Siege of Breslau

The Siege of Breslau (Wrocław) was the struggle for the capital of Lower Silesia, fought from mid-February to 6 May 1945 between troops of the Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front and the German garrison of a city declared a fortress – Festung Breslau. Breslau, the largest city of the Reich’s eastern provinces, which for most of the war had lain beyond the reach of Allied bombers, found itself in the path of Marshal Ivan Konev’s offensive after the Red Army, in the course of the Vistula–Oder offensive, reached the Oder and seized bridgeheads on either side of the city. In February, during the Lower Silesian offensive, Soviet troops closed a ring of encirclement around Breslau. The task of taking the city was given to the 6th Army (PL) of General Vladimir Gluzdovsky, a relatively weak formation almost entirely lacking tanks.

On the German side power in the fortress lay with the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, Karl Hanke, who did not shrink from terror against his own population, while military command was exercised in turn by Generalmajor Hans von Ahlfen and General Hermann Niehoff. The city held out for almost three months – longer than Berlin. House-to-house fighting, bombing, demolitions carried out by the defenders themselves and fires reduced most of its buildings to rubble. Breslau capitulated on 6 May 1945, two days before Germany’s unconditional surrender. A few months later, by decision of the victorious powers, the city passed to Poland, and its German inhabitants were expelled in the years that followed.

Name and dates

Polish historiography refers to the fighting as the siege of Wrocław or the defence of Festung Breslau; German historiography calls it the Battle of Breslau (Schlacht um Breslau) or the fight for the fortress. The siege is usually dated from 13 February 1945, when, according to studies based on Soviet documents (by Alexey Isaev, among others), the spearheads of the 6th Army’s 7th Guards Mechanised Corps and units of the 5th Guards Army met south of the city, near the village of Rothsürben (today Żórawina). The ring was not yet tight, however: on the night of 13–14 February the Germans briefly forced open a corridor through which some soldiers and civilians managed to leave the city. For this reason some Polish authors – among them Karol Jonca and Alfred Konieczny in their classic monograph Upadek Festung Breslau (The Fall of Festung Breslau) – date the closing of the encirclement to the night of 15–16 February. The date of 13 February nevertheless prevails, in line with the commonly used formula “from 13 February to 6 May”.

The end date is 6 May 1945: on the morning of that day the garrison ceased fire, and in the evening General Niehoff signed the act of capitulation at Gluzdovsky’s headquarters. Counting from 13 February, the siege thus lasted 82 days.

Background

Before the war Breslau had about 630,000 inhabitants and was the capital of the province of Lower Silesia, an important centre of industry, higher education and communications – a rail and road junction on the route from Berlin and Saxony to Upper Silesia. For most of the war it lay far from the fronts and beyond the reach of Allied bombers. Armaments plants and government offices were moved there from the Reich’s western cities, and from 1943 it took in thousands of evacuees from bombed regions. Tens of thousands of forced labourers – many of them Poles – as well as prisoners of war and camp inmates, including those of the Gross-Rosen sub-camps, also worked in the city and its surroundings. By the end of 1944, according to various estimates, close to a million people were crowded into Breslau.

In the summer of 1944, when the Red Army reached the Vistula, the Reich authorities declared Breslau a fortress (Festung Breslau). For several months the title meant mainly the digging of trenches and anti-tank ditches on the approaches, to which civilians, forced labourers and young people were driven. Real defences – as in the other “fortresses” designated by Adolf Hitler – were prepared only in the last few weeks. In the autumn the military commandant, General Johannes Krause, proposed evacuating women with children and the elderly from the city, but Hanke, Gauleiter and Reich Defence Commissioner for Lower Silesia, refused to agree, so as not – as he claimed – to spread defeatism.

The Soviet offensive launched on 12 January 1945 changed everything within days. Hitler’s order of 19 January deprived commanders of the freedom to retreat on their own initiative, and the fortress cities were to fight to the end. On 19 and 20 January Hanke ordered the compulsory evacuation of everyone unfit to fight. The trains ran out on the very first day, so women with children and the elderly were ordered to walk south-west towards Kanth (Kąty) and Kostenblut (Kostomłoty) in frosts that, according to accounts, reached –20°C. The death toll of this evacuation is unknown and disputed: Polish studies repeat an estimate of 90,000–100,000 dead, other estimates speak of about 18,000, and German authors usually write of “thousands” of victims; what is beyond doubt is that thousands of people, especially infants and the elderly, died on the roads and in unheated trains. Some of the refugees reached Dresden. According to various estimates, between about 150,000 and about 200,000 civilians remained in the city.

Hanke ruled the fortress by terror. On 28 January, on his orders, the deputy mayor, Wolfgang Spielhagen (PL), accused of defeatism and desertion, was shot in the Market Square in front of the town hall; the Gauleiter declared publicly that whoever feared an honourable death would die a shameful one. In the weeks that followed, summary courts sentenced soldiers, Volkssturm men and civilians to death for flight, “defeatism” or looting. In early February the commander of Army Group Centre, Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, replaced the ailing Krause with Generalmajor Hans von Ahlfen (sources give dates from 31 January to 3 February), a sapper with front-line experience who was to prepare the city for a siege.

Meanwhile Konev’s troops had reached the Oder. At the end of January the armies of the 1st Ukrainian Front seized bridgeheads at Ścinawa (Steinau), north-west of Breslau, and at Oława (Ohlau) and Brzeg (Brieg) to the south-east. Konev’s directive of 31 January envisaged a new offensive – towards the Lusatian Neisse and, further ahead, towards Berlin and the Elbe – in which the 6th Army was to strike at the rear of the German defences of Breslau and take the city within a few days. A shortage of fuel and ammunition, which had to be brought up by lorry hundreds of kilometres from the Vistula, delayed the attack by two days.

Opposing forces

The size of the garrison is one of the most disputed figures of the siege. The number most often given is about 50,000 men; German studies speak of at least 24,000 regular troops, while some Polish ones go as high as 80,000, counting all auxiliary formations. The core of the defence was the 609th Special Purpose Division, formed from shattered units and replacement and training battalions, together with fortress regiments, anti-aircraft artillery and the SS regiment “Besslein”, in which volunteers from France and the Netherlands also fought. An important part of the garrison was the Volkssturm – according to German studies some 15,000 men in several dozen battalions – and a Hitler Youth regiment made up of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, and often of even younger boys. The defenders had a small number of tanks and assault guns and an improvised armoured train. So much food had been stockpiled in the city that it lasted until the end of the siege; ammunition, on the other hand, was critically short and had to be brought in by air.

On the Soviet side the burden of the siege fell on Gluzdovsky’s 6th Army, which, after several divisions and the 77th Fortified Region had been transferred to it, comprised two rifle corps: Major General Fyodor Zakharov’s 22nd Corps, attacking from the south and west, and the 74th Corps, operating mainly from the west and north-west. At this stage of the war Soviet divisions were badly depleted – the strongest numbered just over 5,000 men, roughly half their establishment. The army had only a few tank and self-propelled gun regiments, but strong artillery, including 280 mm mortars and 203 mm howitzers, and air support from the 2nd and 18th Air Armies. In February 6th Army intelligence put the German forces at about 18,000 men – a serious underestimate that was one of the reasons for the failure of the first assaults.

The encirclement (8–16 February)

The Lower Silesian offensive began on 8 February. The 6th Army struck from the bridgehead at Ścinawa and from the area west of Breslau, led by General Ivan Korchagin’s 7th Guards Mechanised Corps – the only large armoured formation at Gluzdovsky’s disposal. The corps’ brigades quickly reached the rear of the German defences, but on 10 and 11 February they got bogged down on the railway line running south-west from Breslau, near Domasław and Kobierzyce, where they suffered heavy losses from tanks, artillery and Panzerfausts. At the same time the German 8th and 19th Panzer Divisions counter-attacked from the direction of Kostomłoty and Kąty, trying to prevent the pocket from being closed.

On 13 February units of the 7th Guards Mechanised Corps linked up south of the city with tanks of the 5th Guards Army, advancing from the bridgehead at Oława. On the night of 13–14 February units of the 269th Infantry Division attacked the ring of encirclement from inside the city and the 19th Panzer Division from outside; a corridor opened briefly, through which, according to German historians, some soldiers and civilians escaped. On the morning of 14 February the Russians restored the ring. In the following days the 6th Army’s infantry consolidated the inner ring of encirclement, while the 5th Guards Army handed its sectors over to it and moved off to other axes of advance. On 15 February the Luftwaffe began supplying the fortress by air.

On 16 February Gluzdovsky called on the garrison to capitulate. Von Ahlfen rejected the ultimatum, as he did further summonses in the weeks that followed. Konev, whose main forces were already pushing towards the Lusatian Neisse, had no intention of tying down large forces at Breslau – the city was to be taken quickly by a single, weak army.

The fighting for the southern districts (February–March)

As early as 14 February the commander of the 22nd Corps ordered the south-western part of the city to be taken and the centre to be reached that same day. The attacks failed: Soviet divisions took suburban estates and villages – including Żerniki, Oporów, Klecina, Partynice and Ołtaszyn – and part of Krzyki, but stalled at the railway embankment in the south of the city. On 18 and 19 February the 218th Division took the embankment and got within about 3 km of the Market Square, but its regiment that had broken into the Southern Park (PL) was driven out on 20 February by a counter-attack by a Volkssturm battalion made up of Hitler Youth boys and supported by assault guns. The Nazi press blew this episode up into proof of the defenders’ indomitable spirit.

Gluzdovsky then prepared a deliberate assault. The main blow was to fall from the south, on a sector of about 2.5 km between Ołtaszyn and the Southern Park, delivered by three divisions of the 22nd Corps backed by more than 570 guns and mortars concentrated there. Every regiment formed an assault battalion for city fighting: the infantry was reinforced with heavy guns firing over open sights, sappers with demolition charges, flamethrowers, snipers and soldiers armed with captured Panzerfausts. The assault, launched on 22 February after an artillery preparation lasting almost three hours, nevertheless made only slow progress. By 26 February the Russians had taken the ground roughly up to the line of today’s Armii Krajowej and Wiśniowa streets, Plac Hirszfelda and Hallera Street, and in the following weeks they fought for individual blocks around Drukarska, Komandorska and Grabiszyńska streets and today’s Plac Pereca.

The fighting became a war of attrition for every house. Soviet assault groups smashed corner tenements with gun and tank fire, and flamethrowers set one building after another alight; the Germans in turn blew up houses at crossroads to open fields of fire and built barricades out of rubble, trams, carts and wrecked tanks. The Moscow press wrote that the fighting was not only for every house and every floor but for every window. Both sides deliberately burned down whole blocks. The front line in the south moved only a few hundred metres over several weeks, and in some places did not shift at all until the capitulation.

At the same time the fortress command changed. Hanke, at loggerheads with von Ahlfen, secured his recall through Hitler. His successor, General Hermann Niehoff, landed in the besieged city at the beginning of March (on 6 March according to Polish sources, as early as 2 March according to others) and took command on 8 March; Ahlfen flew out of Breslau on 10 March. In mid-March the fortress headquarters moved from the bunker on Liebich’s Hill to the cellars of the University Library on Piasek Island. Meanwhile, on 14 March, the Polish authorities appointed Bolesław Drobner mayor of a future Polish Wrocław – a sign that the city’s fate had been decided even before the fighting ended.

Life in the fortress and the airfield in the city centre

Throughout the siege the fortress was supplied by an airlift. Ju 52 transports and other aircraft landed at the airfield at Gądów Mały (PL) in the west of the city, bringing in ammunition and taking out the wounded; because of Soviet anti-aircraft guns and fighters they flew only at night. According to German figures, between 15 February and 1 May the Luftwaffe flew some 2,000 sorties and delivered about 1,600 tonnes of supplies – far less than the 40 tonnes a day the garrison needed. The Luftwaffe lost many aircraft and crews in the process.

Because the airfield at Gądów was within range of Soviet fire, the fortress command decided to build a runway in the safer eastern part of the city – along the former Kaiserstraße, today’s Plac Grunwaldzki, between the Kaiser Bridge (today the Grunwaldzki Bridge) and Szczytnicka Street. According to Polish chronologies the demolitions began as early as the end of February, with the main work coming in the spring, especially after the loss of Gądów at the beginning of April. Sprengkommandos (demolition squads) blew up a strip of buildings about 300 m wide and more than a kilometre long, including blocks of flats and the neo-Gothic Luther Church. The rubble was cleared under fire, day and night, by forced labourers – among them many Poles with the letter “P” on their clothes – prisoners of war and mobilised German civilians, including women and children. Many were killed by bombs and shells. Militarily the airfield proved almost useless.

Civilian life in the fortress went on mainly in cellars and shelters. Hospitals, some pharmacies, the post and the telephones kept working, trams ran until the end of March, and food rations – thanks to the huge stocks built up before the siege – lasted until the end of the fighting. At the same time the population lived in constant fear of bombs, shelling and its own authorities. Residents were evicted from one district after another as they were turned into defensive positions, and their houses were blown up or burned so as not to give cover to the attackers. “Defeatism”, evading service or looting were punishable by death; some authors put the number of executions carried out in the fortress at more than a thousand. On Hanke’s orders a dozen or so members of a small communist resistance group, which had distributed leaflets calling for an end to the fighting, were among those executed.

The fate of foreigners was the most tragic. Forced labourers from Poland, the Soviet Union and other countries, camp inmates and prisoners of war worked on the fortifications and on clearing rubble under fire for starvation rations, and many of them died or were killed by their guards. These events are known today mainly from survivors’ accounts and post-war investigations; their full scale cannot be established.

The Easter assault (1–2 April)

At the end of March Gluzdovsky shifted the weight of his attack to the west. The objective was the airfield at Gądów, through which the fortress kept in contact with the outside world. On 1 April, Easter Sunday, the 74th Corps attacked from the west around Gądów, Popowice and Szczepin and took the airfield that same day. The attack was accompanied by the heaviest air raids of the siege: on Easter Sunday and Easter Monday hundreds of Soviet aircraft – according to Polish sources, about 750 in the evening raid of 1 April alone – dropped thousands of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the city. The city centre, Ostrów Tumski with the cathedral, Piasek Island and the Old Town churches went up in flames; fires consumed whole blocks, with no one left to put them out.

Despite the loss of the airfield the fortress did not collapse. The heaviest fighting took place around the Western Park and Inwalidzka Street, and the front line drew closer to the centre from the west. In the south, along Kamienna Street, the front had not moved since February. At the end of March the Polish 2nd Army arrived in the Breslau area, but at the beginning of April it was regrouped to the Lusatian Neisse, from where it was to attack towards Dresden; it took no part in the fighting of the siege itself.

After the capture of Gądów, supply from the air was reduced to parachute drops and landings by light aircraft. In the spring the fighting settled into an exhausting stalemate: the Russians advanced block by block, the garrison held out in the ruins, and neither side had the strength to force a decision. In orders of 8 and 12 April Hitler commanded that Breslau be defended to the last man, and propaganda held up the fortress as an example to the whole of Germany. On 16 April Konev, together with the fronts of Zhukov and Rokossovsky, launched the final offensive on Berlin; for him Breslau was by now a secondary front.

Capitulation (4–6 May)

After Hitler’s suicide on 30 April and the capitulation of Berlin on 2 May, further resistance had lost all purpose. Hanke, whom Hitler in his testament had named Himmler’s successor as Reichsführer-SS, nevertheless still demanded that the fight go on. On 4 May a delegation of clergy of both confessions – Protestant pastors and the Catholic auxiliary bishop – came to Niehoff to plead for capitulation in order to save the population. On the same day the first exploratory contacts were made with the Soviet side. On 5 May Soviet artillery deluged the city centre with fire, and the Russians issued another ultimatum. A detachment of about 80 German prisoners of war from the National Committee for a Free Germany, sent into the city in Wehrmacht uniforms to persuade the defenders to surrender, also took part in the fighting; the operation ended in bloody clashes.

In the last hours of the siege Hanke left the fortress by air – in a light Fieseler Storch kept in reserve for the commandant. According to most foreign studies this happened on 5 May; according to a Polish chronology of the siege, at about 5.30 a.m. on 6 May. The Gauleiter, who for three months had sent others to their deaths for cowardice, fled in disguise towards Bohemia, where soon afterwards – in circumstances that remain uncertain to this day – he died in Czech captivity.

At 9 a.m. on 6 May the garrison ceased fire. Before noon Niehoff sent out envoys, in the afternoon he received Soviet officers in the shelter beneath the University Library, and in the evening he went to Gluzdovsky’s headquarters in the Villa Colonia in Krzyki. There, at about 6.30 p.m., in the presence of the commander of the 6th Army and his chief of staff, he signed the act of unconditional capitulation. Gluzdovsky promised the prisoners medical care, the keeping of their personal property and a speedy return home after the war; these promises were not kept. Several tens of thousands of soldiers and Volkssturm men went into captivity, many of whom ended up in camps in the Soviet Union and never came back. Niehoff spent ten years in Soviet captivity.

Breslau capitulated as one of the last large cities of the Reich – four days after Berlin and two days before Germany’s unconditional surrender was signed at Reims and Berlin. For the surviving inhabitants the end of the fighting did not mean the end of their suffering: epidemics spread in the devastated city, which had no water or sewerage, and Soviet soldiers committed mass looting, rape and arson, described both in German accounts and by the first Polish arrivals.

Losses and destruction

The losses of the siege are known only approximately, and estimates vary widely. According to the most frequently cited figures, the garrison lost about 6,000 killed and about 23,000 wounded. Soviet losses are put at about 8,000 killed and as many as 60,000–65,000 killed, wounded and missing in all; the British historian Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, in their book Microcosm, give about 13,000 Soviet soldiers killed and 33,000 wounded. Most uncertain of all is the number of civilian victims: the literature contains estimates ranging from about 20,000 to as many as 80,000 killed during the siege itself – by bombs, artillery fire, fires, disease, executions and suicide – and, together with the victims of the January evacuation, Davies and Moorhouse speak of as many as about 170,000. To these figures must be added an unknown number of forced labourers, camp inmates and prisoners of war.

The city was ruined to a degree comparable only with Warsaw, Berlin or Budapest. According to German figures, about 21,600 of some 30,000 buildings were reduced to rubble; Polish authors estimate the destruction at about 70 per cent of all buildings, and as much as 90 per cent in the southern and western districts, where the heaviest fighting took place. By one calculation the ruins yielded some 18 million cubic metres of rubble. Hundreds of historic buildings were destroyed, among them the churches of the Old Town and Ostrów Tumski, as well as industrial plants, bridges, and the water and sewerage networks. A good part of the destruction was the work of the defenders themselves – demolitions for positions and for the airfield, and the deliberate burning of whole blocks – and part of it came only after the capitulation, in the fires and looting of May 1945.

Significance

Militarily, the defence of Breslau had no effect on the outcome of the war. For almost three months the fortress tied down one Soviet army and blocked an important communications junction behind the 1st Ukrainian Front, but it stopped neither the advance to the Lusatian Neisse nor the Berlin offensive. Hitler’s concept of “fortresses”, which were to tie down enemy forces and break his offensives, led – as in Budapest, Poznań and Königsberg – to the destruction of the city and its inhabitants without any strategic gain. Breslau became a symbol of the final phase of the war: of the fanaticism of party authorities ready to sacrifice the civilian population, of terror against their own citizens, and at the same time of the enormous losses of the besiegers.

The siege also brought the history of German Breslau to an end. As early as February 1945, at the Yalta Conference, the Big Three announced that Poland would receive substantial territorial gains in the west and north; in the summer the Potsdam Conference placed the lands east of the Oder and the Lusatian Neisse under Polish administration. On 10 May Drobner’s operational group arrived in the ruined city, and in the months after that the first Polish settlers came, many of them expelled from the eastern borderlands, including from Lwów (Lviv). The Germans who had remained in the city, as well as those who returned after the capitulation, were in their overwhelming majority expelled to the occupation zones in Germany between 1945 and 1948. The rebuilding of the city by its new inhabitants took decades. Because of this exchange of population Wrocław is today one of the clearest examples of the post-war resettlements in Central Europe – a city whose German past and Polish present collided in the ruins of the spring of 1945.