Paul Peikert, a priest who remained in Breslau throughout the siege in 1945, described the waves of human misery passing through the city from the rural regions to the east of the Oder:
As the Russian army came closer the evacuation began of the entire population of Silesia on the right bank of the Oder. For days now, day and night, Breslau presented a gruesome picture of the fleeing population. Never-ending columns of horse-drawn or cow-drawn farmers’ wagons, as well as the handcarts of women workers of the columns of prisoners of war, foreigners, Russians, French, Serbs, etc. with small sleds on which they moved their baggage. […] Mostly they are elderly people and children who sit on the wagons or younger women who have had to cultivate their fields alone with the help of prisoners of war. In addition, this mass of refugees arrives in harsh winter weather, 13-15 degrees and more below zero. Children freeze and are laid out on the roadside by their relatives. It is reported that entire lorry loads of such frozen children are being delivered by the local mortuaries. My cleaning woman reported today that she herself saw eight corpses of children and the corpse of an old man in the roadside ditch along her stretch of the Strehlener Chaussee. […] Many of these refugees are being delivered to local hospitals with frozen limbs.
Then came the turn of the Breslauers themselves. As the Red Army closed in on the Silesian capital during the second half of January, the Nazi Party Gauleitung on 19 January finally gave the order for evacuation. A large portion of the civilian population fled, their actions and reactions differing little from those of their counterparts in East Prussia and Pomerania.
The consequences of the hasty evacuation were horrific: panic among crowds, desperately trying to get aboard the last trains out of the city reportedly led to 60-70 children being crushed to death at the main railway station; the exodus of tens of thousands of the city’s inhabitants in freezing temperatures led to huge numbers of casualties, with search parties burying hundreds of children and adults who had frozen to death; and when the weather thawed in the spring, some 90,000 corpses were found in ditches alongside the roads travelled by Germans fleeing westwards.
Author’s Note:
Of the 530,000 civilian inhabitants of Breslau in the autumn of 1944, only between 150,000 and 180,000 still were in the city when it was cut off by Soviet forces in February 1945.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Fleeing for Their Lives.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 78-79. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Paul Peikert, ”Festung Breslau” in den Berichten eines Pfarrers 22. Januar bis 6. Mai 1945 (ed. By Karol Jonca and Alfred Konieczny) (Berlin, 1971), pp. 25-26, 30.
Hoffmann, Nie Nachkriegszeit in Schlesien, p. 22-3.
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