Death in the Baltic

by Cathryn J Prince

  In January 1943, barely six months after Germany bombed Stalingrad and advanced into its rubble, somber music accompanied the announcement that the Red Army had wrested the city from German control. Even so, the Nazi authorities tried to persuade people that a final victory was imminent.39 The German public didn’t know that the remains of the 90,000-men-strong German Sixth Army had surrendered. Rather, Hitler, obsessed with portraying the Reich as forever on the verge of triumph, ordered the press to report the siege’s end as a “sublime example of heroism.”40 The surrender of Stalingrad became one more instance of martyrdom on the part of the German soldier. Those with access to outside radios and newspapers knew the truth; Hitler’s armies had been defeated.41 The fall of Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war, the beginning of Germany’s defeat.

  That same year Eva Dorn had begun her third semester studying music at University of Leipzig. She wasn’t surprised when the draft notice arrived. Germany had declared total war. The German military gave her a choice between working in an armaments factory or the joining the Women’s Naval Auxiliary. Her mother suggested she choose the Navy so she could at least have fresh air. The day after her birthday, Eva left for training at Flensburg, a German naval base near Kiel on the Baltic Sea. Eva was soon posted to Gotenhafen in East Prussia. There she quietly challenged the rules, wearing lipstick, not giving a full “Heil Hitler” salute when she passed superior officers, and always keeping a pair of high heels in her possession. Eva worked hard, making herself useful beyond her regular duties on the spotlight battery and identifying aircraft. She often worked in the kitchen and infirmary.

  By February 26, 1944, the Red Army had recaptured 75 percent of occupied Russian lands and the Allies celebrated news of the Russian advance as one more step toward victory.42 News of the Russian offensive also excited Americans in Stalag Luft III, a prisoner-of-war camp in Sagan. Inside the camp, on January 27, 1944, the 10,000 Americans cheered when they heard the Russians were less than 20 miles to the east and coming on strong.43

  Meanwhile Helga Reuter’s 21-year-old cousin, Jurgen, a soldier in the Wehrmacht, was killed outside Leningrad. The Russians carved a swastika into his chest. “We got told lies about Leningrad. The Russians had begun to break through after Leningrad. Our soldiers went in and saw that people had been murdered and raped and nailed to a barn . . . nailed to a barn,” Helga said, referring to East Prussians living in the path of the Russian advance. “This scared us to hell. They said the same thing could happen to us. We were planning to leave. We didn’t know where—just to the West. As if the West held milk and honey.”

  In East Prussia, Gauleiter Erich Koch insisted victory was nigh, adhering to Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’s maxim that when one tells a lie often enough, the lie becomes true. Born on June 19, 1896, Koch likened himself to a medieval Teutonic knight. He boasted that his gau (province) represented a vanguard of Germanic ideals, ready to stand against marauding Russians.44 He banned any talk of flight. Having joined the Nazi Party in 1922, Koch had served as gauleiter since 1938, administering the region from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He also controlled the region’s Gestapo and uniformed police battalions. Koch had earlier served without distinction as a soldier in World War One. In spite of Koch’s declaration that East Prussia fight and die together, he, his wife, and his secretary fled Königsberg long before civilians like the Tschinkurs, Rezases, and Reuters. He did so after vilifying soldiers in the Wehrmacht who tried to retreat. Koch went to Pillau and tried to make a show of helping to organize Operation Hannibal.

  Koch ordered the Volkssturm (Home Guard) to mobilize boys as young as 13. Adolf Hitler had called up the Volkssturm in late 1944, selling the idea of it as a similar organization to the Land-sturm, which had fought against the French a century before. At the start it was a volunteer force, but soon men and boys had no choice. Hitler Youth were sent to bolster this home guard, with 16- and 17-year-olds manning machine guns. The youngsters had poor training, wore threadbare uniforms, and were armed only with French long rifles from 1914 that froze in the cold. The Russians slaughtered these adolescents. Reports spread of dead youth lying in ditches with their ears cut off and gouged-out eyes.45

  Horst Woit of Elbing remembered the Volkssturm as just one more part of Germany’s strategy of self-defense. This notion of sacrifice for the fatherland weighed heavily on many civilians. The German forces relied on the idea that the 80,000-strong Volkssturm and enlisted men wouldn’t shy away from a heldentod (heroic death).

  As the Russian army approached the East Prussian border, Erich Koch ordered hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and prisoners of war to build fortified camps and dig antitank ditches. Heinrich Himmler said he didn’t care if 10,000 Russian women died of exhaustion digging antitank ditches for the German army, so long as the ditches were dug.46

  In addition to the East Prussian civilians, concentration camp inmates were also compelled to dig. Dora Love, who survived three years in the Stutthof extermination camp, worked on the ditches. “They were horrors—four and a half meters deep. I doubt that it ever stopped a single Soviet tank—it was meant for the Soviet tanks but the work was for us.”47

  On January 12, 1945, about 3 million Russians attacked close to 1 million Germans on a 400-mile front that extended from the Baltic Sea to middle of the Poland.48 In the north the Third White Russian Front advanced toward Königsberg in East Prussia. The Second White Russian Front advanced toward Danzig. The First White Russian Front moved toward Poznan. The First Ukrainian Front moved in from the south.

  Though Hitler prohibited it, some German army divisions started retreating further west.49 News of the German army retreat reached East Prussian locales, including Königsberg, Elbing, and Gotenhafen.

  Adolf Hitler’s policies kept civilians ignorant of the Soviet advance and prohibited evacuations. Hitler told East Prussians that he intended to keep every square inch of territory. In mid-July 1944 he told the Germans he would hold the Baltic States at all costs. For Hitler, the war was about more than domination; it represented a test of will for the German people. If they lost, they had only themselves to blame. “If the German people should collapse under the present burden, I would weep no tear after it. It would deserve its fate,” Adolf Hitler told the audience during his last Reichstag speech.50

  Nearly three years after Adolf Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa, the Russians penetrated the German lines. When news of the breakthrough reached Moscow, celebratory gunfire crackled the air in lieu of fireworks. The Russians moved forward relentlessly, weakening the Germans daily.51

  “The radio was sending only good news about how hard they were fighting,” Horst Woit said, remembering those years. “But nobody was allowed to flee because that would cause capitulation. In the east we did not hear much about the western front. The store windows had propaganda of Russian killing Germans; gruesome.”

  In January 1945 Red Army tanks crunched through the snow of East Prussia, obliterating nearly everything in their path. On January 11 and 12, 1945, ten armies of the First Ukrainian Front dealt the first blow of the Soviet offensive on the Vistula. On January 13, the Third Belorussian Front bombarded East Prussia with 120,000 rounds. As Stalin’s soldiers raced to form a new front, tanks and men crushed machine gun positions, mortar-firing points, and mine clusters. The Soviet army now paid back the German brutality in kind. Soldiers in the Wehrmacht who were captured and killed by the Russians were found with ears, tongues, noses, and genitalia cut off.

  “In Prussia we had a pretty good life until the fall of 1944, when we had some air attacks,” Horst Woit said. “In general, Germans were not afraid of the English and Americans. Of the Russians? That is another story and for good reason.”

  That reason was Nemmersdorf, a small village located 155 miles east of Danzig, in the district of Gumbinnen, near where Horst’s grandparents lived. On October 16, 1944, Soviet forces had entered the town. Soldiers moved through the night, burning homes and torturing civ
ilians. The massacre followed the Red Army’s capture of two other East Prussian districts: Goldap and Gumbinnen.52

  Afterward, the mere mention of the village’s name distressed civilians. The authorities used it to persuade civilians that staying and fighting remained their only option. “This, this, my fellow countrymen, is what awaits you if you surrender! We will never surrender! You must fight to the last drop of blood!” said Joseph Goebbels in a speech.53 Goebbels invited international observers to tour the village; he took photos to use in newsreels to scare people. Yes, people were outraged, but his propaganda backfired. Seeing the aftermath let people know what they could expect should the Soviets come to their home. East Prussians wondered whether they could rely on the German forces. More than ever, civilians wanted to leave after hearing about this massacre. When the fighting started, residents living in the city of Königsberg, a mere 60 miles away from the front, shuddered under the artillery.

  The East Prussians were desperate to leave before the new year; the Nazi Party strictly forbade such an exodus upon pain of death. “The Nazis would have killed my father for deserting his own business. Stores downtown and furniture factories behind our house and garden had been watched from both sides,” Helga Reuter said. The Reuters had a cruel example of this edict. In early January the Gestapo shot the Reuters’ neighbor for trying to flee.

  Even when the Nazi authorities granted permission for the mass flight, some East Prussian civilians stayed, thinking suicide might be a choice against the marauding Red Army. During the war, the US Office for Strategic Services kept an outpost in Stockholm, Sweden. On December 8, 1944, this report was transmitted: “The feelings of the Germans are very mixed—Germans can still be found who believe in German victory by means of ‘new weapons,’ but it would appear as if, on the whole, the Germans believe the war is lost. The terror reports, issued by the German propaganda, of the behavior of the Russians towards German prisoners of war and civilians, has, however, had its effect, and the Germans with whom I have spoken had decided to fight to the last in the conviction that life in a defeated Germany would be unbearable.”54

  Irene and Ellen Tschinkur’s parents knew that if the Russians reached Gotenhafen, the naval port on the Baltic Sea, it would be catastrophic. They also knew the town officials hadn’t yet planned how to evacuate the population. City officials did not issue any instructions on where to go or how to get there.

  On January 12, 1945, the Red Army stood on the banks of the Oder River, the last natural barrier between Moscow and Berlin. Nine days later, on January 21, 1945, Soviets tanks moved into the town of Elbing and shelled the town from the armored vehicles.

  Twelve days later, on January 26, the Russians reached the Frisches Haff, a shallow lagoon linking Elbing to Königsberg.55 Civilians feared the Red Army, seeking revenge, would show no mercy on a population whose military had unleashed carnage upon them less than a year before.

  Three

  OPERATION HANNIBAL AND THE CROWN OF THE FLEET, THE WILHELM GUSTLOFF

  Toward the end of 1944 Admiral Karl Dönitz knew civilians in Eastern Prussia were in danger. The Third Reich was on the verge of collapse. Adolf Hitler finally allowed East Prussians to evacuate at the end of January 1945. While civilians welcomed the news, some saw it as too late. Had the Führer agreed to declare all of East Prussia as vital to military operations in the autumn of 1944, as some in his military command wanted, many more civilians would have been able to flee over land. Nevertheless, by January 1945 the Russian army had captured most of the eastern territories from their German foes. Fleeing over land was impossible.

  After the war, the Allies indicted Admiral Karl Dönitz as a major war criminal. He faced several charges: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace and crimes against humanity; planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression; and crimes against the laws of war. The Allies found him guilty on the last two counts. After his release from Spandau Prison in 1956, Dönitz lived in relative obscurity in Aumühle, a small town in northern Germany. The admiral never apologized for his role in World War Two, and he never tired of answering correspondence. Eventually he penned his memoir, Ten Years and Twenty Days. In it, Dönitz details how he orchestrated the largest, and perhaps most successful, civilian evacuation during a war: Operation Hannibal. His book strives to put his wartime actions in a positive light; the one-time naval commander-in-chief said that by the end of 1944 he no longer gave credence to the idea of fighting until the Third Reich imploded. Instead, Dönitz wanted to focus on moving as many naval personnel as possible to bolster troop strength as well as ensure the safe passage of millions of people.

  Devoted to duty, Admiral Karl Dönitz was loyal to the Nazi regime, yet he disagreed with Hitler’s refusal to allow East Prussians to flee. He viewed the “salvation of the German eastern population as the one essential task which our armed forces still had to perform. If to our sorrow we could not protect the homes of our eastern fellow countrymen, we could not leave them in the lurch and the least we could do was to ensure that they escaped with their bare lives.”1

  As Operation Hannibal got underway, more than one million German soldiers fought to keep control of the Baltic coast, but it was clear they wouldn’t be able to hold out against the Soviets. Dönitz understood that the Reich needed to transport “by sea men, munitions and stores to our eastern land forces and the evacuation from there of wounded, refugees and Army formations.”2 During the latter half of 1944, the Soviet armed forces either threatened or had already captured German dockyards in the eastern end of the Baltic Sea. The U-boats could no longer mount large-scale operations. Dönitz redirected their efforts toward defending the eastern front and rescuing German nationals from the Russian armies. Getting East Prussian civilians out via boats from the major Baltic ports such as Danzig, Pillau, and Gotenhafen remained the only options. The refugees would board boats in these ports and the German navy would sail them across the Baltic to Kiel. This town in western Germany neighbored the large naval base of Flensburg, near the Danish border.

  Evacuating civilians from the eastern provinces constituted a major military effort. Nearly every remaining surface ship in the German fleet participated in Operation Hannibal. Between January 23 and May 8, 1945, more than 800 ships ferried thousands of refugees and troops from Courland (in German, Kurland), Latvia, as well as from East and West Prussia, and later from Pomerania and parts of Mecklenburg, to points west. Aside from the large Baltic ports, countless numbers of people tried their luck from smaller ports and fishing villages. The German merchant marine had orders to join the effort to help evacuate 1 million military personnel and close to 2 million civilians. From the end of January through the middle of March, the German navy supervised numerous transports of refugees as well as some military personnel across the Baltic Sea to Kiel. The first boats carried U-boat trainees and replacement crew predominantly as well as families of soldiers and members of the Women’s Naval Auxiliary. One of the officers, Wilhelmina Reitsch, oversaw the evacuation of nearly 4,000 women in the Naval Auxiliary, including 400 who would be assigned to the Wilhelm Gustloff along with the civilian refugees.3 As the Russians neared, Reitsch noted that many of the ships took an increasing number of civilians on board, outnumbering military personnel.4

  During the planning stages of Operation Hannibal, Admiral Karl Dönitz delegated much of the work to Vice Admiral Conrad Englehardt, who supervised the naval shipping department, which headed sea transports, and reported directly to him. Dönitz, however, decided who among the hundreds and thousands of soldiers and sailors would be permitted to evacuate the eastern front and who among them had to stay and fight the Soviets. While he wanted to help the refugees, he stipulated that Operation Hannibal must never suspend naval operations in favor of rescuing civilians. Dönitz also cautioned Adolf Hitler to make sure the evacuation didn’t affect the transfer of fighting forces from Courland and from Norway.

  This mass exodus took place during intense Soviet bombing and submarine at
tacks. The Soviet air force’s constant attacks stopped the German navy from mobilizing during daylight out of Pillau, Danzig, or Gotenhafen. But the bombings did not deter refugees from flooding these harbors. Ultimately, in the number of people transported, Operation Hannibal exceeded Dunkirk, the 1940 evacuation from France of nearly 350,000 Allied soldiers in about 850 boats.

  Challenges beset Operation Hannibal from the start. For one, Germany now faced chronic fuel and ship shortages. Damaged rail tracks made it virtually impossible to supply troops. Miners had long ago been conscripted into the army, so coal wasn’t easily attainable. Only a three-week supply of coal remained for sea transport tasks, and only a ten-day supply remained for rail transport to move troops to the front.5 Fuel was at its lowest levels since the war began.6 The military leadership reserved coal supplies for military operations but agreed to spare some naval vessels to help in the mass exodus.7 Hitler pledged his support to Dönitz to stop the Soviet navy from entering the Baltic Sea. Hitler’s modest reassurances came largely because he had a great deal of personal respect for Dönitz.8 The feeling was mutual. Admiral Dönitz often praised Hitler’s character, applauding his “unswerving confidence,” and calling anyone who doubted the Third Reich “stupid.”9

  Shortages of food and medicine also affected the refugees. It was common for the elderly or the very young to die on board the refugee ships.10 Hitler ordered refugee ships to load up food and medicine in Kiel and bring it back to the Baltic ports. This was nearly impossible since the entire Reich experienced food shortages.

  When fuel shortages threatened to halt Operation Hannibal, Dönitz engaged in creative thinking so he wouldn’t have to abandon his plan to evacuate refugees and service members. He decided to still make sure the navy did everything possible to evacuate the refugees on oil-burning vessels, which could be spared from other operations, albeit temporarily. He knew there were 900 noncommissioned officers and 600 men already stationed in the naval base in Gotenhafen undergoing submarine training. The admiral proposed the men be used on land to help defend the medieval city of Danzig. This would free up space on boats for more civilians and offer more protection of the cities.