Walking the Ground – Bautzen

Blowing Bautzen’s bridges…

At 19:15 on the 20th of April, 1945, Oberst Dietrich Hoepke (commander of the Bautzen garrison) ordered all 17 of Bautzen’s bridges to be blown, in order to frustrate the Soviet advance into the city centre.

The most iconic bridge to be destroyed was the Kronprinzenbrücke, which ran from the base of the Ortenburg Castle towards the west of the city.

The story goes that senior Nazi party dignitaries managed to escape Bautzen by fleeing across the bridge in a car just minutes before the bridge was blown to pieces, which sounds just like the kind of thing they would do.

In any case, after all of Bautzen’s bridges were blown, the remaining garrison troops defending the centre of Bautzen were trapped, unable to break out.

What’s worse, by the time the bridges were destroyed there were still 5000 civilians in the city, all of whom were now condemned to spend the next few days in the crossfire of the Soviet and German forces.

Once the battle for Bautzen ended, the Kronprinzenbrücke lay in ruins, and it wasn’t rebuilt until 1949.

However, in commemoration of the horror of the fighting that ravaged the city, the bridge was fittingly renamed the Friedensbrücke – or ‘peace bridge’.

To hear more about the desperate measures taken by the Bautzen garrison in the defence of their city, check out the latest episode of the Europe At War podcast.

1st photo source: Welt.de

P.S. I couldn’t get a better angle of the modern-day bridge as that would have required breaking into people’s gardens 😅