Armageddon (54 page)

The counter-attacks inside Germany took place in sectors lightly held by the Russians, and lacked the weight to achieve anything beyond local successes. They exerted no influence upon Konev’s latest big push, against the Germans further east in Upper Silesia. This was the last important industrial area in the east which remained in German hands. Konev attacked on 15 March. His men gained a Neisse crossing the following night. Reinforcements began to pour over a pontoon bridge. By 31 March, the Russians had gained Ratibor and Katscher, claiming to have killed some 40,000 German troops and captured a further 14,000. The bulk of Hitler’s forces in the region were able to pull back intact, above all First Panzer Army. But Konev’s left flank was now secure.

Between 12 January and 3 February, the drive to the Oder cost 1st Belorussian Front 77,342 casualties, and 1st Ukrainian Front 115,783—more than twice U.S. losses in the month-long Bulge battle. OKH posted eastern casualties for the months of January and February of 77,000 dead, 334,000 wounded and 192,000 missing—a total of 603,000, at least five times German losses in the Ardennes. Soviet forces in Hungary stood eighty miles from Vienna. Konev was 120 miles from Prague. Zhukov’s spearheads were forty-five miles from Berlin.

Yet, even as the eyes of the world were fixed upon Allied forces approaching Hitler’s capital, further north a vast human tragedy was unfolding. The Soviet drive into East Prussia, northern axis of Stalin’s assault upon Germany, was to cost the lives of up to a million people, and inflicted a wound upon the consciousness of the German people which has never healed.

CHAPTER TEN

Blood and Ice: East Prussia

AN IDYLL SHATTERED

T
HIS BOOK TRACES
a descent into an inferno. Its early pages have described chiefly the lot of soldiers, some of whom endured traumatizing experiences. Hereafter, however, as the pace of the Third Reich’s collapse quickened, the civilian population of Germany began to suffer in a fashion dreadful even to those already familiar with aerial bombardment. Leave aside for a moment questions of guilt, military necessity, just retribution. It is here only relevant to observe that in 1945 more than a hundred million people, who found themselves within Hitler’s frontiers as a consequence of either birth or compulsion, entered a darkening tunnel in which they faced horrors far beyond the experience of Western societies in the Second World War.

The great flatlands of East Prussia extended southwards from the Baltic, between the ports of Danzig and Memel. They had been ruled variously over the centuries by Prussians, Poles, even Swedes, yet the population in 1945 was almost exclusively composed of ethnic Germans, 2.4 million of them, to which should be added some 200,000 Allied prisoners and forced labourers, and many thousands of German refugees from the Baltic states. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles severed East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, by granting Poland a corridor to the sea at Danzig, soon followed by the transfer of the province of Posen to Warsaw’s governance. In September 1939, East Prussians rejoiced when their land link to Germany was restored by Hitler’s Polish invasion.

The region’s character was strongly influenced by its great aristocratic families. “East Prussia was a province very untypical of Germany,” observed Helmut Schmidt, “owned chiefly by the gentry and nobility, in which the ordinary people were dependent peasants. It was a peculiar society, with this very thin upper crust of counts and barons and princes, and beneath them hundreds of thousands of people who possessed barely enough food to live.” Henner Pflug, who worked there as a teacher, said: “The Nazis seemed to take second place in East Prussia. The aristocracy was still on top.” The middle class, such as it was, lived chiefly around the provincial capital of Königsberg. The grandees occupied some wonderfully beautiful country houses, in a semi-feudal relationship with the peasantry who tilled their fields. For centuries before the Nazis came, the Germans of East Prussia perceived themselves almost as missionaries, fulfilling a civilizing mission, maintaining the values of Christendom amid the barbarians of eastern Europe.
Heimat
—homeland—is an important word in German. It possessed special significance for the people of East Prussia.

Graf Hans von Lehndorff, the doctor who composed one of the most moving narratives of his
Heimat
’s experience in 1945, wrote of its “mysterious splendour. Whoever lived through those last months with receptive senses must have felt that never before had the light been so intense, the sky so lofty, the distances so vast.” Since 1939, East Prussia had been a backwater, largely sheltered from the impact of world conflict. “It was incredibly quiet,” said Ursula Salzer, daughter of a Königsberg railway manager. “We had no sense of the war going on, and plenty to eat.”

Matters began to change in the late summer of 1944. Königsberg, which had been desultorily bombed by the Russians, was attacked by the RAF’s Bomber Command. Its aircraft came first on the night of 26 August, when most failed to find the city. Three nights later however, on 29 August, 189 Lancasters of 5 Group struck with devastating effect. Bomber Command estimated that 41 per cent of all housing and 20 per cent of local industry were destroyed. Unexpectedly heavy fighter activity over the target accounted for fifteen Lancasters shot down, 7.9 per cent of the attacking force. Yet the people of Königsberg cared only about the destruction which the RAF’s aircraft left behind. When a bailed-out Lancaster crewman was being led through the ruined streets by his escort, a young woman shouted bitterly at him in English: “I hope you’re satisfied!”

Her name was Elfride Kowitz. Her family’s dairy business and their corner house in Neuer-Graben had been utterly destroyed in the attack. When she emerged from a shelter after the raid was over, she stood gazing in horror at the ruins of her family home. She saw a man in a helmet. It was her father. They fell into each other’s arms, and sobbed in despair. “Both my parents were completely destroyed,” she said. “They had lost everything they had worked all their lives for.” Her father saved only the family’s radio set. Everything else was gone. Her bitterness never faded: “That raid was so futile—it did nothing to shorten the war.” Never again before May 1945 did Elfi fully undress at night. She began to shake as soon as she heard sirens.

A few special people beneath the Allied air attacks shared the common fear, but also found the bombers symbols of hope. Michael Wieck, a sixteen-year-old Königsberger, could not enter the city’s air-raid shelters, because he was a Jew. Instead, when attacks came, he resorted to a coal bunker. He listened to the distant buzz of aircraft as it grew to a roar, then heard the angry bark of the flak. He was still above ground when the RAF’s “Christmas tree” pyrotechnic markers drifted down through the night sky. “I was not so critical of bombing then as I became after the war,” said Wieck. “We knew that the only thing that could save our lives was the victory of the Allies, and this seemed a necessary part of it.” Yet even for Wieck and his parents the RAF’s second raid on Königsberg seemed a catastrophe. “Schoolbooks, curtains, debris of all kinds rained half-burned from the sky. The heat was so enormous that many people could not leave their cellars. Everything was burning. Some people took refuge from the flames by jumping into the river. When it was over, the scene was like the aftermath of an atomic explosion.” Local Hitler Youth leader Hans Siwik, a former member of the Führer’s bodyguard, was as appalled as Wieck, from a somewhat different perspective. Siwik was disgusted by the “immorality” of the British assault: “It seemed crazy that people should destroy such a place. People in Königsberg were unaccustomed to raids. We didn’t have a lot of flak. I was horrified by the idea of such vandalism.” Yet worse, much worse, was to come.

In the chilly autumn days of 1944, Hans von Lehndorff watched the storks begin their annual migration southwards. He fancied that many other local people shared his own impulsive thought: “Yes,
you’re
flying away! But what of
us
? What is to become of us, and of our country?” East Prussians recognized that they were doomed to suffer Germany’s first experience of ground assault, because they were nearest to the relentless advance of the Red Army.

The province’s gauleiter was one of the most detested bureaucrats in the Third Reich, Eric Koch. Earlier in the war, as Reich commissioner in Ukraine, Koch had delivered a speech notorious even by the standards of Nazi rhetoric: “We are a master race. We must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here . . . I did not come to spread bliss . . . The population must work, work and work again . . . We did not come here to give out manna. We have come here to create the basis for victory.”

Throughout 1944, as the Red shadow lengthened beyond the borders of East Prussia, Koch delivered an increasingly strident barrage of bombast about the government’s commitment to preserving the province from the Soviets. He set his face against any evacuation by the civilian population. To countenance such a flight would be to acknowledge the possibility of German defeat. It was the duty of each citizen of the fatherland, Koch declared, to hold fast to every inch of its soil in the face of the monstrous hordes from the east. Nor was it only Nazis who saw a special significance in the defence of East Prussia. Every German now knew that, by agreement between the Soviet Union and the Western allies, if their nation was defeated the province would be ceded to Poland, in compensation for eastern Polish lands which were to become part of the Soviet Union.

It had been settled between the “Big Three” that some sixteen million ethnic Germans throughout eastern Europe—whether recent immigrants who had formed part of Hitler’s colonial plantations or historic residents—would be deported to the new post-war frontiers of Germany. This was to be a colossal, historic transfer of populations, which was accepted by the Western allies with remarkably little debate or hesitation on either side of the Atlantic. “The President said he thought we should make some arrangements to move the Prussians out of East Prussia the same way the Greeks were moved out of Turkey after the last war,” recorded Harry Hopkins in 1943; “while this is a harsh procedure, it is the only way to maintain peace and . . . in any circumstances, the Prussians cannot be trusted.” Churchill asserted the justice of this pioneer exercise in “ethnic cleansing” to the House of Commons on 5 December 1944: “A clean sweep will be made,” he said. “I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. The disentanglement of populations which took place between Greece and Turkey after the last war . . . was in many ways a success.”

The purpose of this vast compulsory migration was to ensure that never again would Germans be motivated to act aggressively by the interests of their ethnic brethren in eastern Europe. Germans would be ring-fenced in their own country. Prussia, historic heart of German militarism, was to be dismembered. There would be no more German minorities elsewhere. Such Allied action would also redress, and more than redress, Hitler’s treatment of the regions of Poland annexed to the Reich, from which he had expelled almost a million Poles since 1939.

German generals in Soviet hands, whose conversations were monitored by the NKVD, railed at the immense injustice which they saw looming over their nation. “They want to take East Prussia from us,” said von Paulus, the vanquished commander at Stalingrad. “We can’t just say to them: ‘Here it is. Take it.’ In this respect the Nazis are better than us. They are fighting to preserve our homeland. If German land is given to Poland, there will be another war.” General Strekker agreed: “If they take East Prussia from us, it will mean another war, and of course the German people will be blamed again—this time undeservedly.”

The first Russian incursions into East Prussia took place on 22 October 1944, when 11th Guards Army captured Nemmersdorf and several other border hamlets. Five days later, General Friedrich Hossbach’s Fourth Army retook the villages. Hardly one civilian inhabitant survived. Women had been nailed to barn doors and farm carts, or been crushed by tanks after being raped. Their children had been killed. Forty French PoWs working on local farms had been shot, likewise avowed German communists. The Red Army’s behaviour reflected not casual brutality, but systematic sadism rivalling that of the Nazis. “In the farmyard stood a cart, to which more naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position,” reported a Volkssturm militiaman, Karl Potrek, who entered Nemmersdorf with the Wehrmacht. “Near a large inn, the ‘Roter Krug,’ stood a barn and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands, in a crucified posture. In the dwellings we found a total of 72 women, including children, and one man, 74, all dead . . . all murdered in a bestial fashion, except only for a few who had bullet holes in their heads. Some babies had their heads bashed in.” Even the Russians displayed subsequent embarrassment about what had taken place. Moscow’s official history of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, usually reticent about such matters, conceded: “Not all Soviet troops correctly understood how they had to behave in Germany . . . In the first days of fighting in East Prussia, there were some isolated violations of the correct norms of behaviour.” In reality, of course, what happened in October in East Prussia was a foretaste of the Red Army’s conduct across Poland and Germany in the awful months to come.

Koch and Goebbels turned the tragedy of Nemmersdorf into a propaganda banquet. Photographers and correspondents were dispatched to record every detail of the Russian atrocities. The story was broadcast far and wide as a sample of Soviet barbarism, and as a spur to East Prussia’s defenders. Posters showing the victims were distributed throughout the province, newsreels shown in every cinema. Many women who saw them took steps to acquire poison as a precaution against capture. More than a few subsequently used it.