Forgotten Land (31 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
‘You have,’ Feyerabend told the SS commander, ‘besmirched the German flag’ – and betrayed German military honour by making war on innocent civilians. Asking if he could speak ‘man to man’, Weber, apparently in tears, protested that he hadn’t given orders to shoot, and the murders on the march had been committed by the Lithuanian and Estonian guards. Feyerabend shook Weber’s hand as a fellow officer. In that case, he said, the matter was closed; henceforth the prisoners should be well cared for. But the army, or this branch of it, now had a different code. Weber seems to have contacted Königsberg. On Tuesday 30 January Feyerabend was ordered to take a hundred Volkssturm members to the front at Kumehnen. Finding that the commander there had no role for them, overcome by shame as he realized that this had been a ploy to get rid of him – and that Weber’s honour did not exist – Hans Feyerabend shot himself. There have been claims that he was murdered, possibly on Weber’s orders.
That evening, Mayor Friedrichs summoned a dozen members of the Hitler Youth, including Martin Bergau, to his office. Here he distributed large amounts of alcohol and sent them, with three SS men, to a disused mine shaft near the shore. At the mine, Bergau saw forty or fifty women and girls – Jewish prisoners, shadowy, frail figures who had been herded into one of the crumbling buildings. The SS men ordered these to form up in twos, the commands hard to understand because, Bergau thought, they were in one of the languages of the multi-national victims and guards: Hungarians, Dutch, French and Balts. Two prisoners at a time were led to a hidden side of the building, where SS guards
were waiting. The Hitler Youth heard the pistol shots. Bergau stood at the end of the line, beside those who had to wait the longest to die; across from him was a classmate, holding a cocked rifle. One woman asked if she might move forward to be with her daughter, so that they could walk ‘this last way’ together, and Bergau granted the request. Those killed that evening were only a small proportion of the prisoners.
were waiting. The Hitler Youth heard the pistol shots. Bergau stood at the end of the line, beside those who had to wait the longest to die; across from him was a classmate, holding a cocked rifle. One woman asked if she might move forward to be with her daughter, so that they could walk ‘this last way’ together, and Bergau granted the request. Those killed that evening were only a small proportion of the prisoners.
The next day, Wednesday 31 January, Hans Feyerabend’s body – like ‘a fallen oak’ – arrived back in Palmnicken on a horse-drawn sleigh, to be taken to the neighbouring village of Dorbnicken, where he had lived. Feyerabend was buried four days later under some trees near his house. There were many mourners, the Volkssturm providing a guard of honour for a burial thought to be appropriate for a German officer and a sportsman: the corpse in uniform, a sword placed beside it in the coffin, his hunting dog shot and laid on the grave, which was surmounted by an oak cross crowned with a steel helmet. His widow was told he had been killed in action, not by his own hand. Feyerabend was a conservative nationalist, an officer in the First World War who believed in duty and order, perhaps (as Eva Jänicke thought) initially sympathetic to the Nazis, like Stauffenberg and many of the July conspirators – then shocked by their brutality before becoming another of their victims. It’s strange now to read of his funeral – the dead dog, the attempt at a ceremony that reflected military honour – but he was brave during those January days.
That evening, the rest of the prisoners were herded out of the mining company’s buildings, having been told that they were to be taken to Pillau to be put on a ship for Hamburg. Crossing some fields, out of sight of most of the village, they were escorted by armed SS guards to the beach, which had been lit by flares. On the sands, the guards chased the victims into the frozen sea, firing at them – not killing all in the darkness, leaving many to die of wounds or in the Baltic, trapped between the ice or pushed under by the guards’ rifle butts. Of the seven thousand prisoners who
had left Königsberg, probably only fifteen survived. After some days, when the ice and snow had partly melted, bodies appeared on the route of the march or on the beach, many still in the striped clothes of the camps, their number increasing as the sea washed up more.
had left Königsberg, probably only fifteen survived. After some days, when the ice and snow had partly melted, bodies appeared on the route of the march or on the beach, many still in the striped clothes of the camps, their number increasing as the sea washed up more.
Three Jewish girls struggled up from the beach the next morning, after the SS men had left. They reached the next village of Sorgenau and sought refuge in a house owned by a farmer called Voss. At first Voss hid them in the attic but then announced that, with food in short supply, he wouldn’t shelter Jews; it would cost him his life if they were found here and he believed in a German victory. The girls asked him to shoot them. He refused, saying others must do it – so they fled, sheltering in a nearby coal store. Voss fetched the police and a dog but the girls were hidden by a neighbour, Albert Harder, first in an empty room in his house, then in a deserted chicken coop and finally in the Harders’ house, where the couple ran them a bath and gave them new clothes. Voss remained a threat – but the girls survived, claiming to be Poles. They became inconspicuous among the crowds of passing refugees from Memel and the eastern districts already overrun by the Red Army, until the Russians took (or, as one of the Jewish fugitives said, ‘liberated’) the village ten weeks later. One of them later looked after the widowed Frau Harder in a displaced-persons’ camp in Germany. Herr Harder’s last words, as he lay dying in a Russian prison, were ‘Have you heard anything about the girls?’
It was 15 April when the Red Army reached Palmnicken. Rumours spread that the Jewish corpses washed up on the shore were the result of Soviet atrocities further up the coast, perhaps in Latvia: that the Russians were going to kill five Palmnicken civilians for every murdered Jew. The survivors – who spoke of how some locals had helped them – were surprised to find themselves treated as liberated ‘Soviet civilians’: a strange liberation, for it was followed by desperate conditions that bred typhus and starvation. Most of the guilty – Friedrichs, the mayor; Weber, the
SS commander – had fled, but some members of the Hitler Youth were sent off to prison, where many died. Contrary to expectations – which had been dark given how much German propaganda had trumpeted the Red Army’s brutality – retribution didn’t take the form of mass slaughter. Instead, the Russians forced the women of the village to dig up some two hundred and sixty corpses from makeshift graves with their bare hands. The bodies were then laid out, witnesses were made to tell what had happened and the women faced two machine guns, to show – as a Jewish Red Army major told them in German – how easy it would be to do to them what had been done to the Jews.
SS commander – had fled, but some members of the Hitler Youth were sent off to prison, where many died. Contrary to expectations – which had been dark given how much German propaganda had trumpeted the Red Army’s brutality – retribution didn’t take the form of mass slaughter. Instead, the Russians forced the women of the village to dig up some two hundred and sixty corpses from makeshift graves with their bare hands. The bodies were then laid out, witnesses were made to tell what had happened and the women faced two machine guns, to show – as a Jewish Red Army major told them in German – how easy it would be to do to them what had been done to the Jews.
Like everyone in Palmnicken, Martin Bergau had dreaded the arrival of the Russians. In fact, before Palmnicken fell, he was called to defend what was left of the Reich. He joined a ship at Pillau, not imagining that this would mean a separation of some five years from his family or that he would never see his younger brother or grandparents again. Captured in April in Mecklenburg, he was taken with thousands of other prisoners east again, first on foot and then by train, the slits in the walls of the cattle trucks revealing the route – the Vistula, Insterburg, Gumbinnen, Eydtkuhnen, then out of East Prussia, through Kaunas, Vilnius and Minsk. The train stopped sometimes for the dead to be taken off. It turned south-east towards Kiev, then north again, past destroyed tanks and transport and lines of wooden crosses crowned with helmets, to Smolensk, Wolchow and further north – some of the names familiar to Bergau from the map on which he had stuck flags during the German advance of 1941. At Segesha, the journey ended. They had reached Karelia, a land of forests and lakes and the midnight sun, and were put into blockhouses, on an island with a large paper factory powered by German machines.
An old lady in the town was kind to Martin Bergau, even though she had lost two sons in the war. She gave him food to supplement the meagre camp rations, which scarcely gave sustenance after hard work in the factory or on a collective farm.
Bergau also stole oats, risking his life. Sometimes he was treated brutally, but mostly he was favoured because of his youth, even getting more clothing to survive the winter. Deaths from hunger were common; he caught bad fever and was put into the camp hospital, though rumours of a visit by the International Red Cross meant that the food briefly improved. The winter of 1947 passed; there was silence from Palmnicken until 1948, when his uncle wrote that Martin’s parents had left for Germany. Bergau realized that what was now a Russian village could never be his home again. He clasped a small piece of amber given to him by another East Prussian prisoner and cried.
Bergau also stole oats, risking his life. Sometimes he was treated brutally, but mostly he was favoured because of his youth, even getting more clothing to survive the winter. Deaths from hunger were common; he caught bad fever and was put into the camp hospital, though rumours of a visit by the International Red Cross meant that the food briefly improved. The winter of 1947 passed; there was silence from Palmnicken until 1948, when his uncle wrote that Martin’s parents had left for Germany. Bergau realized that what was now a Russian village could never be his home again. He clasped a small piece of amber given to him by another East Prussian prisoner and cried.
The only sweetness was a love affair, with Maruschja, a Russian prisoner, that stifled envy of those who were being sent back to Germany. When he was discharged, Martin Bergau wept again, this time at leaving the girl. On 25 June 1948, he arrived in the new West Germany. Discovering that his parents had settled in Finsterwalde in the communist east, Bergau decided to stay in the west, eventually finding a job that suited his technical skills, with an industrial firm in Ulm. Every March he went to reunions in Cologne of people from the old Palmnicken – not political occasions but overlaid with a sense that those attending had suffered an expulsion from paradise.
The mayor, Kurt Friedrichs, fled west on 15 April 1945, over the Frische Nehrung. Imprisoned by the British until October 1947, he was given a West German pension and lived in comfortable retirement until called to give evidence at Ludwigsburg in 1961, when the contradictions in his self-justificatory statements were exposed. The SS commander, Weber, was also brought before a court, but not until January 1965, in Kiel. Here, on the night of 20 and 21 January, while awaiting trial twenty years after the death march, he killed himself in his cell.
Martin Bergau, a spotless innocent compared to Friedrichs and Weber, also had to live with what he had been involved in during those last icy January days in Palmnicken. He came to think that the organizations of expelled East Prussians set up
in the new Germany – together with refugees from other lost provinces, a potent lobby group – had either forgotten or wished to forget this outrage in their portrayal of their pre-1945 home as a lost paradise. In 1991, however, everything changed in his old home: the Soviet Union crumbled, Kaliningrad opened up to the world and Bergau came back to Palmnicken, returning henceforth each year to find that the interpretation of memory on the Russian side had been different. Holocaust victims throughout the conquered territories were buried as victims of fascist brutality, regardless of their religion. Sand took over the graves dug at Palmnicken. When, in the 1960s, corpses surfaced as a result of digging by people looking for amber, they were thought to be Russian soldiers slaughtered by Germans. A memorial stone went up to these Soviet ‘heroes,’ who were remembered each year with a laying of wreaths and a parade.
in the new Germany – together with refugees from other lost provinces, a potent lobby group – had either forgotten or wished to forget this outrage in their portrayal of their pre-1945 home as a lost paradise. In 1991, however, everything changed in his old home: the Soviet Union crumbled, Kaliningrad opened up to the world and Bergau came back to Palmnicken, returning henceforth each year to find that the interpretation of memory on the Russian side had been different. Holocaust victims throughout the conquered territories were buried as victims of fascist brutality, regardless of their religion. Sand took over the graves dug at Palmnicken. When, in the 1960s, corpses surfaced as a result of digging by people looking for amber, they were thought to be Russian soldiers slaughtered by Germans. A memorial stone went up to these Soviet ‘heroes,’ who were remembered each year with a laying of wreaths and a parade.
Martin Bergau persuaded the authorities of the Kaliningrad Oblast that these corpses were Jews. In 1999, the site was restored by young German and Russian volunteers, aided by the German and Russian governments. Supported by Kaliningrad’s small Jewish community, Bergau spoke at the launch of the campaign to raise money for the memorial, mentioning Feyerabend and the desecration of his grave in April 1945 by the Red Army. On 31 January 2000, the fifty-fifth anniversary of the massacre, a memorial stone was consecrated on the shore for the victims, with an inscription in Russian and Hebrew.
Martin Bergau’s description of the massacre in his autobiography –
The Boy from the Amber Coast
– had been published in Germany in 1994, breaking through the idea of East Prussians as pathetic victims. Faced with what had happened, some refugee organizations sought to blame the Palmnicken deaths on General Vlasov’s Russian volunteers who had fought on the German side; only Lorenz Grimoni’s former Königsbergers carried an impartial investigation of it in their bulletin, the
Königsberger Burgerbrief
. The massacre showed how long the Holocaust had lasted, how it could even reach a remote village far from any camp or German
invasion route, how during the Red Army’s hate-filled shattering of the neat German world, another barbarism had remained.
The Boy from the Amber Coast
– had been published in Germany in 1994, breaking through the idea of East Prussians as pathetic victims. Faced with what had happened, some refugee organizations sought to blame the Palmnicken deaths on General Vlasov’s Russian volunteers who had fought on the German side; only Lorenz Grimoni’s former Königsbergers carried an impartial investigation of it in their bulletin, the
Königsberger Burgerbrief
. The massacre showed how long the Holocaust had lasted, how it could even reach a remote village far from any camp or German
invasion route, how during the Red Army’s hate-filled shattering of the neat German world, another barbarism had remained.
The prospect of annihilation was hard to grasp, in spite of all the propaganda about Russian brutality. Arno Surminski’s short story ‘Storm in January’ starts with a young Königsberg schoolteacher in January 1945 thinking about summer holidays during the power cuts that herald the arrival of the Red Army. She’s sent on war duty to a school near the Lithuanian border – and, after a train journey through frost-covered ruins, she finds a village where the locals still apparently live in a wonderland of sugared apples, hot blueberry soup, huge St Bernard dogs, sleighs on the streets, peppermint tea, bergamot marmalade, warming rum, innocent fresh-faced pupils and fresh milk: the appurtenances of a secure world.
But there’s the distant murmur of violence. She learns that the school was burnt by the Russians in August 1914, that a teacher was killed then by the Cossacks; already the deep winter silence is broken by artillery fire, flames flicker through the woods in the darkness and a widow shows her a school photograph of some years before, reciting a litany: ‘He is dead, he is dead, he is dead.’ No one doubts, however, that, as in 1914, the enemy will be repulsed.
The Jänickes, in Palmnicken, were not so hopeful. Johannes had done medical duty on the eastern front, so he knew what was happening. In his absence, Eva had been in charge of the parish and coped with the refugees. By January 1945 over three hundred people were crowded into the rectory and the little church, against a background of what seemed to be an endless sound of rolling wheels in the streets as carts and tractors and lorries passed through on the way west. To her the flight was like the Thirty Years War, with moments of enlightenment, as when a small group who had sought refuge in the rectory made music there one evening. It was at that time that Eva opened the window
to see signs of the death march. Some days later she helped to bury some of the victims.
to see signs of the death march. Some days later she helped to bury some of the victims.
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