Armageddon (58 page)

Even as Lise-Lotte’s group was crossing the Vistula, her mother telephoned Koch from their home, some thirty miles from Königsberg. “Where is my daughter?” she asked. Koch said untruthfully that he had put her aboard a ship: “I got her a place—on the
Wilhelm Gustloff
.” Frau Kussner demanded to know how she herself was to flee, when her grandmother was immobilized with a broken rib. Koch sent a car manned by two uniformed Party officials to take the Kussner women to an airfield, where he arranged places for them on a plane to Breslau. Even the Kussners’ dulled consciences were pricked by the experience of speeding for miles across East Prussia through columns of refugees who could seek safety only on their feet in the snow.

At Stralsund, Lise-Lotte’s tractors ran out of diesel, but a cousin of hers was stationed in the port, a sailor. He found them fuel in exchange for food. Late in April, after many halts and delays, they crossed the Elbe. Most of those who fled from East Prussia in less privileged circumstances would have begrudged them every moment of their good fortune. Lise-Lotte Kussner said: “I know Koch was responsible for terrible things, but that was not how I knew him.” Just so. Later, however, she was careful to tell no one in whose service she had spent the war years.

In the heart of Germany, the news from East Prussia and Silesia seemed a harbinger of the doom that was approaching. “The first shattering reports of the terrible happenings were brought to Berlin by refugees . . .” wrote Paul von Stemann. “They told about people being trampled to death on the platforms in the fight to get seats on the last trains, and dead bodies being thrown out of the moving, unheated goods trains, and young mothers who were driven to insanity and would not believe that the babies they carried in their arms were long dead . . . Many women gave birth in the open, and soon followed their newborn in death.” Shocked refugees told stories of German soldiers killing their cattle and horses, even looting their houses. A grand Silesian landowner described in disgust how one of Germany’s supposed defenders had fired a Panzerfaust at a baroque chest in the hall of his mansion. On Berlin station platforms, soup kitchens were established to feed refugees, and clothes provided to replace those they had lost. It is interesting to speculate whether these grieving people would have recoiled had they known that many of the warm woollens which they were given had been collected by the SS from the wardrobes of Jews translated into ashes in the death camps.

“Berliners are receiving the first visible warning that the Red Army stands before the frontiers of the Reich,” wrote the German correspondent of
Stockholms-Tidningen
on 24 January. “Columns of trucks crowded with refugees and baggage and bags and sacks roll through the streets on their way between one railway station and another. Most of the refugees are typical German peasants from the East, and only women and children—no men. They peep wide-eyed from under their headscarves at the ruined streets of the capital they are now seeing for the first time in their lives.”

Yet Berliners did not receive the easterners with unmingled sympathy. For four years, the people of East Prussia, Saxony and Silesia had lived in tranquillity, while the cities of the west were bombed to destruction. More than a few Berliners were by no means displeased now to see their smug fellow countrymen from the east dragged down into the common misery. The Wehrmacht estimated that 3.5 million ethnic Germans were already in flight, and this number increased dramatically over the weeks ahead. In mid-January in Berlin, said Paul von Stemann, “we expected the Russians to arrive any day. The East was like a flood which had broken all dykes . . . Berlin sat back and prepared itself for the flood to roll over it, only hoping that it would be short and sharp.” Berliners even professed to laugh at the tales of mass rape brought by the eastern fugitives. There was a ghastly joke: “I would rather have a Russian on my belly than a bomb.”

I
N THE LAST
days of January, seventeen-year-old glider-pilot cadet Joseph Volmar lay in a Königsberg hospital recovering from an arm wound. He talked defiantly about rejoining his comrades and getting even with Ivan. His roommate, an old soldier, dismissed his pretensions: “Look, boy, why not give up on this hero stuff? You’re lucky to have made it this far—don’t push it.” As Russian shells began to fall around them, on 30 January the walking wounded were told to make for Pillau. “What a motley group we were! Soldiers with head wounds, arm wounds and even some leg wounds walking with sticks were making a bid for escape. Anything seemed better than letting the Russians get you.” At the beginning, whenever a shell fell close, he dashed for cover. Another man said: “You can’t do that—you’ll miss the boat. You’ve got to keep moving.” A merciful truck, one of the handful still moving, carried them the last few miles to Pillau town square. Volmar’s arm was still intensely painful, but a fat sergeant insisted that he must strip the bandage and show his wound before he was allowed to join the queue for a boat. There were many deceivers cringing among the casualties.

The waterfront was a shambles of abandoned carts and wagons. Refugees and wounded men clustered in thousands around a small ship with a great jagged bomb hole in its foredeck. The column of casualties was forced through the mob, clambering over discarded trunks, crates, suitcases and at last up the gangway. A stench of blood, urine and excrement drifted up the companionway. They lay shivering until darkness fell and they put to sea. Thus they retched and vomited their way to Swinemünde, and onward by train to Lübeck, where an X-ray revealed that a bone in Volmar’s arm was shattered. He cared only that he had escaped from East Prussia and gained a month’s reprieve from the war.

Twenty-year-old Elfride Kowitz was likewise struggling on the dockside at Pillau. She watched people fighting to gain space aboard ships, sometimes crashing into the water as they lost their hold on the quayside or were thrown overboard by rivals. Russian warships intermittently shelled the harbour. Elfi nearly secured a place in a ship loaded with coffins, only to be frustrated at the last moment. Finally, she abandoned the struggle and returned to the Luftwaffe unit outside Königsberg, in whose offices she had been working. She departed in its truck convoy westwards and crossed the ice of the Frisches Haff amid the familiar scenes of terror and horror. “Again and again I thought: ‘We’re doomed.’ All that mattered was to escape the Russians. There were so many people struggling ruthlessly to survive—including myself.” The temperature was 25 degrees centigrade. Women were abandoning babies in the snow. The lorry beside them was obliterated by a direct hit from a Russian shell. Their little contingent was one of the few military convoys driving west. One of the trucks broke down and had to be towed by another.

Among the refugees, the very young and the very old suffered most of all. Once, military police sought to have Elfi evicted from the Luftwaffe truck, to make room for old people. She felt no urge for self-sacrifice. She was only grateful when their lieutenant insisted: “She’s one of us.” Some trekkers, seeing the dead and dying around them in the snow, turned round and went home, saying: “Maybe the Russians aren’t as bad as people say,” a judgement they later regretted. Elfi Kowitz reached the Vistula ferry to find cows abandoned by their owners mooing hopelessly in their unmilked agony: “We knew what was happening. The poor animals did not.” At last, the Luftwaffe convoy was able to cross. The unit was posted to a new airfield in Mecklenburg. Elfi Kowitz never returned to East Prussia, “but the memory still hurts. Sometimes, it seems as we had dreamed it all.” For the rest of her life, she could not bear to hear the grinding of tank tracks, because of the frightening memories the sound evoked.

“The highway along the Frisches Haff is now the only route open between the German garrison in Königsberg and Brandenburg,” the Soviet 1st Baltic Front reported to Moscow early in February 1945.

It is under systematic fire from our artillery, machine-guns and mortars. But the enemy is still getting food and ammunition through on foggy days and at night. According to our intelligence reports, in addition to the garrison there are still a million civilians in the city [Königsberg], both residents and refugees. They include many senior fascist figures, landowners, businessmen, and government officials and their families. People are living in huts and cellars. Food is short . . . Typhoid is rife. There are many wounded and sick in the city. Some refugees have tried to get to Pillau across the ice, but they drowned. The ice is now very thin, after so much shelling by our guns. Every day, the Gestapo arrest and execute hundreds of people for looting and robbing food depots, and also for urging surrender. Prisoners say the city is prepared for a long siege.

The military defenders of Königsberg nursed few illusions about their prospects, shelled and bombed relentlessly, but the Nazis could offer the garrison only the aid of a barrage of fantasy. A National Socialist propaganda officer addressed the wounded at a hospital in the city late in February, announcing with shameless falsehood that several hundred new tanks had just been unloaded at Pillau, and that a German armoured thrust was pushing north from Breslau towards Warsaw. Those who fled East Prussia now, said the Nazi, “would be home in time for the spring sowing . . . This was the Führer’s long-cherished plan, to let the Russians in, the more surely to destroy them.” When a doctor expressed scepticism about this nonsense, he was rebuked by colleagues for defeatism—and for risking his life. Soldiers and civilians alike were urged to attend screenings of Goebbels’s new propaganda epic,
Kolberg,
which was being shown in the city’s theatre. “A capering café violinist in uniform, along with ten other unmilitary musicians, played the latest sentimental popular tunes to the wounded.” Looters scrambled for booty among the ruins—how odd that, when the end of everything was at hand, such men still craved property, possession of which had become meaningless. Military police combed cellars and wrecked buildings for deserters. Every man and boy who could bear arms was herded ruthlessly to join the garrison manning the snowbound defences.

Dr. Hans von Lehndorff, a devout Christian, found himself perversely light-headed as he contemplated his predicament in the beleaguered city: “I tramped through the powdery snow in a curiously exalted mood, as if the whole town and its fate belonged to me alone. As I went, I sang a hymn in praise of God, and my voice moved me to tears of joy. The greatest moments of a man’s life arise when the Last Judgement is near at hand; the world rolls round like a ball beneath his feet.”

Among the very few people in Königsberg who prayed for the coming of the Red Army were sixteen-year-old Michael Wieck and his family. They were musicians from a distinguished artistic background. His mother was a Jew, and he himself was reared in the faith. His elderly gentile father had always proudly rejected official demands that he should disown his wife. In childhood, Wieck experienced the familiar escalation of humiliations which Nazi Germany heaped upon all his kind. Back in the mid-1930s, his parents had instructed him not to greet his teachers with the Nazi salute each morning. The headmaster had insisted. When Hitler honoured the school with a personal visit, Wieck was pushed into the back row of the welcoming ranks. He felt bitterly the exclusion of being forbidden to join the Hitler Youth. Then he was expelled from school altogether, and the family were evicted from their home. His father was dismissed from the directorship of his musical seminary. Michael Wieck’s sister Maria had mercifully escaped to Scotland with a
Kindertransport
in 1939, but Michael was thought too young to accompany her. Once, he asked his mother despairingly: “Why am I treated as different from all the others?” She answered: “It is more honourable to belong to the persecuted than to be a persecutor.” His childhood ended, said Wieck, at the age of fourteen. Even at the height of the siege of Königsberg, if he was careless enough to walk on a pavement with his yellow star, some German—probably young—would order him into the gutter. He was sent to work ten hours a day in a small soap factory among Russians, Gypsies, homosexuals and other outcasts. Only four out of twenty survived the siege. His parents waited, waited, waited for deportation or death. They had heard nothing of gas chambers, but they knew that Jews were marked for extinction. Unbeknown to the Wiecks, late in 1944 an order was sent from Berlin to Königsberg to kill all Jews, but this was implemented only in respect of those already held in camps. The handful who still dwelt in local communities were carelessly omitted.

Michael’s father feared that the Germans would kill the last Jews just before the Russians arrived. A man of sixty-four, he cherished at home a little hatchet, his pathetic weapon. “If the Russians are coming and the block warden sends for us,” he would say, “that is the moment to resist.” They clung to life amid the deluge of Soviet bombs and shells, almost despairing of deliverance.

“IT WAS OUR HOLOCAUST, BUT NOBODY CARES”

B
ETWEEN
23
J
ANUARY
and 8 May 1945, German merchant and naval shipping evacuated more than two million refugees from the Baltic coast, under the orders of Admiral Oskar Kummetz, naval high commander in the east. Freighters and launches, naval escorts and colliers were all pressed into service. Several large passenger vessels had been lying idle for years thanks to the Allied blockade. The
Wilhelm Gustloff
was a 27,000-ton pre-war “Strength through Joy” Nazi cruise ship, which since 1940 had served as a U-boat depot vessel. In the last days of January, its ageing captain was warned to take on fuel and prepare to transport refugees westwards from the port of Gdynia, near Danzig. As soon as it was known that the
Gustloff
was to go, a desperate struggle began to gain boarding passes. Most berths were quickly filled by those with money or influence. Stabsführerin Wilhelmina Reitsch, sister-in-law of Hitler’s favourite test pilot, Hanna, clamoured for space for some of the 8,000 naval auxiliaries in the port, whom she commanded. They were all girls between seventeen and twenty-five, acutely conscious of their likely fate at the hands of the Russians. Only 373 were embarked. So were 918 naval personnel and 4,224 refugees.