Death in the Baltic

by Cathryn J Prince

  Born two years apart, the sisters were as close as twins. They had left their parents in Königsberg. A majestic and imperial city— a castle and cathedral lorded over the city—the Prussian kings had appointed it as the site of their coronations. The Russians now surrounded the historic city that lay on the edge of Germany, close to Russia, Poland, and Lithuania.27

  The sisters jostled their way past knapsacks carried by refugees to the gangplank. Inge Reuter tilted her head, the cold light bouncing off her honey-brown hair, and stared at the vessel. Its smokestack looked like a stake impaling the sky. “That is a nice ship to be torpedoed on. But it’s better to drown than fall into Russian hands,” Inge told Helga.

  “Those were her exact words. She had the vision like my mother,” Helga said, under a nimbus of white hair, her veined hands holding each other as if for comfort.28

  Then with nothing left to say or do, the girls boarded the Wilhelm Gustloff, without even knowing the ship’s name. They simply didn’t care. They just wanted to get away.

  The Reuter girls were just two among hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in Gotenhafen when the floodgates opened. They were just two among thousands of civilians who walked up the gangplank onto the deck of the Wilhelm Gustloff, putting their faith in the ship’s ability to get them to safety.

  Two

  HITLER’S HOSTAGES

  LIFE IN THE EASTERN TERRITORIES

  “WAR!” the radio blared. An accompanying choir trumpeted the words of the German national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles.”1 When the German forces invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, about 10 million German speakers, former subjects of the Hapsburg monarchy, lived in East Prussia, a German enclave with Poland and Russia for neighbors. Some had lived there for generations; others had been only recently relocated there. Horst Woit and his mother, Meta, lived in Elbing in East Prussia; Helga Reuter and her sister, Inge, lived in Königsberg; Irene and Ellen Tschinkur and their cousin Evi were in Gotenhafen. While the late 1930s were economically hard for the eastern parts of the Reich, they were largely untouched by the political upheavals that marked the Nazis’ rise to power and affected their countrymen in the western part of Germany.

  Many of these families lived in towns and cities that were ethnically and linguistically mixed. When in 1939 Germany annexed parts of Poland and incorporated them into the rest of East Prussia, the Nazi leaders were surprised to discover some ethnic Poles who spoke only German and some Germans who spoke only Polish.

  Just weeks before the invasion, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin had forged an uneasy truce. On August 23, 1939, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a pact that included a plan detailing how the two nations would dismember Poland. This pact, known officially as the Treaty of Non-Aggression, also directed the dislocation and expulsion of ethnic Germans from Russian lands. The Soviets were keen to extend their state west while the Germans were determined to extend their state east. Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin could virtually consume Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well as push Russia’s border 200 miles farther west. Hence, the Soviet Union incorporated the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and North Bukovina, and also recovered some territories that once belonged to the tsarist empire. The Baltic States had been Russian from the time of Peter the Great until World War One.

  Officially the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was supposed to prevent hostilities between the Germans and the Russians. In a secret protocol both parties agreed to “spheres of influence.” However, many civilians, like Helga Reuter and her family, had good reason to question the validity of the agreement. In late 1939 and early 1940 Helga’s uncle was serving in the German merchant marine. While stationed in Leningrad, Russia, he wrote home, warning his family in Königsberg of how the Soviets were arming themselves in spite of the treaty. “He said please do not believe the safety contract,” Reuter said. “He had seen the harbor full of war equipment. They were preparing for war.”2

  Reuter’s uncle was correct. Laurence Steinhardt, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, duly noted the “extensive secret mobilization” taking place in the Soviet Union in 1939. “Large numbers of recruits still in civilian clothes and reservists up to the present age of 50 are known to be departing from Moscow. Tanks and trucks believed to be conveying ammunition have been seen in the city. Horses rarely observed in Moscow together with a considerable quantity of fodder are in evidence. This extensive mobilization is being conducted with great secrecy.”3 Steinhardt correctly appraised the situation. The Soviets were prepared to occupy part of eastern Poland and were also bracing themselves against a future German invasion.

  German troops and mechanized units overran Poland on September 1, annexing the country in a few short weeks. Two days later, on September 3, England and France declared war on Germany. Neither nation, however, fully engaged the Third Reich until the Battle of France began in 1940. Poland’s Foreign Minister Jozef Beck said that “official circles in London and Paris state that British and French planes hesitate to bomb German railways, other communications, power plants and war industry centers because of potential effect on American public opinion.”4 Beck understood the American public did not want to enter the war. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to news of the invasion with a telegram appealing to Germany to refrain from bombing civilians. “I am therefore addressing this urgent appeal to every government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities, upon the understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all of their opponents.”5

  The Tschinkurs, originally from Riga, Latvia, were resettled in the “Home to the Reich” campaign. Thousands of ethnic Germans were moved west with whatever possessions they could carry in 1940 and 1941 after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed. To achieve this, Nazi negotiators presented their case to the respective governments of Latvia and Estonia. Regarding ethnic Germans living in other Soviet lands, such as in Russia or Ukraine, the Nazis negotiated with officials from the NKVD, the Soviet internal secret police. The German envoys accomplished the population swap in part by convincing ethnic Germans that they were moving to paradise. Instead, many of the newly returned immediately were assigned to one of about 1,500 holding camps. There the Nazi authorities assessed their hair and eye color and other traits, such as nose and head shape, to see who among the new arrivals most closely resembled the Aryan ideal. They wanted to weed out those resettlers they considered having genetically inferior foreign elements; namely Jews and those not of purely German origin.6 The German authorities made a ceremonial effort to welcome the Baltic Germans to their new home in East Prussia: “We greet our Baltic folk comrades who are now returning home into the Greater German Reich of Adolf Hitler.”7 Although the Germans looked at the Slavs as potential underlings, they still invested in the East; they viewed the land as ripe for colonization and settlement, the lebensraum, or living space, touted by Hitler as being Germany’s right.

  After the Tschinkurs arrived in East Prussia, they were first sent to Stettin to a dormitory style building called “Baltic Home.” From inside this institutional setting, authorities sorted out the Baltic people, parceling them off to different towns and cities, all of which now bore German names. The Tschinkurs would have been subjected to a certain amount of reeducation including acceptance of Nazi ideology and culture. Members of Hitler Youth often helped process the newly arrived Baltic Germans.8

  After several weeks the Tschinkurs were sent to Poznan, a city on the Warta River in what was formerly west central Poland. Herbert Christoph and Serafima soon decided to leave for Gotenhafen so they could be closer to the water. Back in Riga Herbert Christoph had belonged to a sailing club, and being near the water was a small comfort to the newly displaced family. Most of Irene and Ellen’s f
amily stayed in Poznan, including her aunt and beloved cousins Wilhelm and Evelyn, whose nickname was Evi. In Gotenhafen the Tschinkurs lived in a nice apartment building overlooking some shops and their father ran the bakery there. “We probably took over somebody’s home,” Irene Tschinkur admits.

  In spite of the upheaval, families like the Woits, Tschinkurs, and Reuters still had some years of relative peace remaining before the violence and fear of the mid-1940s arrived. East Prussian children had to join Hitler Youth and schoolteachers increasingly focused on imparting students with knowledge about the front and what it meant to be a good citizen of the Reich. People became increasingly wary about what they said in public and with whom they spoke. Gestapo agents seemed omnipresent. Still, most East Prussians escaped the direct effects of the Nazi regime for a bit longer than those who lived in Germany proper.

  “The strange thing is that East Prussia was divided by Poland after World War One. But until the Russians got there, we felt disconnected from Hitler and what was happening,” Helga Reuter said. Almost 70 years after the ship’s sinking, Helga recounts what it was like to come of age during the Nazi era. She recently moved from Arizona to live with her son, David Knickerbocker, in Las Vegas. The desert areas she has lived in bear no resemblance to the East Prussian city where she grew up.

  In picturesque, cosmopolitan, seaside Königsberg, Helga Reuter and her sisters, Inge and Ursula, attended a private school together with Jewish, Lutheran, and Calvinist children. Helga never paid much attention to her classmates’ religions until Germany’s Nazi Party imposed draconian laws on the city’s Jewish population. It meant reading Mein Kampf in school and hearing, repeatedly, “Comradeship,” a story by a Hitler Youth member named Hans Wolf. The story extolled the idea that a child in Nazi Germany could only thrive through sacrifice and loyalty to the Führer.9

  Helga remembers the English teacher who wore a dreadful brown tweed skirt who had to stop teaching them English because England was at war with Germany and opposed to Nazi values. She remembers time out from academics to track Germany’s conquests on a map pinned to the classroom wall, as well as endless rallies, parades, speeches, and rituals. And she recalls playmates who were there one day and gone the next.

  “One day, my friend said, ‘Please don’t come with me. I cannot visit you either.’ She was Jewish. This is what it was like to grow up in Hitler’s Germany,” Helga said, her cerulean eyes narrowing at the memory.10

  In 1939, as Helga Reuter struggled to adapt to her disappearing childhood, the Nazis slaughtered thousands of people living in central Poland. Mobile killing squads comprised of the German SS and Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) rounded up victims and drove them on foot or in trucks to secluded sites. There the victims were forced to strip before being shot. Corpses were burned in large pits.

  Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr., the American ambassador to Poland, sent news home of the civilian killings. Biddle supplied one of the earliest reports about Nazi atrocities. In his observations the Germans functioned “to terrorize the civilian population and to reduce the number of child-bearing Poles irrespective of category.”11

  West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Einsatzgruppen pounced on the populace. In Bydgoszcz, a village over the border, the German military killed an estimated 10,500 Poles in retaliation for anti-German riots. Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man, organized the murderous task force using members from the security police and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) intelligence service of the SS. Blond, tall, and with a narrow face, Heydrich had been appointed to the post in 1933. During one operation alone the Einsatzgruppen murdered 61,000 Poles.12

  East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Soviets also annexed territory and for the next several years murdered those they deemed a threat to their political ideals. The Soviets were similarly brutal throughout western Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. The Soviet government under Joseph Stalin implemented a strategy to send the affluent and intellectuals to Siberian gulags, where millions were subject to reeducation camps and forced labor in brutal conditions. In this way, the Soviet authorities hoped to rid the population of those who in their eyes undermined the Communist Party.

  Born in Lodz, Poland, Ruth Weintraub Kent was one of six children. Her father died before the onset of the war. Of her immediate family, she lost everyone but two brothers.

  “We were in the country when Hitler declared war on Poland. We wanted to come back to go to school . . . we were not able to get any transportation. There were no buses, no streetcars, and no trucks. Not even a horse and carriage. Everything was mobilized for the war effort,” Ruth Weintraub said of the immediate hours and days following the Nazi invasion. “When we came back from the country, a lot of soldiers were coming down our street. Although our streets were not very wide, it seemed like masses of soldiers were marching through our streets. And we could see tanks. It was a frightening experience.”13

  Nazi storm troopers swept through Polish cities arresting, assaulting, and executing anyone deemed an enemy of the Reich. The list included Polish citizens, communists, and Jews. Upon its invasion of Poland, the Germans arrested and imprisoned Polish men of fighting age first in Auschwitz and then in other concentration camps.

  After the Third Reich occupied the Polish provinces, it created various Reichsgaue, or administrative subdivisions of those territories. Regional provincial leaders called gauleiters headed each Reichsgau. The gauleiters helped supervise the removal of Polish citizens to make room for ethnic Germans arriving from the Baltic and other regions of the Reich.14 The Nazi Party imported people into Poland and East Prussia as colonists to augment the labor force.

  Thus began an intensive Germanization of the region. On October 7, 1939, Adolf Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler commissioner for the Consolidation of the German Race. The one-time chicken farmer assumed the job of eliminating those that the Third Reich deemed racially and politically inferior. Himmler had served as chief of the Munich police from 1933 until 1936 when he was appointed head of all the German police.15

  Extreme violence descended upon East Prussia. The violence was directed not only at Jews and Poles, but also set its sights on a mosaic of people from vastly different ethnic backgrounds and religious faiths. Lawyers, clergy, and teachers were deported and killed. Arrests and deportations came with little or no warning, most often at night. Families were often separated. Polish citizens left behind dear possessions—a wedding album, a grandmother’s teapot, a favorite doll. “I had the clothing I was wearing and nothing more. Hungry and cold, I sat down on the bench, it was very cold, and then came the grief and sadness that I had known in my life. I was nineteen years old then, and I didn’t know then the world of poverty that fell upon me,” wrote Stanislaw Jaskolski, an ethnic Polish civilian, about his arrest in East Prussia.16

  Germans had actually begun gathering information on Jews and Polish intelligentsia living in East Prussia before the war started. The Nazis scouted locations for a concentration camp long before the first shot hit Westerplatte, a peninsula near Gotenhafen on the Baltic Sea. They chose Stutthof, a small village just about 22 miles from the fairy tale–looking city of Danzig. Occupying wet, muddy land, the camp was along the Danzig-Elbing highway on the road to the Krynica Morska resort on the Baltic Sea. Prisoners built the camp, which originally operated as a civilian internment camp under the direction of the Danzig police chief. The first inmates arrived on September 2, 1939—150 Polish citizens were imprisoned in Konzentrationslager or KZ Stutthof concentration camp.

  The number of inmates in Stutthof swelled to 15,000 by September 15. In 1941 Stutthof became a holding center for political prisoners. By the time the Russians liberated the camp in 1944, prisoners from 26 European countries, in addition to the United States and Turkey, had passed through its barbed-wire gates.17

  Many of the prisoners in Stutthof worked at the munitions factories of Deutsche Auskustungswerke, or DAW, in Gotenhafen, Elbing, and other Baltic towns. The
Nazi concentration camps spawned subcamps at an exponential rate. Stutthof had 150 subcamps along the Baltic coast near towns and villages, including Elbing, Gotenhafen, Thorn, and Königsberg. As of 1944, camps occupied nearly every region of the Third Reich, though some camps held only 10 prisoners. “When the train stopped and we were told to get out and it was already light, and you could see the sign where in large letters was written Stutthof,” recalled Stutthof survivor Stanislaw Jaskolski. “On all sides stood SS men dressed in black military uniforms, with skull and crossbones on their caps and Ukrainians who served Hitler.”18

  Like Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau, the East Prussian camp of Stutthof became an extermination center where Nazis gassed, shot, and worked prisoners to death. Camp doctors administered lethal injections to more than 60,000 prisoners. The camp doctor reserved the right of selection for the gas chamber. It was in Stutthof that Rudolf Spanner experimented with various methods to render human fat into soap, leather, and book covers. Inside the soap factory “they hauled the bodies, they tore off the skin for another different use and the body was cooked in a huge kettle,” wrote Jaskolski.19 Every day special commandos pushed carts brimming with corpses to the camp’s crematorium; the corpses burned day and night.20 Stutthof resembled an open graveyard where the only difference between the living and the dead was that the living occasionally moved.21

  After more than a month in Auschwitz, Ruth Weintraub, the girl from Lodz, was transported to Stutthof. Inmates like Ruth and Stanislaw were used as forced labor in brickyards and private enterprises such as the Focke-Wulf airplane factory.22 They were just a few miles from where the Woits, Reuters, and Tschinkurs lived.

  In Königsberg the Reuter furniture factory and showroom shared the block with another business. The Nazis closed the Jewish-owned business and nailed a large sign above the shop’s windows that read Feinde, or Enemy.