Death of a Nation
Page 63
On 8th March 1945, Hitler issued a Führer order declaring the eastern German cities as ‘fortresses’ of the Reich. The citizens of Königsberg, Danzig, Thorn, Kolberg, Posen, Breslau, Oppeln, Ratibor, Frankfurt an der Oder and Küstrin were thus condemned to live and die in their cities as they were torn to pieces and turned to rubble, just as Stalingrad, Smolensk and countless cities had been in the East.ccxxxvi Preparations for the orderly evacuation of German civilians, if considered at all, took place in an atmosphere of extreme denial; the belief was that the Russians would not take a square inch of German soil, that they would be repulsed at the borders, that every last man, woman and child would do their duty to repel the invader, and Germany would be saved. Talk of evacuation in the autumn of 1944 was regarded by Nazi authorities as tantamount to defeatism and could result in summary execution.
The Russian advance continued relentlessly, cutting off major German population centres in East Prussia and along the Baltic coast from the possibility of their land evacuation. Those who attempted to flee were strafed by Russian fighters, or risked becoming snowbound on narrow country roads, or being crushed to death by rapidly advancing Russian tanks. Those who were left encircled in East Prussia — and along other parts of the Baltic coast in Elbing, Danzig or Kolberg — had only one way out, across the frozen ice from ports where the German merchant fleet undertook the largest civilian evacuation in the history of war. Civilians headed out across the frozen ice to the offshore dunes (the Frische Nehrung and Kurische Nehrung, now UNESCO World Heritage sites, were then sites of unspeakable horror and death) and to the ports, such as Pillau and Hella, in the hope of embarkation and evacuation away from the Red Army. The ice was often not thick enough to take the heavy load of their horse and carts, and whole families were lost to the dark, freezing waters of the eastern Baltic. Those who reached the ports encountered a vision of apocalyptic chaos; hundreds of thousands of people were pressed into the evacuation areas, cities were being shelled by artillery fire, people were being pushed into the harbours as everyone made a desperate attempt to get a berth and get out. Those lucky enough to make it onto one of the massively overcrowded ships then had to run the gauntlet of the frozen Baltic filled with Russian submarines. Over a thousand vessels of every kind attempted the crossing. Of those, 158 were sunk, and amongst them were the three largest maritime disasters of all time, the cost of which — in terms of human lives — dwarfed the death tolls of the Titanic and the Lusitania.
On 30th January 1945 the Wilhelm Gustloff set sail from Goteshafen (Gdynia) near Danzig for Kiel, overloaded with 10,000 fleeing refugees and wounded soldiers. The ship was torpedoed in the early hours of the morning as it was within sight of shore, and 9,400 people, mostly women and children, drowned in the icy waters of the Baltic, an unbelievable tragedy compared to the 1,500 lives that were lost when the Titanic sank. On 9th February 1945 the Steuben, sailing from Pillau (Baltiysk) and heading for Sweinemuende (Świnoujście), was sunk with the loss of an estimated 4,000 souls. The captain of the Russian submarine, Alekandr Marinesko, who sank both the Steuben and the Wilhelm Gustloff, was made a hero of the Soviet Union and never expressed any remorse for his actions or for the victims of his attacks. The last major horrific sinking in the Baltic took place on 16th April with the sinking of the Goya and the death of a further 6,000 refugees.(15)
The RAF was also not averse to sinking these rescue ships or bombing the refugee embarkation and disembarkation ports. On 26th April, the RAF sunk three ships in the port of Lübeck and proceded to machine-gun any survivors in the water. What the pilots did not know was that two of these ships, the Cap Ancona and the Thielbek, were carrying between 7–8,000 concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war. The SS then shot many of those that made it ashore and in total only 350 survived. In the first three days of May 1945 the RAF sank thirty-two ships laiden with fleeing refugees.(15.1) An estimated 33,000 people, mostly women and children, were shot, bombed, frozen or drowned to death in the Baltic while trying to make their escape. Operation Hannibal, the evacuation of the German population of the eastern Baltic, was Germany’s Dunkirk but on a far larger scale, rescuing over 2 million citizens from the clutches of the Red Army. The harsh winter weather also took its toll.
The Russians reached part of the Oder river at Steinau, north of Breslau, as early as 22nd January, a mere ten days after their offensive had begun. Breslau, which straddled the Oder, faced encirclement and was under heavy artillery fire from the Russians. Breslau’s population had swollen from 700,000 to over a million in the months before the offensive, filled with evacuees from other cities which had been bombed, and refugees fleeing the East. Last minute chaotic and disastrous forced evacuations began on 20th January, ordered by the city’s fanatical Nazi Gauleiter, Karl Hanke, who was attempting to rid the city of every extra mouth to feed, and anyone that could not hold a gun. By the time the city was encircled, only 200,000 of the city’s citizens remained to face their fate. Most Breslauers joined millions of other refugees who were trekking out of Silesia through snowstorms and sub-zero temperatures of minus 20 degrees centigrade. Tens of thousands would lose their lives in these harsh winter conditions. Many of the Silesian refugees who survived the treks were headed for what they mistakenly assumed was the ‘open city’ of Dresden.
THE FATE OF THE FORTRESSES
Those who did not load up their wagons and handcarts to leave clung to the vain hope that the stories of atrocities had been no more than propaganda. Some of the older generation remembered the Russians invading East Prussia during the First World War; they had come and gone, and life had continued. But this time was different; this was a ‘total war’ of annihilation on both sides. In May 1944, Stalin publicly announced that Soviet strategy, once the Red Army reached Germany, was, ‘… to kill the wounded German beasts in their lairs’. Soviet military media propagandists like Ilya Ehrenburg underpinned this policy, stoking the fires of retribution, inciting bloodlust, and demanding ‘merciless revenge’. Soviet propaganda no longer made any distinction between Germans and Nazis; they were all inhuman fascist beasts, and the Junker ruling class of East Prussia were condemned as being foremost among them.(16)
The Russians expected fanatical resistance from the heartland of the Prussian aristocracy in East Prussia, and the defenders of fortress Königsberg knew there would be no mercy. East Prussian estates have been compared to the great plantation houses and estates of the American South; these aristos and their tenant farmers had carved this land out of marsh and forest, and had fought and bled to retain it for over seven centuries. Those heading for the ports looked back on a landscape where their ancestors lay buried, fearing they would never see it again. Others chose suicide in their homes over risking the uncertainties of a trek through the frozen wastes of a Baltic winter.
‘Wir halten Königsberg’ (We’ll hold Königsberg) was inscribed above a gun emplacement in the city’s ancient defences, showing that where there is life, there is always hope, but never was that hope more misplaced than in East Prussia. The Russians bombed the city again, hitting it with a 1000-bomber raid and strafing it with over 800 fighters. Whilst the fighting continued and the city held, Königsberg shielded those refugees who continued to flood toward the nearby port of Pillau, the only remaining exit route out across the Baltic from East Prussia; if there was any purpose to the resistance it was this. The Nazi Gauleiter, Erich Koch, positioned himself outside the city, close to Pillau. While he was busy planning his own escape, he was urging the local population to maximum exertion and extolling the virtues of Goebbels’ last propaganda film, Kolberg, which urged that Germans were better off ‘buried in the ruins than surrender’. The last train left Königsberg for Berlin on 22nd January, and Russian tanks reached Elbing on 23rd January, completely cutting off East Prussia. One Soviet officer, describing the desolation of the East Prussian countryside, reported that, ‘The only civilians we saw were two very old men, whom my soldiers promptly spitted on their bayonets.’(17)
Gerda Deskau, aged thirteen, left Braunsberg (Braniewo), west of Königsberg (Kaliningrad) with her grandmother Anna, mother Frieda and five-year-old younger brother Gerhardt on 2nd February in temperatures of minus 20 degrees centigrade, heading for the only remaining escape route out across the frozen Baltic sea. This took the form of the Frische Nehrung (a stretch of sand dunes that lies off the coast in an arch to the east of Danzig and up towards Königsberg). Those that stayed behind would die in overwhelming numbers, or like their beloved grandfather be marched off into captivity in Siberia.
The journey Gerda’s family embarked upon resembled that of many millions fleeing west. In recounting her story for the first time in decades, the memories were vivid and at times overpowering. Gerda recalled the constant straffing fire of Russian fighter aircraft on the refugee columns as they crossed the frozen ice and the warnings from the men not to gather too close together, but to spread out to avoid crashing through the ice into the icy black depths of the Baltic sea; only then to hear the gut-wrenching crack of the ice and see a horse and cart with the family still aboard move away slowly beneath her feet.
On reaching the mainland again the fear of being caught and overrun on the narrow country roads, or crushed by the advancing Russian tanks who stopped for no one, or blown to bits by low flying aircraft remained a constant companion for the entirety of their three-month long trek west. Gerda recalled they were constantly terrified, so much so she cannot remember the cold, what she ate, what the sanitary conditions were like, only that they always slept with all their clothes on clutching their meagre possessions, ready to move at a moment’s notice. Gerda’s grandmother Anna slipped on the ice and fell right into the path of an advancing cart, only saved by the horse’s refusal to move forwards despite being mercilessly whipped by its owner. Her younger brother, who only managed to salvage one toy for the journey, had to be sat on by three family members when he tried to run out of a ditch to retrieve it during an air attack. Anna developed pneumonia, but stoically kept telling her family, ‘Never complain, never feel self-pity, just keep going, we have to tough it out.’ Upon reaching Danzig they saw bodies hanging in the trees where people had hanged themselves rather than face capture, as news of the Red Army’s atrocities spread.(17.2)
The battle for Königsberg was fought hand-to-hand and room-to-room. After the bombing, eyewitnesses reported the city to be aflame, yet Russian soldiers still had to use flame throwers and grenades to flush out the defenders. It was the hardest resistance the Red Army had yet encountered. Atrocities were committed that sent survivors out of their minds, surpassing the most ghoulish and gut-wrenching horror films.
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, international human rights lawyer, historian and former high-ranking UN official and now Professor of International Relations at the Geneva School of International Relations, has worked tirelessly and campaigned relentlessly for judicial protection of minorities across the globe. He also has never flinched from collecting and publishing eye witness accounts and testimonies, over many decades, that record the horrors of the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany. Authors like de Zayas and institutions in Germany such as the Lastenausgleich Archive in Bayreuth that helped me compile some of the recollections that are to follow, are the repository of the memories of the suffering endured by German civilians during the war, the occupation and dismemberment of Germany. They do not make for easy reading.
As the fighting ebbed and flowed through East Prussia, German soldiers retook towns and villages around Königsberg, where they came upon the vestiges of Soviet occupation. One massacre, that took place at Metgethen, a suburb of Königsberg, is particularly well documented (see link to the Library of Congress in the final photo section). It had been occupied by the Red Army from 29th January to 19th February before being retaken by German forces. One witness statement reads:
In one street I discovered the bodies of two young women, both about 20, who had apparently been tied by the legs, one limb each between two cars, and then torn apart when the vehicles were driven in opposite directions. It was an absolutely disgusting sight. In the same street I came upon a large villa… The house contained around sixty women… Half of them had to be taken immediately to a psychiatric hospital… on average they had been raped sixty to seventy times a day.(18)
Another witness recalled:
I suddenly came upon the bodies of twelve women and six children, most of the children had been killed by a blow to the head with a blunt instrument, some had numerous bayonet wounds in their tiny bodies. The women, mostly between forty and sixty years of age, had been killed with a knife or bayonet. All of them bore the unmistakable black and blue marks of beatings… I stopped for a rest at the village of Gross Heydekrug, I had arrived just as medics and civilians were burying some thirty-five mostly female bodies. Here again I saw the gruesome mistreatment practiced by the Russians, all shown to me by indignant soldiers and civilians. Most of the victims were again women. A corporal told me of a church where a girl and two soldiers had been found. The girl had actually been crucified on the altar cross, the two soldiers strung up either side.(18.i)
A report by Professor Dr Ipens, on file at the German Federal Archives, reads:
The mounds of bodies were without exception Germans, most of them not residents of Metgethen, but refugees who had been caught unawares by the Russian advance three weeks ago, and thus unable to flee farther west. The empty refugee trains still stood in the train station… The incident of the crucifixion in Heydekrug is true… The survivors of Metgethen were mentally in a state that bordered on insanity. It was not possible to release them back into the city or to friends and relatives. They could only be released into private care after they had regained some measure of emotional equilibrium, so that they no longer posed a threat to themselves and their gruesome accounts would not unduly alarm those who might come into contact with them.(18.ii)
The Eastern Documentation section of the German Federal Archives holds tens of thousands of reports by families who had their loved ones taken away from them in the most fiendish way, or who witnessed the atrocities of the Red Army and their lackey Polish and Czech militias. In one report, Marie Neuman recalls:
…the other (Russian) stood guard in front of the house, continuously calling out to the passing Russian troops, bringing in several hordes of seven to ten men, one group after another. My sister was on one side of the house with her two other children and my husband. My sister and I were raped again and again. The animals lined up for us. Once she and her daughter both screamed in such an awful way, that I thought they were being killed; and I wanted to go over to them when the policeman standing guard burst into our room and knocked my husband to the ground with his rifle. My niece, Ilschen, was crying and threw herself on my husband while the boy and I held the policeman’s arm crying loudly, otherwise he would probably have killed my husband. When we were finally granted a little peace and my husband had regained his senses, my sister came over to us and begged my husband to help her asking, ‘Karl, what’s going to happen to us?’ My husband said, ‘I can’t help any of you; we’re in the hands of a mob, not soldiers, and they’re all drunk out of their min
ds.’ I said, ‘Karl has to hide himself or they’ll beat him to death.’
But their nightmare was only just beginning. They all attempted to hide in the hayloft, but as they were climbing into the rafters three men appeared who had followed their tracks in the snow, and they were forced to climb down. The girls kissed their mother before she was dragged off to be gang-raped again. When they attempted to hide again, another rabble appeared in their yard. ‘What happened next I can barely write down, the pen sticks in my hand. They hanged us all in that hayloft, from the rafters, except the children. The mob strangled them by hand and with a rope. I came to on the floor, lying next to my loved ones. I had lost consciousness…’
Marie was later interned in a house with a lot of other German women of different ages, where they were routinely taken out by Russian soldiers and raped. ‘The next morning the Polish “gentlemen” wanted a turn with us, but none of us moved to go along. That one certain Pole, always the worst of the lot, had wedding bands on every single finger, top to bottom. Oh it’s so disgusting to think back on all of this.’ She was then moved to a makeshift prison in the city where the brutalisation continued, unabated. Her horrific accounts of what happened to herself, her family, neighbours and friends and to other Germans of the Baltic, while she journeyed through hell from East Prussia across the Oder, go on and on. She repeats, many times, that she just wanted to die or be shot.(19) Her experience simply defies the limits of human endurance in the face of the sheer horror of war and man’s seemingly limitless inhumanity to mankind.