After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  Not all Germany’s gems had been homes to small courts. There was Hildesheim, where the wooden houses burned for a fortnight before the flames could be extinguished, and where the two largest Carolingian churches went up in smoke. Hamburg had been the testing ground for Britain’s and America’s weapons of mass destruction in 1943: in two days of bombing, 50,000 had died. The ancient centre of Frankfurt-am-Main was gone; a few façades on the latter’s Römerberg recalled the glories of what had been before. Little remained of the centres of the former Roman cities of Cologne and Trier, or of Charlemagne’s capital, Aachen, where the baptistery lay open to the skies; the Bavarian cities of Augsburg and Regensburg had been pulverised. Leipzig, the capital of the German book trade, was badly bruised; Breslau smouldered long after the end of the war as the Russians lit fires in the ruins. The medieval cores of Stettin and Danzig had been levelled by Soviet artillery. The list is endless.

  The inhabitants of urban Germany were dead or scattered. The survivors generally headed west, hoping to reach the Western Allies who - they believed - would treat them more fairly than the Red Army. Only a few brave souls ventured east. One of these was Ursula von Kardorff, who undertook a mission to Berlin in September 1945 and listed the shattered cities as she went: ‘Darmstadt, Mannheim, Hanau - a landscape of craters provoking extreme sadness. Add to this the prison camps surrounded by barbed wire and their watchtowers, the ruins, the detonated bridges and autobahn viaducts. Scorched earth, just as Hitler dreamed up for his people.’1

  East Prussia

  East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army, and to some extent the worst treated. The first incursion, at Nemmersdorf on 21 October 1944, was to be a foretaste. In the course of a single night the Red Army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified. Gauleiter Koch refused to allow the population to flee. Hitler wanted East Prussia to prove the resilience of the German people. That autumn the East Prussians watched the departure of the birds: ‘Yes, you are now flying away! And us? What is to become of us and our land?’2

  Then in January 1945 the Soviet offensive began. The Russians broke through the German lines on the 17th. Insterburg was the first to fall, followed by Tilsit and Gumbinnen. Koch, who had been named commissar for the defence of the Reich, finally gave permission for the civilian population to leave. Almost simultaneously, however, the Red Army reached Elbing on the Baltic, thereby cutting East Prussia off from the Reich. The East Prussians resorted to every conceivable means of leaving the beleaguered territory and reaching what was believed to be the safety of the west bank of the Vistula. Trains, however, ran head on into the Russian advance and were stopped in their tracks. Passengers froze in the icy temperatures, and the dead were thrown from the windows.3

  Ships fared no better. They were sunk as they left the harbour of Pillau outside Königsberg. Hundreds of thousands of refugees trekked across the ice that covered the inland seas of the Frisches and Kurisches Haff in heavily laden carts and proceeded towards Danzig. The Russians warned them they would fire at the ice from their warships on 15 February. The shells hit men and horses. Where the ice was smashed, the trekkers put up temporary bridges and persevered. The night was pitch black. All they could hear was ‘Shooting, screaming and screeching’. When dawn broke they realised the full horror: body upon body, man and horse; and every now and then the chassis of a cart sticking out of the ice. Those who succeeded in making it to the thin strip of land that borders Haff and Nehrung had a choice of heading north to the ships at Pillau or south-west towards Danzig.4

  One family that left an account of the crossing headed south to Stutthof, the home of the infamous concentration camp to the east of Danzig. The road to Danzig was barred; one of the horses went into labour; and the Russians continued the bombardment of the refugees from the sea. The family was lucky enough to reach Hela Point. From there they were shipped to Jutland. They did not see Germany again until they were repatriated from Denmark in November 1948.5 The noose tightened around Königsberg on 26 January 1945. Very soon the road to the sea and Pillau was cut off. The city held out until 9 April. The first the surgeon Hans Lehndorff knew of the fall of Königsberg was when Russians soldiers broke into his hospital and robbed his patients of their watches, beating up anyone who stood in their way. Fountain pens were the next craving. The sick and injured were tipped out of their beds, bandages ripped from their wounds, and papers burned to create more light to steal by. All the hospital’s provision in food was consumed or squandered in a matter of hours.6 One of the attackers, ‘a really young fellow, suddenly burst into tears because he had yet to find a watch. He struck three fingers in the air. He was going to shoot three people if he did not get one at once.’ They found him a watch.7

  General Laschw capitulated the next day and swarms of soldiers attacked the population as they ventured out of the warrens they had inhabited during the long siege. They were beaten, robbed, stripped and, if female, raped. The women’s screams could be heard everywhere: ‘Schieß doch!’ they shouted. ‘Go on, shoot!’ The sisters in the hospital were raped by ‘blood-crazed children’, sixteen years old at the most. The pious Lehndorff could feel the women’s souls dying. ‘Is not every word an accusation against me? Is there no opportunity to throw oneself between them and through it to find an honourable death?’8 Some of the women were laughing hysterically. One of the conquerors was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He wote of the rapes in a poem called ‘Prussian Nights’:The little daughter’s on the mattress,

  Dead. How many have been on it

  A platoon, a company perhaps?

  A girl’s been turned into a woman.

  A woman turned into a corpse.9

  Bunkers and shelters were simply torched with flame-throwers. A very large number of Königsberger took their own lives to escape the indignity of Soviet revenge. That night the surgeon looked out into the hospital courtyard to see it filled with horses and caravans. It could have been deepest Asia.10

  Lehndorff was touched by the help he had from the French forced labourers. They too were robbed by the Red Army. ‘Adieu, docteur!’ one of them cried out as Lehndorff successfully ran away from a Russian soldier with a submachine gun who was angry that the surgeon had pushed him out of the way, making him fall on his back. Lehndorff removed his white coat, and the soldier did not recognise him again. Episodes of this sort did not make the business of treating the sick and wounded any easier. The instruments were pilfered off the operating table. One glimmer of light came when they were visited by a Russian major who wanted a wart removed. After the hospital staff cut it out, he gave them temporary protection.11

  Worse was to come when the Russians found alcohol. On 11 April they located the Menthal distillery. They now set fire to the undamaged parts of the city. The bad mood of the Red Army was made more acute by syphilis and gonorrhoea. The soldiers ran back to the hospitals and demanded treatment at gunpoint. In their wilder orgies, however, they had smashed the dispensary to smithereens. Even Lehndorff could not resist a moment of Schadenfreude.12 It did not last long. His soulmate - designated simply by the name ‘Doktora’ - was dragged from the operating table and raped. Lehndorff had not been there at the time, and at first he did not notice the change in her. She stood at the table, binding wounds in the same way: ‘but these eyes! A barb stuck into the remains of my soul.’ A little while later she came to him in her torn tracksuit. She asked for her Bible. She had put pills aside for when she needed them. The horror had yet to abate, and she fought off three more attacks. Finally when she burst into tears Lehndorff was relieved: ‘I am happy that she has finally given in.’13

  The city was burning. Once the fun was over the remaining citizens were assembled for forced marches to camps. Anyone who was too old or too ill was shot there and then, either in their beds or in the gutters. On 12 April Lehndorff was one of those rounded up and marched out of the city. As he walked out, the
Russians cheered, shouting, ‘Gitlair Kapoot!’ (Hitler’s had it!). He marched for twenty-five kilometres. With the help of Polish auxiliaries the women were dragged away from the column with cries of ‘Davai, suda!’ (Come, woman!). Before he left the hospital Lehndorff had found a female patient with a head wound who had been raped countless times without ever being aware of it.14

  They were marched to camps, some of which were in Königsberg itself, like the one in the garage of the Rothenstein Barracks. On the promise of better treatment, some Germans acted as kapos - prisoners who had wormed their way into positions of trust - dealing out blows for their Soviet masters. A number of these were allegedly communists, who believed their day had come.15 Had they expected to become masters of the city now that the Nazis had been deposed, they were deluding themselves. Königsberg had been awarded to the Soviet Union and it was now administered as a Soviet city. The German population would be at best deported, at worst exterminated. The remaining buildings that had escaped the British raid in August 1944, or which had not been filled with Soviet political bureaux - like the Kommandatura, or military command, in the Ziethenstrasse and the old Gestapo Headquarters - were rased to the ground. A Soviet city would be built on the site of the old capital of the Teutonic Knights.

  The Russians were expecting to find the Amber Room from Tsarskoe Selo in the shattered Royal Schloss. The invading Germans had packaged it up and sent it back to a secret location in Germany.x Later it was put on display in the Schloss, where Marianne Günther visited it on 15 March 1943. The Russians appear to have accidentally incinerated the room themselves in their zeal to put the city to the torch; they then accused the Germans of hiding it to cover up its wanton destruction by their own men.16

  It is estimated that there were as many as 110,000 Germans left in Königsberg on 9 April. When the Soviets conducted a head count in June, 73,000 remained. Graf Plettenberg maintained that the Russians had actually tied Hitler Youths to horses and torn them limb from limb, but in the absence of any other reports of this taking place in Königsberg, it has to be discounted.17 Nonetheless, as one Königsberger maintained, ‘a man was worth less than the watch he wore’.18

  Valiant efforts were made to preserve life against all odds. Professor Wilhelm Starlinger ran a hospital for Germans in the Ziegelstrasse until he was deported to Siberia. It handled 13,200 patients until it was closed in 1947. Of these around 15 per cent died, chiefly of typhus and malaria. Others were treated at the Barmherzigkeit, or Sisters of Mercy, a bombed-out building administered by Professor Arthur Böttner. He was assisted by Lehndorff and the hygienist Hans Schubert. Both left records of their experiences in Königsberg. Lehndorff ’s are possibly the most moving account of human suffering written anywhere and at any time.

  Those who lived in the villages of East Prussia fared no better than the townsfolk. A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the morning. One man was shot and fed to the pigs.19 Another woman tried to take the last train from Mohringen, but it was derailed and the passengers proceeded on foot, only to run into the Russians. She describes these soldiers breaking into a farmhouse and finding an Iron Cross, Second Class. The owner of the decoration and his wife were taken out and shot in the back of the head. The narrator herself was raped around twenty times the night she was captured, but there was worse in store. She was carried off by two officers and seven men, whom she suspected were deserters, or temporarily estranged from their unit. They lodged her and eight other females, including a fourteen-year-old girl, in a house in the forest, where they raped them for a week. Their ordeal came to an end only when the GPU, the secret police, found the house. The woman was then taken to Insterburg and shipped beyond Stalingrad to the north-eastern Urals. She was in a carriage with fifty women for three weeks. During that time she had only two hot meals. The guards gave them salted herrings. They were so thirsty that they licked the condensation off the window panes. Five of the women had died by the time they reached their destination. They were suffering from typhus, dysentery and facial erysipelas. In August 1945 she was sent back to Germany.20

  Christel Beckmann reached Mecklenburg, whence she sent the teacher Marianne Günther news of the tiny village of Gertlauken at the end of 1945:Hildegard Schustereit was dragged off with the other girls and died in the Urals. In the village practically all the old people are dead. My cousin Ingrid Iwahn is also dead, so are Aunt and Uncle Matschull, my classmate Lotte Jakobeit and her mother, Lies Wallat and Eva Gronwald. Siegfried Schwarm has also died, his mother buried him in the gutter. Herr von Kohs was killed, Frau von Kohs came back to the village and died of typhus. Their children have been shared out: little Franka has gone to Frau Kather, one of the boys is with Frau Schwarm, the other with Frau Fröse. My dear cousin Herta was frequently raped, the other women too. The Russians behaved badly in Mecklenburg, but it was nothing to what they did at home. The farms lie dormant. The land is overgrown with thistles and thorns. They all have to work in Deimehöh, Gertrud Beckmann and my cousin Herta too. As regards animals they have only dogs, cats, mice and rats; there is not a cow, a pig or a hen. They have all lost their things: the last bed, clothing, shoes, everything; they have just the rags on their bodies.21

  Pomerania

  The war had ended much earlier for the Krockows at Glowitz in eastern Pomerania. The Russians came in March, announcing their arrival by setting fire to the manor house. At the time no one could understand why they should destroy a useful building. They attributed the Russian wrath to a portrait of an ancestor, resplendent in his uniform as a colonel of the hussars, that had made the invaders think of Hermann Göring. It was more likely, however, that the manor excited a class-hatred among the Russians and accounted for their cheering from the elegant parterres as this symbol of hated Junkertum went up in flames. The Junkers fared no better on the whole. Even an implacable opponent of the Nazis, like Eberhard von Braunschweig, was hauled out with his family and shot.22

  The refugees and the Russians had arrived with plagues of disease, venereal and other (dysentery, typhoid and spotted fever). Not even the animals were spared: the cows caught foot and mouth disease, the pigs erysipelas and the horses equinia. Not that it mattered much. The Russian arrival had been the cue for hecatombs in every farmyard. The beasts were butchered and salted away. No one knew when food would be available again. The farms and houses were stripped of everything. There was even an order issued that all musical instruments be delivered to the railway stations. There they lay, braving the elements, until children began to take them back, anything that was still workable.

  To protect themselves against the Russians the women covered themselves with ashes to make themselves look old, hobbled around on crutches or painted on red spots to feign disease. In a village near Greifenberg, in the western part of East Pomerania, the squire’s wife Käthe von Normann took the precaution of removing her false front tooth to make herself look older, and dressed herself in peasant costume. The other women adopted the same attire. It rarely worked - the Russians were none too choosy anyhow, and the victims ranged in age from tiny children to great-grandmothers. Others kept their children by them at all times. Libussa von Krockow had recently given birth, and the baby at her breast proved a disincentive to Russian attacks. The Russians were often very taken with the German children, hugging and kissing them and giving them things to eat.

  Käthe von Normann saw her first Russians on 5 March. An officer asked for her gold watch, telling her that his own had been destroyed when his hand was wounded. Frau von Normann tried to ascertain whether this was true or not, but he hid his hand. The next thing he needed was a race-horse. Her horse was led out and she began to cry. ‘Why woman cry?’ the officer asked in fractured German. ‘About an animal, it is war, and about people.’ A short while later the horse returned by itself, having thrown its Russian rider.23

  The next visitors were a couple of grimy soldiers demandin
g shoes. Philipp von Normann was obliged to hand over his own. When they noticed his wife one of the men uttered the terrible words, ‘Frau, komm!’ Käthe von Normann did not know what he wanted and ran behind her husband, sobbing. The man shouted to her again to come, but his companion began to yell at him, and both left. Herr von Normann had to explain to his wife what was at stake: ‘It might happen now that I will have to protect you, and then I shall be shot.’ They assembled the family in one room and prepared for the siege.24

  The Russians moved into the house, together with an interpreter, who counselled them to lock themselves in at night. That night they were helpless to prevent the Russians from stealing the silver, making off with it over the sleeping children. Next they found the schnapps. Frau von Normann’s mother was obliged to try each bottle first, lest it be poisoned. She replied with a few lines of broken Polish that had no effect on the Russians. They drank three of the four bottles, then fell asleep, and the Normanns were relieved to hear their snores. Käthe’s mother had indeed prepared poison, but for them. Philipp von Normann refused to countenance suicide: ‘It is still a sin, and even if we can justify it for ourselves, the three children have a right to live. We cannot justify it to God.’25 Dawn was an age coming. While Herr von Normann went out into the farmyard, his wife went to the kitchen where she found Russian women soldiers with unruly hair, washing themselves. The boarders had run through a stock of some 3,000 eggs that had been destined for the military hospital; the lavatories were a sight to behold.

  The Russians were becoming ever bolder in their demands. Philipp lost his watch, his wedding ring and his signet ring. Then he was interrogated. Although he had not been a member of the Party (the Polish estate workers confirmed this), his military ID was enough to condemn him. He was taken away. He hugged his wife and children: ‘God protect you!’ He died of dysentery in a Russian camp in Schwiebus in May.26