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Richard Hargreaves

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Hitler's Final Fortress: Breslau 1945 Kindle Edition

by Richard Hargreaves (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 114 ratings

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A dramatic account of how the Nazis were driven out of Breslau, drawing on the words of those who witnessed it.

In January 1945, the Red Army unleashed its long-awaited thrust into Germany with terrible fury. One by one the provinces and great cities of the German East were captured by the Soviet troops. Breslau, capital of Silesia, a city of 600,000 people, stood firm and was declared a fortress by Hitler.

A bitter struggle raged as the Red Army encircled Breslau, then tried to pummel it into submission while the city’s Nazi leadership used brutal methods to keep the scratch German troops fighting and maintain order. Aided by supplies flown in nightly and their building improvised weapons from torpedoes mounted on trolleys to an armored train, the men of Fortress Breslau held out against superior Soviet forces for three months. The price was fearful. By the time Breslau surrendered on May 6, 1945, four days after Berlin had fallen, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians were dead, the city a wasteland. Breslau was pillaged, its women raped and every German inhabitant driven out of the city which became Wroclaw in postwar Poland.

Based on official documents, newspapers, letters, diaries, and personal testimonies, this is the bitter story of Hitler’s final fortress.

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"a brutally honest and personal look at World War II urban combat..."--Stuart McClung"NY Journal of Books" (04/01/2015)

About the Author

Richard Hargreaves is a journalist, working in regional newspapers. Prior to taking up his present job with Navy News, he was an official war correspondent with the Portsmouth Evening News. He lives at Southsea, near Portsmouth.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B009EE9EAU
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pen & Sword Military (September 20, 2012)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 20, 2012
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 36376 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 529 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #969,726 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #962 in History of Russia eBooks
- #1,042 in History of Germany
- #3,157 in Russian History (Books)

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4.4 114 ratings

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Richard Hargreaves

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Many thanks for visiting my author's page.

I've been a journalist since 1994, specialising in naval affairs for the past decade, travelling the globe courtesy of the Royal Navy and reporting on the 2003 invasion of Iraq aboard HMS Ark Royal.

The day job funds my passion: writing German history. I've been researching the Second and Third Reichs for the past 20 years, amassing a large library (and an even larger debt...) and delving into the archives of the world.

Although I'm labelled as a 'military historian', the emphasis in all my work is on the human element - I'm more interested in the fates of individuals than the movements of regiments, divisions and armies.

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WryGuy2

A Recounting of the Death of a City

Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2012

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"HITLER'S FINAL FORTRESS - BRESLAU 1945", by journalist and historian Richard Hargreaves is a non-military book about a military event, the siege of Breslau in 1945 by the Soviet Union during World War II. If this sounds confusing, it's not. Rather than a battle history, where the author shows that this unit attacked here, and this unit defended there, Hargreaves follows the story of the city, from before the start of the war until its destruction during battle and ultimate rebuilding (but by the Poles, to whom it was transferred to after the war.) The author does this primarily through letters and accounts by the people who lived there, primarily Germans, but occasionally Soviets and Poles. He writes this history chronologically, recounting the struggles, horrors, incompetence, and brutality during this timeframe, using the city of Breslau as the central unifying theme.

Hargreaves introduces you to many characters as the history plays out, not all of which survive. He shows how the Nazi leaders, through willful incompetence and reluctance to disobey their leaders, failed to prepare this part of Germany for war and neglected to evacuate vulnerable citizens from the area until it too late, leading to the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Germans. And he also recounts how the Germans had scraped to the very bottom of their manpower barrel and beyond, forcing children as young as 13 into the fight, as well as older citizens aged well beyond military usefulness.

The siege itself was bitter and lengthy, and while total casualties were not on the scale of some of the largest sieges of the war, the destruction the battle imposed on the city was among the war's worst. By the end of the war, large parts of the city were completely destroyed. And for those Germans who survived the siege, worse was yet to come, as soldiers were shipped to the Soviet Union to be used to rebuild that country for years, and the remaining civilians were deported out of their territory forever, when Breslau was given to Poland. When that happened, Breslau ceased to exist, and Wroclaw was born.

While on the one hand, it is hard to feel sympathetic to the German leadership, who did the same or worse on Soviet and Polish soil earlier in the war, it is very easy to feel sorry for the sufferings of the ordinary German during this time frame. The author does an excellent job describing their struggles and misery, and unlike another reviewer here, I didn't find any problems with his syntax or style whatsoever. When I purchased the book I was expecting to read more about the military aspects of this battle, from the top down, so to speak, but now that I've read the book, I'm also happy with how the author built the book in almost narrative from, from the bottom up. Five stars.

22 people found this helpful

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jack taylor

Good retelling of events.

Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2013

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As others have mentioned, this is a retelling of battle details dug out of many different publications. It's not a technical blow by blow, but rather gives a pretty good feel/overview of how the situation unfolded from Breslauers POV. My dad was one of the ones captured there - "In Breslau umkesselt", he says. He'd told us a few stories of all the very high quality food they had, brandy, wine, how the cellars had all been interconnected by the time he got there and they could move around large areas underground. Told of how his regiment ended up being just he and one other 18 year old hiding in the woods as Russians tore everything apart around them - the book mentioned the remnants of German "reinforcements" straggling in. Told of one story where he and a few other 19 year olds were huddled in a basement during a bombardment and a bomb crashed through 3 stories of their building and landed in their midst - within seconds they were outside, then realized that the bomb was a dud. Their FeldVebel just laughed and said he'd never seen a basement cleared so fast. Then the book mentions the firestorms going on in buildings and suddenly dad's situation attains a whole different level of gravity.

This book really gave credence to everything my dad told me. Amazing stuff. Now I need to find some documentation on the Russian work camps that they were assigned to , where he survived another 3 years before being released. Amazing stories that we have no idea about, I have no understanding of how they survived what they went through.

7 people found this helpful

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Richard C. Geschke

To the Last Man!!

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2014

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In the vast studies of the terrible events of the Eastern Front such battles as the siege of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk and the siege of Konigsberg onto the great tragedy that was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff one never considers the siege of the fortress designated by Hitler as the Silesian capital city of Breslau. Richard Hargreaves brings to us a detailed account of what really transpired on the plains of Silesia as this fortress was the last to fall to the Russian Bear in The Great Patriotic War. Breslau outlasted all German strongpoints including Hitler's Berlin.
Hargreaves brings to us all the major players from both sides of the conflict. The intentions of the Russians to the fanatical leadership of the Gauleiter of Breslau as the battlefield is set for the battle of bloody attrition that would lead to the utter destruction of a once proud Germanic city. The author details the lives of the Germans who had to endure this long siege. The destruction, the death and the fanatical leadership are ingrained into the reader as the story unfolds to us in all the tragic results.
However what is also told is the tragic use of German youth known as Hitler Youth who were fighting to the last man for the Third Reich. The Landsers along with the use of the Volkstrum and other line units made for an eclectic collection of defenders with little resources and material to accomplish what Hitler desired. With these resources the struggle continues with all the resident horrors.
Hargreaves details the battle and struggle to supply Breslau using the Luftwaffe which in the end was defeated in detail as all the Junkers used in support evaporated under the air defense artillery of the Soviets. With the loss of the much needed resupply, the Germans were subject to the attacks of the Soviet airstrikes on Easter, 1945. The author describes these events in very bloody detail as the siege continues and despair reigns supreme for all the German residents of the final Nazi fortress.
What happens after defeat is the final soliloquy of what transpired in 1945 in Breslau. The transference of the Silesian capital from the Germanic Breslau to the Polish Wroclaw is detailed by the author in all its tragic consequences. This book was indeed eye opening and provided to me more background as to what transpired in The Great Patriotic War which is opening up to we historians who search for what really happened on the Eastern Front.

5 people found this helpful

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Stephen Midgley

A great city changed for ever

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 30, 2015

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I was prompted to read this excellent book after visiting modern-day Wroclaw and learning about its past – and, in particular, of the terrible ordeal experienced in the final months of World War 2 by the city formerly known as Breslau. There are already a number of detailed and thorough reviews here on Amazon, so I won't repeat too much of what others have written.

I agree with the assessments of fellow reviewers such as Dave History Student, Lance Grundy, foreverblue, D.G. Donnelly and Ron Dutton. This is a gripping and terrifying story, told in compelling and sometimes horrifying detail by Richard Hargreaves. The amount and quality of the writer's research are phenomenal; the story is greatly enhanced by his quotations of accounts from so many people, on all sides of the conflict, who were there and who witnessed and suffered the terrors of a great city under merciless siege by the Red Army – and under even more merciless orders from the Führer and his underlings to hold out at all costs.

I must admit that, terrible as their ordeal was, I found it hard to work up too much sympathy for the civilian population. They'd been happy enough when the boot was on the other foot as Hitler's armies wrought death and brutal havoc on the peoples of eastern Europe, with little thought that they might eventually find out how it felt to be on the receiving end for a change. Likewise with the ruthless 'Vertreibung', the expulsion of German civilians westwards from what now became Polish territory. It was, of course, Stalin's will that Polish borders should be shifted westwards as soon as the war ended – and inevitably, at that point in history, what Stalin wanted, Stalin got. As a result, many thousands of Polish people arrived in the city from places further east such as Lwów, and treated the departing Germans with considerably more hatred and brutality than they'd suffered at the hands of the Red Army. Human nature being what it is, I don't believe the former Breslauers should have been all that surprised.

Even today, the far right in Germany are still harping on about nostalgia for their former Schlesien and their alleged right to recover it and other lands they lost as a result of the war. It's a very dubious point, because the Germans had seized Silesia in the first place, under Frederick II in the 18th century, and other parts of Poland under Bismarck in the 19th century. Be that as it may, they would clearly need to start World War 3 in order to do anything about it. But for as long as people remember the use they made of Polish lands at the likes of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka, nobody is about to let any of that happen. So they may as well leave it alone.

In a final chapter referring briefly to Wroclaw's post-war history, Richard Hargreaves touches on the nostalgia question, but perhaps more objectively than I have just done. The fact is that Wroclaw is now a modern Polish city, although still bearing some of the scars of war and of the quick-and-ugly approach to housing reconstruction under a communist regime in the fifties and sixties. But the city also has a busy and thriving population, one of Poland's great universities, a cathedral and other fine churches, a superbly reconstructed market square (Rynek) and old town hall (Ratusz), and - unlike Edinburgh, 20 miles from where I'm writing this - an extensive and practical tram network. It's a far cry from the misery, rubble, fire and destruction so vividly described in Hargreaves' fascinating study.

3 people found this helpful

Lance Grundy

Festung Breslau. A comprehensive and engaging account of a city under siege

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 20, 2012

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On 24 August 1944, with the Red Army advancing across eastern Europe towards Germany, Adolf Hitler declared the German city of Breslau [now Wroclaw in Poland] to be a "Festung", a fortress city. He ordered that "Festung Breslau" should be defended at all costs with no retreat and no surrender. Thus the scene was set for one of the most savage sieges in modern history. During the 82 day Siege of Breslau, which followed in early 1945, the city would suffer destruction on a scale that exceeded that experienced by either Berlin or Dresden. By the time Festung Breslau surrendered on 6 May 1945, according to Richard Hargreaves, "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 ten schools were in ruins. Almost the entire rail and tram network was wrecked, while every electricity line and three quarters of the telephone wires were down. The water mains had been damaged at over 3000 locations while the sewage system was broken in 7000 places. Of the 400 miles of roads and streets in Breslau nearly 200 were impassable, buried beneath 600 million cubic feet of rubble and ash".

Hargreaves' book is the first full-length English language account of the Siege of Breslau and it provides a fascinating glimpse into the dying days of the Third Reich and the implosion of National Socialism. Quoting extensively from personal testimonies, diaries and contemporary documents, Hargreaves weaves a spellbinding narrative of the fall of "Hitler's Final Fortress". The book is well-researched and Hargreaves gives due credit to other writers whose work he quotes [notably the Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse Microcosm: A Portrait of a Central European City and the seminal work on the Siege of Breslau, the ten-volume, German language "Breslauer Apokalypse" written by Horst Gleiss - whose personal recollections feature heavily throughout this book]. There are also thorough notes at the end of each chapter which cite the sources used.

First-hand accounts from both those defending and attacking the city recall the savage battles that took place in and around Breslau during the assault on this Nazi stronghold and the recollections of ordinary Breslauers are used to convey the horror of life in a city under siege. A city which is being pummelled to dust by non-stop artillery barrages and round-the-clock air raids. A city which seems to be permanently on fire. A city where 100,000 people freeze to death while being evacuated. A city where the regime seems to have turned against its own people and a city where even after the surrender the terror continues as the Russian invaders wreak revenge on the German inhabitants of Breslau - especially its womenfolk. There are also accounts from some of those Breslauers who took part in what must be one of the most desperate acts of the Second World War. With Breslau completely surrounded the city's Gauleiter, Karl Hanke, decreed that an airstrip should be built in the city centre so that the defenders could be re-supplied from the air. Dozens of buildings were demolished and a two kilometre long, 250 metre wide 'runway' was carved through the heart of the city. Built under constant shellfire at a cost of over 3,000 lives, the runway was completed too late to be of any military benefit and it was hardly ever used. One person who did use the runway however was Karl Hanke himself. On the day before the surrender of the city, the man who had given orders that anyone who tried to flee the city should be executed for cowardice, boarded a Fiesler Stork aircraft, took off and fled to the Czech Republic. The final chapter considers his fate along with that of the other Breslauers we've got to know throughout the book.

I found Hargreaves book particularly interesting because I am planning to visit Wroclaw later on this year and Hargreaves explains in the final chapter how the city's buildings and structures still bear the scars of 1945. Concrete bunkers litter the city and its outskirts and there are at least two of the huge, round "Hochbunker" fortifications still standing in the city centre. Most of the bunkers though are underground and it seems they are in various states of disrepair. What was Fortress Command is now, according to Hargreaves, "a rather run-down restaurant with a Russian-themed nightclub on the ground floor". Hanke's 'runway' is, predictably, now a massive dual carriageway completely out of keeping with the historic heart of the city. It is, perhaps, the biggest scar of all.

In summary, "Hitler's Final Fortress" is a well-written, all-round account of the Seige of Breslau, which will be of particular interest to those wanting to learn more about WWII on the Eastern Front or anyone who is planning to visit Wroclaw and who would like to learn more about the city's recent history. Definitely recommended.

9 people found this helpful

foreverblue

A must have book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 20, 2012

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If you're interested in the dying days of WW2 in Eastern Europe (as I am) then this is a fantastic book. Graphically written by the author, it's the tale of the siege of Breslau in 1945. Of how this city of around 600,000 came to be cut off from the rest of Germany and yet held out longer than Berlin, Konigsberg and others. Of how it eventually fell to the Soviets, followed by the rape and pillage of it's citizens. And finally their expulsion from their ancestral homes, to be replaced by Poles who had also been expelled from their homes further east - mainly Lwow.

This is a story that is unknown to most of us in the West. Much of it is extremely moving and horrific. The tales of the Hitler Youth boy who looked down into the mud and saw the face of a soldier who had been crushed under the tracks of a tank staring back at him and the Russian soldier who threw a young German boy into a house on fire in revenge for the death of his own children are particularly horrifying.

A fine book, excellently written. I found it hard to put down and would highly recommended it.

22 people found this helpful

SoniaMac

Its good to see the story told as

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 26, 2016

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Not a huge amount to add. Its good to see the story told as, as one previous reviewer said it's one very few people seem to know, and it is a tragic and powerful one.. My mother aged 15 and her family were some of those still in the city when the Red Army came. This filled in the gaps in what she had told me. A big thank you to the author for writing it..

One person found this helpful

Bunny Adolf

Breslau Apocalypse

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 28, 2013

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This is an extraordinary and appalling story of heroism and fanaticism that was ultimately for nothing.The courage of the Fallschirmjager and Hitlerjugend troops defending the city is not in doubt, nor is the savagery of the Soviet assault. This pile of rubble fought on till 6th May 1945,dragged down to its own destruction by one man. Karl Hanke. I wish the book had given us a little more on this enigma of a man, but this minor gripe does not mar a shattering and deeply emotive book.Totally recommended!

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