The scene was similar to a colourful waiting caravan, moving over the rubble-covered streets. Lorries were damaged and filthy and in between were tanks, with large red flags hung from their turrets, and dangerously near the vehicles were the typical Russian Panje pony-drawn carts. I really had to wonder at the mass of tanks that we had held at arm’s length for three months. I was not there long, for I heard the cries of the women and girls nearby, and single revolver shots from Soviets searching for solitary soldiers, cut off from their units. I had seen enough and hurriedly re turned to my comrades in the cellar.
Not long after, a gigantic fireworks show lit the skies over the dying city from tracers, flares and shells. The trigger-happy drunken Reds were firing salvo after salvo from machine-pistols, and even from light and heavy anti-aircraft guns, into that balmy May night. Some of the shells hit unexploded mines, for we heard them too. The walking wounded had watched the spectacle from the cellar entrance. Even in our totally depressed state one could imagine a New Year’s celebration in Breslau in peacetime being something similar, the people having flocked to the inner ring of the city, to wish their neighbour “Cheers and Happy New Year, good health and peaceful times”, on the stroke of midnight. On that May night however, in 1945, the show was a prelude to brute force and lack of rights.
Stalin’s ‘Attrition’ applied not only to the people of Breslau, but to every building of importance left standing that through a wonder, had remained whole in the three-month siege. Everything had to be destroyed, and so a wave of destruction rolled through the city. Bands of drunken Reds tottered through the city burning everything that took their fancy and that was still standing.
On 11 May, it began with the Barbara Church and six days later the Church of Magdalena. They burned them to the ground. Frederick the Great’s palace in the city had already been destroyed by fire. This type of war had replaced the one that we knew, and as feared it was followed with plundering and rape. Many in the city asked themselves whether the former was not the more bearable of the two, although they had thought that it was the most terrible that they had lived through, thinking that it could not be worse. They were wrong!
For both the military and civilian populations, 8 May was not a day of freedom, nor one of being freed. On the contrary, it was the beginning of hell, and the realisation of their half-joking phrase, “Enjoy the war, for freedom will be hell”.
On the fate of the female staff, we dare not think, for they were fair game. All women and girls were ‘fair game’ for the Russians, like game running wild in the woods. Even when now and then a decent Russian officer was to be found, who could and did deter single acts of rape, there were hundreds to follow. The women of Breslau fell victim to the same fate as hundreds of others in East Prussia and other German provinces.
According to the reports received in the Ministerium für die Vetriebenen it was stated in 1974 “that sadly there are not enough words in the German language to reconstruct for others the experiences written down and sent to us from the people of Breslau. Words are inadequate”.
Prelate Lange, the curator of the ‘House of Good Shepherds’ reported that on 7 May, a group of Russians climbed over the damaged wall of the convent in Kaiserstrasse, where two elderly nuns were to be found. One of them escaped, but the other did not even try, thinking that her great age would save her from any physical abuse. Sister Felizita was overpowered by the group, was shot and then raped. “We buried her in the garden of the convent. She was 81 years of age.”
Mrs Hedwig Goering reports that, “At first the Russians gave us a good impression, but we were fooled. My niece was raped by Russian soldiers on the third day of occupation. She was only eleven.” Other women fled to their allotment gardens, thinking that they were safer there than in the city. Mrs. A. Hartmann was one of them. “We made a mistake, for we women were raped time and time again, just like the women in the city. I lost my nerve, with the continual cries of the women and ran into the city. I must have been in a state of shock for it was only afterwards that I realised that I was witness to seeing women jumping from the windows of the houses, dying, rather than being the subject of rape from one soldier after the other”.
This report contained uncountable pages describing experiences, not only from the suffering of the women, but of children and old men. Every Russian at this time was a Tsar and he could do what he liked with ‘the Germans’, without repercussions. It was allowed, and from General Niehoffs ‘conditions of surrender’, the guarantee of the ‘victors’ was nowhere to be seen.
8 May was also no happy day for the anti-fascists. Even his loudly announced membership of the KPD, did not hinder the execution of Herr Langwitz, in Neukirchen a suburb of Breslau, or that of Mrs. Sacher in the same city. The membership books of both were torn into pieces by grinning Red Army men in front of these ‘old Communists’ before they were both murdered. The former Jewish mayor Heinzelmann, who luckily escaped deportation, angrily asked, “and we Anti-fascists? We feel betrayed and cheated, and we always promised that Communism would free the population from the yoke of Fascism!”
Music from the Russian loudspeakers was continually interrupted with announcements in the German language, ordering prisoners to gather at certain points in the city and then to wait for further orders. Officers who demanded the freeing of their men were laughed at. “Dawai dawai, i.e. faster, faster!” was the order and the long field-grey columns marched into POW camps. For some it was to lead to their deaths.
The doctor in our medical centre decided to wait, for there were no special orders for the wounded. We used the last hours of freedom to sit or lie in the sun, in the back yard of the Hotel Monopol. With the three other walking wounded, I climbed on to the flat roof, to take a last look at the city. We were discovered finally, on 9 May.
It was in the morning, as we were suddenly ordered ‘to show ourselves’ to Russian soldiers not trusting themselves to come into the dark cellar. They were waiting at the entrance, with cocked machine-pistols. “Come out with your hands up!” (Idi sjuda! Rucki verch!) The walking wounded walked up the cellar steps blinking at the sunlight. Before climbing those stairs I was a regular soldier. But it occurred to me that in the moment my feet left the last tread, I would become from one second to the next, one of those nameless prisoners of war. It was not to be, at least not on that day, for seeing that we were wounded, we were not taken away, nor was there an examination of our pay-books. We were uninteresting in seemed, at least for the time being.
Once more, for all of us in the cellar, it was not long before a husky cry echoed through the cellar. A single Russian soldier tottered down the cellar steps, like a Russian bear looking for honey. He thoroughly searched in all the corners of the cellar rooms and suddenly his eyes fixed on me, or perhaps it was my bed. We were ‘freed’ of our personal possessions on that day by this one soldier. My bed was obvious for it was the only one with a blue and white gingham cover plus a white curtain as extra warmth. The pale colour made the presence of lice more visible for me to destroy. For him however, it meant that I was someone special. “Uri, uri!” he screamed, and I answered “nix uri!”. It didn’t do me any good for he found my ‘Uri’ anyway, for he was on the lookout for plunder. He tore my bedding off my bed finding my knapsack and my silver pocket-watch. Taking it by the chain, he swung it under my nose, waving his pistol at me at the same time. My watch had been a going-away present from my father upon entering the army. It had accompanied me throughout the duration of the war, till now. From the six sons in the family, I was the only one named after my father and this watch had my name engraved in the lid. This ‘bear’ of a man, because of his ungainly movements, ‘freed’ all of my comrades from their watches too, adding them to those already decorating his arms, up to the elbows, one on top of the other.