On 8th April 1945 out of sheer desperation, the evacuation order for the remaining 120,000 citizens of Königsberg finally came, but the fighting was so intense they could not make it out of the city. Hans von Lehndorf was a doctor who remained at his hospital through the fighting and the occupation. He kept a heart-rending diary as he watched his family, friends and colleagues beaten, raped and murdered around him. Even in the depths of despair he initially showed a dark sense of humour, when writing of his first encounter with Russian troops in his hospital, saying, ‘I feel like I’m on a bear hunt but forgot my rifle.’(20) On 7th April, Lehndorf wrote, ‘The shooting stops and you can’t feel the ground under your feet. You feel as though you are falling, or sinking into an eternity… we look at one another with crooked grins, almost disappointed that we’re still here and that therefore it has to go on. We did not expect to resurface from the sea of flames…’(21) As each day passed, his despair rose, and on 12th April he wrote:
The women, whimpering or cursing, were dragged out with the help of the Poles. This unending devilry! ‘Davai suda — Women come!’ It has a more horrific sound than all the curses in the world. When that which should signify life stands under the sign of death, Satan’s triumph has reached its zenith. It did not matter to them in the least that they were handling semi-corpses. Eighty-year-old women were no safer from them than the unconscious ones. At one time a patient of mine with head injuries, as I discovered later, had been raped over and over again without knowing anything about it.(22)
When the city finally surrendered on 10th April, after four months of bitter fighting, NKVD figures reported only 60,526 prisoners being taken (Königsberg’s pre-war population had been 360,000). Many of the remaining men were marched straight off to Siberia. The great Junker estates and country houses were also favourite haunts for the amusement of soldiers of the Red Army. Owners were often concealed and protected by their workers, but if discovered, they were lucky to be shot on sight. The prospect of finding ‘aristocrat-fascists’ in their midst enraged the sensibilities of Soviet soldiers and raised their ardour to new heights of bestiality. The Lord of Grumbkow, Herr von Livonius, as one report recalls, ‘… had his arms and legs cut off and was tossed into the pigsty to be eaten by its denizens.’(23) Manor houses were looted and ancient family tombs broken open; even the dead were robbed. Some of the grandest houses and castles in Europe were ransacked and then set ablaze.(24) Those who could not take their own lives were abused, starved or worked to death; ration cards were not issued to Germans in East Prussia until the spring of 1947, and then only for essential workers.
A Jewish family who had clung to survival hiding in Königsberg throughout the war, with little cause to defend their former persecutors and who had hoped to welcome the Russians as liberators, gave a chilling account of the Red Army’s advance into Germany. Michael Wieck, wrote, ‘But how could we? They killed every man they saw, and raped every woman between seven and seventy. We heard screams and cries for help far into the night. They locked some people into the cellars and then set fire to the houses above.’(25) Michael met a Jewish-Russian officer who told him, ‘If you were really Jewish you would be dead, since you are alive you must have thrown your lot in with the Germans.’ Michael came to share the fate of his German neighbours in Königsberg describing the next circle of hell thus:
I have to force myself to recall the actions during those days… The first burial I had to take part in was in a basement of a half burnt-out house, where a half-naked young woman lay with dried bloodstains on her mouth and her thighs… I can remember almost all of these poor murdered women and men, I can see not only their faces but the way they lay and the items that surrounded them: children, the same as the old folks, most of them shot, some stabbed or strangled to death.(26)
Michael was interned in a prison camp, of which he wrote: ‘Those sixteen days in the cellars at Rothenstein were no less terrible than Auschwitz. First Hitler and the Nazis tried to destroy us and now it was the Russians. I had given up, I wanted to die…’(27) By July 1946, the surviving population numbers were down to 42,927, and by July 1947 they numbered only 34,888. The surviving German civilians of Königsberg continued to die in their droves long after the war had ended.
In April 1947, the Soviet Military Commander, reporting to the Russian Interior Minister, wrote:
A substantial element of these Germans, due to their extreme physical weakness, is not capable of sustaining any useful work… Those within the German population who are not working receive, with the exception of invalids and children (those children that are in care homes) no ration cards and are therefore in an extremely poor state. As a result of this situation the crime rate among the German population has increased (theft of food, robberies and even murder). In the first quarter of 1947 there have even been cases of cannibalism; in the entire region twelve cases have been registered. In these cases of cannibalism they not only use the meat of the bodies as sustenance but also kill their children and family members. There have been four cases of murder attributable to cannibalism. Among those Germans capable of work there have been cases of sabotage. There is a debilitating effect of the remaining German population upon the unstable part of the Soviet civilian population, but also on large parts of the Soviet army and fleet stationed here, and is the basis of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The infiltration of Germans who work as paid or unpaid servants to Soviet households is contributing to the development of spying. As the German population is having, as outlined above, such a negative effect on the annexation of these new Soviet territories, I see it as necessary to raise the question of the organised transfer of the Germans to the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany. I await your decision.(28)
By the time the transports for this transfer were organised, only 25,000 Germans had survived.
The fate of Königsberg was far from unique. At Gottesdorf (‘God’s Town’) in Silesia, German troops retook the town from the Russians, as they had with Metgethen, only to find the population had been massacred.ccxxxvii The most fanatical resistance of all came in Breslau, Germany’s largest city in the east and the region’s cultural capital. Both Dresden and Breslau were known as the ‘Luftschutzkeller — air-raid shelters of the Reich’, and for most of the war these cities had been out of the reach of Allied aircraft. Hundreds of thousands of women and children had been evacuated to these cities to escape the air raids. They were among the last major urban centres in Germany to remain unscathed and the evacuees were soon to be joined by a mass of fleeing refugees. Those who fled to Dresden assumed the city would be spared because it had been so popular with tourists before the war. It was ‘Florence on the Elbe’; surely the Allies would spare this jewel. As the Russian offensive crashed through the Ostwall, Zhukov’s advance covered 60 kilometres in only three days; Breslau and then Dresden were soon within the Russians’ grasp.
The first Soviet air raid hit Breslau on 18th January. The city’s Nazi Gauleiter hunkered down in an ‘exemplary’ display of the regime’s callous disregard for its own people; the city was to be rid of every additional mouth to feed, and anyone who could not stand and fight. That meant women and children had to get out now, irrespective of the conditions, the lack of preparation, or their chances of survival. There were chaotic scenes at the railway stations, with women desperate to get their children out of the city on one of the last trains leaving for the West; in one stampede, twenty-four children were trampled to death. On a train reserved for pregnant mothers, the sheer panic and crush caused women to give birth prematurely to stillborn children; others had to watch their babies die because they were unable to produce milk to feed them. When all the trains had left, the loudspeaker system in the city told the remaining women to gather with their children at assembly points in the city. Nazi functionaries went from house to house to speed their last minute evacuation. Then, in the early hours of 20th January 1945, in temperatures of minus 20 degrees centigrade and biting winds, 80,000 women and chi
ldren were forced to march west, over ice and through snowdrifts, toward the town of Kanth. In these conditions the old and very young soon came to grief. Vera Eckle recounts a Volkssturm officer and ‘a real Nazi’ who shouted, ‘Girls use the blankets to collect up all the dolls.’ She wondered what dolls these could be, until she stumbled over a bundle. She writes, ‘I picked it up and let it fall in the same moment. “Oh my God, they’re children, dead children,” I screamed. It was the most horrific thing I’ve seen in my life. I was numb but I could not stop crying.’(30) In these freezing conditions babies and the elderly stood zero chance of survival. The older members of the trek were seen sitting on the side of the road, waiting to freeze to death, rather than go on. Another young refugee from Breslau recalls, ‘I kept trying to breast feed my baby but she wouldn’t take it. The bottle of milk I had was frozen solid. When we finally reached a point where I could unwrap her she was deadly silent. A mother next to me simply said, “She’s dead.”’
More evacuations followed, of all those who were excess to requirements and not capable of fighting. On 21st January, civil servants, who had never held anything more offensive then a pen, were set marching off to the west (perhaps someone in the Nazi hierarchy had a dislike of bureaucrats), and with them went anyone else considered unfit for military service. Four days later, there was a mass expulsion of everyone else that the regime wanted rid of. But conditions were still treacherous; effectively the Party was condemning tens of thousands of their own citizens to death. On 20th January alone, of the 80,000 women and children who left Breslau, 18,000 are estimated to have died. In total 90,000 people died in the ongoing attempts to flee the city.(31) But as Breslau’s citizens were being press-ganged out of their city, other refugees were arriving, filled with more horror stories of treks being mown down by Russian tanks that crushed people and animals alike, leaving steaming trails of blood and guts in the snow; the advancing Russian tank brigades were determined to reach the Oder and they would stop for no one. While the Nazis were busy trying to empty the city of excess mouths to feed, they were loath to lose a single man who could limp into the fight. Police squads were also busy shooting ‘traitors’, including the mayor of the city, who was shot by firing squad for helping a family to get out to Berlin. At the same time, leading party officials could be seen packing their luxury vehicles to the hilt, their women adorned with fur coats; the double standards of the regime only became more apparent as the suffering of ordinary citizens went on.
By mid February, all departures but one (the Nazi Gauleiter Karl Hanke) were stopped; Breslau was completely encircled. Those who had got out, and survived the cold, headed for Dresden and its railway connections west. The stations in Dresden were packed to the gunwales with Silesian refugees, still hoping against hope that this city would not, or could not, be bombed. But at 22.00 hours on the night of 13th February, the first Allied aircraft arrived over the city and by 22.10 the fires had started. There was no anti-aircraft defence and no German fighters to hinder their progress. Wave after wave of Allied aircraft came at the city and by the time the firestorm took hold it could be seen 350 kilometres away. No one knows how many refugees were killed in Dresden that night, as no one knows how many had crammed into the city. Recent estimates put the number of bodies found at between 35,000–40,000 but this is a hard figure to estimate when temperature in excess of 1,000 degrees have cremated remains and when there is no official estimate of how many people were in the city centre at that time.
The author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, descended from third generation German immigrants, was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge and was an American POW in Dresden at the time of the bombing. Papers discovered by his son after his death, give a moving eyewitness account of what happened to the city:
Since the war (started), hospitals had become her (Dresden’s) prime concern. Every day hundreds of wounded came into the tranquil sanctuary from the East and the West. At night we would hear the dull rumble of distant air raids, we used to say… thank heaven we are in an ‘open city’ we thought, and so thought thousands of refugees… They flooded the city to twice its normal population. Dresden was surely among the world’s most beautiful cities. Her streets were broad, lined with shaded trees. She was sprinkled with countless little parks and statuary. She had marvellous old churches, libraries, museums, theatres, art galleries, beer gardens, a zoo and a renowned university… The accumulated treasure of hundreds of years. Dresden spoke eloquently of those things excellent in European civilisation wherein our debt lies deep… In February 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and embers; disembowelled her with high explosives and cremated her with incendiaries… (and) managed to exterminate in one bloody night more people than died in the whole London Blitz…
Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were then put to work by the Germans helping to clear the cellars of the bodies, of which he wrote:
It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but, boys, you killed an appalling number of women and children. We had to exhume their bodies and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks, so I know… Believe me it is not easy to rationalise the stamping out of vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored when gathering up babies in bushel baskets.
He added that not one of the railway bridges was hit and even the rail yards that had been were restored and to near normal service again in forty-eight hours.(32)
Back in Breslau, Hanke was throwing everyone who was left into the fight; children as young as fourteen were armed to go into the attack, and the Hitler Youth, as in Berlin, played a major part in the city’s defence, with half of them being killed before the battle was over.(33) During lulls in the fighting, people would venture out to try and forage for food and firewood, but they might then be caught and killed as the artillery fire opened up again. The streets were littered with body parts, which the remaining young girls, who were not useful for the fight, were commandeered to collect for burial.
Marianne Stiebitz, who was thirteen at the time, recalls:
As things got worse and worse, my mother came to wake me one morning at 04.00 and said ‘Listen to me, we have to melt some snow now, we have nothing left to eat or drink. One more thing, we have razor blades at the ready and may eventually have to cut our own arteries, when we simply cannot handle this torture any more.’(34)
One priest alone reported 120 suicides a day.(35)
On 5th May, Gauleiter Hanke, who sent so many children to their death, proclaimed to his military commander that he was too young and too important a figure to die. He then saved his own skin escaping the city in a Fieseler Storch Aircraft.ccxxxviii Berlin surrendered on 2nd May 1945. Breslau held out until the evening of 6th May, but even then she did not surrender unconditionally. She was promised safe conduct for her civilians; not that anyone really believed the Russians would honour their promise. As with everywhere else, the Red Army was given three days of murderous rampaging through the cities they had captured as the ‘spoils of war’ before any attempt at restoring order was made. In practice, the murders, rapes, looting and wanton destruction went on until well after the war. German soldiers were marched off through a shattered city to camps in Siberia and the remaining civilians were given safe passage to the concentration camps that had only recently been emptied of their former Jewish and Polish inmates. Lambsdorf Concentration camp became know as the ‘Gateway to Hell’ and was soon crammed full of Breslauers.
In the ancient Hanse city of Danzig, there was a surreal period from mid-January to mid-March when it remained untouched by bombing or war; the Red Army had rushed past Danzig heading for the Baltic port of Kolberg. With blacked-out windows and its streets covered in a blanket of snow, this beautiful city — one of the oldest and most vital trading centres of the East — nervously awaited its fate, wondering if it would be spared. It would not. On 9th March, the ancient Teutonic Order’s Fortress of Marienburg — the largest brick fortress in the world
which lay just to the south of Danzig — fell to the Russians, and that night the rumble of Lancaster engines droned over Danzig. The city was bombed three times between 9th and 18th March. In the middle of the mayhem the Nazi Gauleiter of the city, Albert Forester, gave the usual diatribe about how he would remain to see either ‘victory or death in Danzig’.
Three German warships kept up an accurate barrage against advancing Soviet tanks from the bay of Danzig. Although the Prinz Eugen, Leipzig and the Schlesien blew scores of T34s to bits, this only delayed the inevitable. But every extra hour meant more German refugees could board ships to get out. On 24th March, the Russians dropped leaflets promising to spare the population and their property if they surrendered. No one believed them, and no one even bothered to respond. The last ship to leave Danzig left on 25th March, at which point the Russians took the heights over the city preventing any more ships from docking, ranged in their mortars on the harbour, and began shelling the refugees that were left behind. Their artillery now pounded the city at will. Those left in the city attempted to make it to the Hela Peninsula — the spit of land that bowed down into the port of Danzig like the branch of a tree — where ships kept evacuating the citizens of Danzig until 8th May, the last day of the war. On 25th March, Gauleiter Foresterccxxxix arrived at this spot with his baggage train. His fellow citizens were astonished to see their glorious ‘victory or death’ leader scrambling to save his own skin while his special SS and police units were hanging countless citizens of the city for desertion, some as young as fifteen and for reasons no more onerous than they had gone home for lunch. Avenues were lined with victims hanging from trees with signs around their necks proclaiming their ‘treachery’.
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