Just days after surrounding the Silesian capital, Koniev’s forces made their first thrust towards the city centre. Soviet tanks attacked from the south and moved up their heavy artillery; house after house was set alight with incendiary grenades, which took a terrible toll on the civilian population. The Germans were able to repel this assault and to stabilize the front, but their successes served only to prolong the suffering.
The city was pounded daily by Soviet artillery, and corpses became a regular feature on the city’s streets. Cut off from the rest of the Reich, all railway transport having ceased in mid-February, Breslau could be supplied only by air, from the airport at Gandau just outside the city. However, realizing that it was only a matter of time until the Russian advance made the use of Gandau impossible, in March the Germans set about constructing a makeshift airstrip along the Kaiserstraße, a wide boulevard to the east of the old city centre; buildings along the Kaiserstraße were detonated; men, women and children were put to work shifting the rubble, while Soviet artillery was aimed at the intended landing strip and Russian fighter planes strafed the area. In the event, the improvised landing strip proved of little value, and when Gandau was lost at the beginning of April it spelled the end of the evacuation of the wounded from Breslau.
Altogether, the German forces defended the beleaguered city for nearly three months. On 6 April, referring to the 140,000 ‘desperate’ civilians trapped in the besieged city, the last ‘fortress commandant’ General Hermann Niehoff (who had replaced von Ahlfen on 9 March) requested permission to surrender, a request brusquely refused by Hitler, and then went on loyally to continue the senseless struggle for another month.
’Fortress Breslau’ did not surrender until 6 May, a week after Hitler had killed himself and four days after Berlin had fallen to the Red Army. By the time Niehoff finally capitulated to the Russians, two thirds of the city had been destroyed, 20,000 houses had disappeared, roughly 6000 German and 8000 Soviet soldiers, and at least 10,000 civilians (including 3000 suicides) were dead.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “A World in Flames.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 39, 40. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Böddecker, Der Untergang des Dritten Reiches, pp. 95-6.
Siebel-Aschenback, Lower Silesia, p. 75.
See Hans von Ahlfen and Hermann Niehoff, So kämpfe Breslau, Verteidigung und Untergang von Schlesiens Hauptstadt (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 74, 83.
Schwendemann, ‘Strategie der Selbstvernichtung’, pp. 240-241.
See Peikert, ‘Festung Breslau’.
Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm, pp. 13-37.
Further Reading:
What an incredibly nice thing to say, thank you!
So, if I were hypothetically writing a book, would you hypothetically buy it? ;D