Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)
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The fascists were fighting with the fanaticism of doomed
men. Looking back, we can say now that the seeds of the
destruction of the Wehrmacht had already been sown in the
battle in front of Moscow, but it seemed to us that it was
only at Küstrin that we heard the unmistakable finale of the
war. (Del'va, 1983, 176)
CHRISTOPHER DUFFY
248
CHAPTER 22
Posen
ONE of the reasons why the Vistula-Oder Operation ran out of
steam was that Zhukov had to detach significant forces to con-
tain and eliminate the cut-off German strongpoints in his rear.
The most significant of these was the fortress-city of Posen (see
p. 99), where the siege absorbed four divisions of the Eighth
Guards Army and two divisions of the Sixty-Ninth Army.
Inside Posen Major-General Ernst Mattern was relieved of
the command on 28 January, making way for the newly pro-
moted Major-General Ernst Gonell, an 'inveterate Nazi' (Chui-
kov, 1978, 137). Gonell imposed an iron hand on the
numerically large (60,000) but very mixed garrison, and Chui-
kov himself saw how a group of German soldiers showed white
flags and tried to surrender, only to be shot down by their own
officers. The bodies rolled down the ramparts in twos and
threes at a time.
The Russians enjoyed an overwhelming superiority in artil-
lery, and they had so much ammunition that they could afford
to fire their anti-tank guns at individual soldiers. They drove
the Germans from the outlying works and the greater part of
the city by the beginning of February, and from the twelfth the
resistance was largely confined to the large citadel, which
crowned a dominating height above the Warthe.
By 15 February Gonell had lost all confidence that Posen was
about to be relieved, and his sense of betrayal was deepened
when Himmler (commander of the new Army Group Vistula)
refused to allow him to try to save the garrison by breaking
out. On his own authority Gonell allowed the troops to the east
249
of the Warthe to escape as best they could, and on the night
of 16-17 February 2,000 men slipped through the Russian po-
sitions and broke into smaller groups, many of which actually
reached friendly lines.
The Soviets opened a formal attack against the survivors in
the citadel on 18 February. In the first onslaught the Russian
infantry used assault ladders to descend the ditch and climb
the rampart on the far side, but the follow-on forces were able
to cross only in small groups under a lashing of enfilade fire
from two redoubts which proved extraordinarily difficult to
silence. At last on 21 February the embrasures of Redoubt No.
2 were swept by a flame-thrower, and small charges of explo-
sives were dropped down the ventilators to eliminate the gar-
rison. The German machine-gunners in the lower casemates of
Redoubt No. 1 withstood a great exploding drum and an attack
by flame-throwing tanks, and they kept up their fire until the
Russians in their desperation threw down wooden crates, bar-
rels and other articles which finally blocked their view.
At 0300 on 22 February Russian tanks and assault guns burst
into the citadel across an assault bridge. The battle continued
unabated inside the citadel, and the Russians sent in a captured
German officer bearing a ferociously worded demand to sur-
render. Gonell gave his soldiers permission to break out as best
they could, after which he retired to his bunker, spread the
Reichskriegsßagge on the floor, lay down and shot himself
through the head. In the event, none of his soldiers were able
to make good their escape.
In the evening Chuikov was told at his headquarters in the
city theatre that the enemy command desired to surrender. By
then the German combatants had been reduced to 12,000
troops, and they were all penned up in the citadel.
A quarter of an hour later a badly puffing Major-General
Mattern—an incredibly stout man who must have weighed
about 130 kg—squeezed his frame through the door. Re-
gaining his breath, he handed me a brief note from the for-
CHRISTOPHER DUFFY
250
tress Kommandant, General Gonell, asking the Soviet
command to take care of the German wounded.
'Where is Gonell?' I asked.
'He shot himself.'
When asked how he himself felt, General Mattern
shrugged: 'It is all the same to me; I am not a member of the
Nazi Party and I would not have shed blood needlessly know-
ing that resistance is useless. Hitler is finished!' (Chuikov,
1978, 142-43)
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251
CHAPTER 23
Breslau
The First Crisis, February to Early May 1945
THAT OVER-USED WORD 'EPIC' applies in full force to the German
defence of Breslau, the capital of Lower Silesia. This city resisted
for the remarkable term of seventy-seven days, which was be-
yond the lifespan of Hitler and Nazi Berlin. From the history
of the other sieges we will be familiar with some of the basic
ingredients of the story—professional but conscience-striken
military commanders, a helpless civilian population, and a bru-
tal and self-seeking Party leadership—but only in the telling
do we encounter some of the strengths which prolonged the
defence so far beyond the ordinary duration.
Breslau was a fortress only in virtue of a decree of August
1944, which set the Germans to work building an outer defence
line about fifteen kilometres from the city centre. A couple of
light field positions had been constructed outside the city in
the Great War, but there were no rings of forts as at Posen or
Königsberg, and no cleared fields of fire. Indeed all the con-
notations of Breslau had been peaceful ones. A pleasant assem-
blage of historic and modern buildings, it sat in the middle of
the gently rolling Lower Silesian countryside, and in recent
years it was famed as one of the few German cities which lay
beyond the normal reach of the Allied bomber offensive. Al-
most 1 million German civilians were therefore sheltering in or
around Breslau by the time the Soviets attacked on the Vistula
in 1945.
The Russian armoured spearheads raced the three hundred
252
kilometres from the Sandomierz bridgehead with appalling
speed, and from 14 January the Breslau railway station was
swamped with thousands of civilians who sought places on
board the trains leaving for Berlin, Saxony and Bavaria. Gau-
leiter Karl Hanke at first refused to allow any official movement
from Lower Silesia, for this would have smacked of defeatism.
The people tried to escape anyway, and when the trains and
buses were unable to cope, loudspeakers blared down the
streets on the twentieth and the twenty-first: 'Women and chil-
dren must leave the city on foot and proceed in the direction
of Opperau and Kanth!' It was an expulsion rather than an
evacuation, for the defenceless folk were simply turned into
the countryside. The snow lay half a metre deep in a temper-
ature of minus twenty degrees centigrade, and the babies were
usually the first to die.
On 24 January the sound of guns was heard from Oels
scarcely thirty-five kilometres to the west, and by early February
the area of Breslau emerged as an outlying bulwark stranded
between the two Russian bridgeheads of Steinau and Ohlau.
The approaches to Breslau were defended in a very energetic
way by the 269th Infantry Division (from the Western Front)
and the 17th Infantry Division (from the Vistula), but these
formations were forbidden to run the risk of being cut off in
Breslau, and on the night of 13-14 February they fought their
way into the open country. Breslau was virtually isolated on
15 February (see p. 134), and a tight investment was completed
on the following day.
The first axis of Russian effort was against the southern sub-
urbs of Breslau, where it took the Soviets from 20 February to
1 March to advance the two kilometres from the Südpark to
the Hindenburgplatz. On this sector the main symbolic and
physical barrier was the great railway embankment which de-
fined the city limit. Both soldiers and civilians were still confident
that Schörner's Army Group Centre would shortly break through
to them, and they hoped that by defending Breslau they were
winning time which the Reich could turn to its advantage.
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In early March the costly Russian effort in the south gradually
died away, which offers us an opportunity to take stock of the
means of the defence in general.
German Resources and Methods
In some respects Breslau was well provided. The garrison stood
at an adequate 45,000 to 50,000 men, including about 15,000
Volkssturm, and this force was divided into twenty-six combat
teams, ten construction battalions, two training battalions and
a number of smaller units. Some 80,000 civilians remained in
the city, and they might have presented a problem if Breslau,
as a long-established sanctuary from Allied air attacks, had not
been so well stocked with food.
The 'fortifications' included fortuitous barriers like the rail-
way embankment, and the massive ferro-concrete warehouse
near the harbour basin, but the Germans mostly had to adapt
the ordinary office and apartment blocks as best they could. To
begin with, the Russians employed a very successful tactic of
setting corner buildings ablaze with incendiary shells and mor-
tar bombs. The flames drove the defenders out, and the way
was clear for Soviet combat teams to make their entry with the
help of fire-fighting apparatus. The Germans in their turn coun-
tered by setting fire to the buildings in advance, which got rid
of the inflammable material before the garrison moved in. Be-
hind the front line Gauleiter Hanke had entire rows of houses
along the Götenstrasse and the Sadowastrasse blown up, which
created a no-man's land inhabited only by the rats which lived
off the unburied corpses.
Public facilities functioned remarkably well for a city under
siege. The fire brigade with its six hundred men and forty-four
engines attained a higher rate of activity than the brigade of
any other German city, and it suffered a loss of 26 per cent of
its personnel. No less brave and industrious were the battalions
of specialised workers who carried out demolitions, manufac-
CHRISTOPHER DUFFY
254
tured ammunition, repaired bridges and other communications
and supplied gas, water and electricity. Medical care was the
responsibility of the fortress Oberfeldartzt Dr. Mehling, who set
up improvised hospitals in cellars, underground shelters, and
the tall and massive concrete Hochbunker, which were proof
against direct hits from artillery and aerial bombs.
The same spirit of resource and invention provided Breslau
with a range of manufacturing facilities. The Aviatik cigarette
factory continued to produce 600,000 smokes a day, 'which
proved extremely welcome to all the fortress garrison, whether
soldiers or civilians' (Ahlfen and Niehoff, 1978, 91). This detail
was typical of the care which was taken to keep up morale.
Private as well as service correspondence was dropped by para-
chute and bomb, and the postal service worked so well that
there was a schoolmaster in the Volkssturm who received letters
from his home in Vienna nearly every day. Entertainments were
held for the soldiers whenever the tactical situation allowed,
and the director of the Breslau Theatre, who had been enlisted
into the Volkssturm, was particularly proud of a concert which
he helped to organise in the pretty suburb of Villen. A string
trio was included among the performers, and
the waltz Voices of Spring by Johann Strauss accorded well
with the swaying verdure of the fields, the blossoming apple
trees along the roadside and the green of the young birches.
Our mighty-voiced heroic tenor K. sang Italian arias, and
these too seemed to match the deep blue sky of that day of
early spring. We might have been able to forget the war and
the siege for a little while if it had not been for the dreadful
backdrop which extended behind the lightly coloured fields
of spring—the city of Breslau, with its great fires and their
black towers of smoke. (Hartung, 1976, 81-82)
The very considerable FAMO (Fahrzeug- und Motorenwerke
Breslau Gmbh) was forced to abandon its premises in February,
but it continued to manufacture and repair machines from a
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number of temporary workshops. The most spectacular single
product of FAMO was the Eisenbahnpanzerzug Poersel, an
armoured train mounting 88-mm, 37-mm and 20-mm anti-air-
craft guns, and two MG-42 machine-guns. This fearsome as-
semblage was first taken into action by First Lieutenant Poersel
on 20 March, and it went on to destroy seven tanks and three
aircraft. Its presence was very comforting to the defenders, and
particularly those in the area of Gandau airfield.
On 1 February the quantity of ammunition in Breslau was
calculated at 130,000 rounds, which was alarmingly low. A
search of the stores revealed forty 125-mm heavy mortars, for
which it was easy to manufacture the 'low technology' am-
munition. Elsewhere the Germans came across about 100,000
empty shell cases for light field artillery. The necessary fuzes
were flown in from the Reich, and the filling was extracted from
unexploded Russian bombs—a delicate process, since the ex-
plosive became fluid only at 90 degrees Centigrade, but ex-
ploded at 102 degrees. Some of the duds contained notes from
the German prisoners of war who had been forced to manu-
facture them: 'This is all we can do for you, comrades!' With
this the Germans had reached the end of their technical re-
sources, and the shortage of ammunition threatened to cripple
the defence, to the extent that the artillery was forbidden to
open fire without the permission of the commandant.
From the time the Russians had cut off Breslau on 15 Feb-
ruary, the survival of the city hung to a great extent on air
supply. On the next night the aircraft began their ferry service
to Breslau, flying in artillery ammunition and other precious
commodities, and leaving when possible with loads of
wounded men. The classic Ju-52 trimotor was a strong and
reliable machine, capable of carrying twenty-eight passengers
or their equivalent in cargo at time, but the Germans had too
few planes of this kind to meet the demands of Breslau, and
the aircraft could not be risked in daylight against the batteries
of anti-aircraft guns which the Russians massed along the ap-
proaches. Gandau field was too short for the fast tactical aircraft
CHRISTOPHER DUFFY
256
14. The siege of Breslau, 15 February-6 May 1945
which were employed to help with the transport, and their
loads were therefore dropped by parachute. Some of the con-
signments fell behind the Russian lines, were lost in the Oder
or suffered a variety of bizarre fates. Early one morning a party
of Volkssturm were alerted by an agitated cry of:
'Alarm! Paratroops!' Large, dark aircraft were already thun-
dering towards us in massive formation. They had no visible
insignia, and red parachutes were floating down from them.
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