271. The Siege of Breslau: Where Nazi Fanaticism Met the Red Army's Fury
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Hello and welcome to Battleground 45 with me, Saul David, and Roger Morehouse. Today we're discussing one of the most tragic but little-known events of the war on the Eastern Front that took place 80 years ago, the Siege of Breslau. It

It began on the 13th of February 1945 as Soviet forces encircled the city on the west bank of the Oder River and ended with the unconditional surrender of the remnants of the German garrison 82 days later, on the 6th of May, the last major German city to capitulate.

By that time, according to Richard Hargreaves, author of Hitler's Final Fortress, two thirds of Breslau was in ruins, two thirds of its industry damaged or destroyed, two in every three homes and apartment blocks were no longer habitable, and seven out of 10 schools were in ruins. Almost the entire rail and tram network was wrecked while every elect

line and three quarters of the telephone wires were down. And so the list goes on. Total number of casualties on the German side, up to 30,000 killed and wounded. And the Soviets, you won't be surprised to hear, lost more than double that. It's a horrific tale, Roger, and we haven't even got into the finer detail yet. And yet it should be much better known. Of the major works of history that cover the Eastern Front that litter my bookshelf, I'm looking at

them now, very few of them devote more than a couple of paragraphs to Breslau, and including Beaver here and all the major works of the Eastern Front. So people like Overy, Catherine Merredale, there's actually nothing on Breslau. So my first question to you is, why is that, do you think? It's a very good question, Saul. I mean, just for full sort of clarity, the first book that I wrote, I actually co-wrote with Norman Davis, my old professor,

It was called Microcosm, which was a history of Breslau, which is now a beautiful city in Western Poland called Wrocław. We wrote that sort of multinational, if you like, history of Breslau-Wrocław from its earliest times until the present that then came out in 2001.

And actually researching that, so as you'd imagine, I sort of concentrated largely on all the German aspects of that story, which are substantial, of course. It's 700 years. It's essentially a German province, German-speaking province at least. So yeah, it's a good question. I think part of the answer to that is that there's a weird phenomenon that if you travel through modern-day Germany, you

You can, or you look up on a, you know, look up on your Google maps. Every city in Germany will have a Breslauer Straße in the same way as it will have a Königsberger Straße or a Danziger Straße.

But I suppose a little bit like the other two, because of the sort of squeamishness of post-war German society about trumpeting their own victimhood, as it were, it sort of fell through the cracks. It never really gets talked about. So if the Germans weren't talking about it,

then there's a sort of dearth really of primary material about the siege itself. I mean, there are some collections of materials that I used when I wrote that book, which are available. But for those that are approaching this subject, certainly approaching it sort of 20 plus years ago as I was,

There really wasn't much at all, certainly not in the sort of mainstream academia didn't talk about it. So I think there's a sort of a lack of materials. First of all, there was a lack of materials. That's changed substantially. I mean, you mentioned Richard Hargreaves' book, which is very good. There's another one. I forget the author's name was Duffy. It's called Red Storm on the Reich. So that covers Breslau as well. It's still a little bit the poor relation, I think. You know, I think, you know, Konigsberg is probably sexier. Danzig is probably sexier in that respect.

But this aspect of what is essentially, in inverted commas, German suffering at the end of the war is one that the Germans themselves are squeamish about talking about. And consequently, I think nobody else does. What's fascinating about your previous work on this in concert with Norman Davis is that you've got a proper kind of long view of the city. Too often, we just end up talking about a location as it's under siege and the kind of horrors that happens. And we'll come on to that. But

Tell us a little bit about Breslau. I mean, it was the capital of Silesia, wasn't it? So it's kind of an important city that, as you say, has a very long history. So tell us about it, its relevance to Germany on a broader scale and something about its architecture. It's an incredibly beautiful medieval city. It's incredibly beautiful. I mean, in 45, so at the beginning of the siege...

It's essentially a city of a million people. It's one of Germany's great cities alongside, you know, the likes obviously of Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Königsberg in the east. It would have been very, you know, very much in that group of, seen in that group of cities.

It had a very, very rich tradition, a very Central European tradition in that sense, because it was always sort of multinational, if you like, multicultural, multi-faith, had an enormous Jewish population. It's one of the main Jewish centers of German Jewish culture. So really sort of mixed population. As the capital of Silesia, it had been under, you know, Bohemian rule in the Middle Ages, and then later under Austrian rule, and then after 1740 under Prussian rule. And then, of course, you know, Prussia sort of

of absorbs and morphs into the German Empire as we know in 1871 so a really sort of mixed history and that's why it was such a fascinating subject for that book because you've got so many influences and so many sort of different episodes within that history you mentioned the architecture I would you know I know I'm biased I think it's one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen it's

It's got really fascinating architecture. The city, this town square, which they call the Rinek now, the ring in German, the sort of central square, has the most impressive town hall, Rathaus, Ratusz in Polish,

I think I've ever seen. You know, there's a wonderful, the wonderful cloth hall in Krakow is very, you know, is all very impressive. But the town hall in Wrocław, in Breslau was, you know, was and is amazing. It's been restored. It's a Gothic riot. It's absolutely astonishing. So it's a really beautiful, really interesting city, sat, you know, astride the Oder, the River Oder.

Cathedral is beautiful. It's really, you know, if you can get a weekend there to go and do it, it's fascinating.

Okay, let's put the siege into some sort of context, shall we? I think the previous year, the summer of 1944, Hitler declared Breslau and other places, of course, a fortress, a festung. In other words, it needs to be defended at all costs. It's going to be one of the bastions, basically, isn't it, of the Soviet advance on the Eastern Front. Its location is pretty important. I mean, what's happened just before this, we spoke about this before, Roger, the

have launched their very successful Vistula to the Oder offensive. So that's where they've now got, and they've actually got bridgeheads over the Oder on both sides of Breslau. So it's quite clear that sooner or later this place is going to come under siege. And that's exactly what happens a few days later when the Soviets begin their next advance. The actual army group around it, or front as the Soviets called it, was Konevs.

I think it's the first Ukrainian front. An army within that is actually detailed. The Soviet 6th Army under Gluzdovsky, Lieutenant General Vladimir Gluzdovsky, is ordered to reduce the city of Breslau in, they hope, four days, or Konev hopes, four days. Konev, interestingly, like a lot of the other Soviet commanders, is involved in a bit of a race for Berlin, isn't he? It's who's going to get there first and who's going to get the glory first.

You've got Zhukov immediately to the north, his army group, and then another army group under Rokossovsky. So three of the most famous Soviet group commanders, generals of the Second World War involved, Konev in particular. So he launches his attack in early February. His immediate objective is to get to the River Nyssa and then close in on Berlin. So he's not really that

concerned about Breslau and hopes it will fall in four days. But of course, that isn't going to be the case. So before we get on to the actual fighting itself, tell us a little bit about who from the German side is inside Breslau, who's leading the defense of Breslau, and also a little bit about this nasty bit of work

Gauleiter Karl Hanke, who's the Gauleiter for Silesia. Yeah, we should just briefly explain the sort of Festungen idea, this fortress idea that the Nazis had towards the end of the war. You mentioned that initially it's sort of first raised in 1944, but

And the first festungen were nominated, I think, were Mogilev and Bobrysk, which are now, I think, in Belarus. Obviously, they fell fairly quickly. But the logic of the festung, and they then subsequently nominated all of the big cities and large towns, including Königsberg, Poznan, modern-day Poznan, even some of the ports in the West, for example. I mean, even places like Brest,

strategically significant cities in the West as well. Brest, Lorient, Saint-Azère, you know, they were all nominated as Festungen as well. And the logic was that if you could, you know, basically pack these places with as much, you know, as much men and material as you possibly could, and with the instruction that they were to fight to the bitter end,

The idea was that possibly if you could get enough of these festungen, these fortresses to hold out, you know, it would sort of, it would hold up in the East, the Soviet advance in the West, the Western Allies advance. And the logic behind that, strategic logic behind that was that, you know, the Nazis sort of realized, perhaps belatedly in sort of 43, 44, that this alliance between, the grand alliance between the Western powers and the Soviet Union was a rather unnatural one.

So they're desperate. Actually, you know, they don't do enough, actually, strategically to try and sort of stick wedges into that relationship. They do a bit with the whole controversy around the discovery of the cat in graves in 1943. So they try and use the Poles, in a way, as a wedge issue between the Western powers and the Soviets, unsuccessfully, because the Western powers, you know, basically throw the Poles to the wolves.

anything to keep the Grand Alliance going. But this Festung policy is basically trying to buy time by using that manpower rather than confronting the Soviets on the field where they're suffering an absolute huge disparity in manpower, in material, everything.

Five to one tanks, Soviets have five for every German one tank. You've got about seven to one artillery pieces. I think the figure I saw was 17 to one in aircraft at this stage in 1945. So rather than confront them in the conventional way in the field, try and tie them down in urban warfare where their material and numerical superiority can't really tell quite so much. And it

Essentially, it's buying time for Berlin in the hope that something will happen that will scupper that grand alliance and make the thing collapse. So I know it sounds fanciful at this stage now, 80 years on, but it actually held some sort of logic to it. So I'm just trying to give its logic rather than just portray it as being a hopeless resistance at all costs.

You mentioned the German forces in Breslau itself. They had a garrison. Again, a lot of these are estimates, but the garrison is estimated at about 45,000. And that is all the way. A lot of it is just groups of soldiers that have been pulled in in those last few weeks before the ring closed around Breslau. So it goes all the way from Waffen-SS troops and Fallschirmjäger as well, parachute troops,

who are considered the elite fighters of the Third Reich very much, all the way down through ordinary Wehrmacht infantry units down to Hitler Youth Boys and Volkssturm. And Volkssturm was raised in those last months of the war, basically old men and boys beneath conscription age

who are put in this, you know, probably a foreign uniform or a mismatched uniform, you know, given a Belgian rifle and some Italian bullets and basically sent to the front. It's as brutal as that. Most of them are, you know, destroyed, literally. It's quite hideous. The story of the Volkssturm is... The sort of German dad's army, isn't it? It's a German dad's army, but if you imagine dad's army actually in the teeth of combat...

And they don't, you know, there are units, I remember reading about this before, there are units of Volkssturm that go into battle, and literally none of them survive the day. You know, they literally mown down. So we're going all the way from Waffen-SS and Fallschirmjäger, all the way down to Volkssturm units. So it's a very, very mixed garrison. But as I said, about 45,000. The Gauleiter, who's the regional Nazi leader for Lower Silesia, whose name was Karl Hanke, you mentioned,

is an interesting guy. He's an absolutely fanatical Nazi. That might not sound surprising because he's a Gauleiter. So you kind of expect that. It comes with the territory. But interestingly, he was very much amongst the Nazi elite. He worked with Goebbels in the propaganda ministry, as one of Goebbels' deputies in the propaganda ministry through the war.

He's rumored to have had an affair with Magda Goebbels as well, as part of that relationship with Goebbels. And actually, in Hitler's own testimony, his political testament that is promulgated or published after his death on the 1st of May, Hanke is actually given the position of Reichsführer SS.

So he's Himmler's successor as leader of the SS for however many days until that was considered defunct. So that shows you actually how he was viewed amongst the Nazi hierarchy. He was a big fish.

Okay. And I mean, you called him an ardent Nazi. Any mischief in particular that he's got up to prior to this in terms of the way, for example, they evacuated the Jews from Breslau? Evacuation is the wrong word. The deportation of Jews from Breslau obviously had begun like most big German urban centers, the end of 41, early 42, deportation east.

So Breslau had effectively been cleared of, as they would have put it at the time, it was free of Jews or Judenrein already, I think from memory by about 1943. And as I said before, it was a huge Jewish center and with a very rich sort of Judaic tradition. So that's one of the city's great tragedies is the extermination literally of both the Jewish population and that Jewish culture that came with it.

It's ethnically cleansed. Effectively, the city is ethnically cleansed by that, again, horrible phrase, by the middle of the war.

And, you know, later on, say the beginning of this siege, for example, so Hanke makes it very clear that there's a very brutal evacuation of German population begun already in the third week of January. So they can kind of see the writing on the wall and start this evacuation of German population, which, as I said, total population is about a million at the beginning of all of this.

And this happens in sort of temperatures of minus 20. The railheads are very quickly, you know, swamped. So people are going on foot, desperately trying to get south and west and get over into Bohemia if they can. The death toll from that is enormous. You know, it is sort of estimated, you know, perhaps 100,000 that actually die as a result of that evacuation itself. So really, really, and brutally done as well, as you can imagine. I mean, they didn't sort of mess about.

And there's one moment which kind of sums up the regime really showing its teeth to its own people during the siege. So the deputy mayor of the city, his name was Spielhagen,

was supposedly sort of shaping to get himself a ride out somehow before the ring closed. And Hanka got word of this. And Spielhagen, who was, you know, a local man, was very well respected and so on, was hauled into the main square in front of that beautiful Rathaus and was shot by a firing squad. So they kind of showed to the rest of the people in the city, you know, we're not messing about here. You do what we tell you.

So yeah, that was just a sort of foretaste, if you like, of the brutality that was to come. Okay, we'll take a break there. Do join us in a moment when we'll hear more from Roger about the extraordinary siege of Breslau.

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Welcome back. Okay, so the Soviets begin their drive towards the Nisar River and this kind of concurrent operation to reduce Breslau on the 8th of February. Breslau's siege begins on the 13th of February. Is there ever, during the next few months, a major German attempt to relieve this siege? And if there is, how close does it actually get to breaking through the Soviet lines?

There was no real prospect of relieving the siege in the conventional sense of by ground forces because the Germans simply didn't have the weaponry and the manpower by that stage. So they're being pushed back really at every turn.

So, you know, the line continues to sort of push inexorably westwards, the front line. You've got the Battle of Ceylon Heights later on, the gateway to Berlin. And then, of course, they encircle Berlin by, you know, middle of or late April. So, you know, not that much later. So there's no real prospect of relief by land in that conventional sense. But the city is quite reasonably ably supported by an airlift, which lasts,

until I think the 1st of May, I think it runs until. And they're sort of delivered. I made a note here from my original work on this. They sent in 2,000 flights, which again doesn't sound great, but it's better than nothing. Most of that would have been ammunition after the city has been closed off. So lots of supplies, ammunition, and evacuated more than 6,000 wounded as well.

When they lost the airport or the airfield in the city, they actually blasted a replacement airstrip out of one of the main streets. Literally went down the road dynamiting all the buildings and built another airstrip, which was fairly short-lived because by that stage it was close to the end of the siege. But that story, if you like, the airlift, again, it's one logistically, which we don't talk about, with the ability that the Germans had to do that. Of course, they'd done something similar in Stalingrad as well a couple of years before.

And elsewhere, there's Demyansk, another one, another of these encirclement battles that was supplied by air. Very successfully, it has to be said. So the Germans did have this capacity to do this, and they did it in Breslau as well. So that's where the defenders of Breslau were sustained from, but there was no real prospect of actual relief. That's true. Do we know much about the German commanders? Because their names I'm not that familiar with. I mean, it started out as...

Hans von Alphen is the initial commandant, and then he's replaced by Hermann Niehoff. These are not names that anyone who's even looked at the story of fighting on the Eastern Front will have heard of before. So what do we know much about these two?

No, we don't. You're right to put your finger on that. I mean, it always makes me smile that Niehoff, it sounds very, very close to a German form of no hope or never hope. So that's which is how you would roughly translate it. So it doesn't sound great if your military commander is called Mr. No Hope. But no, you're right. They don't really have as much of a backstory that I recall being prominent at all. Niehoff, you know, I think he survives the war.

So, you know, these were sort of middling Wehrmacht commanders and they were the ones that were available on the spot. Alphen, as you said, von Alphen, the first commander, was removed because he was considered not to be vehement, you know, robust enough in sort of leading that defense. And that sort of shows you where the power lay. The power lay very, very solidly with the, you know, the civilian administration, which is important.

which is Hanke and the Gauleiter. So, you know, that shows you where the power was. It wasn't with the military. They were really very much under the command of the Gauleiter himself. Yeah, I mean, it was clearly a tough nut to crack, wasn't it? You mentioned the Waffen-SS. They were also full Schoenjager. So there were some very good troops mixed in with obviously a bit of a ragtag bunch. But nevertheless, fighting in a defensive way in a very large city is going to be a difficult nut

to crack. And although the Soviets devote a certain number of troops to doing it, a large force, the 6th Army, they nevertheless, although they put in a number of attacks, there's never this kind of overwhelming assault put in, in the way, of course, that it was at Berlin, presumably because it's just not a priority for the Soviets. Yes, they want to reduce it. They hope it will happen quickly. And when it doesn't, it doesn't really matter because they've bypassed it. Is that pretty much the story of Breslau? Because

Presumably, if the Soviets had wanted to reduce it, they really needed to. They could have done much more quickly. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think, you know, there are probably, you could probably say there's two extremes of the spectrum. You've probably got somewhere like Berlin at one end where, you know, they absolutely wanted to conquer Berlin as soon as possible. Yeah.

And kind of, to a large extent, hang the consequences, you know, in terms of, you know, the material costs on the ground and the cost of manpower didn't matter. I mean, that generally didn't matter to the Soviets anyway. And at the other end of that spectrum, you could probably look at one of the sieges. And again, sort of siege in inverted commas.

I mentioned before of somewhere like Lorient on the French Atlantic coast besieged in inverted commas again by the Western allies, you know, and had been since essentially September 44. But that's, that was a siege where it was just sort of contain and move on. Right.

So the death toll actually in Lorient was relatively small because the Americans and it was the Free French as well at Lorient, I think. But they were just, you know, content to sort of contain it with a minimum of actual conflict in the knowledge that the front would move on and the more strategic battles would be elsewhere.

In the case of Breslau, it's probably somewhere between the two, because you're right that the Soviets knew that this was not going to hold up the vast advance that they were part of and leading. But at the same time, they did want to reduce the fortress. They didn't necessarily want it to be left with potentially 30,000, 40,000 German troops essentially behind their lines. So it was somewhere in between the two that, yeah, okay, they didn't necessarily reduce it

in short order, because they could have done, but they still did try and reduce it in the knowledge that this was potentially a thorn in their side. Yes, and I shouldn't underestimate the fact that the Soviets, particularly during the early stages of the siege, did make a number of pretty serious attempts to break into the city. I think in particular on the night of the

where it began on the night of the 21st and 22nd of February. I mean, this is a multi-divisional attack supported by over 500 guns and planes too. So this is not a small operation. It is absolutely not just contain and move on. It is, you know, they are, as I said, they are genuinely, you know, fighting for that city. Yeah.

Yeah. So there's this incredibly brutal attempted assault in which Soviets take a lot of casualties. The Germans beat them off. But what you really got from this point onwards is an incremental advance into Breslau's suburbs.

and a destruction of the city from artillery bombardment and, of course, from constant attack from the air. So as a result, conditions for those still left within the city, and there were a number of civilians still there, weren't there? I don't know the exact number, but maybe up to 80,000 civilians are still there. But of course, that's a relatively small chunk of the original population. And as you said, a defending force of about

45,000 troops. And they're gradually being forced into a smaller, smaller area. Meanwhile, the infrastructure around them is being destroyed bit by bit. So this is a pretty horrific experience, isn't it, for people inside? I mean, were you able to get any firsthand accounts from the German perspective of what conditions were like inside the city? Yes, I did. And the destruction is quite astonishing, as you say. I mean, this idea...

I don't want anyone to assume from what I said earlier on that this is just kind of one of those battles where they just contain it in a sort of state of stasis and then wait for it to surrender. They don't. This is actively fought over.

As you said, the Soviets had absolute air superiority, with the exception of the airlift. Many of the aircraft coming in on the airlift were shot down by the Soviets as well. In terms of aerial combat over the city, very, very little. So the Soviets are free to raid as they at will.

And actually, in terms of that sort of material destruction on the ground, the Germans are, you know, as much to blame for that as anybody because they had these, what they call clearance squads, where they would literally go in and sort of demolish a whole block of the city. So all the people that were still there, probably living in the cellars and so on, would be sort of shooed out to God knows where. And the block would literally be dynamited and very often set on fire.

And the intention was, you know, classic sort of urban warfare, the intention was basically to make this, you know, a dead zone, what they called a dead zone, where the other side couldn't get any, find any sort of cover at all either. So you could basically then better defend the next block along. And then as soon as the, you know, the line moved, then you demolish the next block. So the Germans actually were systematically demolishing the areas of the city themselves. So a lot of that destruction, you know, was coming from them. In

In terms of first-hand accounts, there are a lot. As you said, it's estimated there are about 80,000 civilians left in the city. And there are quite a few first-hand accounts that we managed to get from them. There was a great compendium of...

of all of that stuff, which was done by a chap called Horst Gleiss, and now long dead. He was one of those that survived the siege. And he sort of made it his life's work, really, to sort of compile all of these firsthand accounts of the siege. It was called Breslauer Apocalypse. It was only available in German, but, you know, really thorough, you know, considering it was his life's work.

really thorough and loads and loads of first-hand accounts in that. So it is unbelievably brutal, as you can imagine. So if the Germans are not brutal enough in sort of, you know, shooing people out of their houses before the buildings have been destroyed, then the Soviets come in. And the Soviets are, you know, bear in mind that for your average Red Army infantryman, if they haven't seen the conquest of Königsberg, this might well be the first German city that they actually got to, right?

Right. If you were on that front, this, as we said, it was the first Ukrainian front. So it's a bit further south. Chances are you probably weren't at Königsberg. So this will be the first German city you get to. So this is the first place that you're going to want to avenge yourself for everything that your country and your own people have have experienced at the hands of the Germans over the last four years.

So, unbelievably brutal. The Red Army, you know, the epidemic of rape is the only word for it, means that, you know, as has been documented, you know, they didn't just rape German women, they raped everybody. They raped women of all sorts. They raped Soviet women who had been liberated from concentration camps were also raped by the Red Army. I mean, so that's one absolute, you know, phenomenon.

So civilians are treated as the absolute, you know, the last people on the list. There's absolutely no quarter given for civilians whatsoever. They are literally caught in that in the midst of that urban warfare. And it's extremely brutal.

There are a couple of accounts that sort of came to mind when I was sort of thinking about this earlier on. There was a wonderful one, again, this sort of idea of an element of levity or humor in a battle situation. There was one situation, again, kind of typical of urban warfare, where the Germans were supposedly playing records on a gramophone on one floor of the building. And when the music finished, they heard applause from the floor below,

and realized and then they were cheering and then they were speaking like shouting back to them with requests and they realized that they were speaking in russian so that's when the germans realized that the soviets were in the floor below right so i mean it again apocryphal so we can't verify it but it's it's kind of a an interesting illustration of the that sort of proximity in in urban warfare which is something you don't necessarily get very often

There's also evidence of the use of chemical weapons in the Siege of Breslau, which is one that, as you'll know, is pretty unusual. Again, it's rather hard to verify, but, you know, there was an account, first-hand account of a soldier in a Fallschirmjoger unit, so a parachute unit.

And they used in counterattacking on a basement that was occupied by Red Army troops. They used what they described, what's described in the source as pissboiton, which is a piss bag, right?

And it says that they threw these piss bags into the cellar and then sort of waited for a couple of hours. And then by the time they went back, everyone was dead. So this sounds suspiciously like the use of chemical weapons on a sort of ad hoc, you know, local basis. And if you bear in mind that just down the river Oder was a place called Durenfurt, which was the German factory. It's called the Anorgana plant. And it was the German factory that was producing tarbun, nerve gas.

which the Germans, like everybody else, they had it loaded into shells and, you know, it was all ready to go. As soon as the opposition used chemical weapons, they would have done the same thing. So everyone was kind of waiting for someone to give the order and then it would be all systems go. So they had this liquid radioactivity

ready to go that we should be loaded into those shells to be used so the fact that that account talks about these piss bags and we know that tarbun was yellow in color being used on the ground in Breslau there's a very good chance I suggest that that was probably tarbun especially given that the uh the end effect was that all of the soldiers in that in that particular basement were killed so potentially we had the use of chemical weapons in in the siege of Breslau as well

So what you have to grasp here, I think, is the degree to which, as I said, for the Soviets, for many of those soldiers, this was the first German town that they come to. So they were ready to avenge themselves on everything, on the city itself, never mind the people. The strength of feeling was that great. On the German side, this is existential, right? Breslau had kind of for a long time seen itself as,

as one of the primary eastern outposts of German-ness in Europe. German culture, German history, all of that stuff. And interestingly, there's, you know, in 1241, when the Mongols sweep west, there's a battle just outside Breslau at a place called Hunsfeld, where the local nobility are all slaughtered. The Mongols, of course, sweep westward, bringing

Asia into Europe, as the Nazis would put it. But they see it absolutely in that same way in 1945. So in 1941, the anniversary of the Battle of Hunsfeld was given big prominence by the Germans, by the Nazi regime.

And now there they are four years later. And a lot of the points of reference for Germans in Breslau is this is Asia, right? Asia is coming to avenge itself on us, right? And it's going to be bloody and it's going to be brutal. So this is absolutely existential, right? They're not just thinking this, we're going to be defeated and we'll end up in a prison camp or whatever. They see it in existential terms because they've been taught to, partly because it's, you know, the tradition of the city to see itself as this Eastern bastion.

But also because of all of the bloodthirsty propaganda of the Nazis as well, that the Soviets were, you know, it's an inhuman regime and they're just going to consign all of you to, the women will be raped, the men will be sent to the salt mines and so on. A large proportion of which, of course, was absolutely true. But you can see how for the German population, this was absolutely seen as existential.

And there are a huge number of suicides. There are thousands of suicides in Breslau during the siege because surrender was just not seen as a viable option. The timing of the surrender is interesting, isn't it? It's a few days after Hitler's death and that's been announced in Germany. So presumably they know about that in Breslau. Now sort of all bets are off. The

The clergy, I think, are the first ones to demand that Hanker actually opens the gates to the Soviets. I think that's on the 4th of May. Hanker says absolutely not, as you might expect him to. But a day later, he does a runner, doesn't he? He flies out of the fortress. It's always hard to imagine that he could have got away at that point, given that the Soviets would have had air superiority. But he flies out and if he's a Storch,

which I think was Niehoff's. And Niehoff, now Hanke's gone and the last kind of obstacle to peace has left the fortress, actually capitulates the following day, doesn't he? So do we know what happened to Hanke in the days to come? Frustratingly, no, we don't. He supposedly was flying south-west to the Sudetenland.

So, yeah, as he said, he disappeared in a Fieseler Storch, supposedly the only aircraft to have used that makeshift runway that they built. But yeah, he just disappeared. So there's no sort of record of where he landed, if even he landed at all. And he just disappears into history at that point. So, yeah, he's last seen in Breslau. No idea what happened to him. And they said by that point, he'd already been named Reichsführer SS. So they would have done, you know, presumably, you know, those sort of remnants of,

of the Nazi state that are still in place and able to do anything by that stage, which is saying something, but...

But, you know, they would have tried to take care of him as best as possible because he was right through at SS. But, you know, my suspicion is he probably either was shot down or captured and killed, you know, soon after landing. But, yeah, no record in after that. I've seen one account, which I doubt is verifiable, in which it's claimed that he was actually captured, disguised as an ordinary SS soldier, actually,

captured by Czech partisans or Czech irregulars and shot trying to escape. But, you know, it seems to me that that's not something that's got into kind of mainstream history books and therefore may or may not be true. But what we do know, as you say, Roger, is he disappears from the pages of history and let's hope his

his end was an immediate one rather than he got to South America and lived there for many years afterwards. But in any case, getting back to the main event, you spoke about the retribution of the Red Army. Of course, this would have continued on after the surrender of Breslau. What happens to Breslau in the weeks and months to come? In fact, you know...

Tell us about Breslau today. Yeah, it's handed over fairly swiftly to Polish control. So as you'll remember, Saul, Silesia, along with Pomerania, is sort of handed over to a future Polish state.

So, you know, fairly swiftly, there's a Polish administration comes in. There would have been, you know, as it was inevitable, there would have been a sort of a hiatus period where, you know, the Soviets were in control of the city and would have been screening all of the inhabitants. So, you know, the men would have been sent east for labor and women, well, we can imagine what happened to most of the women. So, you know, it's just as brutal as the analogous story was in Berlin.

in those immediate sort of days after the surrender. There's in total, I've got the estimate here, I've got is about 80,000 civilian dead, which is a hell of a lot, actually. There's not much leeway in that from the sort of figures we had at the beginning.

and about 10,000 dead military. So, but, you know, many more, about 60% casualties in total. Sorry, Roger, just to be clear on the numbers, does that number include some of the civilians who would have died in the forced evacuation of the city in January and early February 1945? Yeah, I mean, there is a huge death toll during that evacuation, as I said earlier on. So it depends where we sort of draw the line in separating them out. And to a large extent, it's anyone's guess.

because there's an ongoing deportation which goes on. The next thing to get to is that, you know, once the Poles are then in charge of Silesia and of what is fast becoming Wrocław, then, you know, they begin these sort of deportations of Germans, you know, through 46,

Germans are being sort of systematically deported westwards from all of those provinces, Pomerania as well, and the southern part of East Prussia that they inherited as well. So, you know, there's deportations of Germans from across Eastern Europe and all of those from Sudetenland for the Czechs as well are rounded up and deported, often under really, really brutal conditions.

So you're left with, you know, at the end of all of that, let's jump forward to say about 1948, 49, perhaps where you've got the, you know, the lines of the Cold War very much drawn.

Really, for the first time in its history, because the Germans had exterminated the Jews, the Poles had deported the remaining Germans from somewhere like Breslau. So you're left with a city that really, for the first time in its history, is monolingual, monocultural, mononational. It's Polish. It's Polish-speaking. And as Germans always say, but the stones, the buildings speak German, because a lot of the remaining architecture and so on was very German.

So they're sort of living in this city that, you know, their surroundings are still very, very German, very medieval, what's left of it. You know, the Rathaus, the Rathaus in the center of the town, that sort of riot of Gothic architecture that I mentioned before, that was, I think it was hit by one incendiary during the siege. So it's remarkable that it survived like it did. But it's still there. You know, it was there all the way through. Beautiful, beautiful building. And there's a conscious sense, I think, for a lot of post-war Poles

in Wroclaw as it becomes. Not now and not in the last 20, 30 years even beyond, but in those immediate post-war years where they feel like they're sort of squatting in someone else's house, that this is someone else's property and they don't really feel like they belong there. So it took a while for, in a sense, in their own minds for Breslau to become Wroclaw and to become a Polish city.

So that's an interesting element that jumping forward, obviously way beyond the war, but jumping forward in terms of the sort of, you know, the sociological impact of, you know, shipping out one group of people and shipping in another. And very often, you know, there was this link very often in terms of the demographics that, you know, the Poles at the same time had themselves lost Lvov.

you know, modern day Lviv in Ukraine, as you well know. So that had been a real Polish center and a Jewish center, of course, as well, Polish Jewish center for centuries. And that had been given to Ukraine first by, you know, Stalin in 1939. And then when the Red Army comes back through in sort of 44, then, you know, that's earmarked again for the future Ukrainian state. So post-war, you have the same process of deportations going on there, that Poles that have survived all of that in Lviv

are being deported westwards into the Polish state. So very often they're sent to what the Poles called the reclaimed territories, which is the likes of Silesia and Pomerania, the ones that they've taken from the Germans. And those deportees, refugees, whatever you want to call them, are sort of let loose in these new territories. So there was a link between Lviv and Wrocław.

even institutional. So there's a couple of cultural institutions that came from Lviv to Wroclaw and sort of settled in Wroclaw and made their new home there. So it's very much, it's peopled by people who themselves have been deported and need to find a new home. So there's some really interesting sort of sociological aspects to it there as well in the post-war period. Yeah, fascinating stuff, Roger. And finally, I spoke at the beginning about the number of

houses destroyed in the siege of Breslau, now Wroclaw, all rebuilt since then and presumably one of the jewels that is worth visiting in Western Poland today.

Yeah, absolutely. As I said at the beginning, you know, I still say that that sort of main square in Wroclaw, you know, with the beautiful town hall, I'll say it again, the beautiful town hall and those sort of patrician buildings all around it, you know, it's one of the most beautiful squares in Europe, I would say. And I'm not exaggerating by saying that. And the Cathedral Island as well, you know, the old cathedral, which dates back to sort of 13 something or other.

which is on an island in the stream of the order, absolutely beautiful. I mean, a lot of this obviously has been rebuilt because of all the destruction that we've been talking about. But this is one of the sort of phenomena really of post-war Poland is that because essentially they couldn't afford to,

to pull everything down and rebuild it in concrete. So they kind of lived with the ruins for decades sometimes and worked on their, you know, so consequently their skills in terms of, you know, being able to restore old buildings are second to none. So in places like Rostov, I remember when I first went there, which must have been in the mid-90s,

You had the main square and you had this sort of ring of patrician buildings around it, all of which were beautiful, you know, pastel colors and beautiful gables and all of that sort of thing. And then the next row out from there, already they were very gray, they were filthy, you know, some of them were semi-derelict and so on. If you go now, each successive ring out from the center has been beautified and has been restored.

And, you know, have to go quite a long way to find anything, you know, remotely distasteful architecturally. So, you know, it's really a fascinating place to go. There's a beautiful piece of modernist architecture as well called the Jahrhundert, or in German it's called the Jahrhunderthalle. It was built by the Germans in 19...

What would it have been? 1913, I think it was. So it's the anniversary of the War of Liberation from Napoleon. So it would have been 1913 it was built. It was called the Century Hall. So it's called the Halas Dulecia in Polish, which is really modernist. It's a fantastic big arena, big round building, you know, as a modernist piece of architecture, absolutely astonishing.

So there's really loads to see in it. And as I said at the beginning, I do genuinely hope that people might listen to this and go and see it because it's a fascinating city. Yeah, good stuff. Thanks so much for being our guide to that, Roger. Look forward to chatting to you on our next program. That will be Ukraine at the end of this week. But thanks so much. My pleasure. Thanks all.