He believed in force and ‘the survival of the fittest’ in domestic as well as foreign politics. [He] did not lack intelligence but he did lack stability, disguising his deep insecurities by swagger and tough talk… He was not so much concerned with gaining specific objectives, as had been the case with Bismarck, as with asserting his will. This trait in the ruler of the most important Continental power was one of the main causes of the prevailing uneasiness in Europe at the turn-of-the-century.84
According to an unattributed but shrewd assessment, the Kaiser, ‘if not the father of the Great War, was its godfather’.
By 1914, Europe’s two strongest military powers, Russia and Prussian-led Germany, were poised on the verge of a trial of strength, before which neither would flinch. Indeed, both Berlin and St Petersburg were convinced that the coming clash had better be fought sooner than later. Russia was aligned with France and Britain. Germany stood alongside Austria and Italy at the head of the so-called Central Powers. The ‘Great War’ exploded very nearly 100 years after Waterloo had ended the last Continent-wide conflagration. All sides blamed their opponents for the conflict. Western analysts, who denounced ‘the Kaiser’s War’, pointed to Germany’s ‘Schlieffen Plan’, the tactics of which determined that Germany should strike first before being struck a double blow. Though his original plan was modified, the dead General Schlieffen was roundly denigrated as a treacherous Prussian warmonger. Germany’s fears of encirclement were given little credence.
Russia’s equally ambiguous actions attracted less criticism in the West. Yet in the chain reaction that led from the assassination at Sarajevo to the outbreak of war, Russia’s unconditional support for Serbia matched Germany’s ‘blank cheque’ to Austria, and it was Russia’s provocative mobilization that finally pushed Germany over the edge.85 The speed of the Russian army’s double-pronged attack on the Eastern Front showed how the tsarist military command, like its German counterpart, had been planning a pre-emptive blow. Kaiser Wilhelm II and his entourage were undoubtedly paranoiac, but their readiness to resort to war did not exceed that of the Russians.
Western commentators have not generally wanted to hear how their Russian allies hoped to harm Germany, but war aims published by the Russian foreign office in September 1914 reveal their intentions. They foresaw (a) the total liquidation of East Prussia; (b) the re-creation of a Russian-run Kingdom of Poland; and (c) the establishment of a new Russo-German frontier on the Rivers Oder and Western Neisse (exactly as eventually happened in 1945).86 From Germany’s viewpoint, they were deeply threatening. They do not absolve the German leadership, but they certainly show that Prussia’s militarism was not unique. Of course, Russia’s plans were quickly forgotten. The attack on East Prussia was efficiently repulsed; the Russian ‘steamroller’ repeatedly stalled and after 1915 German forces carried all before them on the Eastern Front. Even so, the Prussians who dominated Germany’s military circles had received a nasty shock, a shock which goes a long way to explaining their punitive terms imposed on Soviet Russia at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918). The chief German negotiator at Brest-Litovsk, General Max Hoffmann (1869–1927), had been Field Marshal Hindenburg’s chief-of-staff in East Prussia four years earlier. It was Hoffmann who suggested changing the name of the victory of 1914 to the ‘Battle of Tannenberg’,* thereby claiming revenge for the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at nearby Grunwald 500 years before.87
Any narrative which stresses the Russian dimension in the First World War automatically invites protests about neglect of the French dimension. Surely, one hears, the Russo-German contest in the East must be discussed in conjunction with the centuries-old Franco-German saga in the West. This is true. Yet a contradistinction between the French and Russian factors is not entirely valid. Unlike in 1871, the French had forged a close military partnership with Russia, ensuring that in 1914 Germany faced a concerted challenge on two fronts. As seen from Berlin, the hostile double-headed Franco-Russian hydra was a monster which no one else had to face. What is more, the hydra’s Russian head was judged more dangerous than the French one. Schlieffen and his colleagues reckoned that France had to be dealt with first, because Russia, with far more territory and far more troops, could not be neutralized so readily.
Berlin, moreover, was still looking at the military landscape through Prussian spectacles. The Kaiser and his Junker-dominated. staff had good reason to worry about the proximity of the Russian frontline. At its nearest point, Russian troops were deployed within 60 miles of Königsberg, and in the border province of Grenzmark Posen, less than 200 miles from Berlin. The French frontier was much more distant. If the campaigns were to go badly, the French might retake Alsace and Lorraine, or invade the Rhineland. The Russians would capture the Empire’s capital.
For all these reasons, the outcome of the First World War was deeply bewildering. By late 1918, the German army had gained a complete victory on the Eastern Front, had eliminated its most dangerous enemy and had dictated the terms of peace. Its stalwart performance on the Western Front, against an array of powerful allies, had not faltered for more than four years; and it was brought to an end without experiencing anything that might have been described as a rout. Yet the German Empire collapsed. Revolution erupted in Berlin; the Kaiser was forced to abdicate; the Hohenzollerns were banished; the invincible ‘Iron Kingdom’, around which Germany’s imperial personality had been forged, was demolished; and the victorious Allies, representatives of the ‘Western civilization’ with which most Germans identified, chose to act vindictively and to punish Germany for all the war’s disasters and bloodshed. The resultant bewilderment opened the door to a variety of political hucksters and fanatics whose very existence was previously unknown.
Strategic thinking with strong nationalist and racial overtones was very much in fashion in those days, not only in Germany. Already before the war, strident publicists and learned professors from various countries had raised the so-called ‘Jewish Question’ or the ‘Thousand-Year Struggle between Teuton and Slav’; the success of Bolshevik revolutionaries, who made no secret of their international aspirations, greatly heightened existing tensions. As the Armistice silenced the guns on the Western Front, the prospects of a lasting peace in the East were receding fast. The Bolsheviks were promising to export their Revolution to the heart of ‘capitalist Europe’. If and when they decided to put their promises into practice, the eastern provinces of Germany would find themselves in the first line of attack. Western Europeans were breathing a sigh of relief, but the nations of Eastern Europe were bracing themselves for further conflict. As subsequent history proved, the stay of execution lasted for just thirty years. In late August 1914 the Cossacks of Russia’s General Rennenkampf had ridden up to the outer walls of Königsberg. Given the historical inclinations of Russian ‘imperial tourism’, there was every possibility that in one guise or another they would be back.
The abolition of the Kingdom of Prussia in November 1918 is often mistaken for the end of the Prussian story. In reality, it marked the end of Hohenzollern rule, but not of the Prussian state. Yet another variant on Prussian statehood, a Freistaat Preussen or ‘Free State of Prussia’ lived on, first as a self-governing component of the post-war ‘Weimar Republic’ and then, from 1933, of the Third Reich – though by then the self-government was only nominal.
Nonetheless, the outcome of the First World War left little more than an uneasy truce in many parts of Europe. The settlement of Versailles, bypassing the Bolsheviks, failed to address the problems of the East. The reborn Polish Republic, invaded by the Red Army in 1920, was forced to defend its independence unaided, interrupting Lenin’s revolutionary march on Berlin in the process.88 Both the Weimar Republic and Soviet Russia were treated as pariahs by the Western Powers. Millions of Europeans were left either fearful or resentful, and the possibility of a renewed conflagration was always present. Even though the Central Powers had won a comprehensive victory on the Eastern Front, the people of Prussia suffered the heaviest territ
orial losses and bore a disproportionate share of the opprobrium. It was no accident that the myth of the ‘stab in the back’* was launched by Hindenburg and General Ludendorff.
After the abolition of the Prusso-German monarchy, the Freistaat Preussen, though substantially reduced by cessions to Poland, remained the largest territory in Germany. Its government was dominated by Social Democrats. A single SPD politician, Otto Braun, served as Prussian prime minister from 1920 to 1932.89
Prussia’s brief era of democracy was overthrown by the arbitrary actions of Germany’s central government. In 1932 the German chancellor, von Papen, suspended Braun’s administration in the so-called Preussenschlag or ‘Prussian coup’, citing ‘electoral turbulence’. His dubious decision facilitated the introduction of one-party rule by the Nazis, who appointed Hermann Göring as the Prussian premier only one year later. Göring gloated over ‘the marriage of old Prussia with young Germany’.
Traditional Prussian society, still led by the landed Junker class, did not provide a natural hunting-ground for the Nazis. Prussia’s cities, including Berlin, leaned decidedly to the Left. Very few Nazi leaders were born in East Prussia. Even so, some Nazi ideas did resonate strongly. Protests against the ‘Diktat of Versailles’, for example, made more sense in Danzig or in Königsberg than in Hamburg or Munich. Claims about the German master race could also appeal to people who had long cultivated the ethos of hardy pioneers, and the concept of Lebensraum was associated exclusively with the East. The idea that Germany’s natural ‘living space’ was there for the taking did not seem particularly outlandish after the German army’s recent victory in those parts. In East Prussia, above all, still shaken by the Russian invasion of 1914, proposals for the eastward extension of German settlement could be seen as a necessary defensive measure.
Voting trends in Weimar Prussia followed no simple pattern. While the provincial Landtag had a socialist majority, the city of Königsberg itself was run by a right-wing nationalist, Carl Goerdeler (1884–1945), Bürgermeister from 1920 to 1930. In the two elections of 1932, the Nazis made significant advances, but failed to win an outright victory. In the last democratic contest in Königsberg, the Nazis received 62,888 votes from 173,154 cast (36.3 per cent); the left-wing vote of 75,564 was divided almost equally between socialists and Communists.90
Inter-war Prussia did not share a frontier with the Soviet Union, but many of Prussia’s discontents were shared by the Bolsheviks. Both sides hated the Versailles settlement, and despised the new, Western-backed national states. The Bolsheviks were free of Nazi-style racism, but they shared an appetite for mass killing by category and assumed that ideological conflict would lead to military conflict. They knew that their attempt in 1920 to export Communist Revolution with bayonets had failed miserably.91 So when Stalin launched his Five Year Plans, he famously predicted that, if the breakneck programme did not succeed within a decade, ‘we will be annihilated’. He was counting on war.92
The Second World War in Europe, therefore, must be conceived above all as a fight to the death between two totalitarian monsters. The Greater Reich and the Soviet Union were the largest combatant powers by far. Both aimed to recoup losses incurred since 1914. And their titanic, savage struggle on the Eastern Front accounted for perhaps three-quarters of the fighting and casualties.93 The future of East Prussia hung in the balance throughout. Each stage of the war, therefore, has to be defined by the changing relations between Germany and the Soviet Union. During the currency of the Nazi–Soviet Pact in 1939–41 East Prussia was protected by its location in the German sphere of influence. After the start of ‘Operation Barbarossa’ on 22 June 1941, when Hitler assaulted his erstwhile partner, it was left far behind the area of operations. Within a couple of years, when the tide changed, its prospects quickly grew precarious.
The outcome of the war was decided by the unexpected survival of the Red Army, and by the series of colossal, almost unimaginably expensive victories that began with Stalingrad and Kursk. From mid-1943 onwards, Stalin’s triumphant forces smashed their way westwards, until they won the shattering Battle for Berlin in April 1945 without even calling on Western assistance. The final layout of Europe on VE Day saw perhaps one-quarter of the Continent neutral, one-quarter under Western control, and one-half under Soviet control. Though the Third Reich was totally destroyed, the principal victor was not ‘Freedom, Justice and Democracy’. It was a second totalitarian regime, which had killed millions, which ran the world’s largest network of concentration camps, and which had triumphed by exacting unparalleled human sacrifices. This second evil monster would keep the free world busy for the next forty-five years. The Prussia of the Teutonic Knights, of Duke Albrecht and of Immanuel Kant, lay entirely at its mercy.
The sentence hanging over Prussia could not be executed by one blow. The first phase began in the late summer of 1944. When Soviet troops approached, the decisive move appeared imminent. A Red Army sortie into the frontier village of Nemmersdorf left a trail of atrocities behind it. But Stalin had given priority to the conquest of the Balkans, and his northern armies halted on the Nieman and the middle Vistula.
Adolf Hitler’s main military command post was located at the Wolfsschanze or ‘Wolf’s Lair’ near Rastenburg in East Prussia from June 1941 to November 1944. The unsuccessful bomb plot against him took place there on 20 July 1944, yet the headquarters was not relocated for a further four months. In that time, the central Soviet spearhead forces stayed encamped before Warsaw; three Soviet ‘fronts’ in Lithuania surrounded East Prussia’s northern border, while the Red Army’s attack columns were surging through Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. The Western Allies were still crawling up Italy, and pushing stolidly on through France. Their one contribution to the reduction of East Prussia occurred when the RAF twice raided Königsberg.
In the records of RAF Bomber Command, the Königsberg operation is justified by the target being ‘an important supply port for the Eastern Front’ and is described as ‘one of the most successful of the war’. For ‘successful’ read ‘devastating’. Two consecutive raids were necessary before the desired effect was achieved. On the night of 26/7 August, 74 Avro Lancasters of 5 Group flew in: 4 were lost, and little damage was inflicted. So on the night of 29/30 August, 189 Lancasters were sent, dropping 480 tons of incendiaries, and losing 15 of their number. Their controllers noted ‘significant fighter activity’. The fires burned for three days. The inner suburbs of Altstadt, Löbenicht and Kneiphof, which had no port facilities, were obliterated.94 In the local record, 25,000 people were killed.
The firestorm of August 1944 figures prominently in explanations of the disappearance of the famous Prussian treasure, the Bernsteinzimmer or ‘Amber Room’ presented to Peter the Great during the Great Northern War. Fifty-five amber panels decorated with gold leaf and crystal mirrors and weighing six tons adorned the Imperial Palace at Tsarskoye Selo near St Petersburg from 1716 to 1941. During the Siege of Leningrad, they were ‘reclaimed’ by German troops, reassembled in Königsberg, and put on public display in the Royal Castle. Since 1944, their whereabouts have been unknown.95
By January 1945 the Soviet conquest of East Prussia had been awaited for many months, and the Red Army rapidly overran the whole province except for Königsberg. The purpose of the operation, which began on 13 January, was to engage the large German Army Group Centre and to prevent it from assisting other German defence lines. Marshal Zhukov’s principal offensive, which set off from the vicinity of Warsaw, was pointed directly at Berlin; and Marshal Rokossovsky was tasked with ensuring that no German units from East Prussia could interfere. This objective was achieved, though progress was slow, and heroic efforts by German defenders managed to reopen the supply road from Königsberg to Pillau.
The most obvious, immediate consequence, however, was to sow panic among East Prussia’s civilian population, and to trigger the terrible Flucht aus dem Osten or ‘Flight from the East’.96 The winter was unusually harsh. Deep snow covered the ground. All the ri
vers and canals were frozen hard, and the Frisches Haff, the ‘Freshwater Lagoon’, had turned into a vast slab of solid ice. The Gauleiter of the province, Erich Koch, resisted the orderly evacuation of the population until it was too late, condemning disobedient civilians to be shot. So when he finally relented on 20 January, he started a stampede. Germans living north of Königsberg had no chance of escape. Those living further south had ten days before the roads to Elbing and Danzig were cut. Tens of thousands of people set off in carts, on bicycles, horse or foot, hoping to reach safety.
To begin with, the Königsbergers were only half-trapped. Once the railway to Allenstein was cut, the best way out was to cross the ice to Pillau. Hundreds and thousands attempted the crossing every day for several weeks. Many dropped from cold and exhaustion. Many were strafed by Soviet fighters, or fell into holes in the ice. But many struggled on to Pillau to wait for help.
Fortunately for them, the Kriegsmarine had prepared plans for a large-scale humanitarian rescue. Admiral Dönitz gave orders on 21 January for ‘Operation Hannibal’ to begin. A thousand merchant ships and naval vessels operated a non-stop service between Pillau, Danzig and Stettin, running the gauntlet of Soviet bombers and submarines. They suffered horrendous losses, including the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the greatest maritime disaster in world history, when 10,000 may have died.97 But they also saved very many lives.
The final battle for Königsberg – what the Russians now call the Shturm Kenigsberga, the ‘Storming of Königsberg’ – was mounted in the first week of April under General Chernyakovsky. The attackers faced four concentric defensive lines, twenty modernized forts, and five full divisions of the 3rd Panzer Army. Calls for surrender were ignored. Chernyakovsky moved to the assault, deploying four armies, massed artillery at a density of 250 guns per half-mile, and a fleet of warplanes. Shelling pulverized the outermost defences. Day 1 of the ground assault brought the attackers to the second line in the south. Day 2 was marked by fierce resistance and by Hitler’s repeated refusal of permission to capitulate. On Day 3, in better weather, the Soviet air force wreaked havoc in the city centre. Day 4 dawned with the defences hopelessly fragmented, and finished with the forbidden capitulation.98 An estimated 80 per cent of Prussia’s one-time capital lay in ruins. The surviving defenders were marched off, and the remaining civilians subjected to a reign of murder, rape and pillage. ‘The robbers’ lair of German imperialism’, Pravda announced in Moscow, ‘has been liquidated.’
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