Two years before the war, in 1937, the German authorities had ordered the Reuters to relinquish their furniture factory to the Reich. The German authorities turned it into a uniform factory and the Reuters had to knock to be let into their building. While Helga doesn’t know for certain, it’s possible that Polish, Russian, and French prisoners, incarcerated in one of KZ Stutthof’s 150 subcamps, worked in the Reuter factory.23
Though East Prussian civilians were far away from Berlin, they shared in certain sacrifices from the start, namely food rationing and the conscription of men into the Nazi forces.
“Fortunately, we grew our own food, chicken and rabbit. So we had no problem with food shortages,” Helga said.24 Her father, Kurt, would try to feed the prisoners surreptitiously. Every day two soups simmered on the stove, and Kurt snuck chicken and rabbit into the soup for the workers. They were fortunate to have some meat, because as the war progressed butter, sausage— any kind of meat—became scarcer and scarcer, Helga recalled.
“The Germans found out and called him to the police station. He was called there once or twice a month. Each time my mother wondered if he would come home. The police said he was too friendly with the POWs.”
The Reuters continued to resist in small ways. Helga’s father often referred to Adolf Hitler as a German communist. Every Sunday the Reuters visited with their neighbors for the chance to trade news and sip hot cups of ersatz coffee. Helga remembers her parents suspected that their cook tried to curry favor with the German authorities by informing on them. The Reuters became less carefree in their conversations, but they continued to tune into a Hungarian radio station for information. This was dangerous; listening to outside news warranted the death penalty. The Reich newspapers and magazines reported news of the front only when that news portrayed Nazi Germany in a positive light. Reports extolled the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) and the Volkssturm (Home Guard), but the broadcasts never mentioned the Third Reich’s retreats and surrenders.25
As the war progressed, Berlin’s influence on East Prussian life intensified. By 1939 an estimated 82 percent, or 7.3 million, of German children aged ten and older belonged to Hitler Youth.26 Helga Reuter was one of those children.
Helga remembers the day her notification to join Hitler Youth arrived in the family’s letterbox at their house on General Litzman Street. Her parents were hesitant but they felt compelled to enroll her.
“At first it was lovely. We made toys for Christmas; we went on picnics,” Helga said. “It was fun. But suddenly it turned into drilling. I did not like it.” Soon Helga feigned sickness on meeting days, wanting to avoid the group’s ever-escalating militarism. She didn’t want to train to join the military. She didn’t want to attend the formal meetings in the required starched white shirt, navy skirt, and black neckerchief. She bristled at joining the straight-marching lines of boys and girls. Her father, however tempted he was to disobey the rules, worried about appearing to the neighbors as if he were snubbing the Nazi Party. Kurt Reuter paid the girls’ dues and told his daughters Helga and Inge to attend meetings. It was too dangerous to let them risk being branded as outsiders.
Helga said the group’s teachings regarding Jewish children bothered her. Growing up in Königsberg with its reputation for tolerance, Helga had never thought much about religious or ethnic differences. The city had a relatively small Jewish population; a little more than 3,000 Jews called it home when the Nazis assumed power in 1933. The Reuters worked with, associated with, and studied with Jewish people. As the war continued, Helga and her family knew it was dangerous to talk with Jews, even those who had been friends and colleagues. All around the streets were being emptied. “In my family Jewish was a religion, nothing more. My father’s doctor was Jewish. Once my father saw his doctor cleaning the streets and asked him what he was doing. ‘Please go away and don’t talk to me. Go, go,’ the doctor said. That is when our eyes really opened up. My sister’s friends suddenly weren’t coming around. They were just picked up.” Police reveled in publicly humiliating Jews and it was forbidden for non-Jews to associate with Jews.27
Soon after that incident with his physician, Helga Reuter said her father started warning his three girls every day about the seemingly omniscient Gestapo. Each morning Kurt Reuter told his daughters to pay attention, whether they were riding the streetcar, sitting in school, or walking down one of Königsberg’s sidewalks. Criticizing the government, talking with Jews or others, often meant arrest. He worried the Gestapo might arrest the sisters, or him and his wife, if they spied them in friendly conversation with fellow countrymen now considered subhuman enemies of the state. Kurt Reuter was right to fear his neighbors. Many denunciations came from people harboring the slightest jealousy or wanting to be seen in favorable light.
Irene and Ellen Tschinkur slowly adjusted to life in Gotenhafen, a large, bustling naval port on the Bay of Danzig. When they lived in Latvia their father belonged to a sailing club and they naturally gravitated to the port town, and the family often lingered at the waterfront, looking at the sea. In Gotenhafen, the harbor, once a place of recreation, was now overtaken by the military. Although the two sisters said they hardly noticed the naval ships and German sailors when they walked by the waterfront, they remember that a feeling of dread lingered: The Third Reich mystified and scared them.28
Just outside of town, their first apartment in Gotenhafen was “situated near a hill where Ellen and I would go and pick flowers and where we saw soldiers training German shepherds in a clearing,” Irene said. “One day Ellen and I, we stumbled on a meadow. There were soldiers there, training German shepherds. I felt we shouldn’t be there. We quickly went away.”
The close encounter with the German shepherds unnerved Irene. She took Ellen’s hand and quickly ran down the hill, clutching freshly picked flowers between their fingers.
Once Irene and Ellen and their parents settled in Gotenhafen, they faced a new reality. Because they were volksdeutsch, they were being schooled in what was considered the proper ways of the Reich. On one of Irene’s first days of school the teacher asked her to recite a poem. Irene stood before her new classmates and nervously performed a little ditty about a bunny. As soon as she finished the teacher barked at Irene. He motioned for her to stand in front of his desk, hands turned up. The teacher caned her palms.
“I had said the poem in Russian. Only German was allowed from this point,” Irene said.
On another afternoon in school, teachers led Irene and her classmates out of the building to a sidewalk on one of the city’s main streets. The teachers pressed small, stiff Nazi flags into their hands and told the children to wave and smile at the soldiers and officials marching in lockstep down the street. “There was a beautiful car, an open landeau. A man in a brownish or greenish uniform stood up in it. It was Hitler. He went by in his beautiful car. I couldn’t have cared less,” Irene recounts.
But the neighbors cared who waved, who attended marches, and whether children joined Hitler Youth, and there was always the danger of being snitched on for not attending. Upon turning ten years old Irene was supposed to join the Hitler Youth. Her father Herbert Christoph refused to send her, not caring to hear Irene learn to say “Heil Hitler” or sing national hymns or perfect a stiff-armed salute. The Tschinkurs were also not especially political. However, the next year, when Irene turned 11, “an SS man came to our apartment door and asked why I was not in the youth group. Dad had no excuse—so I went and had a good time. Dad had no good reason to give. It was August 1944,” Irene said. Thus, Irene joined what would eventually be an organization to which more than 60 percent of children aged 10 to 18 belonged.29
Busy with school, piano lessons, and ballet, Irene doesn’t remember having to learn Nazi songs in the first year of Hitler Youth, only what she called “just pretty outdoor songs.” She remembers spending a lot of time outdoors, doing calisthenics on the beach and throwing a medicine ball. Sometimes her group went raspberry leaf picking for tea. Other afternoons they
did crafts; they knitted squares of colored wool and pieced them together for lap blankets for sick people. Irene said they learned how to make little farm animals, sheds, and barns out of wood. They painted the little toys and gave them as Christmas gifts for poor children. “All that to me was fun. What would happen later on I wouldn’t know. I think as the girls and boys got older, there must have been more indoctrination of something sinister perhaps. I’m glad I didn’t go there,” Irene said, adding that her father’s discomfort with the organization never lessened. He knew that as the children grew older, what they learned and did in the organization changed. It was that part of the Hitler Youth he didn’t want his daughters to participate in.
The sinister part of Hitler Youth didn’t surface until children reached the age of 14. Children in the older groups were exposed to gleichschaltung, or “bringing into line.” This stage of Hitler Youth injected teenagers with Nazi social and political thought in order to get them to conform to Nazi ideology. Though neither Irene nor any of the children in the Jungvolk might have realized it, the lyrics to those pretty songs often contained Nazi propaganda. Yet, most children at that age didn’t understand the deeper meaning to the songs. Rather, they enjoyed the infectious rhymes and melodies.
Irene only stayed in Bund Deutscher Mädel, BDM, or League of German Girls, for five months before she and her family fled the oncoming Soviet army.
The intense Germanization was designed to assimilate children like Irene and Ellen to life inside Nazi Germany as quickly as possible. German was the official language now; the use of Latvian, Russian, or Polish in public was clearly forbidden. No longer were they to read books, see films, or visit exhibitions that contained anything the Nazi regime might consider even remotely anti-German. The German authorities were determined to smother and suppress every ounce of their old life beneath a parade of racial and political doctrine.
The port of Gotenhafen filled with Kriegsmarine and U-boat sailors training on the Wilhelm Gustloff. Though they heard Adolf Hitler’s fevered radio broadcasts and reports of Stutthof and its nearby subcamps, Irene and Ellen’s parents spoke little of the war in front of their children.
Horst Woit, a grammar school student in Elbing, East Prussia when the war started, remembers buildings draped in Nazi banners and flags hanging from lampposts. Sitting on a sofa in the basement of his lakeside home in Canada, nearly 70 years later, Horst said he remembers hearing Hitler’s speeches on the radio. Yet, it was more background noise than anything else for the young boy. Aside from the fanfare and pomp of marching soldiers and older children dressed in the crisp khaki of a Hitler Youth uniform, the war and Adolf Hitler seemed remote for a young boy more concerned with making friends and eating sticky marmalade sandwiches. Horst’s mother didn’t talk about the war. His father, long gone to the front, never wrote home.
Eva Dorn hated Hitler Youth. She liked the required skirt and blouse all the girls wore because they were the first new clothes she’d had in years. However, she quickly grew to hate what the skirt and blouse represented.30
“I was ten years old when I decided not to be a Nazi,” Eva said, a feisty smile playing across her face at the decades-old memory.
One weekend in 1936 Eva’s Hitler Youth group went camping and hiking near the Baltic Sea. The girls were to spend the night in the tower section of a youth hostel. Each girl received a mat and a blanket. The next morning Eva awoke before the other girls. She asked her group leader permission to go downstairs to the bathroom. The older girl forbade Eva, telling her that she couldn’t go until the entire group was ready. “I had to go, so I went in the corner. Can you imagine? I was humiliated. I knew then I couldn’t be a part of any group that wouldn’t let me take care of myself,” Eva said.
The next incident came three years later during her group’s weekly Tuesday meeting. Eva, then 13, was asked to lead the meeting since their regular leader was sick. Eva looked out the classroom window and saw a carousel in the marketplace. The sun shone. “I told the group, ‘Why should we sit here? It’s so beautiful outside. Let’s go to the fair.’ We did and had fun,” she said. The next afternoon the group’s leaders summoned the teenager. They threw Eva out of the Hitler Youth and told her she would be banned from ever joining the Nazi Party and would never amount to anything. “I was so happy, I couldn’t care less,” Eva Dorn said.
Eva’s views of Hitler differed vastly from her brothers’. Her two half-brothers had joined the German army and they died on the Eastern Front. Her full brother was a believer; he joined the SS. One afternoon when her parents were still together, the doorbell of their apartment rang. “It was the black shirt being delivered. My mother was furious. Only then did I realize she was against the Nazis,” Eva said, avoiding further discussion about her brother and his wartime activities.
In 1938 the Jews of Haale (Saale) were forced to wear yellow stars to identify them. Eva remembers an incident when she was riding the streetcar to school. At one stop, a Jewish couple got on. “If there was one thing my mother taught me it was manners. So I said to the couple, ‘Please sit down.’ They said, ‘We are not allowed to.’” When Eva returned to her seat the other passengers berated her. “‘Don’t you see that they are Jews?’” Eva stared out the window. Jews had started to leave Haale. Many of them had worked in the theater with her parents. One farewell stood out; before a musician from their theater group departed for Palestine, he gave Eva an orange, a rare treat during the war.
On June 22, 1941, Germany abrogated the non-aggression pact and invaded Russia. “Stalin must be regarded as a cold-blooded blackmailer; he would, if expedient, repudiate any written treaty at any time. Britain’s aim for some time to come will be to set Russian strength in motion against us,” Hitler told his commanders-in-chief.31
Adolf Hitler, the house-painter-turned-tyrant, declared his intent to turn the Soviet Union into a wasteland. Given the code name Operation Barbarossa, German soldiers marching toward Moscow had carte blanche to use violence against Russian civilians. “The Russians must perish that we may live.”32 As in Poland, the Nazi Party policy included subjugation through dehumanization. It encouraged famine, torture, and execution. A song at the time set this idea to music:
The ancient brittle bones of the world tremble.
Before the Red war.
We have broken its slavery,
For us it was a mighty victory.
We will march on,
Even if everything sinks into dust,
Because today Germany belongs to us
And tomorrow the whole world.33
The command allowed German soldiers to shoot any civilians seeming to resist, without precisely defining what they meant by resistance. They shot men with cropped hair, deciding anyone with a crew cut was a Soviet soldier. They shot Asiatic Soviets and summarily executed female soldiers, reasoning that armed women mocked German notions of military propriety.34 Soldiers snapped photos of their grisly work.
Three weeks after the invasion, 20 million Soviet citizens lived under German rule and thousands of Soviet soldiers lay in mass graves.
On June 22, 1944, three years after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Russian army launched Operation Bagration, named for Prince Peter Bagration, a Russian hero of 1812. The Soviets pushed forward with overwhelming force; they gave no quarter. The Red Army directed its first attacks against the key German strong points of Vitebsk, Mogilev, Osha, and Bobruisk. Stalin and his military commanders warned soldiers that their counterattack would be grueling, particularly in East Prussia. Stalin told his commanders the Germans would fight for East Prussia to the end. “We could get bogged down there,” Stalin said.35
The Red Army marched toward Berlin with revenge on their minds. Soviets called the Germans “fascist monsters” who destroyed their cities and homes. Soviet troops, from lowly privates to higher-ranking officers, thought the worst Germans hailed from East Prussia.
Many Soviet soldiers knew people who had suffered under German occupa
tion. They were quick to visit violence on German civilians. Reprisals took all forms, particularly physical. The famous chronicler of Soviet gulags, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who served as a captain in the Russian army during the war, later wrote that every soldier knew German girls were fair game to be raped and shot.36 His long poem “Prussian Nights” contains this section “Zweiundzwanzig Horingstrasse” (“Twenty Two Horingstrasse”):
It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled.
A moaning, by the walls half muffled: the
mother’s wounded, still alive.
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.
It all comes down to simple phrases:
Do not forget! Do not forgive! Blood for
blood! A tooth for a tooth!
The mother begs, “Kill me, Soldier!”37
Anti-German propaganda incited the Red Army. One leaflet distributed to Russian soldiers read: “Kill. Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the living nor the yet unborn. Follow the words of Comrade Stalin and crush forever the fascist beast in its den. Break the racial pride of the German woman. Take her as your legitimate booty.”38 Some German women chose suicide.
Russian soldiers seized German men and women for forced labor in Siberia. As they pressed forward, the soldiers grabbed weapons, ammunition, food, fuel, livestock, and boots left by retreating Germans. The Soviet troops plundered so that they could send provisions home. They were allowed to send two packages a month, each weighing up to 18 pounds. Officers could send twice as much.
To the Russian invaders, the German’s wartime standard of living, particularly in the eastern territories, seemed frivolously luxurious. The cultivated land and neat houses seemed to look at Soviet soldiers with reproach. Raging, the Red Army burnt to a crisp entire towns, such as Stolp, Zoppot, and Insterburg. Throughout East Prussia, from Königsberg to Elbing, the people were terrified.
Death in the Baltic Page 4