The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  ‘A blind feeling of hatred’ was how one veteran described the attitude of Soviet troops as they entered Reich territory.4 After the Wehrmacht’s crimes in Russia, it was the Germans’ turn to suffer. More than 12 million Russian civilians had been killed by the Nazis following the invasion of the Soviet Union. A month before the attack, Hitler authorized German troops ‘to strike such terror into the population that it loses all will to resist’.5 Now Red Army commanders had whipped up their troops to rape, pillage and murder without fear of punishment.

  The propaganda of hate was intended to arouse Soviet soldiers to fight more fiercely; it was also necessary to counteract four years of war weariness. Major Lev Kopelev, a dissident writer, later arrested by Stalin for anti-Soviet behaviour, noted a conversation with his superior in the Political Administration of the 50th Army: ‘Zabashtansky called me in for a heart-to-heart talk.6 “You can understand,” he said, “we’re all sick and tired of this war, and the front-line soldiers most of all. When we were fighting on our own soil, everything was simple: we were fighting for our homes, to drive the enemy away. But now we’re on their soil, and the soldier who’s been under fire for four years now, and has been wounded – and knows that his wife and kids are hungry back home – he’s got to go on fighting, on and on! Forward, always forward! … So what’s needed now? First, for the soldier to go on hating, so he’ll want his revenge. And second, for the soldier to have a personal interest in going on fighting, to know why he should climb out of that trench and face that machine gun once again. So now, with this order, everything is clear: he’ll get to Germany; and there everything is his – goods, women, do what you want! Hammer away! So their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will remember and be afraid!”’

  To begin with, the Russians encountered fierce German resistance and progress was slow. After the first few days, however, defences started to crumble and the Red Army moved at speed across the frozen ground. The landscape of East Prussia was mainly flat and forested and the approaching thunder of artillery created terrible fear in the isolated towns and villages. Etched into the minds of people living there were images of the atrocities committed at Nemmersdorf in the north-east of the province.7 The Red Army had briefly occupied the town in October 1944 and, after the Wehrmacht recaptured it, Goebbels sent propaganda units to film the ‘gruesome Bolshevik crimes’. There were reports and images of mutilated dead bodies, of naked women nailed to barn doors, and babies with their ‘heads bashed in’. Dozens of women and young girls had been raped many times over by Red Army soldiers before they were murdered.

  Panic at the thought of suffering the same fate as the residents of Nemmersdorf spread like a contagion, compounded by the fact that there were no plans for the evacuation of the civilian population. Claiming that the Wehrmacht would ‘smash any enemy attack’, Nazi authorities considered any talk of evacuation treason. They exhorted East Prussians to defend their province to the last, and threatened punishment to anyone caught fleeing, while simultaneously making preparations for their own departure. The consequence was that the greater part of the civilian population was not evacuated from the towns until the force of the explosions from the Soviet artillery began to shatter the windowpanes in their houses.

  By then, they were trapped in towns without water, gas or electricity, waiting for transport that the Nazis promised, but never came. All motorized vehicles had been requisitioned by the retreating Wehrmacht, and the trains had stopped running. Even by East Prussian standards, it was a bitterly cold January, and the prospect of days and nights out in the open, trying to make headway on icy roads, was frightening.8 Some chose suicide, taking capsules of cyanide readily available in town pharmacies. Others fled to the forests, digging foxholes in the snow, where they hoped to remain undetected by the Russian troops. Most, however, elected to flee by road. Total confusion reigned. ‘Panic grips the people as the cry goes up: “The Russians are close,”’ one woman recalled.9 ‘Then a man comes by on horseback, shouting in a loud voice: “Save yourselves, you who can. The Russians will be here in half an hour.” We’re overcome by a paralysing fear.’

  In the last ten days of January, some 2 million East Prussians fled into the unknown. The forced induction of all men into the Volkssturm meant that the majority of those taking flight were women, children and the elderly. Mothers had to harness horses and load up the family’s belongings, together with food and other provisions necessary to survive the coming days in the open. Seizing whatever transport was available – hay carts, wagons, even prams – they set off along the roads out of their towns and villages. Hurriedly fabricated awnings, made from strips of carpet, covered the possessions they had managed to pile on to the wagons. ‘It was sad and touching to an extreme degree to see the sorry farm carts, out of which the muffled heads of children peeped in curiosity,’ one woman noted.10 ‘The pots and pans tied to them clattered loudly. Often a sheep or a cow followed behind.’

  In the snow and ice, progress was painfully slow. Columns kept halting because carts were overloaded and axles broke.11 On icy surfaces, undernourished horses found it hard to work, and in places the drifts were so deep that the animals had to be uncoupled from the wagons while the women dug the snow from under the wheels. Some carts were drawn by oxen, whose unshod hooves, worn raw by the roads, left trails of blood in the snow.12

  The flight of the ‘trekkers’, as they were called, meant that medieval towns founded by the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century, whose shields bore a black cross similar to the swastika, were depopulated within days, sometimes even hours. Advancing from the south and from the east, Soviet troops found themselves entering ghost towns where the only signs of the former inhabitants were the packs of dogs roaming the streets and messages pinned to the doors of the houses. They had been left for menfolk fighting at the front in the hope they would return. ‘Dear Papa!’ one read.13 ‘We must escape to Alt-P by cart.fn1 From there on to the Reich by ship.’

  Rampaging through the abandoned towns, Soviet troops wreaked havoc. Leonid Rabichev, a signals lieutenant with the 31st Army, described the sacking of Goldap in the eastern part of the region: ‘The entire contents of shops were thrown out on to the sidewalks through the broken shop fronts.14 Thousands of pairs of shoes, plates and radio sets, all sorts of household and pharmacy goods and food were all mixed up. From apartment windows, clothes, pillows, quilts, paintings, gramophones and musical instruments were hurled on to the street. The roadways were blocked with all this stuff.’ A few hours later, in the nearby Rominten Forest, the troops stormed through Göring’s hunting lodge, formerly owned by the kaiser, destroying valuable pictures and furniture. With black paint, one soldier scrawled ‘khuy’, the Russian for ‘prick’, across a nude of Aphrodite by Rubens.15 Envy, as well as revenge, prompted the mindless destruction: ‘German villages looked like heaven compared with ours,’ one Russian officer noted.16 ‘Everything was cultivated. There were so many beautiful buildings. They had so much more than we did.’ The loathing for anything German was so visceral that, as another wrote, ‘Even the trees were enemy.’17

  The wrecking continued in town after town. Private Efraim Genkin witnessed the stripping of Gumbinnen, 20 miles to the north of Goldap. ‘Germans abandoned everything and our people, like a huge crowd of Huns, invaded the houses,’ he wrote home to his family.18 ‘Everything is on fire, and down from pillows and feather-beds is flying about. Everyone, starting with a soldier and ending with a colonel, is pulling away loot. Beautifully furnished apartments and luxurious houses were smashed in a few hours and turned into dumps where torn curtains are covered in jam that is pouring from broken jars … this town has been crucified.’ Three days later, after leaving Gumbinnen, he wrote: ‘Soldiers have turned into avid beasts. In the fields lie hundreds of shot cattle, on the road pigs and chickens with their heads chopped off. Houses have been looted and are on fire. What cannot be taken away is being broken and destroyed. The Germans are right to be running away from us lik
e from a plague.’

  Moving at speed through the flat landscape, the Soviet troops quickly caught up with the trekkers. The driving wind and the snow deadened all sound; muffled against the cold, with scarves wrapped around their heads, the columns of refugees often did not hear or see the frost-camouflaged tanks until they were upon them. Sometimes, the tanks simply ploughed on, their tracks crushing all in their path. If the troops stopped, it was to rape young girls and women. Leonid Rabichev described the scene outside Goldap: ‘The roads were filled with old people, women and children, large families moving slowly on carts, on vehicles or on foot towards the west.19 Our tank troops, infantry, artillery, signals, caught up with them and cleared the way for themselves by pushing their horses and carts and belongings into the ditches on either side of the road. Then thousands of them forced the old women and children aside. Forgetting their honour and duty and forgetting about the retreating German units, they pounced on the women and girls. Women, mothers and their daughters, lie to the right and the left of the highway and in front of each one stands a laughing gang of men with their trousers down. Those already covered in blood and losing consciousness are dragged to the side. Children trying to help them have been shot. There is laughter and roaring and jeering, screams and moans. And the soldiers’ commanders – majors and lieutenant colonels – are standing there on the highway. Some are laughing, but some are also conducting the event so that all their soldiers without exception could take part. This is not an initiation rite, and it has nothing to do with revenge against the accursed occupiers, this is just hellish diabolical group sex.’

  Further along the road, Rabichev came across another column of trekkers. This one had been mowed down by Soviet tanks: ‘As far as the eye can see, there are corpses of women, old people and children, among piles of clothing and overturned carts.’20 Later that day, after he was ordered to find a billet for his platoon for the night, he recorded other atrocities: ‘I took my platoon to a hamlet two kilometres from the highway.21 In all the rooms are corpses of children, old people and women who have been raped and shot. We are so tired that we don’t pay attention to them. We are so tired that we lie down among the corpses and fall asleep.’

  Rabichev’s platoon reached Goldap on 20 January – a week after the launch of the offensive. By then, tens of thousands of East Prussians had been killed or captured; but hundreds of thousands were still on the roads, streaming westwards. For upwards of half a million trekkers it was too late. On 24 January, advance units of the Red Army reached Elbing, closing the escape route to the west and trapping the refugees in a pocket of land along the Baltic Coast. Compressed alongside them were the last remaining forces of the German Army, fighting with their backs to the sea.

  The pocket – about 40 miles long and 12 miles wide – reached up to the banks of the Frisches Haff, a huge lagoon formed from the narrow spit of land that jutted into the Baltic Sea a few miles east of Stutthof.

  Only two means of flight – both extremely perilous – were left for the half a million trekkers. One way was to escape by ship from Pillau, the harbour at the entrance to the lagoon. The alternative was to cross the frozen lagoon to the Nehrung, the narrow spit of land opposite. From there, they could get to the port of Danzig, where they hoped to be evacuated by sea to the west.

  To reach Pillau meant having to skirt the Soviet troops outside Königsberg. With time running out, over 450,000 trekkers opted to risk the 6-mile journey across the ice.

  The ditches along the roads leading to the banks of the Frisches Haff bore witness to their tragedy. Soviet air attacks, exhaustion and the extreme cold had taken their toll, and horses and people lay dead or dying beside all sorts of household items: parcels of linen, pots and pans, pictures and valuable pieces of antique furniture – things people had jettisoned to lighten their load or to free up space in their carts for those travelling on foot.

  Now, stranded on the banks of the lagoon, the trekkers had to wait their turn to cross the ice. A constant barrage of artillery rained down and Soviet planes raked the columns with machine-gun fire. Looking across the lagoon, the leaden sky merged with the grey expanse of ice, making it impossible to see the spit of land the families were trying to reach. The one blessing was that a foot of snow fell on 24 January and the approach roads were impassable, even for the Red Army’s tanks.

  That night, the endless columns began to cross the Frisches Haff at the risk of their lives. While the ice on the lagoon was 18 inches thick, Soviet shells had blown great holes in it, forcing the Wehrmacht to map out the route with trees and branches. For many, the hazardous journey ended in tragedy. In some cases, wagons and entire families tipped into the ice. Gertrud Dannowski made the crossing after fleeing from a small village some 15 miles inland: ‘Bullets and pieces of ice ricocheted off the tin roof of our cart … It was every man for himself in a desperate attempt to get off the ice as quickly as possible.22 Dawn broke over a horrific scene: body upon body, man and horse alike. Often enough, only the drawbars of the carts protruded out of the ice.’

  ‘The ice was breaking and in some places we had to drag ourselves through painfully cold water, 25 centimetres deep,’ remembered one trekker, who crossed the lagoon on foot.23 ‘We continually tried the surface with sticks … We often slipped and thought we were already lost. With our clothes wet through, movement was difficult. But blind terror drove us on, in spite of the shivering cold.’

  Others on foot, already exhausted after the arduous trek from their towns and villages, were grateful for a lift. Lore Ehrich and her two young children were offered space on a farmer’s cart: ‘During the very first half-hour the colt, which was tied to the side of the cart, broke both legs and had to be left behind.24 A short time afterwards one of the two strong horses pulling the cart fell into a hole in the ice. With great difficulty, it was liberated with an axe. The farmer was shaking from head to foot because he was afraid that this animal might also break its legs, for one horse alone would not have been able to do the hard work of pulling the cart. We were compelled to cross at long intervals from the other carts, and also to remain for hours at the same spot. Anyone who tried to overtake the others was greeted with the most violent words.’

  While thousands died, hundreds of thousands of trekkers survived the perilous journey across the ice. When they reached the other side, just one road led off the thin spit of land to Danzig, where they hoped to be evacuated to the Reich. No wider than the width of two carts, a mile after it joined the mainland it passed directly in front of Stutthof – less than 10 yards from the main gates to the camp.

  Here, between two right-angled bends, the road narrowed. After 24 January, with 450,000 trekkers fleeing along it, it did not take long for the road to become gridlocked.

  27.

  At 5 a.m. on the morning of 25 January, the alarm sounded throughout the camp.

  Fey opened her eyes and listened out for approaching aircraft. Above the wail of the siren, she could hear the thud of shells in the near distance; but as the minutes passed and no planes flew over, it was clear this was not an air-raid warning. Instead, from the direction of the camp, came the sounds of great commotion: revving engines, screeched orders, packs of dogs barking and snarling. It could only mean one thing: the Russians were very near.

  The other women were awake too. Steeling themselves against the cold, they got out of bed and crowded around the window. It was still dark and it was snowing heavily. White, strobing lights flickered across the sky to the south, but it was impossible to tell what was going on from the angle from which they were looking. Through the curtain of snow, backlit by the perimeter lights, all they could see was the high wall that blocked their view of the camp.

  ‘We stood there, shivering with cold and fear,’ Fey recalled. ‘We were convinced the SS would simply abandon us to the Russians and escape themselves.’

  On the other side of the wall, the lights were on in all the barracks. Usually this was the quiet hour, before the camp stirre
d, but the entire workforce was on the move, heading towards the parade ground. The siren was still going and the snow blurred the lines of men and women – some 25,000 in total – snaking around the perimeter fence and back along the narrow roads to the barrack. Kapos, wielding sticks, and groups of SS, each with an Alsatian on a short leash, stood at intervals of twenty paces, harrying the lines along. The temperature was minus 10 degrees Celsius and a strong wind, backing in gusts, was blowing off the sea.

  A fleet of motorcycles stood parked up by the main gates, ready to escort the columns of prisoners. With the Russians at Elbing, 30 miles from Stutthof, the commandant was preparing to evacuate the camp. Over the preceding days, the guards had worked around the clock to destroy incriminating records; now, the order from Berlin was to get the prisoners out before the Russians arrived.

  At 6 a.m., Commandant Hoppe addressed the assembled inmates over the PA system. ‘The icy wind cut through our bones,’ political prisoner Meta Vannas recalled, ‘but we were full of hope.1 The thunder of artillery coming from the east was getting louder and louder. We were expecting the Red Army to liberate us at any moment … The commandant called out the German prisoners and promised them freedom if they agreed to defend the Fatherland from the Bolshevik hordes. The criminals declared their support. A few German Communists managed to hide among this group and get out of the camp. Then we were given our orders.’

  The remaining prisoners, and a further 20,000 from Stutthof’s satellite camps, were to march to Lauenberg in Pomerania, some 75 miles to the west. Forty-one columns of 1,000–1,500 prisoners would leave the camp at 25-minute intervals.2 The distance was to be covered in seven days. Rations, consisting of half a loaf of bread, half a packet of margarine and a piece of cheese, would be allocated to each prisoner.3 They were to be escorted by SS guards, riding motorcycles and armed with machine guns and revolvers. Any prisoner caught falling behind would be shot.