Danzig fell on 29th March, at which point an estimated 130,000 of its pre-war 380,000 citizens remained in the city. However, the worst was not over. From 31st March, the city was opened for the entertainment of the Soviet troops, and a frenzied combination of looting and destruction began. Wounded German soldiers at a hospital that had been set alight were used for target practice as they tried to escape the burning building.(36) The city was then systematically put to the torch. One beautiful row of late medieval villas after another was plundered and then set alight. Whether it was revenge for the scorched earth policies of Stalin and the Wehrmacht, which had decimated the territories of their own nations, or just pure nihilism born of jealousy and anger at seeing the vast riches of the Reich compared to those of Soviet Russia, there is no doubt that the genocidal rhetoric of Soviet propaganda and the dehumanisation of the enemy played their part. The historical centre of Danzig, which had survived the entire war unscathed until March 1945, was completely destroyed. The symbol of the city, the Krantor (Crane Gate), was destroyed for a bet. Two Russians wanted to see if such thick walls could be blown up. The bet was for a single bottle of vodka.(37) Only the old crusader cathedral, the Marienkirche, the largest brick cathedral in the world, stood smoldering in the ruins, giving the inhabitants a visual reference point among what little remained of the city.
This scene was repeated time and time again. People in German cities, towns and villages across her eastern territories saw the soldiers and Volkssturm marched off to Siberia, where many languished and died, until Stalin’s death in 1953. As for the German civilian population, the sick, old, women and children were ‘transferred’ once they had served their purpose, and the remainder, who were fit and healthy, remained as slave labourers until the late 1940s. A British journalist, Denis Weaver, who had visited Danzig before the war, where Nazi Germany had fired the opening salvos of the Second World War, returned in July 1946 and wrote, ‘Danzig is a city which has had its heart ripped out. Remnants of medieval gold adornments hang sadly from ruined columns. As I walk through the city I only recognised three buildings. The city is dead. It is said the Russians destroyed it systematically street by street.’(38)
A SENSELESS STRUGGLE
Posen (Poznan) was the first of the fortresses to fall. Others, such as Oppeln, Küstrin and Frankfurt an der Oder, soldiered on through March and April. By 3rd April, Vienna had fallen to the West, but not before it had been bombed and witnessed the destruction of its beautiful opera house. Berlin was encircled from 25th April and surrendered on 2nd May. The last great city of Hitler’s Reich to fall was Prague, on 8th May. Although Hitler’s call to turn these cities into fortresses may have prolonged the suffering of their populations, the fate of the few that surrendered without a fight was hardly any better. Demmin, a small town captured by the Russians, surrendered unconditionally without a shot being fired. The Soviet commanders, exhilarated at taking an undamaged prize, declared the city open for looting and pillaging for three days, and 900 of its citizens committed suicide. As part of the May Day Victory celebration, the Soviets torched the city, shooting anyone who tried to extinguish the flames.(39)
On 1st May, the village of Treuenbrietzen was also opened for a rampage of victory rapine; and when a Russian lieutenant colonel was allegedly shot by one of his victims, at least eighty-eight male civilians were rounded up and shot in ‘retaliation’, although some reports say that as many as 1,000 men were rounded up and taken to a nearby forest clearing and shot.(40)
The population of Wirkheim (Aleksandrow Kujawski), near Thorn (Torun), was similarly massacred by a combination of Soviet regulars and Polish civilians. And all the surviving Volkssturm (‘Dad’s Army’) of the battle for Graudenz (Grudziadz) were rounded up after the surrender and shot inside the walls of the Courbiere fortress. In the village of Galtgarben near Königsberg the Russians murdered the entire surviving civilian population. In Neustettin (Szczecinek) over 300 civilians were recorded as having been massacred after the surrender. There are countless such reports on the bestial nature of the Red Army’s bloody rampage through Germany’s eastern territories, with the true number of civilians murdered virtually impossible to calculate with any degree of accuracy. Estimates vary enormously depending on the ‘sympathies’ of the author.(41) Rage and revenge of Russian soldiers who had witnessed so much death and destruction on their own soil, and who had not been on leave since they had been conscripted, led to many of them becoming desensitised to the scenes of Armageddon all around them; murder and mayhem had become the norm. Soviet propaganda egged them on, not least the tirades of Ilya Ehrenburg who wrote, ‘Kill, Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn is anything but evil!… Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, KILL… Soldiers of the Red Army, German women are yours.’ When the editor of Krasnaya Zvezda attempted to prevail on Ehrenburg to tone down some of his articles, Stalin personally intervened telling the editor, ‘Let him write as he pleases.’ The Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, recalled, ‘All of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot.’ Members of the Red Army were thereby actively encouraged through their daily diet of vitriolic propaganda to take revenge on every German, irrespective of whether they were Nazis or innocent civilians.(42) But it was more than that; this was a call to ethnically cleanse the Germans from vast tracts of Central and Eastern Europe, calls that compared Germans to vermin, disease-carrying rats and bacteria. Ehrenburg’s rhetoric was not dissimilar to that used by Joseph Goebbels to describe Jews and as early as 1942 he wrote, ‘We cannot live as long as these grey green slugs are alive… today there are no stars in the sky; today there is only one thought: kill the Germans. Kill them all and dig them into the earth.’(42.1) There is still incredibly no shortage of historians who refuse to call the Soviet policy of sweeping the Germans out of vast tracts of Central and Eastern Europe ‘ethnic cleansing’, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
It would however be misleading to state that the Red Army reserved rape and murder solely for the Germans. The Red Army’s murderous rampage through Eastern Europe was indiscriminate. They raped and murdered women of all races and from countries that had been their allies as well as their enemies. Ukrainian, Polish and Czech women were no safer than Germans. A large number of the rapes and subsequent murders had nothing to do with revenge; they were simply nihilistic orgies of violence from an army notorious for its violent drunken indiscipline.(43)
The NKVD even lost no time in orchestrating mass shooting of its own citizens. In the Silesian town of Oppeln (Opole) on 7th March 1945, NKVD units shot 250 Russian POWs. The prevailing proposition, which had been fermented by the NKVD earlier in the war to counter the wave of mass desertions, held that any Soviet citizen who was sent to Germany, either as a slave labourer or as a POW, and who failed to either commit suicide or join the partisans, was ipso facto a ‘Traitor of the Motherland’. According to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, this betrayal ‘was the foulest deed in Russian history… (and) in such circumstances, German civilians could expect little mercy.’(44) A report from Opperau (Operów), to the south west of Breslau, confirmed the harsh realities. It states:
Suddenly in the hall of the house, we heard loud screaming. A Russian appeared with a girl whom he was brutally beating. He took the weeping child into a neighbouring room. Again and again, we heard screaming and pleading… but the pleading was to no avail. The whimpering grew quieter, then everything went silent. Soon after the Russian left the room, some women then went next door to have a look. It was a horrific scene. A thirteen year old girl lay bleeding on the floor — completely naked — and dead.(45)
A sixteen-year-old Red Army soldier recounts a horrendous incident he witnessed, one that still haunts him, in the Lower Silesian German town of Sorau (Zary). His company served alongside a Soviet penal battalion who had been given the motto ‘
wash away your sins in your blood’. He recalls; ‘They did this regularly but not only with their own blood. I watched with my own eyes as a horde of these criminals raped a young girl. As they finished their shameful act they stuck a sharpened wooden stake into the girl’s vagina and let her die a tormented death.’(46) Joachim, a German who was ten years old at the time, recounts, ‘I had to watch the Russians rape my mother as a boy. And it was not only one of them… No woman was safe any more. The daughter of a farmer who was in the 8th grade, they fell upon her and her mother and dragged them away. They hanged themselves: a woman with twins — the three of them hung there — I had to help cut them down and bury them. I was only a boy; I had to help with this as I was big for my age.’(47)
No Soviet soldier has ever been brought to trial, either by military tribunal or a court of law, for any of these war crimes. The perverse thinking at home and abroad has been that you could not commit a war crime against a German, no matter whether a baby, mother or a child, just because they were German. Russian historians and the Putin establishment have taken great exception to the depiction of Soviet war crimes by British historians in recent years, even when these historians have been at great pains to state that these crimes were not on the scale of those committed by Nazi Germany upon the Soviet Union. Rape in the eastern part of Germany, and the remnant of Germany that the Soviets kept as their own occupation zone, continued well beyond the end of the war, which undermines the argument that this was merely revenge in the heat of battle. Cold blooded and calculated acts of rape continued to be reported until 1948, at which point the Soviet government decided that, in the interests of stability and communist fraternity, they had better confine their troops to barracks. In total, it is estimated that between 2 and 2.5 million German women were raped by the Red Army. Many were not only gang raped, with queues of soldiers waiting in line outside their houses as though queuing for a brothel, but were gang raped dozens and dozens of times. Hans von Lehndorf treated one woman at a hospital in East Prussia who said she had been raped 128 times. Some committed suicide after only one attack rather than live with the shame. Those who were not murdered as part of their ordeal often died of the consequences of gang rape, either bleeding to death for lack of doctors and medicines, or as a consequence of botched abortions. The true number of victims of this insidious, dehumanising weapon of war will never be known.(48)
There is an argument that this level of barbarity was simply the result of cause and effect; issue should be taken with this view, as there is ample evidence against it. The ‘Winter War’ against Finland was begun by the Soviet Union. When Finnish archives relating to the Soviet invasion during the Continuation War of 1939–41 opened in 2006, they detailed a catalogue of horrors, proving that Soviet ‘commando’ raids penetrated deep into Finnish territory, raping, terrorising and murdering women and children long before the German invasion of Russia.ccxl The Poles recount atrocities committed by the Red Army and NKVD units in the area of Poland occupied by Soviet troops between September 1939 and June 1941, which was also before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Polish historian, Tomasz Strzembosz, has compared the actions of these NKVD units with those of the SS Einsatzgruppen. The American historian, Carroll Quigley, states that of the 320,000 Polish POWs the Russians took in 1939, over 100,000 were murdered.(49) Every Polish town in old Poland and in the ‘regained territories’ is awash with memorials for those who suffered both Nazi and Soviet atrocities, and not least for those deported from eastern Poland to Gulags in Siberia, few of whom ever returned.
In Budapest it is estimated the Soviets raped 50,000 women and children. In his book, Behind Closed Doors, Laurence Rees comments that, ‘… as far as the crime of rape was concerned the Soviets were in a league of their own.’ Reports of the excesses were sent to Stalin’s henchman, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, who was head of the NKVD. Lavrentiy Pavlovich would hardly have cared; he was a serial murderer and rapist himself. After his fall from grace, following Stalin’s death, the full horror of his brutal excesses came out into the open. His death squads had snatched victims from the streets and Beria had then ‘invited them for dinner’ where they were drugged, raped and some of the victims murdered. Those that were not killed were then sent to a Gulag or received flowers, depending on their ‘standing’.ccxli (50) Undoubtedly, among the most tragic victims of the war were the orphaned children — no matter whether they were Poles, Ukrainians, Russians or Germans — who were left roaming the ruins of the cities crying for their mothers, abandoned by everyone, left to starve to death or forage an existence out of their apocalyptic surroundings.
The Wolfskinder, or German ‘beggar orphans’ roamed the countryside of the Baltic from Lithuania to Pomerania, for years after the war ended. Some of them formed gangs to survive, living in the forests and sneaking out to steal food from local farmers. Estimates suggest there were around 5,000 of these tragic orphans wandering around in Lithuania alone.(52) One such child was Liesabeth Otto whose deeply moving fate received considerable attention following Guido Knopp’s tremendous television series Die Grosse Flucht (The Great Exodus), for ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehn – the equivalent of BBC Two). Knopp is himself the son of Silesian expellees and has been criticised in some quarters for having made documentaries that are too empathetic to the suffering of Germans during the Second World War. The criticism is made by those who usually don’t wish to see any Germans portrayed as human beings, even less as victims of war. The fact that Knopp has made a very wide array of excellent documentaries on a wide range of subjects including the horrors of the Holocaust and has never in any way, shape or form shied away from depicting the genocidal atrocities committed by the Third Reich makes such criticism hard to justify. Most of Knopp’s excellent historical documentaries have been dubbed into English but this one, to the best of my knowledge and for some unknown reason, has yet to be screened in English. The series recounts a number of personal stories, some of which I’ve cited here. Liesabeth’s story began in East Prussia at the tender age of seven. Her father was at the front and she, her mother, her older brother and her sister thought themselves lucky to have made it onto one of the last trains to Königsberg and then from there, onto a ship heading for Danzig. Liesabeth remembers how upset she was when she discovered shrapnel had damaged her favourite doll after their small convoy of ships was attacked (during which two of the ships were sunk). When they reached Danzig, it was far from the refuge they had hoped for. They spent the last days of the fighting in an air raid shelter, hunkering down as the intense artillery bombardment hailed down on the city outside. Liesabeth recalls:
How long we were in the cellar for I don’t know. As the door opened Russian soldiers came in and lit up the room with their torches. They all wanted watches. Then they shot one man, everyone screamed… Finally they took the girls and women with them, my mother was one of them. When she came back she was strange. She lay down next to us on the floor, with her face towards the ground. Again and again they came for the women and girls, not all of them came back.
Liesabeth’s family was spared the deportations but her mother could not escape the constant attentions of the Russian soldiers.
They raped her repeatedly and after each episode she would lie on the floor, in an empty room, as she had done before, often calling my name, ‘Liesabeth, Liesabeth, where is my child, Liesabeth?’ One day I was sent to collect food, as spring had begun… When I came back they would not let me see my Mum. ‘Mummy is sleeping’ said my sister Christel, crying, the other women that were there were crying also. At some point I was allowed to see my Mum, and even though I was very young, I understood, she was not sleeping because she was completely cold and stiff.
The Russians eventually sent the three children back to their hometown in East Prussia where the two oldest children were put to work and Liesabeth spent the days foraging for food again. Liesabeth received no rations, as she was too young to work. Her brother and sister received starvation rations insuffici
ent to sustain themselves. One day starving Liesabeth ate her sister’s ration of butter and when Christel discovered her sister’s crime, she went ballistic and told Liesabeth to get out and not come back. In an effort to make up for her ‘selfishness’, she went to the railway station to look for food. The doors closed on the carriage she was foraging in, and when they opened again the train had crossed the border into Lithuania. She went from house to house, hoping that the farmers would take pity on a dishevelled and starving eight-year-old girl living a hand-to-mouth existence. But people were afraid to help even an orphaned German girl. Soviet NKVD forces were fighting Lithuanian resistance fighters in a bitter struggle; hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians were being shipped to the Gulag and giving assistance or shelter to any Germans was strictly forbidden.(53)
When she was nine, Liesabeth was given refuge in a barn, only to be raped by the farmer, who then bundled her into a sack and threw her into a river like an unwanted cat. A traumatised, bleeding young child, she ‘thanked her Guardian Angel’ for saving her from death by drowning when she was rescued by two passing fishermen who had witnessed the farmer throwing the wriggling sack into the river. When she came across a group of older German Wolfskinder in the forests she told them of her ordeal. In an act of revenge the boys returned to the barn where she had been raped and set it alight. They then stood and watched it burn from the hills above. It was a small act of defiance in lives blighted by pitiless indifference and outright cruelty; their nightmarish existences would make Dickensian tales seem bearable by comparison. Liesabeth lived this way for eight years, until the autumn of 1953, when she was eventually caught stealing food and sentenced to work in a child labour camp in Siberia. The Soviet Union was desperate for any kind of workers it could find, no matter how young they were. Liesabeth remained in the camp, where she learned Russian, and also learned to read and write, until she was seventeen. She was always hungry and cold but for her it was a more regular existence than foraging for food in the woods. When she was released the Soviet authorities sent her back to Lithuania, but again she could find no regular existence, struggling to find food or a roof over her head. In sheer desperation she decided she preferred the idea of returning to the children’s Gulag over starving to death as a beggar in Lithuania; she stole food again in the hope of being sent back. However, even though she was only seventeen, this time she was sent to an adult Gulag near Archangel where conditions were unspeakably worse. There she rotted and prayed for release, which finally came six years later in 1959.
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