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 began on the 13th of

February 1945 as Soviet forces encircled the city on the west bank of the Oda 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 Hargreed, 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 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. 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 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 Overie, Catherine

Meridale, 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, was called Microcosm,

which was a history of Breslau, which is now a beautiful city in Western Poland called Vrotswav.

We wrote that sort of multinational, if you like, history of Breslau, Vrotswv, 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,

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