Death in the Baltic

by Cathryn J Prince

  This constant arrival of refugees spurred Admiral Karl Dönitz to forge ahead with Operation Hannibal. That meant changing the training and deployment schedule for hundreds of naval personnel. Captain Vollrath was yanked from the U-boat training course on the Gustloff in early January 1945 and instead posted to the 22nd Submarine Training Flotilla, which was part of the 2nd Submarine Training Division. Now he was billeted to the U–351, a training submarine.

  Barely a week passed before Vollrath received orders to prepare to depart Gotenhafen. The harbor city joined Königsberg and Pillau on the list of fortress cities to be evacuated. Adolf Hitler had considered Pillau essential to Königsberg’s protection. Throughout the long war Hitler allowed his fighting men to withdraw only in the face of utter destruction such as at Stalingrad. By January 25, 1945, it was clear that Königsberg, Pillau, and the other cities along the coast were in danger of succumbing to the Russian army.

  With the Soviets threatening the entire Baltic Coast, Captain Vollrath received orders to report as a second officer aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff. Vollrath’s previous service in the merchant marine suited him for this post. He feared losing a fifth ship. He’d already lost four ships during the war; three in the Mediterranean Sea and one in the English Channel off Boulogne; mines, bombs, and gunfire nearly took another off the coast of Le Havre, France.

  Vollrath wasn’t one to believe in premonitions or wax philosophical. The captain just realized that given the ferocity of the war, it was naïve to think he would get through the entire war unharmed and that no ship he served on would be lost or damaged. Vollrath didn’t think he was being unfairly tested. “In any case I prepared for the worst as I did not like to be taken by surprise or worse still with my pants down. Cigarettes, a bottle of Half and Half, a popular spirit made by Mampe at that time, a flash lamp, a knife and a Mauser pistol I got ready,” Vollrath wrote.35

  In 1937 the Germans built the 684-foot-long Wilhelm Gustloff to prove the power of the Reich. For a few years it sailed atop the warmer waters of the Mediterranean, a more forgiving climate. Then Germany invaded Poland and the shimmering ship was confined in the Baltic Sea where ice often glazed its deck.

  The Wilhelm Gustloff was just one of hundreds of vessels, from large cruise liners to smaller fishing boats, attempting to leave the frozen Gulf of Danzig in January 1945. Aside from the Gustloff, several other large passenger liners participated in Operation Hannibal carrying thousands of men, women and children: Cap Arcona, Robert Ley, Hamburg, Hansa, and Deutschland. There were smaller ships too, including the Potsdam, Pretoria, Berlin, General Steuben, Monte Rosa, Antonio Delfino, and Winrich von Kniprode. These boats were between 10,000 tons and 20,000 tons.

  Most people killed during Operation Hannibal, which lasted from January through May 1945, were civilians. Aside from the Gustloff, the Goya went down between April 16 and 17, 1945, drowning close to 7,000, and the Steuben was attacked and sunk between February 9 and 10, drowning about 3,500. Soviet submarines sank each of these ships. This evacuation from the Baltic Sea region also involved those trying to evacuate over land. Because of the inherent chaos of war, no one knows exactly how many tried, how many died, or how many survived. However, those tragedies, which claimed thousands of lives at a time, came after the Wilhelm Gustloff tried to cross the Baltic Sea on a cold, dark winter night.

  In January 1945 the Wilhelm Gustloff, the crown jewel of the German cruise liners, waited in Danzig harbor for clearance to sail. A convoy of other vessels, all under military escort, was to leave with the Wilhelm Gustloff. The ships were all bound for Kiel, Germany, about 289 nautical miles, or 332 statute miles, away.

  Four

  “WE KNEW WE HAD TO GET OUT”

  On the morning of January 26, 1945, ten-year-old Horst Woit sat in his cozy kitchen for the last time. “On this Saturday everything was what we called normal. Mom had made me breakfast. Most likely it was rye bread with marmalade and warm milk; what to eat in those days was not great,” Woit said. “Then hell broke loose. Some young boy in a Hitler Youth uniform knocked on the door and told us the Russian tanks have entered the city Elbing and we have permission to flee. As most people knew this would happen sooner or later, Mom had a suitcase already packed with the exception of sandwiches.”1

  The pair dressed in thick layers for the long walk. They piled on long underwear, ski pants, multiple sweaters, and coats. They wore heavy boots that after a while made Horst’s legs tire with each step. Just before they left the ten-year-old boy slid his uncle’s eight-inch long, black jackknife into his pocket. Outside the snow covered the ground.

  “The knife I took out of my uncle’s trunk and hid in my ski pants was the only object I had. Mom did not know about it; I do not remember what she had in that little suitcase either, and I hated the long underwear because it was scratchy. I hated it with a passion,” he said.2

  Until this day Horst Woit had lived a relatively normal life in Elbing, a small city located in the northern part of East Prussia. It had a shallow port on the Elbing River, which flows into the Vistula Lagoon, which in turn emptied into the Baltic Sea. The city once belonged to the Hanseatic League, the thirteenth-century trade association that allowed commerce with England, Flanders, France, and the Netherlands. The port lay about 6 miles away from Horst’s home, a long walk for a small boy in any circumstances, but on this frigid day it was a matter of life and death for Horst and his mother.

  For days Russian tanks and soldiers had nipped at Elbing’s heels. On the day Horst and Meta Woit left Elbing, Russian troops entered the city to confront the 100,000 German soldiers stationed there. The battle didn’t ignite into full force until after they left. When it did, it lasted two weeks and ended with the Germans’ surrender. Between February and May of 1945 the Soviets virtually destroyed Elbing with its thirteenth-century Gothic architecture. Horst remembers scores of refugees like himself, fleeing with their possessions. The Woits, like so many of their neighbors, had lost faith in the ability of the German army to protect them. They had waited to receive official permission. Helga’s neighbor had tried to leave before official permission was granted; the Germans shot him.

  Radio broadcasts still aired Hitler’s directives to “lash out in all directions with fists and claws to gain control of the storm sweeping over our eastern borders.”3 The men who were left were either the very elderly or very young. They were ordered to stand firm, the ailing and sick commanded to fight to the last ounce of their strength. As Irene Tschinkur recalls, her father, Herbert Christoph, wasn’t drafted because he ran a large bakery that employed many people. “He had to stay behind to keep producing bread to feed all those people who had come into Gotenhafen from the eastern parts. Before Mom, Ellen, Evi, and I left, I saw a lot of army trucks roll into the yard to pick up bread—I suppose for the front,” Irene remembered.4

  Some German citizens in the eastern territories stubbornly held out, choosing to stay on their farms or with their businesses. They believed in the Third Reich’s power to stop the Soviet invaders. Others stayed, hoping the Red Army would show them mercy.

  For the most part, women led children and the elderly to safety since so many men were fighting, or wounded, or dead. Many boys over the age of 12 were also gone; the Nazi military had sent them either to the front or to operate antiaircraft guns. In some instances former prisoners who had been sent to work on farms in East Prussia helped their German “hosts” prepare to leave. These prisoners helped properly pack wagons and close up homes. They helped dress children for the long and cold journey, and they stayed with the families through artillery fire, hunger, and the dangerous walk over breaking ice. Hoping to make their way to American or British lines, their fates became inextricably linked with these families.5

  Horst’s mother, her friend Hildegard, and Hildegard’s eight-year-old daughter Christa decided to leave Elbing together. The two mothers felt they had a better chance traveling in a small group amid the refugees. The heavy suitcases slowed them considerably;
it took them two hours to walk the distance to the Elbing River. Horst kept his head down against the cold as they walked. Meta and Horst trudged over the frozen Frisches Haff (the Vistula Lagoon), while the cold wind dipped and swirled, forcing them to bend like saplings in a storm. Gritty dirt blew across the ice. Icy winds swept the land, and snowdrifts rose higher and faster, at times blotting out the roads and trails from view. In some places wooden stakes marked the route to show refugees where to safely cross the ice. Where there were no markers, people followed a trail of broken carts, wagons, and discarded belongings. It had been an uncommonly cold stretch of weather with temperatures hovering at or below zero degrees Fahrenheit; wind gusts caused temperatures to dive as low as minus 25 degrees Celsius (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit) at times. The refugees feared frostbite. People wore fur coats, gloves, mittens, boots, hats pulled low, shawls and scarves; it wasn’t always enough.

  All across East Prussia, fleeing civilians pulled sleds heaped with everything from crockery and linens to clothing and carpets. Sharp winds lashed convoys. Wheel ruts scored the icy ground and hundreds of tramping feet, both human and horse, left their mark. Masses of refugees and retreating German army vehicles jammed the narrow roads. Sometimes people had to wait for hours in one spot just to move a few more feet forward. There were also prisoners of war and retreating troops. Refugees saw withdrawing troops dig antitank trenches with their helmets because they no longer had shovels. Later witnesses to the treks described the hundreds of thousands of East Prussians as a piteous stream. Stories of Soviet atrocities drove the refugees forward.

  “Russian tanks opened fire on us and drove over refugee columns crushing livestock and people beneath treads with no more thought than someone would swat a fly,” Woit said.6 Russian air force planes strafed the Frisches Haff as the refugees fled; the ice cracked under the weight of horse-drawn carts and bodies plunged beneath. Women abandoned their babies, some dead, some gravely ill, to the snow and ice. Many mothers could no longer carry their children after they died. On roads, they left their babies in the deep snow, away from the automobiles and farm wagons.7

  Frisches Haff (the Vistula Lagoon) is a shallow body of water running alongside the Baltic Sea. It starts about 25 miles east of Danzig and runs northeast to Königsberg along the southern coast of Samland and the port of Pillau. It is less than 60 miles long. Woit’s father had once taken him sledding on this very lagoon. In the days after Horst left, the situation for refugees making their way to the ports grew ever more dire. There were people who had started their journey to the Baltic coast from towns farther east than Elbing. By this point many who were too weak to walk were becoming part of the snowy landscape. Along the way refugees passed stray livestock, ransacked houses, and corpses, some with their skulls bashed, some with their dresses pulled up, all signs that the Soviet army had passed. These were not the hot-blooded atrocities that occurred when fighting units come under hostile fire or experience an onslaught of casualties. Rather, these were cold-blooded, planned actions against people considered lower than animals. A premeditated viciousness never seen on such a large scale in the west marked the eastern front.

  Horst remembers that the frozen land felt like ice needles stabbing into the soles of his feet. Irene and Ellen remember eyeing the sky warily, on the lookout for Russian aircraft. Helga remembers hearing stories of children flattened by Russian tanks. The terror of what the Russian soldiers might do propelled them toward the Baltic coast.8 Refugees of all ages passed along this frozen route, clutching their belongings, each suitcase, each trundle carrying a lifetime inside: a doll, a wedding picture, family photos. Most took only bare essentials with them, but some took things like baby carriages, mirrors, and flowerpots.

  As for the German army, though the retreat was in some cases disorderly, they tried to make sure not to leave behind anything that the Russians could find useful. The military didn’t want to leave a thing for the enemy, not a pound of bread or a drop of oil. Everything had to be given to the army, from livestock and grain reserves to fuel and nonferrous metals. If it couldn’t be transported, it was to be destroyed.9 German soldiers blew up bridges, railway junctions, telegraph and telephone wires. However, because the Wehrmacht was on the defensive, their retreat was sometimes as chaotic as the flight of the refugees. In spite of that, German soldiers had almost nothing with them as they retreated; they had no winter clothes, food, or ammunition, and still much equipment was left behind.10

  With few exceptions, the German army was no longer solely fighting on foreign soil in January 1945. This was new to a military machine that even when it surrendered in the past, as it had during World War One, it did so standing on foreign soil. Now foreign troops stood upon German soil.

  After a day the Woits and Hildegard and Cristina reached Pillau, about 30 miles northeast of Elbing. Meta Woit knew she and her son were going to get on a transport ship. Eventually she planned to join the rest of her family in Schwerin.

  Under cold and cloudy skies the two mothers and two children, along with 30 other people, climbed aboard a 24-foot cutter that was headed on the Vistula River to Danzig. Arriving in the port of Danzig, they boarded another small boat, which sailed to Gotenhafen. Because Meta and Hildegard were traveling with children, and because they were one of the first evacuees to arrive, they easily received boarding passes for the Wilhelm Gustloff.

  Horst remembers being impressed by the crowds and the numerous ships. While their little group waited to board the ship, they saw scores of wounded troops arriving in Gotenhafen from the front lines. They joined the thousands of others awaiting evacuation.11

  Horst remembers reveling in stories about the great Elbing castle built by the Teutonic knights. During the war, and though Horst doesn’t recall this, the town supported the Nazi Party. He didn’t know about the three subcamps of Stutthof—Elbing, Elbing (Org. Todt), and Schinau. He doesn’t recall “confrontations with prisoners.”12 He was also just young enough to escape Nazi indoctrination since Hitler Youth membership didn’t start until age ten. Thinking back on his childhood, Horst remembers looking forward to Sundays when soldiers would parade through Elbing’s old town and the band played. Most of Elbing’s men, his father included, were fighting on the eastern front. Horst and his mother never heard from him during the war.

  Although the Woits had only peripheral contact with Hitler Youth until the beginning of January, he remembers seeing them all across town. While most children like Horst led quite ordinary lives, the Hitler Youth infiltrated much of daily life by the late autumn of 1940.13 Members of Hitler Youth collected streetcar tickets and stood in as workers in munitions factories to replace men sent to the front. They manned antiaircraft guns and dug trenches at the borders of towns and cities. At the end of the war, boys as young as 12 years old were pressed into service on the front. Girls in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM, League of German Girls) worked as nurses’ aides and streetcar conductors. They helped ethnic German farmers settle in annexed Polish territories and even helped with evictions. They also chaperoned Baltic Germans newly arrived to East Prussia.14

  Meanwhile in Königsberg, the Reuter family coped with the war years in their own way.

  “We had a lovely childhood, but the teenager time? Forget about it,” said Helga Reuter Knickerbocker, who was born in 1927 to Kurt Reuter and Marta Walloch.15 The Reuters owned a furniture factory in Königsberg that had dozens of showrooms, each more well appointed than the last, with walnut dining room tables, satin smooth console tables, and elegantly framed mirrors. Helga and her older sisters—Ingeborg, or Inge as she was nicknamed, and Ursula—lived in a spacious home on the same property as the factory. Inge, born in 1921, “was beautiful—outside and such goodness inside. We were so very close.”

  Being older than Horst, Helga Reuter had to join Hitler Youth. As part of the Hitler Youth, Helga remembers going door-to-door collecting recyclables and gathering paper, scrap iron, rags, and bones. For years Nazi Germany had been “carrying on a des
perate campaign to remedy her acute shortage of raw materials. . . . Kitchen remains are collected, made into fodder for cattle. Old newspapers may no longer be used for kindling fires, sardine cans no longer have individual openers (saving 2,000 tons of iron a year), men’s shirts are made two inches shorter.”16

  Shortages of clothing, food, and fuel meant families across East Prussia depended on ration cards. The Reuters felt fortunate to have a small but bountiful vegetable garden and to raise chickens and rabbits. The family depended on their ration cards for daily staples such as flour, sugar, and butter. They also were allowed milk, available to families with children under 18. However, Helga didn’t like milk, so her mother could cook with the precious liquid.

  Before the war the upper-middle-class family employed a cook and housekeeper. They also had a chauffeur until her sister Ursula turned 18 and, to the delight of her father, she could drive. The Reuters were rich, but Helga said the hired help had been mostly because her father suffered from limited eyesight. Helga’s mother, Marta, acted as his eyes; she was always by his side, never wanting or willing to leave him.

  Helga’s parents and grandparents had long called East Prussia home. According to family lore, Helga’s great-great grandparents, who had been Lutheran, had moved to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, from Austria to escape tensions between the Calvinists and the Lutherans. Her mother’s parents died when Helga was four. While Helga doesn’t remember either of them, she grew up hearing about how they indulged her. When her parents weren’t busy working in their furniture showroom, they too indulged the three daughters. Each summer Helga’s parents took the girls to a resort town on the Baltic Sea. There the Reuter family delighted in time spent on the shores of the crystalline, cobalt waters. She and her sister swam, sometimes in the smooth inner waters of the lagoons; sometimes they braved the strong Baltic waves.