The siege of Breslau begins

On the morning of 13 February 1945, near the village of Żórawina (Rothsürben) south of the city, tanks of General Vladimir Gluzdovsky’s Soviet 6th Army, advancing from the west, met units of the 5th Guards Army coming from the east. The troops of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front thereby closed the ring around Breslau (today Wrocław), the capital of Lower Silesia, which had been declared a fortress in the summer of 1944. So began the siege of Festung Breslau, one of the longest urban battles of the Second World War in Europe. The fortress did not surrender until 6 May 1945, four days after the fall of Berlin.

The date on which the siege began is not settled in the literature. Soviet documents and the studies based on them state that the ring was closed on 13 February; during the night of 13–14 February and on 14 February, however, German panzer divisions attacking from outside, together with part of the garrison attacking from within, forced open a narrow corridor for a dozen or so hours, through which a number of soldiers and civilians left the city. According to Polish studies the encirclement became final during the night of 15–16 February, and some authors give that day – 16 February – as the start of the siege. The date of 13 February, adopted in most general chronologies, marks the first closing of the ring.

Breslau as “Festung Breslau”

In 1945 Breslau was the largest city in eastern Germany. Before the war it had some 630,000 inhabitants, and in January 1945, after an influx of refugees from the east and of people evacuated from the bombed cities of the western Reich, about a million people were living there, according to Polish estimates. It was an important rail and road junction on the route from Upper Silesia to Saxony and Berlin, a centre of the armaments industry and the seat of the headquarters of Military District VIII. In the summer of 1944 – in August, according to most sources – Adolf Hitler declared the city a fortress. Its first commandant was General Johannes Krause; anti-tank ditches were dug and fortifications built around the city by its inhabitants, forced labourers and prisoners.

Political power in the city lay with the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, Karl Hanke, formerly a close associate of Joseph Goebbels, who as Reich Defence Commissioner was also responsible for mobilising the population. It was he, rather than the successive military commandants, who set the tone of the defence: fanatical, ruthless towards “defeatists” and determined to hold the city to the end in accordance with Hitler’s orders. On 28 January, on his orders, the city’s deputy mayor, Wolfgang Spielhagen (PL), was shot in the Market Square, accused of defeatism – according to various accounts because he had sought a transfer to Berlin or had advised surrendering the city. Hanke had the sentence announced in the press and on posters as a warning.

At the turn of January and February the commander of Army Group Centre, Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, replaced the sick Krause with Colonel (soon Generalmajor) Hans von Ahlfen, an engineer officer with experience of the Eastern Front; sources give various dates for his assumption of command, from 31 January to 3 February. Ahlfen forbade evacuated inhabitants to return to the city, and on 8 February he issued an order under which anyone who left his post without orders was to be sentenced to death for cowardice by a summary court.

Evacuation in the frost

As early as December 1944 General Krause had proposed moving some 200,000 people – mothers with children and the elderly – out of the city, but according to post-war accounts Hanke refused, not wishing to spread defeatism. When, after the start of the Soviet offensive from the Vistula, Konev’s spearheads were rapidly approaching the Oder, the Gauleiter ordered on 19–20 January that everyone unfit to fight must leave the city. The evacuation had not been prepared. Panic broke out at the stations and there were not enough trains, so women with children and the elderly were ordered to walk west and south-west, towards Kąty Wrocławskie (Kanth) and beyond, in temperatures of minus ten to fifteen degrees, falling below minus twenty at night.

Many people died in the columns on the snow-covered roads, especially infants, small children and the elderly. Nobody counted them and estimates vary widely: some Polish studies and guidebooks give figures of the order of 90,000–100,000 victims, other publications about 18,000, while German authors write cautiously of “thousands” of dead. Many of the refugees reached Dresden, and some of them were in the city at the time of the raid on the night of 13–14 February. The experience of the January march led some inhabitants to refuse further evacuation. Government offices, the university, clinics, archives and museum collections were removed from the city; according to the most frequently cited estimates, between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians remained in the fortress.

In the same weeks columns of prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz and from the Gross-Rosen camp and its subcamps were marching across Lower Silesia, and some of them passed through Breslau. Thousands of forced labourers – Poles, Soviet citizens, Frenchmen and others – and prisoners of war also remained in the city. The fortress authorities used them to build barricades and fortifications and to clear rubble, often under fire.

The Lower Silesian offensive

By the end of January the 1st Ukrainian Front already stood on the Oder: Dmitry Lelyushenko’s 4th Tank Army had established a bridgehead at Ścinawa north-west of Breslau, and General Aleksei Zhadov’s 5th Guards Army had established bridgeheads at Oława and Brzeg to the south-east. In a directive of 31 January Konev ordered his armies to push on westwards from both bridgeheads as far as the Lusatian Neisse, with Berlin and the Elbe also in his plans. The capture of Breslau, an important road and rail junction in the rear of the front, was entrusted to Gluzdovsky’s 6th Army – a second-line army, supported by General Ivan Korchagin’s 7th Guards Mechanised Corps. According to Soviet documents cited by historians, the city was to be taken within a few days of the start of the attack.

The Lower Silesian offensive began on 8 February, two days late because of overstretched supply lines: after the January pursuit there was a shortage of fuel and ammunition, which had to be brought up by lorry from the Vistula. The armies in the Ścinawa bridgehead advanced west towards Legnica and the Bober; the 6th Army with the 7th Guards Mechanised Corps went round Breslau to the west and south, and the 5th Guards Army from the south-east. On 10–12 February the German 8th and 19th Panzer Divisions counter-attacked from the direction of Strzegom (Striegau) and Kąty in an attempt to prevent the encirclement; Soviet tank brigades suffered heavy losses at Kobierzyce (Koberwitz) and Domasław, from guns, tanks and Panzerfausts fired from the cellars of houses.

The ring closes

At about 8 a.m. on 13 February a patrol of the 25th Guards Mechanised Brigade came upon a self-propelled artillery regiment of the 5th Guards Army at Żórawina; soon afterwards Soviet tank regiments and brigades of both armies met there. In the afternoon the 309th Rifle Division, having beaten off another German counter-attack, advanced on Breslau from the south-west. The Germans did not accept the encirclement: during the night of 13–14 February units of the 269th Infantry Division and other formations trapped in the city attacked from within, while the 19th Panzer Division attacked from outside, from the direction of Świdnica. They briefly linked up near Tyniec Mały, and for a dozen or so hours a corridor existed through which some of the soldiers – and, according to the German historian Rolf Hinze, civilians as well – were brought out. On 14 February the Soviet brigades regained their positions, and over the following days the infantry of the 6th Army strengthened the inner ring. The 5th Guards Army was soon moved to another sector, and Breslau was then besieged by Gluzdovsky’s army alone, reinforced by a fortified district from the 52nd Army.

The encircled garrison was a mixed one. According to the most frequently cited estimates it numbered around 50,000 men, including well over ten thousand members of the Volkssturm, a Hitler Youth regiment, Waffen-SS units (among them the Besslein regiment, in which volunteers from France and the Netherlands also served), the remnants of the 269th Infantry Division, fortress regiments formed from soldiers of replacement units and men on leave from the front, police and anti-aircraft crews. Some German studies speak of at least 24,000 men of real fighting value, while in mid-February Soviet intelligence put the forces capable of fighting at some 18,000 soldiers. The garrison had few tanks and assault guns but a large number of Panzerfausts.

The encircled fortress could rely only on supply from the air. On 15 February the Luftwaffe began an airlift: the first aircraft carrying ammunition and food landed during the night of 15–16 February at the airfield at Gądów Mały (PL) in the west of the city, taking the wounded on the return flight. From the outset the planned 40 tonnes of supplies a day could not be delivered, and aircraft losses rose week by week.

The first assaults on the southern districts

An order of 14 February from the commander of the 22nd Rifle Corps, General Fyodor Zakharov, assumed that his divisions would take the south-western part of the city and reach the centre that same day. It did not happen. Over the following days the 309th and 218th Rifle Divisions broke into the southern suburbs – around Oporów and Krzyki (Krietern) – but became bogged down in fighting for individual houses, allotments and railway embankments. On 18–19 February the 218th Division took a railway embankment in the south-west of the city, about three kilometres from the centre, but its regiment that had broken into the Südpark (PL) (South Park) was thrown back 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 inflated the episode into proof of the defenders’ unbending will.

Gluzdovsky had to prepare a systematic assault. The plan approved by Konev on 19 February envisaged the main thrust from the south, on a narrow sector from Ołtaszyn to the Südpark, using specially formed assault battalions supported by heavy guns firing over open sights, sappers and flamethrowers. The attack began on 22 February, but it too failed to bring a breakthrough: the fighting in the south of the city turned into the slow capture of one block after another, at heavy cost to both sides.

In the city itself the fortress authorities removed the inhabitants from the districts near the front line and drafted more men and teenagers into the Volkssturm, while summary courts sentenced to death soldiers and civilians accused of desertion, “sabotage” or defeatism. Forced labourers and civilians were made to work on the fortifications under artillery fire, and people crammed into cellars suffered from lack of water, from disease and from air raids.

The siege in the war

The encirclement of Breslau was one of the fruits of the Vistula–Oder offensive and of the Lower Silesian offensive, which by 24 February had brought Konev’s troops to the Lusatian Neisse. Like Poznań and, soon after, Głogów, Kołobrzeg and Königsberg, Breslau became a “fortress” whose garrison was meant to tie down Soviet divisions in the rear of the front. From a military point of view the defence only partly fulfilled this task: the 6th Army, with a few understrength rifle divisions, was enough to keep the city encircled while the main forces of the 1st Ukrainian Front prepared for the attack on Berlin. Breslau had no chance of relief, and every week of fighting added to the toll of dead and destruction.

The siege went on for almost three more months. At the beginning of March Ahlfen was replaced by General Hermann Niehoff. On the orders of the fortress authorities, forced labourers and civilians, Poles among them, demolished under artillery fire the buildings around what is now Grunwald Square in order to build a runway there. After a great air raid and assault over Easter (1–2 April) the Red Army took the airfield at Gądów, but it did not reach the centre. On 5 May Hanke flew out of the fortress, and on 6 May Niehoff signed the surrender. Estimates of the losses vary very widely: there is talk of several thousand German soldiers killed, between ten and several tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers killed and tens of thousands of civilian victims, while according to Polish estimates some 70 per cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed.

After the surrender Breslau came under Polish administration as Wrocław, which was confirmed in August 1945 by the decisions of the Potsdam Conference. The German inhabitants who remained were expelled in 1945–1947, and their place was taken by Poles, including people resettled from the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic that had been incorporated into the USSR. The siege that began on 13 February 1945 marked the beginning of the end of German Breslau and was at the same time one of the most tragic chapters in the city’s history.