,500 patients. It was always full and the doctors and nurses always gave dedicated care in that mausoleum.
Entry into this bastion was through two steel, fireproof doors, designed of course for the protection from fire. Because of that, one was confronted with firstly a wall of darkness, upon passing through the doors. Secondly, one was immediately met with foul air, the stench of pus, blood and ether, mixed with a pungent sweetness, reminding one of the battlefields. A narrow stair case wound its way upstairs around the round building. The electric light was sparse, very sparse. Leading from the passages were concrete cells, for want of a better word, housing three patients lying on collapsible beds, almost in darkness, for the only light came from the passages. The delirium of dying men emerged from the ghostly darkness, together with the cries of pain or the faint murmur of “Comrade, com rade”. The suffering of mankind rang in their voices. It came from the remnants of men, who had ‘run the gauntlet’. They had received the military ‘punishment’ of that destructive war.
I wanted to escape from that horrifying place, but I found my friend in his wretchedness, lying on bare boards, bandaging protruding from underneath his open jacket. There was a light in his eyes as he saw me and silently he gave me his hand. I did my best to console him, telling him that he would pull through. But three days later he died from his wounds. If that was not enough, I saw with my own eyes the facilities available for the dead, in that situation and place of death, which were far, far less than offered in a cata -comb. The corpses were piled one on top of the other, on the ground floor near the stairs that I had to pass. My friend, with his broken ‘dog-tag’, was finally to be put on top of that pile of corpses.
There were many rumours about that bunker at Striegauer Platz, some becoming a legend. They stemmed from German soldiers not wanting to surrender it, but abandoning the burning bunker in the end. My friend and as sistant field-doctor from those times, Markwart Michler, who was an eyewitness and with whom I have been friends since we were both prisoners of war of the Russians, told me however, that a planned evacuation of the bunker took place at the end of April and the bunker was left to the Russians.
I visited Breslau in 1972 and apart from obvious shell holes in the structure, I could not determine any other form of damage and certainly no burn marks. That still mighty concrete bastion was naturally sealed against inquisitive eyes and stretched itself to heaven as usual twenty-seven years later. Twenty-seven years after, the Polish authorities had not thought it necessary to clear the rubble of war away from its portal where it still lay.
Life in the besieged city was full of contrast. Here one fought and died, there one lived and loved. The front was not recognisable as anything but a communications zone, and there was practically nothing to determine soldier from civilian, for we had become a conspiratorial community. The war was everywhere, but even that slept, if only for a short while, like a beast of prey, bloated from the blood of its sacrifice. It was then somewhat peaceful and the soldier-lad dreamed for a couple of hours of the love of a lovely girl, for it helped him to forget the nightmare of war.
Everyone in the fortress, be it soldier or civilian, now greeted one another with an ironic “Stay healthy!” this irony interpreting the ever present mind-set which did not hold much optimism of surviving. When however, the few opportunities presented themselves, then they used them to the full, with wine, song and girls, with the motto “Enjoy the war, as freedom will be hell on earth”!
We were frustrated young men. We had seen nothing of the world. We had not sown our wild oats. We had not lived or loved. What had we had from life? Was our final chapter to be death, or to freeze in the wilds of Siberia? To ignore a ‘tantalising situation’ is a question of moral determination, is it not? To enjoy this ‘tantalising situation’ while in the midst of it, one needed to adapt, to make the best of life under the slogan, “Live today, for tomorrow you die!” And we did! People must understand, that with the enormous exertions that we had to make in that besieged city, in war-time, inhibitions that we would have had to overcome in normal times, were at a minimum and quickly thrown aside.
A new order was received and executed, in the middle of March. All women and girls, from the ages of 16 to 35 years of age, were conscripted into the Labour Service, to help the military, some in uniform helping the Wehrmacht. Naturally enough this brought us into closer contact with the feminine species. Many of the girls were employed in the ordnance units and were mostly very young assistants of supplies. Some were engaged as helpers in the kitchens, others as auxiliary nurses, who were lovingly called ‘carbolic-mice’ by the men. Despite their age, these girls became mothers for confessions, comforters of the soul, and bracketed as ‘soldier-brides’. It was very easily understood, by everyone, when such young girls, alone and away from their familiar surroundings, sought the company of the soldiers. In sharing the same fate as we did in that inferno, the ‘fortress Lolitas’ were dancing on the top of this volcano with us. It is therefore no wonder that they sought, and found, more than willing guardians and protectors, in order to survive the ‘fate of Breslau’.