Hellstorm The Death of
Nazi Germany 1944–1947
By Thomas Goodrich
3
Nazi Germany 1944–1947
By Thomas Goodrich
3
Between Fire and Ice
About seven in the morning I was awakened by a monotonous roaring
and rumbling. The windowpanes were rattling. It sounded as if many
heavy trucks were standing around the building with their motors running
uninterruptedly. In the dim light I could not distinguish anything.
I stood at the window and collected my thoughts. . . .
Toward noon the roaring became as loud as a falling avalanche. Violent
gusts of wind made you gasp for breath. People looked meaningfully
at one another, trying to take some comfort in the belief that all
this was only the effect of our new Wonder Weapon.
Later on there was a sudden complete silence.1
So recorded in his diary army surgeon Hans Graf von Lehndorff
of a day in mid-January 1945. Although miles behind the
front, the distant roll left little doubt in von Lehndorff’s mind
as to what had occurred. “This could only mean the end,” the doctor
noted solemnly.2
On the morning of January 12, Soviet forces unleashed the greatest
massed artillery barrage in history—a five hour inferno directed at the
German line along the Vistula River. Already bled white by years of
attrition, further weakened by the withdrawal of troops for the failed
Ardennes offensive, the paper-thin German front was blown to bits.
Fearing just such a disaster unless the lines were somehow strengthened,
Field Marshal Heinz Guderian sought desperately to reason with his leader three days earlier. Painfully aware of the gross imbalance—
twenty to one in artillery alone—Adolf Hitler nevertheless insisted
that the Wehrmacht not only could, but would hold.
“The Eastern front is like a house of cards,” Guderian angrily warned.
“If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse.”3
His prophesy correct, when the Russian barrage finally lifted Guderian’s
lines had ceased to exist. “A dead, bloodstained silence settled
over the western bank of the Vistula,” said a Soviet commander.“Just
freshly ploughed land, fallen trees, dead horses, and mutilated bodies
remained where the German lines had been.”4
“As a rule—” added another Russian general, “and this rule was
repeatedly confirmed all through the war—German soldiers stayed
where they were ordered to stay and never retreated without permission,
but on that day . . . the fire was so merciless that those who
remained alive lost all self-possession.”5
With the remnants of the German army in headlong flight, hordes
of Red soldiers swarmed through the breach and poured into Greater
Germany. As word of the Russian breakthrough spread, millions of
Germans in their path hastily packed and fled into the freezing weather.
Those with the means escaped by car, train or boarded ships on the
Baltic coast. Most merely packed farm carts, hitched horses or cows,
and with a whip crack set off as fast as their animals would take them.
Except for the very old or the very young, the only males in the treks
were generally French, Polish and even Russian P.O.W's and laborers
who, after years of working for German farmers had developed a loyalty
for “their” families, particularly the children.6
As the refugees streamed west, thousands more joined the columns.
Wrote a witness, a German officer struggling against the tide to reach
his unit: The treks . . . stood literally wheel to wheel. Their columns barely inched
along. One could hardly see their faces. Many of them had potato sacks pulled over their heads, with holes for their eyes. . . . Most of the wagons were open,
and loaded in great haste. Old people, sick people, and children lay deep in snow wet
straw or under wet, soiled feather beds, occasionally with a cover or a tent
thrown over them and tied down.
The treks were strangely silent, and that made them seem unspeakably sad. The
hooves of the horses thumped on the snow, and here and there a wheel creaked.
From time to time a tractor came chugging along with several wagons hitched
to it. Any of those on foot held on to the wagons for support, and had their little
sport sleighs tied to them. Cattle and sheep drifted along with the crowd.
The villagers of the Vistula valley stood in front of their homes, stiff with fright,
watching the endless stream of people. Most of them, clearly, did not yet understand
that the same fate was in store for them. In one village I saw a farmer getting
excited because one of the wagons, in making way for a heavy truck, had
damaged his fence. The East Prussian leading the wagon looked at him silently
and kept going. Most of the houses were closed up tight, perhaps for fear they
would have to take in refugees. From time to time, when my car got caught
between piled-up wagons, I saw the curtains moving. During the past few years
I have seen enough hard hearts, among all nationalities. Why should we Germans
be an exception? It was all the more precious to see . . . some man or woman
standing by the road with a pitcher of warm milk and calling for children.
The ice of the Vistula and Nogat Rivers was covered with wagon trains. Many
horses had slipped and broken a leg. We shot one of them ourselves, because the
Polish coachman, driving “his” family, asked us to.... The roads were so
congested that for a time we tried to make headway across country and along
field paths. But even there, refugee treks were blocking the way. People of all
kinds on foot leading fantastic vehicles, stragglers—an indescribable, ghostly
procession, bundled up so that you could see only their eyes, but eyes full of misery
and wretchedness.7
Already bitterly cold, several days after the exodus began the temperature
plunged below zero. As a result, little children and infants dropped
by the thousands. “It was so terribly cold, and the wind was like ice,”
said one young mother,“the snow was falling and nothing warm to eat,
no milk and nothing. I tried to give Gabi the breast, behind a house,
but she didn’t take it because everything was so cold. Many women tried
that, and some froze their breasts.” When Gabi died, the distraught
woman continued to cradle the tiny corpse until her own arm eventually
froze.“I couldn’t carry her any more after she was dead. I couldn’t stand it any more,” the mother sobbed. “I wrapped her up well
and put her deep in the snow beside the road. . . . Thousands of women
. . . put their dead in the ditches by the roadside where they wouldn’t
be hurt by automobiles or farm wagons.”8
Hideous as conditions were, the treks pressed steadily west, away
from the terror looming somewhere behind. Although millions were
on the roads in full flight, millions more remained at their farms,
villages and towns. Despite the rumors of Bolshevik savagery and
the reality of Nemmersdorf the previous autumn, many Germans were
determined to ride out the storm, refusing to believe the situation
was as bad as Nazi propaganda would have them believe.
“About one thousand inhabitants defied danger and remained in
Schoenwald . . . ,” ran a typical account. “They did not really believe
that the Russians were as cruel and inhuman as they were reputed to
be, but hoped to win over the latter by welcoming them and being hospitable.”9
“Things never turn out either as well or as badly as one expects,”
explained an old German adage, an adage that those who remained
now desperately embraced. Nevertheless, as a precaution, many in
Schoenwald and elsewhere took time to bury valuables, hang out white
flags and hide their liquor in cellars. When these last safety measures
were taken, there was little the people could do but watch, wait and
pray to God their decision had been correct. For many, an answer came
soon enough. Wrote a priest from the city of Lauban:
In the evening I climbed up onto the roof of the church and gazed at the countryside
around me. Without being a prophet I realized that disaster was about
to overtake us,—a terrible disaster, for the heathens were rapidly approaching.
I could see the reflection of a fire on the horizon. It seemed to be moving. . . . It
was as though a wind of destruction and desolation swept the countryside....
It was as though there were a sinister warning in the very air. The whole sky
was ablaze and the air seemed to vibrate with the rumble of the Soviet tanks, as
they came nearer and nearer.10
The following day, in an effort to bring the aged and sick to the safety of a church cellar, the priest and several nuns raced through the streets with wheel chairs and hand carts.
Unsuspectingly, we proceeded down the Promenade. When we had gone about half-way and were just passing the old town-walls we suddenly heard a deafening crash. Bombs and shells exploded all around us and splinters whizzed past our heads. We threw ourselves flat on the ground and then crawled on all fours towards the low wall which runs along the old Lauban Brook. It was as though all the forces of hell had been let loose in order to destroy the town. The air vibrated with the deadly thunder, rumble and hiss of bombs and shells. We were paralyzed with fear. . . . Shell upon shell hit the buildings, gardens, and streets close by.“We can’t get back to the cellar. We’ll have to try to get to Goerlitz Street, away from the shelling,” I shouted to the nuns. “I’m not coming with you. I’m going back,” replied Sister Johanna-Franziska. Just as she said this, we all jumped up from the ground in order to seek shelter elsewhere....
The shelling grew fiercer. Pieces of glass and bricks whizzed through the air and fell onto the streets. Some of the houses caught fire, and flames shot up amidst dense clouds of black smoke. We managed to get as far as the Protestant cemetery, which had likewise been hit by several shells. To my horror, I discovered that we were no better off here than we had been before, for a fresh volley of shells descended. We crawled along between the tombstones. Bombs and shells exploded with a deafening crash. The ground trembled under the violent impact of shells. We crouched down behind the tombstones whilst this inferno raged all around us. All of a sudden, enemy planes appeared over the town and began to launch an attack. To protect ourselves . . . we covered ourselves with the wreaths which lay on some of the graves. The ground was frozen hard and our hands and feet gradually became numb with cold as we lay there. We prayed to the Heavenly Father to protect us....
When I reached the Promenade I saw a huddled form lying in the middle of the road, some distance away. It was Sister Johanna-Franziska. She was dead. A shell splinter had lacerated her head. There was a look of terror and rigidity on her face. . . . I managed to lift her onto the wheelchair and began pushing it up the slope of the Promenade.11
For the next several days, the fight for Lauban went on. “Shells and artillery fire rent the air and the concentrated fire of the tanks grew fiercer and fiercer,” the priest continues. “The thunder of the cannon which continued without pause was deafening. There was a stifling smell of sulfur.”12
About noon some German soldiers came to the convent and told us that the Russians were likely to arrive in about an hour’s time. . . . The tumult and commotion overhead grew louder and louder. We could hear soldiers tramping about overhead, but we could not tell whether they were Germans or Russians.... Before we had a chance to get out of the cellar the first lot of Russians appeared. They stood at the entrance to the cellar and were obviously very surprised to find human creatures down here. They soon disappeared again, however. They did not look as bad as we had expected and most of us were rather relieved.13
In numerous other towns and villages, frightened German civilians were also “rather relieved” upon their initial encounter with the Red Army.
“The first Russian troops entered the village from the east,” remembered one witness from Schoenwald. “This went off quite peacefully, no shots were fired, the Germans served food and drink to the Russians, and the latter were very amiable. Any misgivings, which some of the inhabitants of the village might have had, vanished.”14
“One moment the streets were deserted, and the next moment they were full of Russians,” added a little girl from another village. “I was in our bedroom upstairs at the time, watching from a corner window partly facing the street. I thought I’d carefully lift a corner of the blanket covering that window to take a peek. . . . I was spotted by an old Russian soldier sitting in the front of a covered wagon pulled by two enormous horses. He smiled at me and waved.”15
“Most of them were of strong and sturdy build,” a resident of Kunzendorf observed.“And all of them, as they confronted us, were armed to the teeth—with revolvers and pistols of every type. . . . They were attired in dirty, brownish, padded trousers and jackets, and on their heads they wore fur-caps.”16
Composed largely of White Russians and Ukrainians, many Germans were shocked that the enemy often looked, sounded, and acted, much like themselves. Recalled Lali Horstmann:
There was a loud hammering on the door, which echoed through the house. When my husband opened the door, a tall, fair-haired officer . . . stood on the doorstep. . . . When he entered the room, the Russian Army itself was in our home, taking possession. As always, reality differed from anticipation, for it was not he who was violent, but Bibi who flew at his legs before we could stop her, while the soldier made a friendly gesture towards the outraged little dog. . . . He talked in the serious tones of a kindly grown-up soothing frightened children, and helpless though we were, we had a mutual respect for each other’s unalterable position. He stalked through the rooms in a formal search for German deserters. Then, his duty done, he gravely saluted with great dignity and departed, leaving us speechless and trembling.17
Unfortunately, the fact that one Russian like the above might display proper conduct did not guarantee that the next would. The lack of consistency or a predictable policy among Soviet front line troops was one of the most confusing and paralyzing aspects of the Russian occupation. From a rural estate, Renate Hoffman wrote:
We saw a Russian ride through the main gate on a horse. He must have been drunk because he fell off. A second Russian came, then a third. They staggered and reeled their way to the door and entered the house. It was worse than we had ever imagined. One of them went straight to the telephone, ripped it off the wall, and threw it on the floor....Another Russian went to the radio and threw that on the floor, making sure we no longer heard any more news broadcasts. More men came in. They raged through the house, going from room to room. They stormed into the kitchen and demanded the cook make them something to eat. There must have been about forty soldiers.
I took the children outside and hid them behind some bushes. Inside, we ran from one corner to the other, not knowing what to do. A man from the nearby village passed by and reported that the Russians were acting like animals everywhere. . . . After hours of this, a Russian officer showed up with an interpreter. . . . He was wearing a perfectly tailored uniform, an impressive looking man, and also wearing white gloves! This officer told us, through his translator, that he was confiscating the house and was giving us five minutes to leave the estate.18
Continues a witness from Kaltwasser:
When the shelling ceased we ventured out of the cellar once more, but we had only got as far as the stairs when we saw . . . a Pole, coming towards us with a Russian officer and another man. We hoped for the best, but the interpreter promptly demanded our watches and rings. In fact, he actually tore my watch off its chain, and made the women remove all their rings, bracelets, and necklaces. We were horrified when the Russian officer and the interpreter seized hold of Mrs. M. and my aunt and dragged them off. When they eventually came back we went to the vicarage. The house was full of Russians and they had already wrought havoc in all the rooms. Some of them had ransacked the pantry and were gorging the food they had found there. Others had opened all the drawers and cupboards and thrown the contents onto the floor....Russians continued to raid the house all day long. They played the mouth-organ and the harmonium and set the gramophone going. There was a bottle of pure alcohol in the house and they drained it undiluted. They swarmed into the pantry and ate all the preserves. . . . When it grew dark they set fire to the school. We did not dare go to bed as one lot of soldiers after another kept raiding the house. . . . At about three o’clock in the morning a savage-looking Russian appeared and searched us. We had already been searched innumerable times by other Russians. . . . In the course of their searches one of them opened the wardrobe and slashed all the garments to pieces with his dagger.19
Traumatic as first encounters were, when the shock troops moved off many Germans would concur that the experience had not been as bad as feared. While rapes had occurred and while many German men of military age had been marched east or shot on the spot, the front line soldier was more concerned with fighting and survival than with loot, rape and revenge. Not so with those who followed. In numerous instances, before Red combat officers and men pushed on they turned to the helpless civilians with stone-like faces:“The Mongols are coming. . . . Very bad men. You go quick. Go quick.”20
Composed largely of Mongols, Kulaks, Kazakhs, Kalmuks, and other Asians, as well as convicts and commissars, these men who formed the second wave of troops were regarded, even by their own comrades,as utterly merciless. Terrified by the news, many Germans did attempt to flee and move in the wake of the first Soviet wave. Most, however, found themselves trapped and could do little more than hide young girls and once again pray that their worst fears were unfounded. After a wait of sometimes days, but normally only hours, the dreaded second wave arrived. There were no preliminaries. Unlike storm troops, who cautiously entered towns and villages and slipped nervously from door to door, the rear echelons burst noisily into communities atop trucks, tanks or peasant carts crammed high with loot. Often wildly drunk, many wore a bizarre array of stolen clothes and gaudy jewelry. Adding to the chaos were herds of bellowing cattle and sheep.
“It was almost like a scene from the Middle Ages—a migration, no less,” said one stunned observer.21
Soon after the “carnival columns” halted in a German town, hell on earth was unleashed. “It seemed as though the devil himself had come . . . ,” a witness from Silesia wrote. “The ‘Mongol barbarism of the Asiatic plains’ had come not in a propaganda phrase but in the flesh.”22
While flames shot up from different corners of the towns and gunfire erupted as citizens were murdered in the streets, the invaders soon began kicking in doors to homes, shops and churches. “A whole horde of Asiatic-looking fellows appeared and started searching the cellar . . . ,” recalled one priest. “The place was a dreadful sight by the time they had finished. The room was already full of smoke and I begged one of the Russians to let us out. . . . Were they going to let us be burnt to death? After a while, however, a more civilized-looking Russian appeared and I repeated my request. He led us out to . . . the courtyard of the convent. The noise was deafening—the raucous shouts of the Russians, the crackling of the flames, the crashing of beams and brickwork.”23
Many horrified Germans tried to greet with a smile their strange visitors. Revealed one woman from a boarding house in Berbitz:
As a precaution, the landlord, Mr. Grebmann, had lined the vestibule with liquor bottles in the naive hope that his house might thereby be spared from ransacking. To the succeeding troop of slant-eyed Mongolians, the tenants brought their jewelry and watches. Hysterical, Mrs. Friedel embraced one of the greasy Kirgis and drank with him from the same bottle, and the elderly Mr. Grebmann patted them familiarly on the back. . . .One of the Mongolians held up my Tom’s tall leather boots triumphantly, the other one put my rings into his pants pocket....
Scarcely had this second detachment left the house and we were beginning to breathe freely, when fists once more thundered at the door: thus it kept up the whole day. The house doors were not permitted to be locked any more. Each took what he wanted either in a more or less harmless or in a malicious way. Soon we and the Russians were wading knee-deep in thrown-around clothing, laundry and bits of smashed dishes....
As soon as a new detachment of Russians entered the house noisily, we squatted trembling about the round table in Grebmann’s living room. One of the soldiers sat at the table with us with pistol disengaged and demanded schnapps or vodka, while the others rummaged around the house. . . . No one dared to speak. We women sat with downcast eyes and lowered head. Someone had told us never to look a Russian in the eye, otherwise we would be lost....
Before long the inside of the house looked as if a band of robbers had lived there. . . . The fellows had cut the beds up into little pieces, slit open the upholstered chairs, thrown furniture around; had slashed pictures, despoiled books, cracked eggs against the wall; had poured liqueur over the rugs, torn curtains down, and scattered the entire contents of all the closets and drawers all over. One of the most painful shocks for me was to see how two of the ruffians with their heavy boots kicked the chest in which I had my beautiful porcelain wrapped in tissue paper and cotton wadding. They were all treasured pieces. . . . My most beautiful piece . . . was used by one of them as a toilet.24
As a rule, the Soviets generally sought out gold and jewelry first, with an especial eye for “uri,” or wristwatches. It was not unusual to see Red troops laden with necklaces and gold chains or sporting as many as a dozen watches on each arm. When the people had been plucked clean of valuables, interest usually turned to liquor. In their mad quest for “wodka,” soldiers greedily imbibed everything from fine wines and champagne to rubbing alcohol and perfume. Red troops, observed one woman, were “crazy for anything even smelling of alcohol.”25
And then. . . .
“Rape was a word that had occurred again and again in our conversation,” admitted Lali Horstmann. “It was an expression which caused no pang of fear in our times for its meaning was purely figurative—‘to be ravished’ belonged to the realm of lyrical poetry. Now its original sense was terrifyingly restored and brought us face to face with a new peril.”26
“Suddenly the door of the room we were in was opened and some soldiers entered,” a frightened boy recalled as he sat with a group of women huddled in a dark room.“One or two matches were struck and I saw that there were about eight Russians in the room who were obviously looking for women.”27 The child continues:
As I crouched there in my corner I saw one of the Russians coming towards me. The match he held in his hand went out. I felt, rather than saw, a hand reach out towards me. I had a fur cap on my head, and suddenly I felt fingers tracing curl-like movements on my temple. For a brief moment I did not know what to make of this, but the next instant, when a loud “No” resounded through the room, I thanked God with all my heart that I was not a woman or a girl.
Meanwhile the beasts had spotted their victims and shared them out. Then they suddenly started shooting at random. But it was dark in the room and no one could see where the shots were being fired or who was hit. I heard wails and groans and voices calling out to me to help, but there was nothing I could do. Right next to me poor defenseless women were being ravished in the presence of their children.28
Merely because a female had been raped once was no guarantee she would not be assaulted again and again. “Many of the girls were raped as often as ten times a night, and even more,” said a witness from Neustadt. 29
“There was never a moment’s peace either by day or at night,” added another victim:
The Russians were coming and going the whole time and they kept eyeing us greedily. The nights were dreadful because we were never safe for a moment. The women were raped, not once or twice but ten, twenty, thirty and a hundred times, and it was all the same to the Russians whether they raped mere children or old women. The youngest victim in the row houses where we lived was ten years of age and the oldest one was over seventy. . . . I am sure that wild and hungry animals would not have behaved any differently.30
Wrote a girl from Posen who desperately clung to a cousin for safety:
When we were lying in bed at night we kept hearing steps coming up the stairs. . . . They beat on the door with their rifle-butts, until it was opened. Without any consideration for my mother and aunt, who had to get out of bed, we were raped by the Russians, who always held a machine pistol in one hand. They lay in bed with their dirty boots on, until the next lot came. As there was no light, everything was done by pocket torches, and we did not even know what the beasts looked like.31
Like hunted prey leading predators from their young, some mothers instinctively sacrificed themselves. Recorded one little girl, ten year-old Mignon Fries:
She told us in a stern voice to go outside to play and under no circumstances to come back in. No matter what we heard, until she herself would come for us, no matter how long it took. Fearfully we looked at her even though we didn’t know exactly what we were afraid of. . . . We went outside and stood around for awhile not knowing what to do, just listening to the noise in the apartment. My mother had just closed all the windows but we could still hear the soldiers talking, laughing and shouting. Then the music started and before long the soldiers were singing....
The day gave way to evening, it got rather chilly and still we were outside and the “party” got noisier. Every once in a while a soldier would open a window and throw an empty vodka bottle outside. Sometimes the music would stop for a while, but the singing and shouting continued. As it got later and later we became very hungry and cold, but having been raised in an atmosphere of strict obedience we didn’t dare go back in the house against our mother’s orders and just huddled against the wall of the shed in the garden trying to keep each other warm....
The music and the singing broke off as suddenly as it had started....Within minutes it was all over and all the soldiers left the house. . . . But it was a long time before our mother finally came out to get us. She was very pale and hugged both of us very tightly for a long time and we could feel her body shaking.32
If front-line troops had displayed unpredictability regarding rape, the second wave did not. “All of us, without exception, suffered the same,” revealed one victim.33
“And to make matters worse,” added a witness from Neisse, “these atrocities were not committed secretly or in hidden corners but in public, in churches, on the streets, and on the squares. . . . Mothers were raped in the presence of their children, girls were raped in front of their brothers.”34
“They . . . raped women and girls . . . in ditches and by the wayside, and as a rule not once but several times,” echoed another viewer. “Sometimes a whole bunch of soldiers would seize hold of one woman and all rape her.”35
For those Germans who had naively imagined that they might “win over” the Soviets with kindness and courtesy, they now understood, too late, that Nazi propaganda had in this instance grossly understated the threat, rather than exaggerated it. “The atrocity reports in the newspapers were harmless, compared to reality,” one incredulous victim revealed.36 While many upright Russian officers courageously stepped in and risked their own lives to stop the murders and rapes, their efforts were little more than a drop of water to a forest fire.37
“All of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot,” admitted Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “This was almost a combat distinction.”38
“There will be no mercy—for no one . . . ,”ran one Russian general’s order to his men. “It is pointless to ask our troops to exercise mercy.”39
“Kill them all, men, old men, children and the women, after you have
amused yourself with them! . . . ,” urged Ilya Ehrenberg in his flaming
broadsides. “Kill. Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the
living nor the yet unborn. . . . Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of
the victorious Soviet Army.”40
Springing from house to house and victim to victim “like wild beasts,” the drunken horde was determined to embrace such words as the above at their literal worst.
“When the Russians eventually tired of looting, robbing, murdering, and ill-treating the women and girls, they set fire to a considerable part of the village and razed it to the ground,” said a survivor of Schoenwald, the small community that had dismissed rumors of Russian ruthlessness and opted to welcome them instead.41
Much like Schoenwald, one town after another was swiftly enveloped by the howling red storm ...with the same results.
“And as we were then hauled out of the cellar,” recalled a woman who, along with her mother and grandmother had been raped repeatedly, “and as they stood there with their machine guns, my mother said, ‘Well, now we’ll probably be shot.’ And I said, ‘It’s all the same to me.’ It really was all the same to me.”42
You can imagine Asian cruelty. . . . “Frau, come,” that was the slogan. “Frau, come.” And I was so furious, because I’d had it up to here.... He had me in such a clinch I couldn’t free myself, with my elbow I hit him in the pit of his stomach. That definitely hurt him, and he yelled, “You, I shoot.” And he was brandishing this kind of machine gun around my nose and then I said, “Then shoot.” Yelled it, yelled it just like he did. “Then shoot.”43
Though this woman miraculously lived, many who offered even token resistance did not. Wrote a witness from Bauschdorf:
Emilie Ertelt . . . wanted to protect her fifteen-year old daughter, who had been raped sixteen times on one and the same day. Holding a lighted candle in her hand, Mrs. Ertelt, and all those present in the room began to pray for her daughter. . . .Four shots were suddenly fired at us. After a few moments some more Russians appeared and started shooting at Mrs. Ertelt, wounding her in the head.
The blood streamed down her face, and the nuns who were present went to her assistance and bandaged her head. Soon afterwards another Russian appeared, a brutal-looking fellow . . . and fired a shot at close range. Mrs. Ertelt was killed instantaneously.44
Surrounded by Soviets, flight was simply not a sane option for females—and yet, some tried. One young teacher from Kriescht ran terror-stricken into the nearby woods. The woman was soon found, however, and, according to a chronicler, “They drove her out on the road stark naked, and many soldiers used her one after the other. She reached her village crawling on hands and knees along the ditch, through mud and snow.”45
Another group of females found temporary haven in a woodland barn near Schoeneiche. But again, the refuge was swiftly discovered. Remembered one who was there:
They burst in, drunk with vodka and with victory, looking for women. When they saw only older women and children hiding behind a pile of carpets, they must have suspected that somewhere younger bodies were being concealed, and they started to ram their bayonets into the carpets. Here and there first and then systematically. . . . Nobody knows how many young girls were killed instantly that night. Eventually, the muffled cries of anguish and pain gave the hiding places away, and the victors started unrolling their prey. They chased those girls that had remained unhurt through the barn. . . . By then the barn looked like a battle field with wounded women on the floor right next to screaming and fighting victims forced to endure repeated and violent acts of rape.46
Faced by relentless assaults, with flight out of the question, females tried a variety of stratagems to save themselves. “Some of us tried to make ourselves as unattractive as possible by rouging the tips of our noses, putting gray powder on our upper lips to look like mustaches, and combing out our hair wildly,” revealed Lali Horstmann.47 Others placed pillows under their dresses and hobbled with sticks to appear like hunchbacks.48 One crazed woman, clad in an alluring night gown, left her door open purposely to attract soldiers to where she was lying in bed, in the hope of finding a protector. “Two Russians, who had entered for a moment stood speechless. Then both spat in disgust, using a coarse word, shocked to the core by a woman who could offer herself to them. They went on to the room next door, from where soon came cries for help from the girl’s grandmother, aged sixty-nine. Her valiant defense of her honor had made her more attractive than the pretty, too willing girl.”49 Regarding “willing” women such as the above as “unclean,” Red troops were as likely as not to kill on the spot such individuals.
Many frantic females mistakenly assumed a house of God would provide protection. In fact, churches were usually the rapists’ first stop. Agonized a priest from Neisse:
The girls, women and nuns were raped incessantly for hours on end, the soldiers standing in queues, the officers at the head of the queues, in front of their victims. During the first night many of the nuns and women were raped as many as fifty times. Some of the nuns who resisted with all their strength were shot, others were ill-treated in a dreadful manner until they were too exhausted to offer any resistance. The Russians knocked them down, kicked them, beat them on the head and in the face with the butt-end of their revolvers and rifles, until they finally collapsed and in this unconscious condition became the helpless victims of brutish passion, which was so inhuman as to be inconceivable. The same dreadful scenes were enacted in the hospitals, homes for the aged, and other such institutions. Even nuns who were seventy and eighty years old and were ill and bedridden were raped and ill-treated by these barbarians.50
Those women pregnant, on their menstrual cycle, or enduring diarrhea, suffered like all the rest. Nothing, it seemed—not age, ailment or ugliness—could repel the Red rapist. Even death was no defense.
“I . . . saw some twenty Red Army men standing in line before the corpse of a woman certainly beyond sixty years of age who had been raped to death,” one sickened witness recorded. “They were shouting and laughing and waiting for their satisfaction over her dead body.” As this viewer went on to add, and as numerous examples attest, such ghoulish depravities were not isolated events.51
While those who remained endured unspeakable fates, Germans who fled with treks also suffered.“What surprised us most was the way they traveled,” recalled a British POW, who, along with thousands of other Allied prisoners, was being marched west away from the advancing Soviets.
There was not a car, lorry or even a bicycle to be seen—only a seemingly endless line of covered wagons and carts drawn by horses or mules. . . . They were a pitiful sight, frozen, hungry, shoes and clothes falling apart, dragging themselves along to an unknown destination, hoping only that it might be beyond the reach of the Russian army. It was so cold that even in the day-time any drink mixed with cold water froze solid before it was possible to carry it to one’s mouth. At night men and women could keep alive only by huddling together in a wagon. . . . Those who fell asleep in the snow were dead within a few minutes. . . .
Within an hour of taking the road prisoners and refugees had become indistinguishable. We were bound together by one common thought—to keep together so as to keep alive. . . . The refugees gladly let us climb on to their wagons and, as they had nothing with which to barter, we gave them what food we could spare.52
Given the chaotic conditions, and with freezing refugees clogging the way, many treks were quickly overhauled by the Russians. Some Soviet tanks refused to leave the roads and crashed straight through the columns, squashing all in their path. After heavy traffic, the victims—men, women, children, and animals—were eventually as flat as cardboard.
Young Josefine Schleiter records the horror when her group was overtaken:
The tanks rushed through the rows of carts. Carts were hurled into the ditches where there were entrails of horses, and men, women and children were fighting with death. Wounded people were screaming for help.
Next to me was a woman bandaging her husband who was losing blood from a big wound. Behind me a young girl said to her father: “Father shoot me.” “Yes father,” said her brother who was about sixteen years old. “I have no more chance.” The father looked at his children, the tears streaming down his cheeks and he said in a quiet tone: “Wait still a little while children.”
Then came an officer on horseback. Some German soldiers were brought to him. He took his revolver; I shut my eyes, shots fell, and the poor fellows lay in front of us shot in the head, an expression of horror on their faces.53
Those terrified survivors who scattered to the icy countryside fell easy prey. “The Russians found us and pulled us out of the barn,” said fourteen-year-old Horst Wegner. “They were Mongolians. They had huge scars and pockmarks on their faces. And they were draped in jewelry—they wore watches up to the elbows. They came in and pulled out everyone wearing anything military—a military coat, for example. They were taken behind the barn, shoved against a wall, and shot. They weren’t even all Germans; some of them were foreigners. They even shot the private who had bandaged my father’s leg.”54
As always, for females the living death soon began. Renate Hoffmann:
Suddenly three Russian soldiers came around the corner. They pointed their guns at us and forced us into the house.... We knew what they had in store for us. We were separated. They put their guns to our heads. Any attempt to defend ourselves meant certain death. The only thing you could do was to pretend you were a rock or dead. . . .
When the three men left the house, I opened the door of the room I was in. Another door opened down the hall and the nurse came out. We just looked at one another. . . . We were nauseated and felt miserable. Thank God there was still running water in the house.55
As he struggled by car over the crowded roads, Major Rudolf Janecke of the Medical Corp gained a glimpse of what seemed to him an “endless agony.”
Near a small village . . . I saw for the first time a trek that had been destroyed from the air. Many wagons had caught fire in spite of the wet—perhaps phosphor bombs—and were entirely burned out. The dead lay around in strange positions, among them children pressed against their mothers’ breasts.... Soon afterward we were stopped by a man waving desperately. . . . He had seen the red cross on our car. His excitement nearly choked him. He was pale as death,and raised his right hand in an imploring gesture. He kept pointing to a wagon that stood out in the open field. His left arm, probably broken, hung limply from his shoulder.
His wife would bleed to death, he managed to groan, if I did not help immediately. A Russian tank crew had caught them, two days ago, while they were resting in a village. Later they had got away. But now she was dripping blood. She hardly breathed any more—no one could help her.
I have performed some difficult operations in the field, under impossible conditions. But this was the first time I tried a tamponade of the uterus, on a snow-covered field over which an icy wind was blowing, with the patient lying on a filthy wagon in her blood-drenched clothes. . . . Some other women stood around. By the patient’s head cowered a befuddled boy of about fourteen, all the while close to tears. “He had to watch it,” the man said while I was giving the woman two injections I happened to have with me. “When the fifteenth man was on her they knocked me down because I dropped the light. He had to hold the light till they all were through.” The other women nodded, with not a word of their own misery.56
As a rule, those who fled by train fared best. Speed did not always guarantee escape, however. Russian aircraft routinely strafed and bombed the cars from above and tanks cut the rails from below. When the Soviets suddenly captured the town of Allenstein, they forced the station master to signal the “all clear” to refugee trains still arriving from the east. As one unsuspecting train after another steamed into Allenstein, the Russians first slaughtered any men found on board, then passed their time raping carload after carload of females.57
For millions of Germans cut off on the Baltic coast by the rapid Russian advance, only one avenue of escape remained open—the sea. Even here, however, Soviet aircraft controlled the skies above and submarines prowled unseen below. In the various ports along the coast, thousands upon thousands of ragged, frozen refugees pressed to the water’s edge in hopes of landing a spot on one of the few vessels available. The numbers were so great and the fear so consuming that efforts to board when ships did dock often resembled riots.
“The crush to get on board was just terrible,” a witness wrote from Pillau.“I saw a pram being squeezed out of all recognition by the pushing masses. One old man fell into the water and there was nothing one could do in the crush—also it was so cold he would have died on hitting the water.”58
Because armed guards had orders to evacuate as many women and children as possible, babies were used like tickets, with half-crazed mothers tossing infants down to relatives on the pier. Some children landed safely; some did not.59
If anything, the situation at Gotenhafen was even more horrific. As the Wilhelm Gustloff made ready to take on passengers in late January 1945, the ship’s crew were stunned by what they saw.“There must have been 60,000 people on the docks . . . ,” remembered second engineer, Walter Knust. “As soon as we let down the gangways people raced forward and pushed their way in. In the confusion a lot of children got separated from their parents. Either the kids got on board leaving their parents on the harbor or the children were left behind as their parents got pushed forward by the throng.”60
A former cruise liner designed to accommodate two thousand passengers and crew, by the time the Gustloff cast ropes on January 30, the beautiful white ship had taken on as many as six thousand refugees. Even so, as she backed away from port, her path was blocked by smaller craft jammed with people.
“Take us with you,” the refugees cried. “Save the children!”
“We put down nets and everybody on the small ships scrambled up as best they could,” said the Gustloff’s radio operator, Rudi Lange. “As we got under way I think I remember being told by one of the ship’s officers to send a signal that another 2,000 people had come aboard.”61
That black, stormy night, as she struggled through high winds and heavy, ice-filled waves, the Gustloff’s ventilation and plumbing systems failed utterly. Strained far beyond its limits, the tightly-sealed ship filled with a hot, nauseating stench of urine, excrement, and vomit.62 The groans and screams of severely wounded soldiers and the wails of separated families added to the ghastly horror. But the worst was yet to come. At approximately 9 p.m., three heavy jolts rocked the passengers on the Gustloff.
“Vroom—Vroom—Vroom! That’s what it sounded like,” recalled a young boy upon hearing the torpedoes.63
“I heard the explosions,” wrote engineer Knust, “and I knew what had happened at once, because the engines stopped and then I saw a rush of water through the engine room. First the ship lurched to starboard under the force of the blast. Then she rose and began listing to port. I put on my shoes and jacket and hurried out into the corridor.”64
Panic-stricken, thousands below deck stampeded through the narrow passageways crushing and clawing others in an attempt to reach the life boats.65 “People were rushing about and screaming. Alarm bells shrilled,” remembered one terrorized passenger.66
“We struggled through the crowd to one of the boats,” said Paula Knust, wife of the ship’s officer.“It was so cold as the wind hit us. I was wearing only slacks and a blouse and blazer. Already the ship had a heavy list. The waves seemed very high, and you cannot imagine how terrible it looked.”67
Most lifeboats were frozen solid and even those that could be freed were mishandled in the panic and spilled their screaming occupants into the black sea. Walter and Paula Knust grappled with one boat that did manage to get away. “As we hit the water,” the husband recalled,“I could see people leaping from the side of the ship into the sea. I thought those who escaped drowning would freeze to death. It was so cold.”68 Indeed, the water was so frigid that those who leaped overboard might just as well have jumped into boiling oil or acid for their chances of survival were almost as slim. In seconds, minutes at most, the struggling swimmers were dead.
While loud speakers blared words of comfort—“The ship will not sink. Rescue ships are on the way”—thousands of freezing people pressed along the decks.69 Convinced that the sealed bulkheads had held and that indeed, the ship would not sink, many passengers fled indoors once more to escape the razor sharp winds and –20 degree temperature. The respite proved brief, however.
At ten o’clock a heavy tremor ripped the Gustloff as the bulkheads broke and the sea rushed in. Within seconds, the big ship began to roll on its side.70 Sixteen-year-old Eva Luck was in the ballroom with her mother and little sister:
Suddenly the whole music room tilted and a great cry went up from all the people there. They literally slid in a heap along the angled deck. A grand piano at one end went berserk and rolled across the crowded room crushing women and children in its path and scattering others before it. Finally it smashed into the port bulkhead with a discordant roar as though a giant fist had hit all the keys at once.71
Elsewhere, other victims went flying through glass enclosed decks into the sea.72 Amid the screams, sirens and roar of rushing water, gunshots sounded throughout the doomed ship as those trapped below committed suicide.
Miraculously escaping the ball room with the help of a sailor, Eva Luck’s family frantically tried to escape:
My mother had forgotten to put her shoes on, and I moved clumsily on high heels towards the iron rungs of the ladder going up the ship’s inside. People around us were falling about as the ship moved but I was able to grasp the rungs and haul up my little sister. . . . My mother followed us to the upper deck. When we got there it was terrible. I saw with horror that the funnel was lying almost parallel with the sea. People were jumping in. I could hear the ship’s siren and felt the ice-cold water round my legs. I reached out to try and grab my sister. I felt nothing but the water as it swept me out and over the side.73
Fortunately for Eva and a few others, the force of the flooding water freed a number of life rafts. As survivors scrambled aboard, the Gustloff began her swift descent. “Suddenly,” remembered a woman in a lifeboat,“it seemed that every light in the ship had come on. The whole ship was blazing with lights, and her sirens sounded out over the sea.”74 Paula Knust also watched the drama:
I cannot forget the loud clear sound of the siren as the Gustloff with all her lights on made the final plunge. I could clearly see the people still on board the Gustloff clinging to the rails. Even as she went under they were still hanging on and screaming. All around us were people swimming, or just floating in the sea. I can still see their hands grasping at the sides of our boat. It was too full to take on any more.75
When rescue ships later reached the scene, they pulled from the icy waters a mere nine hundred survivors. All else—roughly 7,000 men, women and children—were lost. Even then, however, the nightmare did not end. When rescue vessels touched land, scores of victims were disembarked at Gotenhafen. Thus, in less than twenty-four hours, after a harrowing night of incredible terror, some refugees found themselves on the very docks they had hoped to leave, once again searching desperately for a way to escape.76
Meanwhile, the red tide moved closer. In countless German cities and towns the pattern repeated itself, as the diary of a Catholic priest from Klosterbrueck reveals:
January 21st, 1945.... Strange to say, the population intends to remain here, and is not afraid of the Russians. The reports that in one village they raped all the women and abducted all the men and took them away to work somewhere must surely have been exaggerated. How dreadful it would be if Goebbels was telling the truth after all! . . .
January 22nd. . . . the machine-guns sound very near and some shells must have hit some of the buildings close by, because the house keeps trembling. The occupants of the cellar keep asking me what the Russians will be like. I keep asking myself the same thing....
[Later]—We have had our first encounter with them, and are somewhat relieved. They are not as bad as we had expected. When we heard the Russians moving about in the church up above, we went up to them. Two Russian soldiers looked in at the cellar-door and asked if there were any German soldiers there. There was a strange look of tenseness and fear on their faces. A Russian kept watch at the entrance to the cellar the whole night.
January 23rd. . . . After the fighting troops had moved on, a fresh lot of Russians arrived. Two of them entered the cellar, fired several shots into the ceiling, and asked us to give them our watches. They went off with fourteen wristwatches. Then three more Russians arrived. . . . [They] swallowed the food like wild animals, and they drank the wine as if it were water.“The war is good here,” they kept saying. . . .
January 25th.All night long Russians entered the chapel and searched and questioned us. They ordered the woman to go outside with her small child.... [They] raped the woman and sent her back to us. She came back to the chapel, her small child in her arms, the tears streaming down her face. . . . During the morning three women from the village came to the chapel. The vicar hardly recognized them, for their faces were distorted with fear and terror. They told us that whole families had been shot by the Russians. . . . Girls who had refused to allow themselves to be raped, and parents who had sought to protect their children, had been shot on the spot....
January 26th. Last night was very troubled again. Fresh lots of soldiers kept on arriving and searching the house. . . . Every time the door is opened we start with fear....
January 27th. We priests were allowed out of the chapel for half an hour today in order to bury Margarethe in the yard. Poor girl, it is a good thing you were dead and so did not know what the Russians did to your body!
January 28th. The night was very troubled again. . . . Many of the nuns are getting very distressed and nervous. They sleep even less than we do. I often hear them say, “If only we had fled before the Russians arrived!”77
By the end of January, the routed German army was finally able to wheel and face its pursuer. Because the Red advance had been so swift, Soviet supply lines were unable to keep pace. Additionally, a sudden thaw melted icy rivers and turned roads into quagmires, making rapid pursuit impossible. While isolated enclaves continued to hold back the Russians, particularly along the Baltic coast, the bulk of the German Army took up defensive positions behind the Oder River, the last natural barrier before Berlin. Although the miraculous respite was spent regrouping and placing arms in the hands of the People’s Army, or Volkssturm, the morale of the Wehrmacht had received a severe blow. The incredible force and fury of the Russian onslaught now convinced most military men that defeat was unavoidable. And for the huddled and stunned civilian masses, the sickening depth of Soviet savagery also clearly foretold that the end would be vastly more nightmarish than even the most lurid imagination had dreamed.
At first, only breathless rumors relayed by panic-stricken refugees revealed the nature of the approaching horror. Later, however, the extent of Russian atrocities was confirmed when stranded army units broke through to German lines or when the Wehrmacht launched small counterattacks and reclaimed bits of lost ground.
“In every village and town they entered,” wrote one who spoke with soldiers, “the German troops came upon scenes of horror: slain boys, People’s Army men drenched with gasoline and burned—and sometimes survivors to tell the tale of the outrages. In some villages, they surprised Russians warm in the beds of women they had taken, and found the bodies of the many French war prisoners who had died defending German women and children.”78
Staggered by what he had seen and heard, a German officer tried desperately to make sense of the disaster; to understand the minds of men “who find . . . pleasure in raping the same woman over and over, dozens of times, even while other women are standing near.”
There is a perverse hatred behind this which cannot be explained with phrases about Bolshevism, or the so-called Asiatic mentality, or by the assertion that the Russian soldiers have always considered the women of the conquered as their booty. . . . I was in Poland in 1939 when the Russians moved in, and I did not see a single woman being molested.79
“This,” concluded the young officer grimly, “shows the frightful power of propaganda.”80
Hundreds of thousands massacred, hundreds of thousands raped, millions already enslaved—but this was nothing. Worse was to come. “The Germans have been punished, but not enough,” gloated Ilya Ehrenburg.“The Fritzes are still running, but not lying dead. Who can stop us now? . . . The Oder? The Volksturm? No, it’s too late Germany, you can whirl around in circles, and burn, and howl in your deathly agony; the hour of revenge has struck!”81
The following day, in an effort to bring the aged and sick to the safety of a church cellar, the priest and several nuns raced through the streets with wheel chairs and hand carts.
Unsuspectingly, we proceeded down the Promenade. When we had gone about half-way and were just passing the old town-walls we suddenly heard a deafening crash. Bombs and shells exploded all around us and splinters whizzed past our heads. We threw ourselves flat on the ground and then crawled on all fours towards the low wall which runs along the old Lauban Brook. It was as though all the forces of hell had been let loose in order to destroy the town. The air vibrated with the deadly thunder, rumble and hiss of bombs and shells. We were paralyzed with fear. . . . Shell upon shell hit the buildings, gardens, and streets close by.“We can’t get back to the cellar. We’ll have to try to get to Goerlitz Street, away from the shelling,” I shouted to the nuns. “I’m not coming with you. I’m going back,” replied Sister Johanna-Franziska. Just as she said this, we all jumped up from the ground in order to seek shelter elsewhere....
The shelling grew fiercer. Pieces of glass and bricks whizzed through the air and fell onto the streets. Some of the houses caught fire, and flames shot up amidst dense clouds of black smoke. We managed to get as far as the Protestant cemetery, which had likewise been hit by several shells. To my horror, I discovered that we were no better off here than we had been before, for a fresh volley of shells descended. We crawled along between the tombstones. Bombs and shells exploded with a deafening crash. The ground trembled under the violent impact of shells. We crouched down behind the tombstones whilst this inferno raged all around us. All of a sudden, enemy planes appeared over the town and began to launch an attack. To protect ourselves . . . we covered ourselves with the wreaths which lay on some of the graves. The ground was frozen hard and our hands and feet gradually became numb with cold as we lay there. We prayed to the Heavenly Father to protect us....
When I reached the Promenade I saw a huddled form lying in the middle of the road, some distance away. It was Sister Johanna-Franziska. She was dead. A shell splinter had lacerated her head. There was a look of terror and rigidity on her face. . . . I managed to lift her onto the wheelchair and began pushing it up the slope of the Promenade.11
For the next several days, the fight for Lauban went on. “Shells and artillery fire rent the air and the concentrated fire of the tanks grew fiercer and fiercer,” the priest continues. “The thunder of the cannon which continued without pause was deafening. There was a stifling smell of sulfur.”12
About noon some German soldiers came to the convent and told us that the Russians were likely to arrive in about an hour’s time. . . . The tumult and commotion overhead grew louder and louder. We could hear soldiers tramping about overhead, but we could not tell whether they were Germans or Russians.... Before we had a chance to get out of the cellar the first lot of Russians appeared. They stood at the entrance to the cellar and were obviously very surprised to find human creatures down here. They soon disappeared again, however. They did not look as bad as we had expected and most of us were rather relieved.13
In numerous other towns and villages, frightened German civilians were also “rather relieved” upon their initial encounter with the Red Army.
“The first Russian troops entered the village from the east,” remembered one witness from Schoenwald. “This went off quite peacefully, no shots were fired, the Germans served food and drink to the Russians, and the latter were very amiable. Any misgivings, which some of the inhabitants of the village might have had, vanished.”14
“One moment the streets were deserted, and the next moment they were full of Russians,” added a little girl from another village. “I was in our bedroom upstairs at the time, watching from a corner window partly facing the street. I thought I’d carefully lift a corner of the blanket covering that window to take a peek. . . . I was spotted by an old Russian soldier sitting in the front of a covered wagon pulled by two enormous horses. He smiled at me and waved.”15
“Most of them were of strong and sturdy build,” a resident of Kunzendorf observed.“And all of them, as they confronted us, were armed to the teeth—with revolvers and pistols of every type. . . . They were attired in dirty, brownish, padded trousers and jackets, and on their heads they wore fur-caps.”16
Composed largely of White Russians and Ukrainians, many Germans were shocked that the enemy often looked, sounded, and acted, much like themselves. Recalled Lali Horstmann:
There was a loud hammering on the door, which echoed through the house. When my husband opened the door, a tall, fair-haired officer . . . stood on the doorstep. . . . When he entered the room, the Russian Army itself was in our home, taking possession. As always, reality differed from anticipation, for it was not he who was violent, but Bibi who flew at his legs before we could stop her, while the soldier made a friendly gesture towards the outraged little dog. . . . He talked in the serious tones of a kindly grown-up soothing frightened children, and helpless though we were, we had a mutual respect for each other’s unalterable position. He stalked through the rooms in a formal search for German deserters. Then, his duty done, he gravely saluted with great dignity and departed, leaving us speechless and trembling.17
Unfortunately, the fact that one Russian like the above might display proper conduct did not guarantee that the next would. The lack of consistency or a predictable policy among Soviet front line troops was one of the most confusing and paralyzing aspects of the Russian occupation. From a rural estate, Renate Hoffman wrote:
We saw a Russian ride through the main gate on a horse. He must have been drunk because he fell off. A second Russian came, then a third. They staggered and reeled their way to the door and entered the house. It was worse than we had ever imagined. One of them went straight to the telephone, ripped it off the wall, and threw it on the floor....Another Russian went to the radio and threw that on the floor, making sure we no longer heard any more news broadcasts. More men came in. They raged through the house, going from room to room. They stormed into the kitchen and demanded the cook make them something to eat. There must have been about forty soldiers.
I took the children outside and hid them behind some bushes. Inside, we ran from one corner to the other, not knowing what to do. A man from the nearby village passed by and reported that the Russians were acting like animals everywhere. . . . After hours of this, a Russian officer showed up with an interpreter. . . . He was wearing a perfectly tailored uniform, an impressive looking man, and also wearing white gloves! This officer told us, through his translator, that he was confiscating the house and was giving us five minutes to leave the estate.18
Continues a witness from Kaltwasser:
When the shelling ceased we ventured out of the cellar once more, but we had only got as far as the stairs when we saw . . . a Pole, coming towards us with a Russian officer and another man. We hoped for the best, but the interpreter promptly demanded our watches and rings. In fact, he actually tore my watch off its chain, and made the women remove all their rings, bracelets, and necklaces. We were horrified when the Russian officer and the interpreter seized hold of Mrs. M. and my aunt and dragged them off. When they eventually came back we went to the vicarage. The house was full of Russians and they had already wrought havoc in all the rooms. Some of them had ransacked the pantry and were gorging the food they had found there. Others had opened all the drawers and cupboards and thrown the contents onto the floor....Russians continued to raid the house all day long. They played the mouth-organ and the harmonium and set the gramophone going. There was a bottle of pure alcohol in the house and they drained it undiluted. They swarmed into the pantry and ate all the preserves. . . . When it grew dark they set fire to the school. We did not dare go to bed as one lot of soldiers after another kept raiding the house. . . . At about three o’clock in the morning a savage-looking Russian appeared and searched us. We had already been searched innumerable times by other Russians. . . . In the course of their searches one of them opened the wardrobe and slashed all the garments to pieces with his dagger.19
⛋⛋⛋⛋⛋
Traumatic as first encounters were, when the shock troops moved off many Germans would concur that the experience had not been as bad as feared. While rapes had occurred and while many German men of military age had been marched east or shot on the spot, the front line soldier was more concerned with fighting and survival than with loot, rape and revenge. Not so with those who followed. In numerous instances, before Red combat officers and men pushed on they turned to the helpless civilians with stone-like faces:“The Mongols are coming. . . . Very bad men. You go quick. Go quick.”20
Composed largely of Mongols, Kulaks, Kazakhs, Kalmuks, and other Asians, as well as convicts and commissars, these men who formed the second wave of troops were regarded, even by their own comrades,as utterly merciless. Terrified by the news, many Germans did attempt to flee and move in the wake of the first Soviet wave. Most, however, found themselves trapped and could do little more than hide young girls and once again pray that their worst fears were unfounded. After a wait of sometimes days, but normally only hours, the dreaded second wave arrived. There were no preliminaries. Unlike storm troops, who cautiously entered towns and villages and slipped nervously from door to door, the rear echelons burst noisily into communities atop trucks, tanks or peasant carts crammed high with loot. Often wildly drunk, many wore a bizarre array of stolen clothes and gaudy jewelry. Adding to the chaos were herds of bellowing cattle and sheep.
“It was almost like a scene from the Middle Ages—a migration, no less,” said one stunned observer.21
Soon after the “carnival columns” halted in a German town, hell on earth was unleashed. “It seemed as though the devil himself had come . . . ,” a witness from Silesia wrote. “The ‘Mongol barbarism of the Asiatic plains’ had come not in a propaganda phrase but in the flesh.”22
While flames shot up from different corners of the towns and gunfire erupted as citizens were murdered in the streets, the invaders soon began kicking in doors to homes, shops and churches. “A whole horde of Asiatic-looking fellows appeared and started searching the cellar . . . ,” recalled one priest. “The place was a dreadful sight by the time they had finished. The room was already full of smoke and I begged one of the Russians to let us out. . . . Were they going to let us be burnt to death? After a while, however, a more civilized-looking Russian appeared and I repeated my request. He led us out to . . . the courtyard of the convent. The noise was deafening—the raucous shouts of the Russians, the crackling of the flames, the crashing of beams and brickwork.”23
Many horrified Germans tried to greet with a smile their strange visitors. Revealed one woman from a boarding house in Berbitz:
As a precaution, the landlord, Mr. Grebmann, had lined the vestibule with liquor bottles in the naive hope that his house might thereby be spared from ransacking. To the succeeding troop of slant-eyed Mongolians, the tenants brought their jewelry and watches. Hysterical, Mrs. Friedel embraced one of the greasy Kirgis and drank with him from the same bottle, and the elderly Mr. Grebmann patted them familiarly on the back. . . .One of the Mongolians held up my Tom’s tall leather boots triumphantly, the other one put my rings into his pants pocket....
Scarcely had this second detachment left the house and we were beginning to breathe freely, when fists once more thundered at the door: thus it kept up the whole day. The house doors were not permitted to be locked any more. Each took what he wanted either in a more or less harmless or in a malicious way. Soon we and the Russians were wading knee-deep in thrown-around clothing, laundry and bits of smashed dishes....
As soon as a new detachment of Russians entered the house noisily, we squatted trembling about the round table in Grebmann’s living room. One of the soldiers sat at the table with us with pistol disengaged and demanded schnapps or vodka, while the others rummaged around the house. . . . No one dared to speak. We women sat with downcast eyes and lowered head. Someone had told us never to look a Russian in the eye, otherwise we would be lost....
Before long the inside of the house looked as if a band of robbers had lived there. . . . The fellows had cut the beds up into little pieces, slit open the upholstered chairs, thrown furniture around; had slashed pictures, despoiled books, cracked eggs against the wall; had poured liqueur over the rugs, torn curtains down, and scattered the entire contents of all the closets and drawers all over. One of the most painful shocks for me was to see how two of the ruffians with their heavy boots kicked the chest in which I had my beautiful porcelain wrapped in tissue paper and cotton wadding. They were all treasured pieces. . . . My most beautiful piece . . . was used by one of them as a toilet.24
As a rule, the Soviets generally sought out gold and jewelry first, with an especial eye for “uri,” or wristwatches. It was not unusual to see Red troops laden with necklaces and gold chains or sporting as many as a dozen watches on each arm. When the people had been plucked clean of valuables, interest usually turned to liquor. In their mad quest for “wodka,” soldiers greedily imbibed everything from fine wines and champagne to rubbing alcohol and perfume. Red troops, observed one woman, were “crazy for anything even smelling of alcohol.”25
And then. . . .
“Rape was a word that had occurred again and again in our conversation,” admitted Lali Horstmann. “It was an expression which caused no pang of fear in our times for its meaning was purely figurative—‘to be ravished’ belonged to the realm of lyrical poetry. Now its original sense was terrifyingly restored and brought us face to face with a new peril.”26
“Suddenly the door of the room we were in was opened and some soldiers entered,” a frightened boy recalled as he sat with a group of women huddled in a dark room.“One or two matches were struck and I saw that there were about eight Russians in the room who were obviously looking for women.”27 The child continues:
As I crouched there in my corner I saw one of the Russians coming towards me. The match he held in his hand went out. I felt, rather than saw, a hand reach out towards me. I had a fur cap on my head, and suddenly I felt fingers tracing curl-like movements on my temple. For a brief moment I did not know what to make of this, but the next instant, when a loud “No” resounded through the room, I thanked God with all my heart that I was not a woman or a girl.
Meanwhile the beasts had spotted their victims and shared them out. Then they suddenly started shooting at random. But it was dark in the room and no one could see where the shots were being fired or who was hit. I heard wails and groans and voices calling out to me to help, but there was nothing I could do. Right next to me poor defenseless women were being ravished in the presence of their children.28
Merely because a female had been raped once was no guarantee she would not be assaulted again and again. “Many of the girls were raped as often as ten times a night, and even more,” said a witness from Neustadt. 29
“There was never a moment’s peace either by day or at night,” added another victim:
The Russians were coming and going the whole time and they kept eyeing us greedily. The nights were dreadful because we were never safe for a moment. The women were raped, not once or twice but ten, twenty, thirty and a hundred times, and it was all the same to the Russians whether they raped mere children or old women. The youngest victim in the row houses where we lived was ten years of age and the oldest one was over seventy. . . . I am sure that wild and hungry animals would not have behaved any differently.30
Wrote a girl from Posen who desperately clung to a cousin for safety:
When we were lying in bed at night we kept hearing steps coming up the stairs. . . . They beat on the door with their rifle-butts, until it was opened. Without any consideration for my mother and aunt, who had to get out of bed, we were raped by the Russians, who always held a machine pistol in one hand. They lay in bed with their dirty boots on, until the next lot came. As there was no light, everything was done by pocket torches, and we did not even know what the beasts looked like.31
Like hunted prey leading predators from their young, some mothers instinctively sacrificed themselves. Recorded one little girl, ten year-old Mignon Fries:
She told us in a stern voice to go outside to play and under no circumstances to come back in. No matter what we heard, until she herself would come for us, no matter how long it took. Fearfully we looked at her even though we didn’t know exactly what we were afraid of. . . . We went outside and stood around for awhile not knowing what to do, just listening to the noise in the apartment. My mother had just closed all the windows but we could still hear the soldiers talking, laughing and shouting. Then the music started and before long the soldiers were singing....
The day gave way to evening, it got rather chilly and still we were outside and the “party” got noisier. Every once in a while a soldier would open a window and throw an empty vodka bottle outside. Sometimes the music would stop for a while, but the singing and shouting continued. As it got later and later we became very hungry and cold, but having been raised in an atmosphere of strict obedience we didn’t dare go back in the house against our mother’s orders and just huddled against the wall of the shed in the garden trying to keep each other warm....
The music and the singing broke off as suddenly as it had started....Within minutes it was all over and all the soldiers left the house. . . . But it was a long time before our mother finally came out to get us. She was very pale and hugged both of us very tightly for a long time and we could feel her body shaking.32
If front-line troops had displayed unpredictability regarding rape, the second wave did not. “All of us, without exception, suffered the same,” revealed one victim.33
“And to make matters worse,” added a witness from Neisse, “these atrocities were not committed secretly or in hidden corners but in public, in churches, on the streets, and on the squares. . . . Mothers were raped in the presence of their children, girls were raped in front of their brothers.”34
“They . . . raped women and girls . . . in ditches and by the wayside, and as a rule not once but several times,” echoed another viewer. “Sometimes a whole bunch of soldiers would seize hold of one woman and all rape her.”35
For those Germans who had naively imagined that they might “win over” the Soviets with kindness and courtesy, they now understood, too late, that Nazi propaganda had in this instance grossly understated the threat, rather than exaggerated it. “The atrocity reports in the newspapers were harmless, compared to reality,” one incredulous victim revealed.36 While many upright Russian officers courageously stepped in and risked their own lives to stop the murders and rapes, their efforts were little more than a drop of water to a forest fire.37
“All of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot,” admitted Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “This was almost a combat distinction.”38
“There will be no mercy—for no one . . . ,”ran one Russian general’s order to his men. “It is pointless to ask our troops to exercise mercy.”39
Springing from house to house and victim to victim “like wild beasts,” the drunken horde was determined to embrace such words as the above at their literal worst.
“When the Russians eventually tired of looting, robbing, murdering, and ill-treating the women and girls, they set fire to a considerable part of the village and razed it to the ground,” said a survivor of Schoenwald, the small community that had dismissed rumors of Russian ruthlessness and opted to welcome them instead.41
Much like Schoenwald, one town after another was swiftly enveloped by the howling red storm ...with the same results.
“And as we were then hauled out of the cellar,” recalled a woman who, along with her mother and grandmother had been raped repeatedly, “and as they stood there with their machine guns, my mother said, ‘Well, now we’ll probably be shot.’ And I said, ‘It’s all the same to me.’ It really was all the same to me.”42
You can imagine Asian cruelty. . . . “Frau, come,” that was the slogan. “Frau, come.” And I was so furious, because I’d had it up to here.... He had me in such a clinch I couldn’t free myself, with my elbow I hit him in the pit of his stomach. That definitely hurt him, and he yelled, “You, I shoot.” And he was brandishing this kind of machine gun around my nose and then I said, “Then shoot.” Yelled it, yelled it just like he did. “Then shoot.”43
Though this woman miraculously lived, many who offered even token resistance did not. Wrote a witness from Bauschdorf:
Emilie Ertelt . . . wanted to protect her fifteen-year old daughter, who had been raped sixteen times on one and the same day. Holding a lighted candle in her hand, Mrs. Ertelt, and all those present in the room began to pray for her daughter. . . .Four shots were suddenly fired at us. After a few moments some more Russians appeared and started shooting at Mrs. Ertelt, wounding her in the head.
The blood streamed down her face, and the nuns who were present went to her assistance and bandaged her head. Soon afterwards another Russian appeared, a brutal-looking fellow . . . and fired a shot at close range. Mrs. Ertelt was killed instantaneously.44
Surrounded by Soviets, flight was simply not a sane option for females—and yet, some tried. One young teacher from Kriescht ran terror-stricken into the nearby woods. The woman was soon found, however, and, according to a chronicler, “They drove her out on the road stark naked, and many soldiers used her one after the other. She reached her village crawling on hands and knees along the ditch, through mud and snow.”45
Another group of females found temporary haven in a woodland barn near Schoeneiche. But again, the refuge was swiftly discovered. Remembered one who was there:
They burst in, drunk with vodka and with victory, looking for women. When they saw only older women and children hiding behind a pile of carpets, they must have suspected that somewhere younger bodies were being concealed, and they started to ram their bayonets into the carpets. Here and there first and then systematically. . . . Nobody knows how many young girls were killed instantly that night. Eventually, the muffled cries of anguish and pain gave the hiding places away, and the victors started unrolling their prey. They chased those girls that had remained unhurt through the barn. . . . By then the barn looked like a battle field with wounded women on the floor right next to screaming and fighting victims forced to endure repeated and violent acts of rape.46
Faced by relentless assaults, with flight out of the question, females tried a variety of stratagems to save themselves. “Some of us tried to make ourselves as unattractive as possible by rouging the tips of our noses, putting gray powder on our upper lips to look like mustaches, and combing out our hair wildly,” revealed Lali Horstmann.47 Others placed pillows under their dresses and hobbled with sticks to appear like hunchbacks.48 One crazed woman, clad in an alluring night gown, left her door open purposely to attract soldiers to where she was lying in bed, in the hope of finding a protector. “Two Russians, who had entered for a moment stood speechless. Then both spat in disgust, using a coarse word, shocked to the core by a woman who could offer herself to them. They went on to the room next door, from where soon came cries for help from the girl’s grandmother, aged sixty-nine. Her valiant defense of her honor had made her more attractive than the pretty, too willing girl.”49 Regarding “willing” women such as the above as “unclean,” Red troops were as likely as not to kill on the spot such individuals.
Many frantic females mistakenly assumed a house of God would provide protection. In fact, churches were usually the rapists’ first stop. Agonized a priest from Neisse:
The girls, women and nuns were raped incessantly for hours on end, the soldiers standing in queues, the officers at the head of the queues, in front of their victims. During the first night many of the nuns and women were raped as many as fifty times. Some of the nuns who resisted with all their strength were shot, others were ill-treated in a dreadful manner until they were too exhausted to offer any resistance. The Russians knocked them down, kicked them, beat them on the head and in the face with the butt-end of their revolvers and rifles, until they finally collapsed and in this unconscious condition became the helpless victims of brutish passion, which was so inhuman as to be inconceivable. The same dreadful scenes were enacted in the hospitals, homes for the aged, and other such institutions. Even nuns who were seventy and eighty years old and were ill and bedridden were raped and ill-treated by these barbarians.50
Those women pregnant, on their menstrual cycle, or enduring diarrhea, suffered like all the rest. Nothing, it seemed—not age, ailment or ugliness—could repel the Red rapist. Even death was no defense.
“I . . . saw some twenty Red Army men standing in line before the corpse of a woman certainly beyond sixty years of age who had been raped to death,” one sickened witness recorded. “They were shouting and laughing and waiting for their satisfaction over her dead body.” As this viewer went on to add, and as numerous examples attest, such ghoulish depravities were not isolated events.51
While those who remained endured unspeakable fates, Germans who fled with treks also suffered.“What surprised us most was the way they traveled,” recalled a British POW, who, along with thousands of other Allied prisoners, was being marched west away from the advancing Soviets.
There was not a car, lorry or even a bicycle to be seen—only a seemingly endless line of covered wagons and carts drawn by horses or mules. . . . They were a pitiful sight, frozen, hungry, shoes and clothes falling apart, dragging themselves along to an unknown destination, hoping only that it might be beyond the reach of the Russian army. It was so cold that even in the day-time any drink mixed with cold water froze solid before it was possible to carry it to one’s mouth. At night men and women could keep alive only by huddling together in a wagon. . . . Those who fell asleep in the snow were dead within a few minutes. . . .
Within an hour of taking the road prisoners and refugees had become indistinguishable. We were bound together by one common thought—to keep together so as to keep alive. . . . The refugees gladly let us climb on to their wagons and, as they had nothing with which to barter, we gave them what food we could spare.52
Given the chaotic conditions, and with freezing refugees clogging the way, many treks were quickly overhauled by the Russians. Some Soviet tanks refused to leave the roads and crashed straight through the columns, squashing all in their path. After heavy traffic, the victims—men, women, children, and animals—were eventually as flat as cardboard.
Young Josefine Schleiter records the horror when her group was overtaken:
The tanks rushed through the rows of carts. Carts were hurled into the ditches where there were entrails of horses, and men, women and children were fighting with death. Wounded people were screaming for help.
Next to me was a woman bandaging her husband who was losing blood from a big wound. Behind me a young girl said to her father: “Father shoot me.” “Yes father,” said her brother who was about sixteen years old. “I have no more chance.” The father looked at his children, the tears streaming down his cheeks and he said in a quiet tone: “Wait still a little while children.”
Then came an officer on horseback. Some German soldiers were brought to him. He took his revolver; I shut my eyes, shots fell, and the poor fellows lay in front of us shot in the head, an expression of horror on their faces.53
Those terrified survivors who scattered to the icy countryside fell easy prey. “The Russians found us and pulled us out of the barn,” said fourteen-year-old Horst Wegner. “They were Mongolians. They had huge scars and pockmarks on their faces. And they were draped in jewelry—they wore watches up to the elbows. They came in and pulled out everyone wearing anything military—a military coat, for example. They were taken behind the barn, shoved against a wall, and shot. They weren’t even all Germans; some of them were foreigners. They even shot the private who had bandaged my father’s leg.”54
As always, for females the living death soon began. Renate Hoffmann:
Suddenly three Russian soldiers came around the corner. They pointed their guns at us and forced us into the house.... We knew what they had in store for us. We were separated. They put their guns to our heads. Any attempt to defend ourselves meant certain death. The only thing you could do was to pretend you were a rock or dead. . . .
When the three men left the house, I opened the door of the room I was in. Another door opened down the hall and the nurse came out. We just looked at one another. . . . We were nauseated and felt miserable. Thank God there was still running water in the house.55
As he struggled by car over the crowded roads, Major Rudolf Janecke of the Medical Corp gained a glimpse of what seemed to him an “endless agony.”
Near a small village . . . I saw for the first time a trek that had been destroyed from the air. Many wagons had caught fire in spite of the wet—perhaps phosphor bombs—and were entirely burned out. The dead lay around in strange positions, among them children pressed against their mothers’ breasts.... Soon afterward we were stopped by a man waving desperately. . . . He had seen the red cross on our car. His excitement nearly choked him. He was pale as death,and raised his right hand in an imploring gesture. He kept pointing to a wagon that stood out in the open field. His left arm, probably broken, hung limply from his shoulder.
His wife would bleed to death, he managed to groan, if I did not help immediately. A Russian tank crew had caught them, two days ago, while they were resting in a village. Later they had got away. But now she was dripping blood. She hardly breathed any more—no one could help her.
I have performed some difficult operations in the field, under impossible conditions. But this was the first time I tried a tamponade of the uterus, on a snow-covered field over which an icy wind was blowing, with the patient lying on a filthy wagon in her blood-drenched clothes. . . . Some other women stood around. By the patient’s head cowered a befuddled boy of about fourteen, all the while close to tears. “He had to watch it,” the man said while I was giving the woman two injections I happened to have with me. “When the fifteenth man was on her they knocked me down because I dropped the light. He had to hold the light till they all were through.” The other women nodded, with not a word of their own misery.56
As a rule, those who fled by train fared best. Speed did not always guarantee escape, however. Russian aircraft routinely strafed and bombed the cars from above and tanks cut the rails from below. When the Soviets suddenly captured the town of Allenstein, they forced the station master to signal the “all clear” to refugee trains still arriving from the east. As one unsuspecting train after another steamed into Allenstein, the Russians first slaughtered any men found on board, then passed their time raping carload after carload of females.57
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For millions of Germans cut off on the Baltic coast by the rapid Russian advance, only one avenue of escape remained open—the sea. Even here, however, Soviet aircraft controlled the skies above and submarines prowled unseen below. In the various ports along the coast, thousands upon thousands of ragged, frozen refugees pressed to the water’s edge in hopes of landing a spot on one of the few vessels available. The numbers were so great and the fear so consuming that efforts to board when ships did dock often resembled riots.
“The crush to get on board was just terrible,” a witness wrote from Pillau.“I saw a pram being squeezed out of all recognition by the pushing masses. One old man fell into the water and there was nothing one could do in the crush—also it was so cold he would have died on hitting the water.”58
Because armed guards had orders to evacuate as many women and children as possible, babies were used like tickets, with half-crazed mothers tossing infants down to relatives on the pier. Some children landed safely; some did not.59
If anything, the situation at Gotenhafen was even more horrific. As the Wilhelm Gustloff made ready to take on passengers in late January 1945, the ship’s crew were stunned by what they saw.“There must have been 60,000 people on the docks . . . ,” remembered second engineer, Walter Knust. “As soon as we let down the gangways people raced forward and pushed their way in. In the confusion a lot of children got separated from their parents. Either the kids got on board leaving their parents on the harbor or the children were left behind as their parents got pushed forward by the throng.”60
A former cruise liner designed to accommodate two thousand passengers and crew, by the time the Gustloff cast ropes on January 30, the beautiful white ship had taken on as many as six thousand refugees. Even so, as she backed away from port, her path was blocked by smaller craft jammed with people.
“Take us with you,” the refugees cried. “Save the children!”
“We put down nets and everybody on the small ships scrambled up as best they could,” said the Gustloff’s radio operator, Rudi Lange. “As we got under way I think I remember being told by one of the ship’s officers to send a signal that another 2,000 people had come aboard.”61
That black, stormy night, as she struggled through high winds and heavy, ice-filled waves, the Gustloff’s ventilation and plumbing systems failed utterly. Strained far beyond its limits, the tightly-sealed ship filled with a hot, nauseating stench of urine, excrement, and vomit.62 The groans and screams of severely wounded soldiers and the wails of separated families added to the ghastly horror. But the worst was yet to come. At approximately 9 p.m., three heavy jolts rocked the passengers on the Gustloff.
“Vroom—Vroom—Vroom! That’s what it sounded like,” recalled a young boy upon hearing the torpedoes.63
“I heard the explosions,” wrote engineer Knust, “and I knew what had happened at once, because the engines stopped and then I saw a rush of water through the engine room. First the ship lurched to starboard under the force of the blast. Then she rose and began listing to port. I put on my shoes and jacket and hurried out into the corridor.”64
Panic-stricken, thousands below deck stampeded through the narrow passageways crushing and clawing others in an attempt to reach the life boats.65 “People were rushing about and screaming. Alarm bells shrilled,” remembered one terrorized passenger.66
“We struggled through the crowd to one of the boats,” said Paula Knust, wife of the ship’s officer.“It was so cold as the wind hit us. I was wearing only slacks and a blouse and blazer. Already the ship had a heavy list. The waves seemed very high, and you cannot imagine how terrible it looked.”67
Most lifeboats were frozen solid and even those that could be freed were mishandled in the panic and spilled their screaming occupants into the black sea. Walter and Paula Knust grappled with one boat that did manage to get away. “As we hit the water,” the husband recalled,“I could see people leaping from the side of the ship into the sea. I thought those who escaped drowning would freeze to death. It was so cold.”68 Indeed, the water was so frigid that those who leaped overboard might just as well have jumped into boiling oil or acid for their chances of survival were almost as slim. In seconds, minutes at most, the struggling swimmers were dead.
While loud speakers blared words of comfort—“The ship will not sink. Rescue ships are on the way”—thousands of freezing people pressed along the decks.69 Convinced that the sealed bulkheads had held and that indeed, the ship would not sink, many passengers fled indoors once more to escape the razor sharp winds and –20 degree temperature. The respite proved brief, however.
At ten o’clock a heavy tremor ripped the Gustloff as the bulkheads broke and the sea rushed in. Within seconds, the big ship began to roll on its side.70 Sixteen-year-old Eva Luck was in the ballroom with her mother and little sister:
Suddenly the whole music room tilted and a great cry went up from all the people there. They literally slid in a heap along the angled deck. A grand piano at one end went berserk and rolled across the crowded room crushing women and children in its path and scattering others before it. Finally it smashed into the port bulkhead with a discordant roar as though a giant fist had hit all the keys at once.71
Elsewhere, other victims went flying through glass enclosed decks into the sea.72 Amid the screams, sirens and roar of rushing water, gunshots sounded throughout the doomed ship as those trapped below committed suicide.
Miraculously escaping the ball room with the help of a sailor, Eva Luck’s family frantically tried to escape:
My mother had forgotten to put her shoes on, and I moved clumsily on high heels towards the iron rungs of the ladder going up the ship’s inside. People around us were falling about as the ship moved but I was able to grasp the rungs and haul up my little sister. . . . My mother followed us to the upper deck. When we got there it was terrible. I saw with horror that the funnel was lying almost parallel with the sea. People were jumping in. I could hear the ship’s siren and felt the ice-cold water round my legs. I reached out to try and grab my sister. I felt nothing but the water as it swept me out and over the side.73
Fortunately for Eva and a few others, the force of the flooding water freed a number of life rafts. As survivors scrambled aboard, the Gustloff began her swift descent. “Suddenly,” remembered a woman in a lifeboat,“it seemed that every light in the ship had come on. The whole ship was blazing with lights, and her sirens sounded out over the sea.”74 Paula Knust also watched the drama:
I cannot forget the loud clear sound of the siren as the Gustloff with all her lights on made the final plunge. I could clearly see the people still on board the Gustloff clinging to the rails. Even as she went under they were still hanging on and screaming. All around us were people swimming, or just floating in the sea. I can still see their hands grasping at the sides of our boat. It was too full to take on any more.75
When rescue ships later reached the scene, they pulled from the icy waters a mere nine hundred survivors. All else—roughly 7,000 men, women and children—were lost. Even then, however, the nightmare did not end. When rescue vessels touched land, scores of victims were disembarked at Gotenhafen. Thus, in less than twenty-four hours, after a harrowing night of incredible terror, some refugees found themselves on the very docks they had hoped to leave, once again searching desperately for a way to escape.76
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Meanwhile, the red tide moved closer. In countless German cities and towns the pattern repeated itself, as the diary of a Catholic priest from Klosterbrueck reveals:
January 21st, 1945.... Strange to say, the population intends to remain here, and is not afraid of the Russians. The reports that in one village they raped all the women and abducted all the men and took them away to work somewhere must surely have been exaggerated. How dreadful it would be if Goebbels was telling the truth after all! . . .
January 22nd. . . . the machine-guns sound very near and some shells must have hit some of the buildings close by, because the house keeps trembling. The occupants of the cellar keep asking me what the Russians will be like. I keep asking myself the same thing....
[Later]—We have had our first encounter with them, and are somewhat relieved. They are not as bad as we had expected. When we heard the Russians moving about in the church up above, we went up to them. Two Russian soldiers looked in at the cellar-door and asked if there were any German soldiers there. There was a strange look of tenseness and fear on their faces. A Russian kept watch at the entrance to the cellar the whole night.
January 23rd. . . . After the fighting troops had moved on, a fresh lot of Russians arrived. Two of them entered the cellar, fired several shots into the ceiling, and asked us to give them our watches. They went off with fourteen wristwatches. Then three more Russians arrived. . . . [They] swallowed the food like wild animals, and they drank the wine as if it were water.“The war is good here,” they kept saying. . . .
January 25th.All night long Russians entered the chapel and searched and questioned us. They ordered the woman to go outside with her small child.... [They] raped the woman and sent her back to us. She came back to the chapel, her small child in her arms, the tears streaming down her face. . . . During the morning three women from the village came to the chapel. The vicar hardly recognized them, for their faces were distorted with fear and terror. They told us that whole families had been shot by the Russians. . . . Girls who had refused to allow themselves to be raped, and parents who had sought to protect their children, had been shot on the spot....
January 26th. Last night was very troubled again. Fresh lots of soldiers kept on arriving and searching the house. . . . Every time the door is opened we start with fear....
January 27th. We priests were allowed out of the chapel for half an hour today in order to bury Margarethe in the yard. Poor girl, it is a good thing you were dead and so did not know what the Russians did to your body!
January 28th. The night was very troubled again. . . . Many of the nuns are getting very distressed and nervous. They sleep even less than we do. I often hear them say, “If only we had fled before the Russians arrived!”77
By the end of January, the routed German army was finally able to wheel and face its pursuer. Because the Red advance had been so swift, Soviet supply lines were unable to keep pace. Additionally, a sudden thaw melted icy rivers and turned roads into quagmires, making rapid pursuit impossible. While isolated enclaves continued to hold back the Russians, particularly along the Baltic coast, the bulk of the German Army took up defensive positions behind the Oder River, the last natural barrier before Berlin. Although the miraculous respite was spent regrouping and placing arms in the hands of the People’s Army, or Volkssturm, the morale of the Wehrmacht had received a severe blow. The incredible force and fury of the Russian onslaught now convinced most military men that defeat was unavoidable. And for the huddled and stunned civilian masses, the sickening depth of Soviet savagery also clearly foretold that the end would be vastly more nightmarish than even the most lurid imagination had dreamed.
At first, only breathless rumors relayed by panic-stricken refugees revealed the nature of the approaching horror. Later, however, the extent of Russian atrocities was confirmed when stranded army units broke through to German lines or when the Wehrmacht launched small counterattacks and reclaimed bits of lost ground.
“In every village and town they entered,” wrote one who spoke with soldiers, “the German troops came upon scenes of horror: slain boys, People’s Army men drenched with gasoline and burned—and sometimes survivors to tell the tale of the outrages. In some villages, they surprised Russians warm in the beds of women they had taken, and found the bodies of the many French war prisoners who had died defending German women and children.”78
Staggered by what he had seen and heard, a German officer tried desperately to make sense of the disaster; to understand the minds of men “who find . . . pleasure in raping the same woman over and over, dozens of times, even while other women are standing near.”
There is a perverse hatred behind this which cannot be explained with phrases about Bolshevism, or the so-called Asiatic mentality, or by the assertion that the Russian soldiers have always considered the women of the conquered as their booty. . . . I was in Poland in 1939 when the Russians moved in, and I did not see a single woman being molested.79
“This,” concluded the young officer grimly, “shows the frightful power of propaganda.”80
Hundreds of thousands massacred, hundreds of thousands raped, millions already enslaved—but this was nothing. Worse was to come. “The Germans have been punished, but not enough,” gloated Ilya Ehrenburg.“The Fritzes are still running, but not lying dead. Who can stop us now? . . . The Oder? The Volksturm? No, it’s too late Germany, you can whirl around in circles, and burn, and howl in your deathly agony; the hour of revenge has struck!”81
NOTES
1. Hans Graf von Lehndorff, Token of a Covenant (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1964), 5.
2. Ibid.
3. John Strawson, The Battle for Berlin (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 75.
4. Duffy, Red Storm, 88.
5. Ivan Konev, Year of Victory (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 19.
6. Duffy, 278.
7. Thorwald, Flight in the Winter, 142–144.
8. Ibid., 48–49.
9. Johannes Kaps, The Tragedy of Silesia, 1945–1946 (Munich: Christ Unterwegs, 1952/53), 155.
10. Ibid., 445.
11. Ibid., 446–44
12. Ibid., 448.
13. Ibid., 448–449.
14. Ibid., 155.
15. Chadwick, Anna, 113.
16. Kaps, Silesia, 283.
17. Horstmann, We Chose to Stay, 82–83.
18. Pechel, Voices From the Third Reich, 443–444.
19. Kaps, Silesia, 435.
20. Lucas, Third Reich, 69.
21. Ibid., 41.
22. Thorwald, Flight, 53.
23. Kaps, 449.
24. Elizabeth Lutz, “Rape of Christian Europe—The Red Army’s Rampage in 1945,” The Barnes Review 3, no. 4 (Apr. 1997): 11.
25. Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 218.
26. Horstmann, 40.
27. Kaps, Silesia, 147.
28. Ibid.
29. Kaps, 192.
30. Ibid., 136.
31. Theodor Schieder, ed. The Expulsion of the German Population from the Territories East of the Oder-Neisse Line (Bonn, Germany: Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugess and War Victims, 1951–), 256.
32. Letter of Mignon Fries Baker, 1992 (copy in author’s possession).
33. Thorwald, Flight, 180.
34. Kaps, Silesia, 228.
35. Ibid., 324.
36. Ibid., 192.
37. Heinrich von Einsiedel, I Joined the Russians (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 193.
38. DeZayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, 68.
39. Sorge, Other Price, 127.
40. Lutz, “Rape of Christian Europe,” 13; The Barnes Review 4, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1998): 19. (title?)(author?)
41. Kaps, 155.
42. Alison Owings, Frauen—German Women Recall the Third Reich (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 405.
43. Ibid., 406.
44. Kaps, Silesia, 252.
45. Thorwald, Flight in the Winter, 180.
46. Erika M. Hansen, “A Woman’s Odyssey” (unpublished manuscript, Glendale, Calif.): 158.
47. Horstmann, We Chose to Stay, 89.
48. Lutz, “Rape of Christian Europe,” 1
49. Horstmann, 104–105.
50. Kaps, Silesia, 228.
51. Ibid.; Thorwald, Flight, 55.
52. Crawley, Spoils of War, 10–11.
53. Schieder, Expulsion of the German Population, 129–130.
54. Pechel, Voices From the Third Reich, 418.
55. Ibid., 445.
56. Thorwald, 144–145.
57. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights—A Poem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 51, 63, 65.
58. Christopher Dobson, John Miller and Ronald Payne, The Cruelest Night (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 25.
59. Ibid.; Toland, Last 100 Days, 31.
60. Dobson, Cruelest Night, 58.
61. Ibid., 84.
62. Ibid., 90.
63. Ibid., 105.
64. Ibid., 102.
65. Thorwald, Flight, 122.
66. Dobson, Cruelest Night, 104.
67. Ibid., 112–113.
68. Ibid., 114.
69. Ibid.
70. Thorwald, Flight, 123.
71. Dobson, Cruelest Night, 117.
72. Thorwald, 123.
73. Dobson, 117.
74. Ibid., 120.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., 135.
77. Kaps, Silesia, 179–181.
78. Thorwald, Flight, 79.
79. Ibid., 145.
80. Ibid.
81. Toland, Last 100 Days, 72
11. Ibid., 446–44
12. Ibid., 448.
13. Ibid., 448–449.
14. Ibid., 155.
15. Chadwick, Anna, 113.
16. Kaps, Silesia, 283.
17. Horstmann, We Chose to Stay, 82–83.
18. Pechel, Voices From the Third Reich, 443–444.
19. Kaps, Silesia, 435.
20. Lucas, Third Reich, 69.
21. Ibid., 41.
22. Thorwald, Flight, 53.
23. Kaps, 449.
24. Elizabeth Lutz, “Rape of Christian Europe—The Red Army’s Rampage in 1945,” The Barnes Review 3, no. 4 (Apr. 1997): 11.
25. Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 218.
26. Horstmann, 40.
27. Kaps, Silesia, 147.
28. Ibid.
29. Kaps, 192.
30. Ibid., 136.
31. Theodor Schieder, ed. The Expulsion of the German Population from the Territories East of the Oder-Neisse Line (Bonn, Germany: Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugess and War Victims, 1951–), 256.
32. Letter of Mignon Fries Baker, 1992 (copy in author’s possession).
33. Thorwald, Flight, 180.
34. Kaps, Silesia, 228.
35. Ibid., 324.
36. Ibid., 192.
37. Heinrich von Einsiedel, I Joined the Russians (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 193.
38. DeZayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, 68.
39. Sorge, Other Price, 127.
40. Lutz, “Rape of Christian Europe,” 13; The Barnes Review 4, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1998): 19. (title?)(author?)
41. Kaps, 155.
42. Alison Owings, Frauen—German Women Recall the Third Reich (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 405.
43. Ibid., 406.
44. Kaps, Silesia, 252.
45. Thorwald, Flight in the Winter, 180.
46. Erika M. Hansen, “A Woman’s Odyssey” (unpublished manuscript, Glendale, Calif.): 158.
47. Horstmann, We Chose to Stay, 89.
48. Lutz, “Rape of Christian Europe,” 1
49. Horstmann, 104–105.
50. Kaps, Silesia, 228.
51. Ibid.; Thorwald, Flight, 55.
52. Crawley, Spoils of War, 10–11.
53. Schieder, Expulsion of the German Population, 129–130.
54. Pechel, Voices From the Third Reich, 418.
55. Ibid., 445.
56. Thorwald, 144–145.
57. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights—A Poem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 51, 63, 65.
58. Christopher Dobson, John Miller and Ronald Payne, The Cruelest Night (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 25.
59. Ibid.; Toland, Last 100 Days, 31.
60. Dobson, Cruelest Night, 58.
61. Ibid., 84.
62. Ibid., 90.
63. Ibid., 105.
64. Ibid., 102.
65. Thorwald, Flight, 122.
66. Dobson, Cruelest Night, 104.
67. Ibid., 112–113.
68. Ibid., 114.
69. Ibid.
70. Thorwald, Flight, 123.
71. Dobson, Cruelest Night, 117.
72. Thorwald, 123.
73. Dobson, 117.
74. Ibid., 120.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., 135.
77. Kaps, Silesia, 179–181.
78. Thorwald, Flight, 79.
79. Ibid., 145.
80. Ibid.
81. Toland, Last 100 Days, 72
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