The trapped 4th German Army, to Hitler’s fury, abandoned the heavily fortified defences of Lötzen amid the Masurian Lakes and tried to break out to the west, aiming to reach the river Nogat and the Vistula beyond, and advancing about 32 kilometres before being forced back on Heiligenbeil. A last attempt to break out was blocked on 30 January. Most of the remaining German forces – the bulk of them comprising twenty-three divisions of the 4th Army – were now compressed between the Red Army and the sea in a sizeable enclave, about 60 kilometres long and 20 kilometres wide along the Frisches Haff south-west of Königsberg, centred on Heiligenbeil. Remnants of the 3rd Panzer Army, some nine badly mauled divisions, still held the Samland peninsula, to the north-west of Königsberg, and with it, crucially, the harbour at Pillau. The rest were left to defend the encircled fortress of Königsberg itself. In all, around half a million soldiers were cut off.13 By the end of January, after a little over two weeks of ferocious fighting, almost the whole of East Prussia lay in Soviet hands.
On 14 January, Zhukov launched his 1st Belorussian Front from bridgeheads on the Vistula, driving on remorselessly through heavy fighting to encircle Warsaw with the help of attached Polish divisions, and racing westwards through central Poland towards Łódz´ and Posen – the gateway to Berlin. The speed and savagery of the assault swept away German defences. When Polish and Soviet troops entered Warsaw on 17 January, scarcely a building was still intact. The German destruction of the city during and after the uprising, carried out under Himmler’s express instructions, following Hitler’s order, had been savage in the extreme. The occupiers had engaged in a last orgy of wanton destruction before they left, fleeing westwards, German troops offering only scant resistance from the rearguard. The big textile city of Łódz´ was seized by General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army on 19 January, with little resistance and no demolition, so fast had been the Soviet advance. Two days later, Soviet tanks reached the outskirts of Posen, government and communications centre of what the Nazis had called the ‘Wartheland’. They were, however, for the time being unable to overcome heavy fortifications to crush the resistance of the 25,000 or so German troops trapped in what had been deemed a ‘fortress’, whose remnants were eventually stormed only in mid-February. Other Soviet divisions were meanwhile driving north-west towards the Baltic coast of western Pomerania, at the same time protecting the flank of Zhukov’s main forces headed due west towards the middle stretches of the Oder. One unit reached the frozen river on 30 January and managed to cross it next morning to establish a small but significant bridgehead north of Küstrin. Berlin was now in sight, no more than about 80 kilometres away. Zhukov, and to the south Konev, swayed by the speed and scale of their successes, had their eyes set for a short time on a rapid triumphal drive to the Reich capital, each already envisaging a hero’s return to Moscow. But the Red Army’s advance had slowed as German resistance had intensified. And heavy losses of men and equipment had been suffered. Zhukov’s men, like Konev’s, were in need of a respite before the big push for the German capital. Momentary hopes of a dash to Berlin to bring a swift end to the war had to be abandoned. It was more important to consolidate strength for the final phase.14
III
The unfolding military disaster for the Wehrmacht conveys little or nothing of the unimaginable agony of the civilian population caught up in the offensive. As they advanced so quickly through formerly occupied parts of Poland, the troops of the Red Army could envisage themselves as liberators of the Polish people – though the subjugated Poles often simply felt one brutal conqueror was being replaced by another. When they reached Reich territory, however, Soviet soldiers saw themselves as avengers. The Germans had shown no mercy as they had laid waste Soviet towns and villages, burning homes and farmsteads, slaughtering innocent civilians. Red Army soldiers, and their commanders, saw no need for restraint now they were the conquerors, advancing through the land of those who had brought them such misery, raping, plundering, murdering as they went. Soviet propaganda encouraged revenge through maximum brutality. The brief incursion in October, for which the name ‘Nemmersdorf’ had become the symbol, now paled into insignificance in comparison with the scarcely imaginable horror experienced during the onslaught in January 1945.
Just as they had the previous October, Nazi officials, clinging to their own propaganda that the Soviet attack would be repulsed, contributed to the unfolding disaster by their stubborn refusal to give the orders for evacuation in time. In East Prussia, Gauleiter Erich Koch set the tone.15 He continued, in empty sloganeering, to preach entirely unjustified optimism and to exhort the population to defend their province to the last. This did not stop him on 21 January encouraging his own secretary to leave with her fellow villagers while she could.16 His wife had already taken a special train to Bavaria the previous day.17 Koch himself left Königsberg with his entourage on 28 January and moved his headquarters to the security of a bunker on a naval air base in Neutief on the Frische Nehrung near Pillau.18 Koch also insisted that no subordinate officials should permit evacuation without his authorization. Not surprisingly, there was intense anger and bitterness directed at the Party’s representatives, though even now faith in Hitler had not completely vanished.19 Last-minute attempts to organize evacuation were often made by local Party leaders and the NSV. Most families however, as the panic at the thought of falling into Soviet hands spread like a contagion, did not wait for orders but resorted to self-help. For many it was too late.20
Even by East Prussian standards, where the winter was invariably hard, this was an intensely cold January, with temperatures falling as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius. The prospect – days and nights out in the open without warm clothing, making painfully slow headway on icy roads in biting winds or on tracks blocked by drifting snow, trying to avoid becoming caught up in the fighting – was frightening in the extreme. Some, too infirm or weak to take the risk, decided not to go, and to await in trepidation the arrival of the Soviet occupiers. Some could not face the future and took their own lives. Cyanide was easily available, at least in Königsberg, and there was much talk of using it.21 But, for most, clinging to life and fear of the Russians were greater than worries about the cold or anxiety about the future. There was no time to wait. ‘Panic grips the people as the cry goes up: “the Russians are close”,’ recalled one woman. ‘Then a man comes by on horseback, shouting in a loud voice: “Save yourselves, you who can. The Russians will be here in half an hour.” We’re overcome by a paralysing fear.’22 In such scenes of chaos, people hurriedly gathered what few belongings they could, threw them onto handcarts, sledges or horse-drawn wagons, left their homesteads, abandoned practically all their possessions and their livestock, and fled into the unknown. Retreating German soldiers grabbed anything they could find and loaded it onto lorries, slaughtering cattle left roaming the fields as they went.23
In the first days after the start of the invasion, trains to the west, into Pomerania, were the means of escape for tens of thousands. Chaotic scenes unfolded at railway stations as people desperately tried to clamber into the departing trains. The big square in front of Königsberg’s main station was jammed with rows of refugee wagons. Armed guards held people back in the station, though Party members and others with ‘connections’ were found places. The Wehrmacht had priority use of the insufficient number of trains available. Soldiers forced their way onto the only trains departing.24 Refugees had to wait – often in vain. Conditions were appalling, with no toilet facilities or food and drink for the crowds milling round the platforms.25 Thousands were stranded as the last trains pulled out. By 23 January trains that had headed west were returning, the lines blocked by the Soviets.26 A few were lucky enough to find transport in military vehicles travelling westwards, even in open-top lorries where they were exposed for long hours to the extreme cold. The majority, however, had to resort to treks, in columns of covered wagons. Those from the western parts of the province were the most fortunate. In the east, the treks were often unable
to make progress on roads blocked by snow or army vehicles before being overtaken by Soviet tanks, or otherwise falling into the hands of the dreaded enemy after finding themselves embroiled in fighting zones. Once the rail connection to the Reich was severed, only two means of flight – both extremely perilous – were left.
One way was to escape by ship from Pillau, the harbour opening from the Frisches Haff onto the Baltic. But the first ship to lift off refugees only arrived a fortnight after the launch of the Soviet offensive.27 Soon, the harbour-town was besieged by tens of thousands who had trekked mainly from the north-eastern parts of the province. Every house was full. People slept where they could, in barns and cow-byres, even exposed to the bitter cold in the open on the dunes. Big communal kitchens were hurriedly set up to provide basic meals.28 When they finally arrived, the ships, filled to the gunnels with refugees, including sick patients evacuated from hospital, suffered long delays before leaving. Those on board had the constant worry of attacks from the air.29 One woman, a teacher who had already endured, after a long wait, more than twenty-four hours on the open deck of a small ship with her elderly mother, travelling round the coast before even reaching Pillau, had then to ‘stand around all day with thousands in the filth of the harbour and wait…. Everywhere broken glass, dirt and excrement. It’s impossible to get a ship. Only families with several children are let through.’ It was twelve miserable, uncertain and dangerous days before she and her mother eventually reached Rügen.30
By the end of January, around 200,000 refugees were crammed onto the Samland, still in German hands. Around 150,000 had also flooded at first into Königsberg, thinking the fortified city was a sanctuary. Once it became impossible to leave by train, many of these, too, headed for Pillau in the hope of escaping by sea. Nursing staff of military hospitals in Königsberg rejected the chance to join them, and decided to stay to look after the wounded.31 By the end of January, when Königsberg was cut off, about 100,000 were still stranded there, though more were able to leave when the connection to the Samland was opened up again for a brief time in mid-February. Many lost their lives in the crossings when their small boats went down. The German navy sent help in the rescue effort. Over the next months, 679,541 refugees were ferried from Baltic harbours to the west (450,000 from Pillau), along with 345,000 wounded and a further 182,000 soldiers, though many more could have been shipped to safety if the navy had not given priority to military demands.32
The alternative was to cross the frozen Haff to the narrow spit of land, the Frische Nehrung, little over a kilometre wide at its broadest point and running for about 70 kilometres along its northern shore, and to head westwards for Danzig (or in some cases eastwards to try their luck in Pillau). By the latter part of January, hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees from all over East Prussia had defied the bitter cold, raging hunger, thirst, frostbite and attacks from the air by Soviet planes to reach the ever smaller cusp of land still in German hands at the southern end of the Haff and, amid mounting chaos, attempt the crossing over the ice to the frozen dunes of the Nehrung. Day and night for weeks thousands of trekkers, haggard and anxious families leading their heavily laden horse-drawn wagons or pushing prams or homemade wooden trucks and sledges carrying all their belongings, an easy target for low-flying Soviet planes, trudged fearfully over the carpet of ice on routes marked out by the military towards what they hoped was safety. Even this escape route was blocked for a time when the German navy used an ice-breaker to force a channel through the frozen Haff to allow three new torpedo boats through from Elbing to Pillau and prevent their falling into Soviet hands. Thousands were trapped on the ice until rapidly improvised pontoon bridges allowed a way across again.33
Once on the Nehrung, the misery was far from over. On the narrow, unpaved track, chewed up by military vehicles as well as the refugees’ wagons, progress was painfully slow and the columns were exposed to repeated terror from the air. For many, the hazardous journey ended in tragedy. The extreme cold took its toll, especially of infants and the elderly. Others died of sheer exhaustion, or were caught in air raids. In some cases, despairing efforts to get away had ended with wagons and the families on board tipping through breaks in the ice into the dark waters of the Haff. One farmer’s wife, after struggling for eight days to reach the Haff, watched in horror as rows of wagons fell into the holes just left by a bombing raid.34 Nor, amid such traumas, did Nazi controls ease up. SS men and military police regularly searched the treks for men aged between sixteen and sixty to serve in the Volkssturm.35 In all, perhaps as many as 30,000 perished on the treks.36 But by the time it started to melt in late February nearly half a million had escaped across the ice.
In one way or another, defying all the perils, most of East Prussia’s population of about 2 million at the beginning of the year, managed to flee. In so doing, they avoided the unspeakable fate of the half a million from the province who fell into Soviet hands. Though there were plenty of honourable exceptions, many of the Red Army soldiers did their best to impersonate the caricatures of Nazi propaganda in their bestial behaviour, with the toleration if not outright encouragement of their superior officers. ‘A blind feeling of hatred’ was how a Red Army veteran described the attitude of the Soviet troops as they entered Reich territory. ‘The German mother should curse the day that she bore a son! German women have now to see the horrors of war! They have now to experience what they wanted for other peoples!’ wrote one soldier in a letter home. ‘Now our soldiers can see how German homes burn, how their families wander round dragging their viper’s brood with them…. They hope to stay alive. But for them there is no mercy,’ wrote another.37 Alcohol played its part. Looting and plundering were endemic among frequently drunken soldiers from desperately poor parts of the Soviet Union who thought they were entering a land of plenty on encountering the war-torn eastern regions of Germany. They commented in wonder in letters home at the stores of food and drink they found. ‘Everybody eats what he has appetite for and drinks as much spirits as he wants,’ wrote one. ‘I’m wearing riding-boots, have more than one watch… in a word, I’m swimming in riches,’ another proudly proclaimed.38 For them, anything they could steal counted only as a token form of recompense for what they and their families and their fellow countrymen had suffered at the hands of the German enemy.
The thirst for revenge was seemingly unquenchable. Houses were ransacked and destroyed, buildings set alight, sometimes entire parts of towns and villages burnt down. German men were often callously and arbitrarily shot, many severely beaten or otherwise mishandled. Anyone recognized as a Nazi functionary was summarily executed. Those in possession of a uniform, even a railway worker or fireman who had no role in the Nazi Party, were likely to be similarly dispatched. It is thought that as many as 100,000 people in the eastern parts of Germany were killed in such fashion.39 The rape of women, young and old, often many times over – a mass phenomenon and act of revenge through inflicting maximum humiliation on the defeated male population by the degradation of their wives and families – was a terrible hallmark of the first encounter with the Soviet conquerors, mentioned in innumerable eyewitness accounts.40 ‘Can you hear?’ one farmer despairingly asked as cries came from his house. ‘They’ve got my thirteen-year-old daughter for the fifth time already this morning.’41 Such horror was commonplace. Some estimates reckon that 1.4 million women – close to a fifth of the female population – were raped in the eastern provinces conquered by the Red Army in these weeks.42 Fortunate indeed were women who managed to hide or otherwise avoid the bestiality. Those Germans who survived such horrors were, however, condemned to endless further misery: to the harshness of further maltreatment and forced labour under Soviet occupation, or – the fate of about a quarter of a million Germans – to transport in the most dire conditions, accompanied by huge death rates, to labour camps mainly in the industrial regions of the USSR, where brutal working conditions extracted a further heavy toll.43
What happened in East Prussia also occur
red, with variants, throughout the German east. Whereas the flight of the East Prussian and Silesian population took place over the best part of four months, the German minority living in the parts of Poland that had not fallen to the Soviets had only about two weeks to make their escape as Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies raced towards the Oder. Only around a half of them, mainly from the western regions closest to the Reich, could avoid being overtaken by the rapidly advancing Red Army. East Brandenburg, with an almost entirely German population of over 600,000, had been taking in refugees from the Wartheland in western Poland for days before huge panic at the imminent arrival of the Russians led to a stampede to reach safety across the Oder. The Nazi authorities of the region had until almost the end of January refused to give orders to evacuate the province in the optimistic belief that the lines of fortifications would provide a formidable barrier to the Red Army. Consequently many Germans fell into enemy hands as the area was swiftly overrun.44