Caught between east and west
Antony Beevor
MICROCOSM: PORTRAIT OF A CENTRAL EUROPEAN CITY by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse Cape. £20, pp. 525, ISBN 0224062433 Breslau, the former capital of Silesia, has been through more changes of name and identity than most cities. In the course of a thousand years the 'Island City' on the river Oder has been known as Wrotizla, Wrestlaw, Presslaw, Breslau and finally, since 1945, Wroclaw.
Close to the borders of Germany, Bohemia and Poland, this important duchy attracted the interest of kingdoms and empires. During the early Middle Ages it proved a veritable apple of discord to be fought over by local and family rivals, from Boleslaw the Wry-Mouth to Kazimierz Sprawiedliwy the Just and Mieszko the Flat-Footed. The only time the warring factions joined together was to face the invasion of the Mongol horde from Central Asia in 1241. This rare example of unity, however, did them little good. At the battle of Legnica, the flower of Silesian chivalry fell in their hundreds under flights of Tatar arrows. Only one knight, out of the 14 from the Strachowice clan who rode forth, survived the massacre. Seven centuries later, his direct descendant, Count Hyazinth von Strachwitz, commanded the first panzer regiment to reach the Volga at Stalingrad. Along with his fellow officers he gazed across the huge river to the endless steppe beyond. Central Europe and Central Asia held a terrible fascination for each other.
In the 14th century, Casimir the Great of Poland expanded his realm eastwards and took the city of Lvov. This decision to turn his back upon the west allowed Silesia a new identity, and it soon became increasingly German under the suzerainty of Bohemia. The city of Wrotizla had started on its transformation to Breslau, just as Lvov was becoming Lwow. These two cities proved to be connected at a distance. Almost 600 years later Stalin, the conquering red emperor, gave Breslau to Poland and seized back Lvov for the Soviet Union. The uprooted Polish intelligentsia from LwOw moved westwards with the remains of the Ossolineum library to colonise their twin city, depopulated and degermanised after one of the most pitiless siege battles of the war.
The onslaught of the Red Army in 1945 must have stirred ancient folk memories. During the horrors of the Thirty Years War, Silesia lost a third of its population. Its strategic position between Prussia, the Austrian empire and Russia attracted further incursions a century later. Frederick the Great's seizure of Silesia provoked the War of the Austrian Succession and soon afterwards the Seven Years War, a conflict which some have called the first world war. Breslau was its epicentre. And in 1813, during the war against Napoleon, Breslau became the birthplace both of the German national colours of black, red and gold, and also of the Iron Cross.
In the 19th century, Silesia became the second industrial region of Germany after the Ruhr. It also had one of the most integrated Jewish communities in Europe. The kingdom of Prussia, despite the wild assertions of some Holocaust historians, was probably still the least anti-Semitic of all regimes on the Continent_ A mood of xenophobic nationalism, however, began to grow under Kaiser Wilhelm H. The first anti-Semitic violence in Breslau followed the end of the first world war when Freikorps factions supported the 1920 Kapp putsch in Berlin. A hatred of Poles was also virulent after the Versailles peace settlement, to such a degree that many extreme nationalists hoped that the Red Army would defeat the Poles in the RussoPolish war. But it was unemployment — one third of the Silesian workforce was out of a job — which increased the share of the Nazi vote in 1930 to 25 per cent and in 1933 to 50 per cent. The poverty was so bad that SA stormtroopers in Breslau had not been able to parade because they lacked shoes, let alone jackboots.
The second world war began in Silesia near Gleiwitz, when a Sicherheitsdienst group faked an attack on a German radio station to provide Hitler's excuse to invade Poland. One of the most terrible parts
played out at Breslau was the collection camp on the outskirts for many of the hundreds of thousands of blond Polish children seized by the Nazis as potential Aryans for their Lebensborn programme. Over 10,000 Jews were transported from the city to concentration camps. Only 160 survived. One saving grace in the Nazi nightmare, however, was the strong Breslau element in the German resistance and the July Plot — Count Helmuth James von Moltke, Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg and FieldMarshal von Witzleben. But nothing could save Breslau in January 1945 when Marshal Koriev's 1st Ukrainian Front smashed through the German defences on the upper Vistula. A week later, the Gauleiter, Karl Hanke, ordered the immediate evacuation of all civilians. People were crushed in the stampede for trains. Some 60,000 women and children left on foot through heavy snow and temperatures of minus 20 Celsius. The Nazi party promised them food and vehicles, but no help materialised. Thousands collapsed and froze to death_ Even many of those who escaped the Soviet attack met another fate. Churchill's order to help the Red Army in Silesia led to the destruction of Dresden by RAF and USAF bombers. Train-loads of refugees were incinerated in the firestorm.
Hitler had ordered that Breslau should be turned into a fortress. Hanke obeyed with such fanaticism and cruelty that Hitler, in his last testament, appointed him to be Himmler's successor. Even ten-yearold children were dragooned into the futile struggle. As the siege intensified, Hanke maintained his rule of terror by firing squads on the market square. Many wanted the fighting to end, but many fought on instinctively. They were determined that this Germanic bastion should never surrender to another Asiatic horde, even if they almost all fell as their ancestors had under the Tatar arrows on the field of Legnica. Norman Davies rightly refers to 'the faulty mental map that had so often led Germans astray'. Following its surrender on 6 May 1945, the new overlords of the ruined city were Poles, not Central Asians.
The idea for this book came out of the blue. In 1996, the City President of the modern Wroclaw suggested to Norman Davies that he should write its history. The story, he recognised, could never be written objectively either by a German or a Pole. With the city's assistance, Roger Moorhouse, a former student of Professor Davies, was appointed chief researcher on the project. And now, nearly six years later, the finished work is appearing simultaneously in all the relevant languages, as well as English. The City President made a wise choice. This book, which must meet his every expectation of scholarship and objectivity, also makes a fascinating story_ Antony Beevor's next book, Berlin: The Downfall, 1945, is published by Viking next month.
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