The End

  Explosions and fear of air raids sometimes caused the refugees to take cover where they could, in the fields away from the road. Women fell on their knees to pray. It was a race against time as main highways became cut off by Soviet troops. Abandoned wagons and household goods littered the roadside. The lucky ones, after an anxiety-ridden wait on the shores, finally crammed into a fleet of little boats that ferried them, though without their livestock and most of their possessions, to temporary safety over the abutting saltwater inlet, the Kurisches Haff, to improvised billets in parts of East Prussia. Some sought to swim across, and were drowned. The last most of those fleeing saw of Memel was a red glow in the night sky. An estimated third of the population fell into Soviet hands. There were stories of plunder, rape and murder by Red Army soldiers.49

  The fate of Memel marked the start of more than two weeks of dread and horror for the population close to the East Prussian border. Worse was yet to come. As General Guderian later commented, ‘what happened in East Prussia was an indication to the inhabitants of the rest of Germany of their fate in the event of a Russian victory.’50

  On 16 October, the Red Army began its assault on East Prussia itself amid a barrage of artillery fire over a 40-kilometre stretch of the front and intensive air raids on border towns. There was as good as no defence offered by the Luftwaffe, and the German 4th Army, severely weakened in the collapse of Army Group Centre in the summer, was forced to pull back westwards. On 18 October Soviet troops advanced across the German frontier. Within three days they had penetrated German lines and forced their way some 60 kilometres into the Reich across a front of around 150 kilometres. The border towns of Eydtkau, Ebenrode and Goldap fell into Soviet hands, while Gumbinnen and Angerapp narrowly escaped that fate, though the former was heavily damaged through air attacks and Soviet troops reached the outskirts. The Soviets reached as far as the village of Nemmersdorf in the early morning of 21 October where, despite their finding a key bridge over the river Angerapp intact, the offensive halted.

  The leadership of Army Group Centre had expected that the Soviet attack, when it came, would be the prelude to a huge offensive that might break through into Germany’s heartlands. As it was, the Soviets’ pause in Nemmersdorf gave the 4th Army the opportunity to regroup, muster its strength and, with panzer reinforcements, attempt a daring and successful encirclement manoeuvre against superior forces that took the attackers completely by surprise and inflicted heavy losses. Soviet commanders, impressed by the Wehrmacht’s counter-offensive, immediately went on the defensive and pulled back their troops. By 27 October their offensive was abandoned. On 3 November German troops freed Goldap – reduced to ruins and plundered by Red Army soldiers – and two days later the ‘first battle of East Prussia’ was over, at a cost of extremely high losses on both sides. A highly damaging Soviet breakthrough to the East Prussian capital of Königsberg had been prevented. German soldiers – especially those who came from the eastern regions – despite often limited training and inadequate weaponry, had fought furiously to fend off the invaders. Even so, a border strip of East Prussia, 100 kilometres broad and up to 27 deep, stayed in Soviet occupation. The front in this area stayed stable until January.51 But East Prussians were from now on a highly endangered species.

  The reason why the Soviet attack had halted after occupying a good position on reaching Nemmersdorf became plain when German troops were able to retake the village on 23 October, barely forty-eight hours after it had fallen to the Red Army. What the German soldiers found awaiting them was a scene of horror. The name of Nemmersdorf soon became familiar to most Germans. It told them what they might expect if the Red Army were to conquer the Reich.

  The fate that would overtake Nemmersdorf and the inhabitants of neighbouring districts was compounded by the lamentable failure of the Nazi authorities – repeated with even graver consequences a few months later – to evacuate the population in good time.52 Evacuation in the whole imperilled area was chaotic. Koch was the paradigm example of power draining from the centre to the provincial Party chieftains, a development that would intensify generally in early 1945. Abetted by his deputy, Paul Dargel, he had complete control over evacuation measures. Supported by Hitler, Koch refused to countenance early evacuation because of the fears that it would begin a stampede out of the province, and would send defeatist signals to the rest of the Reich. The population were to remain as long as possible as a sign of unwavering morale and determination. The Wehrmacht’s own wishes to have the area cleared were ignored.53 The Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, Colonel-General Reinhardt, was himself reduced to paroxysms of futile rage at Koch’s high-handed behaviour in the region.54 When evacuation orders were finally given, they were predictably chaotic in their execution. Dargel and other Party functionaries could not be located for hours. A District Leader briefly emerged, only to disappear into a local pub and drink himself into a stupor. A lorry commandeered to help with the evacuation did not turn up; it had allegedly been sequestered by a Party office to carry off stores of food and drink. At the most critical time, Party functionaries – the only people who could give orders – had failed miserably in their duties.55

  Nemmersdorf, the most westerly point of the Soviet incursion, was heavily involved in the belated, chaotic evacuation. As Soviet troops approached, inhabitants of nearby towns and villages fled in panic, and at the last minute. Horse-drawn covered wagons from all around queued to cross Nemmersdorf’s crucial bridge. People took what few possessions they could and fled for their lives. Helped by the cover of thick autumnal mists, most in fact managed to get across the bridge to safety further westwards even in the final hours before the Red Army arrived. But for some, inhabitants both of Nemmersdorf and of other nearby townships, it was too late. They woke in the early hours of 21 October to find Soviet soldiers already in their villages.56

  The battle-hardened soldiers of the Red Army had fought their way westwards out of their own country, through Poland and now, for the first time, into the country of the hated enemy. As they had advanced through wastelands of death and destruction, they had witnessed the legacy of the savage brutality of German conquest and subjugation and the scorched-earth devastation of a once imperious army in headlong retreat. They saw the unmistakable signs of the terrible suffering of their own people. Soviet propaganda directly encouraged drastic retribution. ‘Take merciless revenge on the fascist child murderers and executioners, pay them back for the blood and tears of Soviet mothers and children,’ ran one typical proclamation in October 1944.57 ‘Kill. There is nothing which the Germans aren’t guilty of’ was the exhortation of another.58 Reaching German soil, and encountering for the first time a civilian enemy population, pent-up hatreds exploded in violent revenge. As German troops moved into villages and townships retaken by the Wehrmacht after days of Soviet occupation, they came across the corpses of murdered civilians, grim indicators of the atrocities that had taken place. The worst had taken place in Nemmersdorf itself, which came to symbolize these early atrocities of the Red Army.

  Details of what exactly happened in Nemmersdorf, however, remain murky. From the outset, fact became difficult to separate from propaganda. Some testimony, given a few years afterwards, which left a lasting mark on the gruesome imagery of events, is of doubtful veracity. According to the most vivid account, provided some nine years later, a Volkssturm man whose company had been ordered to assist in the clearing up of Nemmersdorf after the attack spoke of finding several naked women nailed up through their hands to barn doors in crucifix positions, of an old woman whose head had been split in two by an axe or spade, and of seventy-two women and children bestially murdered by the Red Army. All the women had allegedly been raped. The bodies had been exhumed and the findings established, he claimed, by an international commission of doctors.59

  A report compiled by the Geheime Feldpolizei (secret military police), dispatched on 25 October, two days after the Soviet troops had left the village, to interrogate any witnesses and discover
what had happened, paints, however, a somewhat different picture – though one which was grim enough. There had been plundering, the report registered, and two women had been raped. The corpses of twenty-six persons, mainly elderly men and women, though also a few children, were found. Some lay in an open grave, others in a ditch, by the roadside or in houses. Most had been killed by single shots to the head, though the skull of one had been smashed in. But there were no lurid descriptions of crucifixions. A German doctor from a regiment in the district had inspected the corpses. Himmler’s own personal doctor, Professor Gebhardt, had, remarkably, also found his way to Nemmersdorf within a day of the Soviet troops leaving, though, presumably, someone of his rank was not needed simply to establish the cause of death. Already, it seems, leading Nazi authorities had earmarked Nemmersdorf for special notoriety. Propagandists were swiftly on the scene following the recapture of the area, keen to exploit Soviet ill-deeds to bolster the German determination to fight, and not slow to exaggerate where it served their purposes.60

  Naturally, German propaganda made the most of the exposé of Soviet atrocities. The most grisly scenes may have been a fabrication. On the other hand, the atrocities were not simply a propaganda invention or later concoction. General Werner Kreipe, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, visiting the Panzerkorps ‘Hermann Göring’ near Gumbinnen and in the Nemmersdorf area within hours of the Red Army pulling out, claimed in his diary entry that bodies of women and children were nailed to barn doors, and ordered the outrages to be photographed as proof.61 If the photographs were taken, they have long since disappeared. A machine-gunner among the German troops who entered Nemmersdorf on 22 October recorded in the diary jottings he kept secreted in his uniform the discovery of ‘terrible incidents involving mangled bodies’, some mutilated, one old man pierced with a pitchfork and left hanging on a barn door, sights ‘so terrible that some of our recruits run out in panic and vomit’.62 The numbers killed in Nemmersdorf may have been smaller than alleged, though some of the more inflated figures probably included those also killed by Red Army soldiers in other nearby localities.63 Conceivably, too, there were fewer rapes than claimed, though some certainly took place and the later behaviour of the Red Army on its passage through eastern Germany offers no grounds to presume the best of its soldiers. Colonel-General Reinhardt visited the district on 25 October. He wrote to his wife the following day that ‘the Bolsheviks had ravaged like wild beasts, including murder of children, not to mention acts of violence against women and girls, whom they had also murdered’. He was deeply shaken by what he had seen.64 Whatever doubts are raised about the actual scale of the murders and rapes, and necessary though it is to remember the nature and purpose of propaganda exploitation, the atrocities were no mere figment of propaganda. Terrible things did happen in and around Nemmersdorf.

  Moreover, whatever the truth about the precise details of the atrocities, propaganda acquired a reality of its own. In terms of the impact of Nemmersdorf, its likely effect was to underpin the determination of soldiers to fight on at all costs in the east, to struggle to the utmost to avoid being overrun by the Red Army and to encourage civilians to take flight at the earliest opportunity. The image of Nemmersdorf turned out to be more important than precise factual accuracy about its horrific reality.

  IV

  The propaganda machinery was soon in action. Goebbels instantly recognized the gift that had come his way. ‘These atrocities are indeed dreadful,’ he noted in his diary, after Göring had telephoned him with the details, ‘I’ll make use of them for a big press campaign.’ This would ensure that the last doubters were ‘convinced of what the German people can expect if Bolshevism really gets hold of the Reich’.65 Head of the Reich Press Office Otto Dietrich gave out instructions for the presentation of the story by the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro (DNB; German News Agency), responsible for circulating news items within and outside Germany. ‘It is specially desirable’, the directive ran, ‘that the DNB report brings out the horrific Bolshevik crimes in East Prussia in a big and effective way and comments on them with extreme harshness. The monstrous Soviet bloodlust must be denounced in the layout and headlines.’ It was not a matter of attacks on big landowners and industrialists, it had to be stressed, but on ordinary people, targeted for annihilation by Bolshevism.66

  The headlines duly followed. ‘The Raving of the Soviet Beasts’ bellowed the Nazi main newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, on 27 October.67 ‘Bolshevik Bloodlust Rages in East Prussian Border Area’, and ‘Bestial Murderous Terror in East Prussia’ proclaimed regional newspapers in eastern Germany.68 Other organs of the coordinated press followed suit.69 Maximum shock was the intention in the stories of plunder, destruction, rape and murder. Commissions of doctors, it was said, had confirmed the murder of sixty-one men, women and children and the rape of most of the women. There was reference to a crucifixion. Photographed lines of corpses conveyed graphic images of the horror.70 A front-page photograph of murdered children in the Völkischer Beobachter had an accompanying warning of what would happen if Germans did not sustain their defences and fighting spirit.71

  The mood in eastern parts of Germany made a propaganda campaign on the revelations from Nemmersdorf timely. Reports from propaganda offices had acknowledged, before news of Nemmersdorf had broken, that ‘the gains of territory by the Bolsheviks in East Prussia had produced deepest consternation’, all the more so since Gauleiter Koch had declared in a speech only days earlier that no more land would be given up to the enemy. Bitter reproaches were also made against Koch by East Prussian refugees, arriving in Danzig in a pitiable state and saying that they had first been told by retreating soldiers that ‘the Bolsheviks were on their heels’.72 It was in this climate of wavering morale that Goebbels saw the propaganda value of the Red Army atrocities.

  The sensationalized propaganda barrage was, however, less successful than Goebbels had expected. The first reactions indicated that there was some scepticism about reportage seen as a propaganda manufacture.73 In this Goebbels was hoist with his own petard. Earlier in the month he had given directions to his propaganda specialists to portray ‘the conditions in the areas occupied by the Anglo-Americans exactly as dramatically and drastically as in those occupied by the Soviets’. This had been a response to accounts ‘that our people, should it come to it, would prefer to fall to Anglo-American rather than Soviet occupation’. Such a possibility could not be left open to the ordinary citizen – ‘the little man’ – because it would reduce the determination to fight. ‘On the contrary, he must know… that if the Reich is lost, to whichever enemy partner, there is no possibility of existence for him.’74

  In reality, the Nazi authorities were well aware that the people of those parts of the west that had already fallen to the Americans had been on the whole well enough treated and had often, indeed, welcomed the enemy and attuned rapidly to occupation.75 Goebbels himself recognized that reports of atrocities committed by British and American troops were not believed, and that it was easy for people – apart from Party functionaries – to give themselves up to the British or Americans since they would be treated leniently. People thought the Americans especially were not as bad as they had been portrayed in the German press.76 Propaganda reports were now telling Goebbels that evacuees from the west were spreading the feeling that ‘peace at any price’ would be preferable to the continuation of the war.77 And, certainly in parts of the Reich far away from the travails of the east German population, people were inclined to see the accounts of refugees as exaggerated.78

  Propaganda backfired, too, in another way. One report commented ‘that the highlighting of Bolshevik atrocities in the East Prussian border areas’ was rejected ‘since the propaganda about Nemmersdorf signified in a certain sense a self-incrimination of the Reich because the population had not been evacuated on time’.79 The allegations were countered only with weak (and false) arguments which claimed that the area directly behind the fighting zone had long been evacuated, that the surprise Soviet ass
ault had overrun refugee treks but that the local population of Nemmersdorf had already left, that the numbers evacuated by the Party had been entirely satisfactory and proof of its energetic and successful work, and – with some contradiction – that people had had to work behind the lines as long as possible to bring in the harvest that was much needed for provisioning the rest of the Reich with food.80 All in all, Goebbels himself was eventually forced to concede that ‘the atrocities reports are not bought from us any longer. In particular, the reports from Nemmersdorf have only convinced a part of the population.’81