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.
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.
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.