The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (28 page)

It must have been easy for a young soldier, reading this, to conclude that his duty lay not only in avenging the honor of Russian girls, but in violating German girls as retaliation.

Even so, what occurred in eastern Germany in the bit- ter winter and icy spring of 1945 cannot all be placed on Ehrenburg’s shoulders. Soviet commanders urged their men to behave as brutally as possible. In January 1945, as his vast army was about to cross onto German soil, Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov exhorted his men to crush the Germans without pity:

The great hour has tolled! The time has come to deal the enemy a last and decisive blow, and to fulfill the historical task set us by Comrade Stalin: to finish off the fascist animal in his lair and raise the banner of victory over Berlin! The time has come to reckon with the German fascist scoundrels. Great and burning is our hatred! We have not forgotten the pain and suffer- ing done to our people by Hitler’s cannibals. We have not forgotten our burnt-out cities and villages. We remember our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our wives and children tortured to death by Germans. We shall avenge those burned in the devil’s ovens, avenge those who suffocated in the gas cham- bers, avenge the murdered and the martyred. We shall

exact a brutal revenge for everything.
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With such rhetoric burning in their ears, Soviet soldiers unleashed a campaign of terror in the eastern German lands of Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia that was barbaric even by the standards of an already ghastly war. Not only were Germans abused, terrorized, and driven off their land, but they were murdered in large numbers, and women in particular were made into targets of abuse. This violence that the Soviet Union’s soldiers now brought to Germany formed a continuum with the violence they had received since 1941, at the hands of the Germans. The war in the east had been predatory and merciless long before the Red Army ar- rived in Germany. What followed was, quite simply, a matter of vengeance.

On January 12, 1945, Red Army forces launched a mas- sive assault from the Vistula river. One thrust sliced north into East Prussia, the other, starting along a two- hundred-mile front from Warsaw to Krakow, leaped across the Vistula, rolled across western Poland, and smashed its way to the Oder river. By early February, Soviet forces were forty miles from Berlin. East Prussia received the brunt of the Russian ferocity. This east- ernmost appendage of the old Kingdom of Prussia that had forged German unity in the nineteenth century

was a fist of German power and culture, pushed deep into the heart of northeastern Europe. Lithuanians to the north, White Russians to the East, and Poles to the south gave East Prussia its ancient frontier charac- ter, and served to forge strong cultural ties among its people based around the land, the monarchy, Prussian militarism, and Lutheranism. There were about two million Germans living in East Prussia at the start of the war. Between January and April 1945, virtually all of them fled.

The Germans of East Prussia had been told to fear the Asiatic hordes for years by German propaganda. It was also rumored among both Germans and Russians that East Prussia was going to be sliced away and given to Poland after the war—in which case, the Germans would have to leave anyway, by choice or by force. But the speed of the Soviet advance placed refugees on the roads just as the Red Army poured through, making for dangerous, and often mortal, encounters between vic- tor and vanquished, and spread panic across the coun- try. Josephine Schleiter of Osterode, East Prussia (now Ostróda, Poland), recalled walking for miles to get away from the battle front, through thick blankets of falling snow with freezing fingers and feet, clutching some bread and milk she had hastily gathered. The roads were choked with refugees, cars, carts, horses, and the

flotsam of an entire people fleeing in panic. They were moving northwest, away from the Russian advance, but the troops soon overtook the struggling refugees. Near the village of Preussisch Holland (now Pask, Poland), Soviet tanks fired on the refugees, then rolled into the column of civilians, crushing whole families. For Jose- phine, these Russian tank troops were terrifying and awesome.

These were strong and strapping fellows, and gun- women in the full bloom of health were sitting next to the soldiers, all in new uniforms, and with felt boots and fur caps. We stood at the edge of the road looking at the panzers rolling past and at the soldiers. Most of them had primitive faces, round heads and expressions of unbounded joy. They waved at us and shouted out “Hitler kaput!” Some of them jumped off the panzers, when they moved more slowly, and came toward us: “ Urr, urr” [“watches, watches”] they shouted hoarse- ly, and for the first time in my life I heard the Russian language which sounds hoarse and not pleasant to our ears.

What followed was still more unpleasant. The soldiers briskly looted and robbed the refugees, stripping them of watches, valuables, gloves, and clothing. These for- lorn wanderers struggled to find shelter in farmhouses

or barns along the road, though most of these struc- tures had already attracted a congeries of panic-strick- en runaways. Amid scenes of weeping parents looking for lost children, or trembling children searching for lost parents, the Russians looted and robbed, often drinking pilfered alcohol. Josephine, on the road for days, was captured by a carload of Russians, raped, then tossed out onto the road like a broken rag doll. That night, she found shelter in a stinking cowshed, among a hundred other refugees.

Terrible hours followed, particularly for the women. From time to time, soldiers came in, also officers, and fetched girls and young women. No shrieking, no beg- ging, nothing helped. With revolvers in their hands, they gripped the women round their wrists and dragged them away. A father who wanted to protect his daugh- ter was brought out into the yard and shot. The girl was all the more the prey of these wild creatures. Toward morning, she came back, terror in her childlike eyes. She had become years older during the night.
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A hundred miles to the east, in Eichmedien (now Nako- miady, Poland), a prosperous farmer recalled that the Russians took not only his corn, grain, flour, and peas

but also his carpets and radio set. “In the evening,” he said, “one could see everywhere the blaze of burning houses, barns and piles of straw, which the Russians had set on fire.” This farmer owned a telephone, and this was considered decisive evidence of his being “a great capitalist.” He was arrested, put on an open truck, and shipped to Insterburg (now Chernyakhovsk, Russia), where he was interrogated and released. He walked home, which took him five days across snow and ice, to find his home had been occupied by a troop of Russians who had put his wife into servitude for them. These men ordered her to cook and wash, but they also had seized numerous local women whom they kept for sexual gratification; one of these was pregnant, anoth- er but fourteen years old. Throughout the long nights, the family heard the “lamentations and shrieks” of the captive women echo through their house. This contin- ued for weeks, as soldiers passed through their farm, helping themselves to provisions, linens, clothing, food, and of course women. From his locale, “young women and girls were deported every day by the Rus- sians to do forced labor in Russia.”
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One such woman, Gerlinde Winkler of Dörbeck (now Prochnik, Poland), was ejected from her home, confined in a variety of sheds, barracks, and jails, fed a thin diet of foul gruel, and finally trucked to a camp at Insterburg. On March 3, she and fifty other women from Dörbeck were herd-

ed onto a cattle car and sent on a twenty-one-day jour- ney to a labor camp in Chelyabinsk, Siberia. After three years of hard labor, Ms. Winkler fell gravely ill; she was not released until June 1948.
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Major Lev Kopelev, a political officer in the Red Army who was assigned by his headquarters to ride into East Prussia to search for German Communist networks that could be mobilized against the Nazis, was appalled by what he saw his own soldiers doing. No sooner had he stepped across the border into East Prussia than he saw the villages of Gross-Koslau and Klein-Koslau on

fire; the Germans had fled. Kopelev spoke to a group of soldiers.

“ What happened here—a clash?”

“ What clash? They took off—couldn’t catch up with them. Not a single civilian stayed behind.”

“ You mean they mined the town? Set fire to it?”

“ Who—the Germans? No, there weren’t any mines. It was our guys who set fire to it.”

“ Why?”

“ Who the hell knows? Just did it, without thinking.”

A moustached soldier said with a kind of indolent bit- terness: “ The word is, this is Germany, so smash, burn, have your revenge. But where do we spend the night afterwards? Where do we put the wounded?”

Another of the men stared at the flames. “All that stuff going to waste. Back home, where I come from, every- one’s naked and barefoot these days. And here we are, burning without rhyme or reason.”

A few days later, in Neidenburg, Kopelev saw more homes on fire, and the soldiers were dragging bed lin-

en, quilts, oaken chests and tables, grandfather clocks, and other trophies out into the streets. “On a side street, by a garden fence, lay a dead old woman,” Kopelev re- called. “Her dress was ripped; a telephone receiver re- posed between her scrawny thighs. They had apparent- ly tried to ram it into her vagina.” In Allenstein, which had been taken without a fight, thousands of fright- ened refugees gathered near the train station, many of them recently arrived from Königsberg. “It was a scene of utter confusion,” Kopelev recalled. “ Train whistles, sporadic shouts, bursts of automatic fire, the tumult of a panicky crowd, a child’s cry, a woman’s scream, a babble of German speech punctuated by the shouts of our men herding the arrivals out of the station.” And then the city was set alight by the Russians, and burned for days. Women were raped constantly, in plain sight. In front of the post office, Kopelev saw a tragic pair, a mother and her thirteen-year-old daughter. “ The wom- an’s head is bandaged with a bloodied kerchief. The girl has blonde pigtails, a tear-stained face and blood on her stockings. They walk away hurriedly, ignoring the catcalls of the soldiers on the sidewalk.” Kopelev was so ashamed of what he saw that he wrote it up in a re- port to his superiors. He was immediately arrested and sent to the gulag on the charge of “bourgeois human- ism,” “pity for the enemy,” and “agitation against ven- geance and hatred—the sacred hatred of the enemy.”
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Revenge, it seems, had become a duty.

It is no wonder, in light of such fanatical, officially sanctioned brutality, that the Germans of East Prussia fled the advancing Red Army. About 250,000 people trekked from East Prussia westward over land, or rail, toward the Oder and into western Germany. The Rus- sian advance along that same route deterred the bulk of the fleeing civilians. Perhaps 650,000 people walked north to the coast of the large Vistula lagoon, called the Frisches Haff. This lagoon was still frozen in early spring, and hundreds of thousands set out across its cracking ice, toward the narrow coastal barrier strip, the Nehrung. There, hundreds of thousands of weary, frightened refugees gathered along the two-lane road, and amid mud, filth, dead horses, dying travelers, hun- ger, thirst, and dysentery, they set out on the march to- ward Danzig. From there, the German navy evacuated many by sea to western Germany or even Denmark. Still others made their way northeast to Pillau (now Baltiysk, Russia), a town on the northern tip of the Haff from which 450,000 people were able to board ferries to take them to Danzig. This was a dangerous means of escape, as Soviet submarines lurked in the Baltic and periodically sank refugee ships: on January 30, the Wilhelm Gustloff, sailing out of Gdynia with over 9,000 refugees on board, was sunk by a Russian tor-

pedo. Yet for those who remained, an awful fate await- ed. The Russians captured Danzig on March 28. Anna Schwartz recalled that in her air raid cellar in Danzig, Soviet troops arrived amid a stinking haze of “alco- hol, sweat and dirty uniforms.” After the usual search for watches and valuables, the now-predictable ritual followed: “we heard the shrieks of women, who were being raped by Mongols.” Herded out into the street, amid falling shells, burning houses, and plundering troops, Anna was eventually incarcerated with a group of residents, marched to a railhead in Graudenz, about eighty miles away, and then sent into forced labor in Siberia.
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For East Prussia, the final reckoning came in Königs- berg, the ancient hometown of the Teutonic Knights and a city in which refugees had been seeking shelter for weeks. At the end of January, the city was surrounded by Soviet forces of the 3rd Belorussian Front. Ensnared within were the German Third Panzer Army—130,000 soldiers—and a terrified group of about 150,000 ci- vilians. The thick walls of the ancient city, formed in concentric rings, served to keep out the invaders until April 6, when the Russians launched their final assault, preceded by days of massive air and ground bombard- ment. Late on April 9, the German commander in the city capitulated, having lost 50,000 casualties. Eighty-