Wrocław, or Breslau as it then was, has the dubious distinction of being declared a Festung (fortress city) by the Nazis in 1944, meaning that it was to be defended at any cost. “Any cost” in this context turned out to mean the near destruction of the city and the needless deaths of tens of thousands, but those were details that didn’t particularly bother the Reich as long as orders were followed.
The concept of Fortress Breslau was meant to hold back the Red Army and protect the eastern flank of Germany, though in reality it was mostly about Hitler’s refusal to admit the war was already lost. The city was ringed with defences, civilians were pressed into service and resistance was supposed to be fanatical. The siege lasted from February until May 1945, outlasting even the Battle of Berlin. By the time the Soviets finally took it, Breslau was a ruin, its medieval heart and baroque splendours reduced to rubble.
The human toll was staggering with around 170,000 civilians trapped, food shortages, forced evacuations in the depths of winter and an estimated 40,000 dead during the siege. The city held out because orders said it had to, not because there was any realistic hope of changing the war’s outcome. It’s one of those decadent exercises in futility that twentieth-century Europe specialised in.
The capitulation itself came on 6 May 1945 when General Hermann Niehoff, the German commander, finally accepted the inevitable and surrendered the city to the Soviets. Accounts describe Niehoff as weary rather than defiant, the fight having gone on long past the point of sanity. It was also the end of the city’s German identity, it became part of Poland just months later. Niehoff himself lived until 1980, it must have been a strange career to look back on.
This is the same location now where the surrender took place. Everything has changed, I can’t imagine anyone in 1939 could have predicted what would happen to this city.