Breslau 1945

[MCT]

Regards to you Mr. Hargreaves.
I am a first time poster, but was very pleased to see that you are writing a book about the battle of Breslau. My mother's family was from Breslau, and from that whole area of Schlesien: Neisse, Grottkau, etc. I have heard many stories about this time, and the aftermath.
My grandmother, and mother just escaped the encirclement by a day, at most, since my mother's birthday is on Feb. 12, and she remembers leaving just a day before.
The Russian 'Storm' hit the peoples in the eastern provinces very hard, as you know, and my mother's oldest sister was not so lucky to get away, my grandfather was in Lodz and just barely avoided capture, her youngest brother nearly bled to death on the trip west, and her oldest brother managed to avoid the Russians in the east and surrendered to the British in Holland.
The other brother was already in lager in Tunisia after being captured while serving with the Kriegsmarine in Marseilles.
I really look forward to the book, and I do hope that the aftermath of what occurred in Silesia is also covered.

[Stephan H.]

Richard - the following entry on Helion.co.uk caught my eye. I've not heard of it before and thought I'd bring it to your attention as a potential source, though I'm guessing you are aware of this 10 vol set. With a price of £950.00 I doubt it will ever end up on my shelf! I'll wait for your version to hit the book stores.

"BRESLAUER APOKALYPSE 1945. DOKUMENTARCHRONIK VOM TODESKAMPF UND UNTERGANG EINER DEUTSCHEN STADT UND FESTUNG AM ENDE DES ZWEITEN WELTKRIEGES

Gleiss, H.G.W.

This is quite simply one of the greatest undertakings in Second World War history, the author attempting to record in the most amazing detail the fate of Breslau in 1945. It endured an epic siege on the Eastern Front, surrendering after Berlin fell in May 1945. The volumes presented here include thousands of pages of eyewitness testimony, much of it collected by the author himself, or taken from diaries, journals and newspapers. As such, the majority of material present in these books cannot easily be located elsewhere. Further details on request. A full set of the 10 volumes is incredibly scarce, particularly as the undertaking was privately published by the author in very limited quantities.

Wedel (Holstein) Natura et Patria Verlag 1986-97 Hardback Overall a fine set, some of the earlier volumes slightly worn boards 210mm x 140mm 12183 pages 2571 ills & photos, 309 maps German"

[MCT]

Here are some photos to look at.


http://www.wratislavia.net/festung.htm

[MCT]

That link is for Festung Breslau photos. Some interesting photos show cattle in the streets, which was mentioned in Soldat by Siegfried Knappe.

[Richard Hargreaves]

Thanks to everyone for their input. Breslau book continues if not apace then at least progress is being made. I don't think I've researched or studied a battle (or a city) more than I have this one (and there's still a year to go before actually writing anything).

Breslauer Apokalypse sits on my bookshelf. Two bookshelfs actually, such is the size of it. I never actually counted the pages. 12,000-plus. Blimey. It's hard to say how much I've translated, but it is the ultimate resource of the battle and life in the city and no-one can contemplate tackling the battle without referring to it. It is a bit uneven - the later volumes are far superior to the earlier ones as Gleiss collected more and more material and word spread of his collection. And it is a bit of a jumble. Although it's ordered chronologically, that's about the only order! Diaries, letters, newspaper cuttings, memoirs, maps - they're all in there, but you have to wade through the lot to find what you want. The nearest I can compare it to is Vopersal's 3 SS Panzer Division history, although it's not as organised as that. £950 for a complete set does seem rather high. Copies do come up on eBay reasonably regularly. There's also a couple of supplementary volumes which are much harder to track down: Breslauer Exodus concerning the Vertreibung in 1946 (which I have) and Breslauer Passion which I cannot find for the life of me.


One excellent site on the city crammed with images (mainly in Polish, but there are quite a few pages in German) is:

http://wroclaw.hydral.com.pl/test.php?c ... me&lang=de

and this is excellent

http://www.breslau-wroclaw.de/de/breslau/welcome/

and you can find much of the Schlesische Tageszeitung for 1945 here:

http://digital-b.staatsbibliothek-berli ... pe=zeitung

and a few books on the subject:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php ... ch=breslau

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php ... =breslauer

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php ... =schlesien

[MCT]

Thank you for those links. I might be able to find Breslauer Passion in Hamburg.
One of the great crimes was what happened to the people in Silesia when the war ended, by the Poles. I hope you research that.

[panzermahn]

Hi Richard

Perry Biddiscombe's book The SS Hunter Battalion mentioned about a unit of Jagdverbande Ost headed by Obersturmfuehrer Witzel who lead a group of 60-70 Germans, Ukrainians, Poles and Russians into the Festung Breslau during March 1945. When Witzel left the fortress back into German lines, he was almost shot by the German themselves because they thought he was a Seydlitz-truppen of the NationalKomittee Freis Deutschland. Would your book on Breslau expand on this chapter?

Regards
Panzermahn

[Richard Hargreaves]

Er, in a word. No. I've not got any source material on that.

[Richard Hargreaves]

Further to that last point, I do have a little bit on NKFD trying to infiltrate German lines on the night of May 5-6.

[panzermahn]

Hi Richard

I think the Nationalkommittee Freies Deutschland is quite active during the last 2 months or so before the end of the war so it was quite possible and there are quite a number of anecdotes that spoke of NFD infiltration into the "eastern fortresses" (Breslau, Kustrin, Danzig, Memel etc..) in the Eastern Front. However I am not sure what happen to the men of the NFD since it is not recorded of what are the fates of these men. Most likely they took the oppurtunity to pretend to be born again Bolsheviks and then took to chance to escape from Soviet captivity..

After the war has ended, several NFD men were jailed on allegation of war crimes (25 years or more) after they had outlived their usefulness to the Soviets...

Panzermahn

[sebastian]

nice intro,makes me hungry for more :-)

[Richard Hargreaves]

And so to the Baranow/Sandomierz bridgehead...

In Sandomierz, Lieutenant Vassily Ivanovich Malinin could hear a handful of aircraft overhead in the night sky. It was rarely quiet in the historic small town which straddles the Vistula. For several weeks, the correspondent with the Soviet Sixth Army’s front-line newspaper Down With The Enemy, had watched the build-up of forces: trucks and armour continuously crossed the bridges Red Army engineers had thrown across the river the previous summer and autumn. As they approached Sandomierz they passed posters, pinned to trees or road signs or erected by the roadside, proclaiming: We will reach Berlin! Germans artillery had tried to disrupt the build-up. Shells sporadically fell in Sandomierz’s centre. Russian gunners responded with heavier salvoes aimed at German lines half a dozen miles to the north. The infantry trained. They practised neutralising enemy bunkers and the art of street fighting. The latter, one battalion commander told the journalist, would “definitely come in handy”. Occasionally, Vassily Malinin visited the front, staring across the eighty or so metres of wasteland between the Russian trenches and the foremost German lines. Bunkers, trenches, connecting trenches, all were easily identifiable. By day there was random fire from enemy mortars and machine-guns. By night, the Vistula landscape was bathed in artificial light by flares which the Germans launched almost without interruption from dusk until dawn. It was, Malinin observed, “a sign that they are afraid.” Tonight the light show had an aural accompaniment. Several German aircraft circled above Sandomierz, dropping bombs on the town. Many did not explode. “Hitler’s machine,” Malinin noted in his diary, “is beginning to stutter.”

[Mike Higgins]

Really enjoyed your book "The Germans in Normandy", I am really looking forward to your upcoming book.

[Richard Hargreaves]

And a little more...

To many Silesians, the Russians’ revenge was blind, their anger unreasonable. “What fate to the Bolsheviks have in store for our people and you, my love?” one junior officer defending Silesia asked himself. “Women and mothers would be raped, disgraced, deported to Siberia – that’s if they don’t just let them starve or exterminate them.” If anything happened to him, Breslau Volkssturm man Hermann Krätzig wrote to his wife Margarete, “then pray that I have not fallen into enemy hands. Protect yourselves, my beloved, from this dreadful fate. The enemy knows no humanity.” The atrocities played into the hands of the Nazi propaganda machine. It had warned the German people an Asiatic storm threatened them in the East. Now the prophecy was being fulfilled. The Russians, Joseph Goebbels noted, “act like barbarians in the conquered region. Stalin has probably modelled his method of torture on Genghis Khan’s column.” There could be no more talk of mercy, the propaganda minister decided. “The German Volk must defend their lives – and any method of doing so is just.”

Any method was used. But they were not just. In one Silesian village, Russian soldiers were found sitting at tables in German kitchens dead after gorging themselves on poisoned schnapps, cucumbers, bacon. There were numerous instances of captured Russian soldiers being executed on the spot by their German foe. “You cannot still call on us to take prisoners!” one Landser told his commander after seeing the corpses of raped women. Female soldiers were invariably shot. “Each one of us always had a bullet left for ourselves – better to die than to go into captivity,” one battlefield nurse recalled. One of her friends was taken prisoner. “When we re-took the village two days later we found her: her eyes were gouged out, her chest cut open. She was impaled on a stake.” In the frost, her body had been entirely frozen, her hair turned grey. Signaller Vladimir Archipov found the bodies of twenty comrades who’d been taken prisoner by German troops. They had been quartered, their eyes gouged out. “So when our lads had taken prisoners, they gave them a good thrashing,” he wrote home to his family. “Today some SS troops were captured. They were beaten by our lads because of their SS uniforms. They were made to feel our hatred.” They were not the only ones. Ambulance driver Pavel Chochlov found the villages of Silesia littered with the corpses of German officers and men; in one perhaps fifty Landsers who had surrendered then shot to a man “on the orders of a Russian officer”. After one particularly bitter struggle for a village involving Chochlov’s regiment, enemy troops filed out of the houses. “Don’t shoot them yet,” the Siberian’s commander told his men. “They’ll all be rounded up, then we’ll shoot them.” He was as good as his word. As the final German soldiers were driven out of the last house in the village, they were lined up and shot. “If we took prisoners,” one female Red Army soldier admitted, “they were not shot dead – that would have been too easy for them. We stabbed them like pigs with spears, chopped them to pieces.” This was not hearsay. It happened. “I saw it with my own eyes,” she recounted forty years later. “I waited for the moment when their eyes bulged with pain.” They bulged, and she felt no mercy. “They burned my mother and my young sister at the stake in the middle of the village.”

Writing about the atrocities has probably been the hardest thing to do; not merely are the stories truly repulsive and gut-wrenching, but I didn't want to show that the horrors of what happened on German soil in 1945 were inflicted by Russians alone - there are plenty of 'death marches' involving prisoners/forced labourers at the hands of the Germans among other crimes. They're not included above because before you know it, the entire manuscript would be posted here...

[panzermahn]

Hi Richard

I'll keep an eye for your book! When it comes out, I would love to buy one signed by you :)

Panzermahn