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By Root 1139 0

Two days later, as dusk fell, their commanding officer summoned them all. “It’s over, men,” he said. “It’s every man for himself now, so get home as best you can.” The officers rode away on their horses. The soldiers stripped off their insignia and put on white armbands. Then they started walking, among many thousands of others. Selzer was disconcerted “to watch the mighty Wehrmacht falling to pieces in such a fashion.” He and a handful of others crossed the Neisse, were briefly imprisoned by Poles from whom they escaped, then were fortunate enough to be ignored by the Russians as they crossed the Elbe. “We fell happily into the hands of the Americans.” He reached home to discover that his only surviving brother Alois had died in the battle for Berlin on 29 April. His parents were distraught with mingled grief for one son and relief that another, at least, had come home. “I simply thanked God for being alive myself.”

On the morning of 4 May, a delegation of Breslau churchmen called on the military commandant to urge the surrender of the city. Two days later, the city’s commander Hermann von Niehoff went out to meet his Soviet counterpart and offered capitulation in return for assurances about the safety of the garrison. That night, the guns fell silent. About a quarter of the inhabitants of Breslau had been killed or wounded in the siege, 30,000 in all. They had inflicted some 60,000 casualties on the Russians. Little of the great old city survived. Von Niehoff refused the chance of escape in a Storch aircraft, preferring to accept captivity with his men. Gauleiter Hanke, however, eagerly seized the opportunity and fled, never to be heard of again. The Soviet occupying forces embarked upon an orgy of plunder and rape in the ruins of Breslau.

In Czechoslovakia, Field-Marshal Schörner, that dedicated Nazi, maintained the struggle to defend the Reich’s last important industrial region, at the head of a million men of Army Group Centre. On his western front, Patton’s Third Army was already at the Czech border. Russian armies of 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts pressed on Schörner from the north and east. Yet still the battle continued. On 6 May, as the German perimeter narrowed, Czech partisans rose in revolt in Prague and other cities still held by the Germans. They gained the support of General Vlassov, the most senior Russian officer to have entered Hitler’s service, at the head of one of his divisions of mostly Ukrainian soldiers. Vlassov’s men, in those last days, made a belated and futile bid to save themselves from Soviet vengeance by turning on the Germans. Czech radio appealed to the nation to rise.

What followed was similar in kind, if not in scale, to earlier events in Warsaw. The Germans, motivated partly by self-preservation and partly by the culture of massacre which now held sway among the doomed fanatics, found means to suppress the revolt with the same energy with which they had addressed previous risings of Poles and Slovaks. A last tragedy, involving the deaths of 3,000 Czechs and terrible damage to their capital, thus took place even after Hitler’s death. SS men herded civilians out of their houses into the street, where they were mown down. A senior Wehrmacht officer announced that he cared nothing for armistices, that his men would fight on until they were granted passage westwards. German radio in Prague continued to broadcast signals of defiance and to threaten draconian reprisals against any civilian found in possession of arms. Here was another example of the folly of inciting civilian insurrection against regular troops. The Allies, through the BBC’s Czech Service, should surely have sought to deter the insurgents, rather than allow them to immolate themselves. The uprising could not conceivably influence events.

On 8 May, the Russians launched an assault on Prague. They entered the city the next day, too late for a substantial number of its citizens. Churchill suffered a new spasm of dismay when he saw that the Czech capital, too, must fall into communist thraldom. He had raised the issue of Prague