Death in the Baltic

by Cathryn J Prince

  Before the Wilhelm Gustloff, Helga remembers the Baltic Sea as a beautiful place for fun. “The Baltic Sea was so beautiful,” Helga said. “The sand was very light and fine; there was no pollution. But even when we had a hot summer, the Baltic Sea was still so cold.”

  Yet in January 1945 seashore excursions only existed in the postcard of memory. Ice now covered Königsberg Bay, although in some places it wasn’t thick enough to support the unending procession of heavily laden wagons. The ice often cracked beneath horses and people, sending them to their deaths. Refugees leaving Königsberg had to navigate about 15 miles of this bay to reach the fishing port of Pillau, located across a strait from the northeastern tip of a sandy strip of land called Frische Nehrung. Some people made this crossing in six to eight hours; others took days to cross the ice. Blocked roads rendered cars useless. Since the lagoon was frozen, rescue ships couldn’t enter the inner waters and get to the refugees sooner. The evacuees had no choice but to hazard a trip over the lagoon.

  Once the authorities lifted the restriction on leaving, Milda Bendrich hurried to gather her belongings, including baby blankets and a change of clothes. Then she closed her home forever.

  “On about January 27 I had a very early morning visit from a friend, a Marine Oberleutant,” Milda Bendrich wrote her daughter Inge many years after the war ended.17 “He came to us to ask if and how we intended to flee. There was no “if” for me, as I had heard enough about the Polish revenge on the Germans who chose to remain in Poland. The “how” I imagined would be by train. Now I learned that the train line ended in Pommern and the refugees were forced to walk the rest of the journey through the snow. I had been offered by my friends, a family by the name of Sika, to join them in fleeing to Sudetengau. I declined and they left Gotenhafen.”

  Milda’s parents, ethnic German refugees from central Poland, helped the new mother pack. Together they gathered clothing, linens, crockery, and books. In her letter, Milda noted the precise measurements of how she loaded suitcases and packets on “a 1.8-meter long sledge, the luggage reached 1.7 meters high.” She estimated the height of the sledge because it was just taller than her father, she wrote Inge. Together the five adults pushed and pulled the sledge to the train station. The wind whipped their hair, sending snow into their eyes. A mile-long path separated them from the station. Milda and her parents and their neighbors kept getting stuck in the deep snow. The caravan of refugees planned on taking the train to Ochtersum/Hildesheim in Germany.

  “You, Inge, were the only one who enjoyed this trip, as you were comfortably positioned and sheltered from the rough wind in a gap between the luggage as if you were sitting in a lounge chair,” Milda Bendrich wrote in a letter to her daughter. The only thing Milda Bendrich ever saw again from her home was a tattered carton full of wool remnants and an old dressing gown.18 The package didn’t arrive until well after the war. Inge still marvels that someone had taken the time to pack the box and track her mother down.

  From the autumn of 1944 on, European and American newspapers published various versions of this headline: “Berliners are receiving the first visible warning that the Red Army stands before the frontiers of the Reich.”19 In Berlin, Germany’s beating heart, headlines like these caused alarm.20 However, as several historians have noted, by 1944 it was clear Germany would lose the war.

  Yet, before German officials allowed civilians to leave, Nazi administrators were already escaping from East Prussia, in part to set up a base of secure operations on the other side of the Baltic Sea, far from Berlin.21 The United States watched this unfold from its Office of Strategic Service station across the Baltic Sea. In September 1944 it reported that Germans have two choices: They could either endure the complete disintegration of the Nazi Party or take a chance for rebuilding their nation on a sound basis. The OSS reported that many in the upper levels of Nazi leadership were trying to drag out the war in order to escape to neutral lands where they might challenge the postwar situation using vast sums of hidden money.22

  The OSS Stockholm station debated how best to exploit these weaknesses. The summer before refugees embarked on the Wilhelm Gustloff, OSS operatives brainstormed on ways to drive a deeper wedge between the Nazi party and the civilians it was forcing to stay in vulnerable lands. The Allies, particularly the Americans, wanted to use the civilians’ growing alarm at the Russian advance as well as any perceptions of privileged treatment given to soldier’s wives and dependents.23 Inequality between the German people and their party leaders ran rampant. The military continued to force young boys into the Volkssturm home guard or militia. These unfortunate conscripts had no enthusiasm and many failed to fight. Meanwhile, Gauleiter Erich Koch, the provincial governor in charge of East Prussia, sent his family out of harm’s way. He did this in spite of telling people that “No true German would allow himself even the thought that East Prussia might fall into Russian hands.”24 He followed the lead of Adolf Hitler. In December 1944, the Soviet troops threatened Wolf’s Lair, the massive East Prussian field headquarters near Rastenberg, and so the Führer retreated to Berlin. The OSS wanted to publicize any “irrational military orders, which may encourage desertion or surrender or lead to a relaxation of discipline with detail.”25 Helga Reuter certainly considered the advice given to women and children to be most irrational. “They told me and my sister to stay behind and throw boiling water at invading Russian soldiers,” she said, the corners of her mouth tilting upward ever so slightly at the absurdity of the suggestion.

  With its grand cathedral and large historic city center, Königsberg became one of what Nazi authorities designated as a fortress city. Fourteen forts surrounded the major East Prussian city. Starting in mid-January more than 700 fighters hunkered inside each stone-walled fort. Civilians joined them. If they had no armaments, they were supposed to help the defense using homemade weapons. Civilians, virtual hostages in these locations, often endured incessant artillery fire from surrounding Soviet forces. Women, children, and those who escaped conscription in the Volkssturm died alongside soldiers. These cities were to be defended at all cost. “Our opponents must know that every kilometer that they want to advance into our country will cost them rivers of blood,” Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler said in October 1944.26 Fires raged across the city.

  Before Erich Koch fled, he ordered hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and Russian prisoners of war to fortify the city. They had to build more tank traps, foxholes, gun emplacements, ditches, and bolstered cellars to prepare for street-to-street and house-to-house combat.27 Koch had started the earthworks when the Russians began their 1944 offensive. Koch prohibited civilians from leaving even as war came closer and even as the Soviet army began shelling Königsberg. The thunderous artillery was so strong, it rattled people from the inside out. Königsberg wouldn’t fall until April 9, and until it did, the German military and political leadership cleaved to the idea that so long as the old city remained in German hands, then Germany still held East Prussia.28

  On January 20 the Soviet army took Tilsit, located on the south bank of the Nerman River. Between January 21 and 22 the Red Army marched into Allenstein and stormed into Insterburg. Four days later, on January 26, the Red Army arrived on the Baltic coast, surrounding the German Fourth Army on the Frisches Haff, the lagoon extending south from Königsberg. Russian guns trained on Königsberg.29

  In the Reuter house, Helga’s parents decided she and Inge would be safer in Berlin with their married sister, Ursula. The girls would have to flee alone. Helga’s father would have been killed for deserting, so her mother stayed by his side. “My parents never argued in front of us, but she, my Mom, used to dream. She didn’t want us to go; she said, ‘Over my dead body.’ But he, my father, banged his fist on the table. He wanted his girls to get to safety,” Helga said.

  Kurt Reuter, who was not drafted because of his poor eyesight, was right in fearing the worst. Earlier that morning, Helga and Inge happened to be talking in Inge’s room. They sat on a window seat, occ
asionally looking down at the street. They weren’t talking about anything serious, just idle chatter to take their minds off the situation, Helga said. A shot cracked through the girls’ talk. Their heads snapped toward the window. On the street below, a group of women huddled. Then the sisters saw an SS soldier dragging a young girl toward their factory driveway. Helga and Inge watched the scene unfold. An SS officer raised his arm and pointed the pistol. Helga and Inge sprinted down the stairs and ran outside. The thin young woman, still warm, lay on the cold pavement; strips of gray fabric wrapped her otherwise bare feet. A shredded gray army blanket swaddled her body.

  “Now we knew we had to get out. We were scared,” Helga said.

  It was immediately decided that Helga, Inge, and their aunt, Ruth Walloch, would take the train from Königsberg. In his barn, their uncle Erick Reuter had left behind a pair of brown horses, Hans and Farmosa, and a wooden wagon after he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Erick had also owned several cows that were taken by the German army stationed in Königsberg. Helga’s father kept the horses in the factory garage, which had long since been emptied of delivery trucks. A son of a neighboring Polish farmer cared for the horses. And so the three young women mounted the horses and, with the Polish boy, they headed to the train station. Aside from their overstuffed knapsacks, they carried chicken and rabbit meat wrapped in cloth.

  Helga remembers she quickly grew tired of riding and walking, but that in frigid temperatures it was the only way to keep warm. Not that she felt cold. She remembers she was so anxious she didn’t feel the bracing air upon her face. She and Inge knew if they rested or sat upon a sledge or wagon for even a few minutes they risked frostbite.

  As fuel shortages increased, transportation became chaotic, and the general health among the German home population declined.30 When Helga and Inge reached the train station they realized they’d be lucky to board. The Königsberg train station resembled a zoo. Hordes of people jockeyed for position. There were no working toilets, no available food, and no water. Soldiers pushed ahead of civilians. Refugees remember vicious fights to secure seats on trains. Some people couldn’t shove or beat their way on board and instead sat on top of cars or tried to hang on between cars. The trains reeked of excrement and urine. There was no medical attention. Some passengers who died en route were thrown out of open berths into the snow. Other refugees, chilled to the marrow, recalled how the SS doled out warm clothes. Historians later documented that these clothes were taken from Jews who had been deported to concentration camps.31

  In January 1945, the Reich’s transport system was fast coming to a standstill. Electricity and gas supplies were rapidly dwindling, telecommunication systems were breaking. At the Königsberg train station, the Reuter sisters and their aunt never had to try their luck because the train never left the station. Allied bombers had destroyed a railroad bridge just down the track. Helga remembers how she, Inge, and Ruth waited for hours in the crowded station before they were finally able to piece together the story. The word was the Germans had reduced the bridge to rubble so the Soviets might not pass. Forced to turn back, the Reuter sisters found their parents, Kurt and Marta, still at home. In fact, the last refugee train had pulled out of Königsberg on January 22, days before the three women arrived.

  It was practice at the time to quarter soldiers with families. Wilhelm Krantz, a German officer quartered with the Reuters, lost two sons in the war. One served in the Luftwaffe and was shot down over Russia. His other son served on a U-boat and died in the North Atlantic. Krantz didn’t hide his hatred for Hitler from the Reuters. After Helga, Inge, and Ruth came back, he advised them to leave by another route. He did this although official permission had yet to be granted to civilians. Helga and Inge were lucky to receive assistance since most people who were still in Königsberg, or anywhere in East Prussia, didn’t get help from the military.32 The German Fourth Army, which was in the vicinity of Königsberg, pushed ahead of civilians and frequently ordered them off the roads to make way for them.

  That night, about eight officers knocked on the Reuters’ door asking for quarter. They looked calm. They told the Reuters their truck had broken down and asked if they could stay until it could be fixed.

  Marta Reuter, Helga’s mother, brewed ersatz coffee, a chalky liquid made out of corn. Later that evening the officers readied to leave. They helped the three girls into the back of the newly repaired truck and off they drove toward Elbing.

  The group heard the fighting; the Red Army was nearly upon them. The soldiers, the Reuter sisters, and their aunt reached Elbing, which was about 60 miles away from their home. They tried to travel over land, but they were stopped in Elbing by the same chomping Russian tanks Horst had heard.

  “I saw three Russian tanks on the hill. They saw the group of us on the autobahn. We jumped into a ditch to escape the shooting,” Helga recounted. “We just made it. The Russians killed nearly everybody. But it was nighttime and they couldn’t see much.”

  It had taken nearly 36 hours for the band of refugees to reach Elbing. It took only two hours for the truck to return to Königsberg and the house on General Litzman Strasse. The driver showed no caution.

  The next day, a soldier offered to take the Reuter girls to Pillau, the harbor opening from Frisches Haff to the Baltic Sea. Frisches Haff still remained the most direct route from Königsberg. This little harbor of Pillau, from which 441,000 refugees fled, was the main staging point for Operation Hannibal. Even now, Nazi propaganda continued full force. Authorities told civilians that hundreds of new tanks had been unloaded at Pillau and that the Germans were moving north to save them. The refugees were promised they would be “Home in time for the spring sowing.” They were told it was all part of Führer’s intricate plan “to let the Russians in, the more surely to destroy them.”33

  Again Helga, Inge, and their Aunt Ruth hitched a ride in the back of a truck. The three lay still. SS officers stopped the truck shortly before it reached the harbor. The sisters and their aunt huddled under the benches, using the soldiers’ legs and gear as cover. They heard the soldiers come to the back of the truck. Helga’s heart pounded as the soldiers scanned the open bed with their flashlights. The soldiers didn’t see them hiding.

  Along the way the sisters and their aunt had passed soldiers, Waffen SS, and uniformed police. Many of those troops stopped refugees on the roadside, searching them for their identity papers. Often the police stopped older men and teenage boys and shoved them onto trucks to be conscripted into the Volksstrum. Most would only last until their bodies gave out or were felled by a Russian bullet. Meanwhile, the refugees raced to pass the German engineers tasked with destroying the sheets of thick ice covering the rivers to impede the Russians’ advance. The German navy deployed icebreakers to open the way so that three new torpedo boats could pass from Elbing to Pillau without falling into Soviet hands.34

  It took Helga, Inge, and Ruth some time to find a boat and captain willing to transport them to Gotenhafen. Finally they found passage aboard a small tugboat, the Elbing IV. Russian fire had damaged the sturdy little boat; its waterlines were broken and some of the wood was splintered. In high seas, water seeped in. They had to return to Pillau to find another boat to Gotenhafen.

  The sight of the harbor shocked the Reuter sisters and their aunt. Almost 70 years later Helga remembers that an overpowering stench pervaded the port. Rats ran over mounds of garbage. There were reports of people butchering and eating wayward livestock.

  East Prussians used all means of transportation, including wagons, carts, carriages, horses, even cows, to flee the advancing Russian forces. Some people hitched inverted tables to horses, riding on these makeshift sleds with their belongings. Horse hooves slipped on the ice, wagons crashed and splintered. Flight routes constantly changed due to weather and fighting. Although some people walked as many as 50 miles a day, it took weeks for others to traverse the land and frozen harbors. All the while they faced Russian attacks from soldiers, tanks, and airplanes. People
dove into snow to hide while the bullets punched through the ice.

  Another route to Gotenhafen wound through the Frisches Nehrung, the narrow land spit on the northern side of the Vistula Lagoon. From there one could travel westward to Danzig. Hundreds of thousands of civilians tried that route; snowstorms claimed thousands of them. By the end of January, when the refugees arrived in Gotenhafen, the city of 3 million people had swelled by another million. A system of housing authorities and reception districts, called Aufnahmekrasse, aided the influx of refugees. The authorities wanted to keep people from sleeping in the streets. It was a futile effort; at the end of January 1945 the refugee population overwhelmed the housing authorities and districts. It was difficult to find food and shelter with so many people.

  Back at the fishing port town of Pillau, the Reuter sisters and their aunt boarded a torpedo boat. On board the three shared a bowl of hot split pea soup that Inge had gotten from the galley. They warmed their hands on the bowl. Pillau, a small coastal town, normally had a population of 5,000; now more than 40,000 people crowded its streets. Indeed, as the Soviet army advanced, people were pushed further west. In the harbor towns along the Baltic Sea, from Königsberg to Elbing, the population swelled. Knees, elbows, and rucksacks banged into each other on the boats usually used to shuttle to large ships in outer harbors. The boat the Reuters took traveled about 11 knots per hour over choppy water. Seasick, Inge stood near the rail the whole time.

  By the time Horst, Helga, and Irene and Ellen reached Gotenhafen by separate routes, their homelands had virtually vanished. Many towns and cities lay in ruins. The Soviets now controlled East Prussia, Silesia, and the parts of Poland previously under German rule. In Gotenhafen ships crowded the harbor. Ocean liners and fishing boats, dinghies and trawlers: anything that floated and could carry people was docked in the port.