Karl Hanke

Karl Hanke was one of those NSDAP functionaries whose careers began in the anteroom of a leading Nazi and ended in a post that gave them power over the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. For several years he was Joseph Goebbels’s right-hand man in the Berlin party and in the Propaganda Ministry, then briefly a soldier, and from 1941 Gauleiter of Lower Silesia. In the winter and spring of 1945 he turned Breslau – today the Polish city of Wrocław – into a fortress that held out until the last days of the war, with no regard for the fate of its inhabitants. Hitler rewarded him in his testament with the post of Reichsführer-SS. Hanke escaped from the besieged city by aircraft just before its surrender and, according to the most widely accepted version, was killed a few weeks later in Czech captivity.

Lauban, the mill and the school

Hanke was born on 24 August 1903 in Lauban, now Lubań, in Lower Silesia, the son of a railway engineer. His elder brother was killed in the First World War; Karl himself was then too young to be sent to the front. In the early 1920s he did a short stint as a short-term volunteer in the 19th Infantry Regiment of the Reichswehr in Frankfurt an der Oder. He trained as a miller – attending the milling school in Dippoldiswalde in Saxony and working in mills for several years – and in 1928 completed a course at a vocational teacher-training institute in Berlin, which qualified him to teach in trade schools.

On 1 November 1928 he joined the NSDAP, and in 1929 or 1930 the SA reserve. In 1931 he was dismissed from the Prussian civil service, in which he worked as a teacher, for his party activities. From then on he was a full-time party official.

At Goebbels’s side

In Berlin Hanke rose quickly through the party organisation: he was a street cell leader, then a section leader, and from 1931 NSDAP district leader in the western part of the city. In that role he became the first party official to give work to the young architect Albert Speer – the conversion of a villa into the district organisation’s headquarters – followed by further commissions, including the new headquarters of the Berlin Gau. The two men became close friends.

From 1 April 1932 Hanke was personal secretary and adjutant to Goebbels, then Gauleiter of Berlin and head of party propaganda. In the same year he became a deputy in the Prussian Landtag and later in the Reichstag. After Hitler came to power and the Propaganda Ministry was created in March 1933, he moved to the ministry with his chief as his personal adviser and head of his private office. He was promoted rapidly: to Ministerialrat in 1933, to Ministerialdirektor in 1937, and in 1938, when Walther Funk moved to the Economics Ministry, he took his place as State Secretary. He was also Vice-President of the Reich Chamber of Culture, the body that controlled artistic life. In February 1934 he joined the SS.

The Baarová affair

Hanke’s meteoric career was interrupted by his superior’s private affairs. Goebbels, known for his many love affairs, became involved in 1937–1938 with the Czech actress Lída Baarová, and his marriage to Magda Goebbels came close to breaking up. According to accounts cited by Goebbels’s biographers, Hanke at first acted as a go-between for the couple and then took Magda’s side: he is said to have given her a list of several dozen actresses with whom the minister had allegedly had affairs, and he himself began an affair with her, probably from the autumn of 1938. Magda reportedly even considered divorce and marriage to Hanke. Hitler, who valued the Goebbels family as a showpiece of the regime, demanded that both relationships end; Baarová had to leave Germany, and the couple stayed together. For Hanke it meant the end of his work at the ministry – in the summer of 1939 he volunteered for the Wehrmacht. The details of the affair are known mainly from the diaries and memoirs of those involved and their circle, and their reliability is variously assessed.

Soldier, 1939–1940

In September 1939 Hanke served in the 3rd Panzer Division, which took part in the invasion of Poland, fighting in Pomerania and East Prussia and then advancing towards Brześć (Brest). In May and June 1940 he was an orderly officer in Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division, which became famous for the speed of its advance in the French campaign. He received the Iron Cross, both classes. His presence with Rommel also had a propaganda dimension – he was Goebbels’s man in a division whose successes were eagerly publicised at home – and, according to Rommel’s biographers, relations between him and his commander were at times strained. At the beginning of 1941 Hanke left the army with the rank of lieutenant.

Gauleiter of Lower Silesia

In January or February 1941 – sources give 27 January or 9 February – Hitler appointed him Gauleiter of the newly separated NSDAP Gau of Lower Silesia, and soon afterwards also Oberpräsident (governor) of the Prussian province of Lower Silesia. Hanke thus held the highest party and state power in a region whose capital was Breslau. From 1942 he was also Reich Defence Commissioner for his Gau, which gave him powers in matters of civil defence and mobilisation. In the SS he rose to the rank of Gruppenführer (1942) and, in January 1944, Obergruppenführer.

For most of the war Lower Silesia lay far from the front and from Allied air raids. Industrial plants were moved to the region, and tens of thousands of forced labourers and prisoners of war, Poles among them, worked in its factories and on its farms. The Gross-Rosen concentration camp, with its network of subcamps, also operated there. According to German and Polish studies cited by encyclopaedias, more than a thousand death sentences were carried out in Breslau during Hanke’s rule, which earned him the nickname “the hangman of Breslau” (Henker von Breslau). Speer wrote in his post-war memoirs that in 1944 Hanke warned him never to visit a certain camp in Upper Silesia, because he had seen something there that he was not allowed to describe – the context makes it clear that this was Auschwitz. This account, however, comes from memoirs that Speer wrote partly in his own defence.

Festung Breslau

The war reached Lower Silesia in January 1945, when, after the start of the Vistula–Oder offensive, the troops of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front quickly approached the Oder. Breslau, which had already been declared a fortress, was full of refugees; according to estimates cited in the literature, nearly a million people were in the city at the time. Around 20 January the authorities ordered women with children, the elderly and the sick to leave the city. As there were too few trains, thousands set off westwards on foot in temperatures well below minus ten degrees. The death toll of this exodus, mainly small children and the elderly, has never been established; various accounts speak of thousands of dead. Men capable of bearing arms had to stay, and many of them were drafted into the Volkssturm.

The military command of the fortress was held in turn by General Hans von Ahlfen and, from March, General Hermann Niehoff, but the real power in the city lay with Hanke as Gauleiter and Reich Defence Commissioner. He ruled by terror. On 28 January 1945 he had the deputy mayor, Wolfgang Spielhagen (PL), shot in the city’s market square, accused of preparing to flee the city – according to some accounts, what he had actually done was ask to be transferred to Berlin. The execution was announced as a warning to others. In the following weeks summary courts and patrols condemned soldiers and civilians to death for desertion, “defeatism” or looting.

In mid-February Soviet troops closed the ring around the city, and the siege of Breslau began, lasting until 6 May. Hanke rejected any thought of surrender. To allow supply by air after the loss of the Gandau airfield, in the spring of 1945 he had a runway built in the middle of the city, along what is now Plac Grunwaldzki. An entire district was demolished to make way for it, and civilians, including women and teenagers, as well as forced labourers, were put to work under shellfire and bombs; many people were killed in the process, although the number is disputed. Some of the destruction in the city was the work of the defenders themselves, who set fire to and blew up buildings to clear fields of fire.

Hanke’s conduct won admiration in Berlin. In April 1945 Goebbels wrote in his diary that he was the “most outstanding leader” among the Gauleiters still fighting. In April Hitler awarded him the highest party decoration, the German Order (German sources give 12 April), and on 29 April, in his political testament, furious with Heinrich Himmler for attempting to negotiate with the Western Allies, he named Hanke to replace him as Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police. It was an appointment with no real significance: a few days later the Reich ceased to exist.

Flight and death

When the surrender of the fortress became inevitable, Hanke left the city whose defence to the last man he had demanded of others. He flew out in a light Fieseler Storch aircraft from the runway at Plac Grunwaldzki or nearby. Sources differ on the moment of his escape: some give 5 May, others, citing eyewitness accounts, dawn on 6 May, a few hours before General Niehoff signed the surrender. According to these accounts, the aircraft was damaged by gunfire and had to make an emergency landing, after which Hanke made his way to the Prague area.

What happened next is uncertain. According to the most frequently cited version, Hanke, disguised in the uniform of an SS private, joined units of the 18th SS Division “Horst Wessel”, which were taken prisoner after fighting Czech partisans. Unrecognised, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp. On 8 June 1945, while being marched on foot near Nová Ves nad Popelkou, he and several other prisoners are said to have tried to escape by jumping onto a passing train; the Czech guards opened fire and clubbed the wounded to death with their rifle butts. This version rests on eyewitness accounts and has never been conclusively confirmed. Others claimed that he died in an air crash or survived the war; his body was never positively identified.

Place in the war

Hanke was neither an ideologue nor a military commander. He was a typical product of the NSDAP apparatus: a man who climbed through personal loyalty to his superiors and who, once given power over a province, exercised it regardless of the cost borne by others. His life brings together several strands of the Third Reich – Goebbels’s Berlin propaganda, the court intrigues around Hitler, the campaigns of 1939 and 1940 and, finally, the fanatical defence of “fortresses” that Hitler made a principle in the last year of the war.

Breslau was the largest city in the east of the Reich, and its defence was among the longest of the final phase of the war in Europe: the city surrendered on 6 May 1945, only two days before Germany’s unconditional surrender, and according to estimates was largely destroyed. The price of that defence was paid above all by civilians – those who died during the January evacuation, under bombs and artillery fire, while building the runway and at the hands of the summary courts – and by the soldiers of both sides. Militarily the fortress tied down some Soviet forces, but it did not change the course of the war. After the war the city, as Wrocław, became part of Poland; most of its remaining German inhabitants were expelled, and Poles arrived in their place, including people resettled from Poland’s lost eastern territories.

Hanke himself escaped justice. He never answered for the executions, for driving the inhabitants out into the freezing cold or for the destruction of the city, and his death – if he died as the witnesses describe – came anonymously, in a crowd of prisoners. In the memory of Wrocław and of its former inhabitants he remains the embodiment of the fanaticism of the Third Reich’s last months, and the Gauleiter who demanded a fight to the end but fled himself at the last moment.