After the Reich (12 page)

To protect themselves against the Russians the women covered themselves with ashes to make themselves look old, hobbled around on crutches or painted on red spots to feign disease. In a village near Greifenberg, in the western part of East Pomerania, the squire’s wife Käthe von Normann took the precaution of removing her false front tooth to make herself look older, and dressed herself in peasant costume. The other women adopted the same attire. It rarely worked - the Russians were none too choosy anyhow, and the victims ranged in age from tiny children to great-grandmothers. Others kept their children by them at all times. Libussa von Krockow had recently given birth, and the baby at her breast proved a disincentive to Russian attacks. The Russians were often very taken with the German children, hugging and kissing them and giving them things to eat.

Käthe von Normann saw her first Russians on 5 March. An officer asked for her gold watch, telling her that his own had been destroyed when his hand was wounded. Frau von Normann tried to ascertain whether this was true or not, but he hid his hand. The next thing he needed was a race-horse. Her horse was led out and she began to cry. ‘Why woman cry?’ the officer asked in fractured German. ‘About an animal, it is war, and about people.’ A short while later the horse returned by itself, having thrown its Russian rider.
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The next visitors were a couple of grimy soldiers demanding shoes. Philipp von Normann was obliged to hand over his own. When they noticed his wife one of the men uttered the terrible words, ‘Frau, komm!’ Käthe von Normann did not know what he wanted and ran behind her husband, sobbing. The man shouted to her again to come, but his companion began to yell at him, and both left. Herr von Normann had to explain to his wife what was at stake: ‘It might happen now that I will have to protect you, and then I shall be shot.’ They assembled the family in one room and prepared for the siege.
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The Russians moved into the house, together with an interpreter, who counselled them to lock themselves in at night. That night they were helpless to prevent the Russians from stealing the silver, making off with it over the sleeping children. Next they found the schnapps. Frau von Normann’s mother was obliged to try each bottle first, lest it be poisoned. She replied with a few lines of broken Polish that had no effect on the Russians. They drank three of the four bottles, then fell asleep, and the Normanns were relieved to hear their snores. Käthe’s mother had indeed prepared poison, but for them. Philipp von Normann refused to countenance suicide: ‘It is still a sin, and even if we can justify it for ourselves, the three children have a right to live. We cannot justify it to God.’
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Dawn was an age coming. While Herr von Normann went out into the farmyard, his wife went to the kitchen where she found Russian women soldiers with unruly hair, washing themselves. The boarders had run through a stock of some 3,000 eggs that had been destined for the military hospital; the lavatories were a sight to behold.

The Russians were becoming ever bolder in their demands. Philipp lost his watch, his wedding ring and his signet ring. Then he was interrogated. Although he had not been a member of the Party (the Polish estate workers confirmed this), his military ID was enough to condemn him. He was taken away. He hugged his wife and children: ‘God protect you!’ He died of dysentery in a Russian camp in Schwiebus in May.
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It was Käthe von Normann’s turn next. She was told to go with the soldiers. She sent for a worker who could translate: she would go only with her children, otherwise they should shoot all four of them straight away. The Russians reconsidered: she and her family had five minutes to pack and get out of the house. Soon afterwards she saw the Russian general arrive.

As the women of the estate left
en masse
to find a refuge, the Russians kept coming back to search for arms and watches. Then they caught sight of a Frau Westphal and tried to drag her away. She was defended by her ten-year-old son with an axe, until the Russians finally desisted and merely robbed her of a pot of lard. The women made for comparative shelter in the woods, although the weather was bitterly cold and there were frequent snowfalls. Eventually they found quarters in one of the many farmhouses abandoned by Germans fleeing across the Oder. The usual news came in from the neighbouring villages: a woman raped twenty times, and she was not the only one. Frau von Normann looked at her son. ‘He doesn’t cry, but the sight of indescribable misery in the eyes of my ten year old I shall never forget so long as I live.’
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On 12 March rumours reached Käthe von Normann that Polish units had occupied some of the local villages. She drew the wrong conclusions - she thought they would want to see the farms working again under their industrious German owners. She had no inkling, any more than anyone else, that her land had already been promised to the Poles.

It was on 30 March that General Berling’s First Polish Army raised their flag on Danzig town hall. The fighting had come to an end, and the people were gradually emerging from the cellars where they had lived through the Russian shelling. The Western Allies were informed that a
Wojewoda
or provincial governor had been appointed. Only later did the Americans realise that this was all part of the
fait accompli
, and that Danzig was going to be incorporated into a Polish state shifted westwards, to allow the Soviets to hang on to the territory they had negotiated over with Ribbentrop in 1939.
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The Soviets estimated that 39,000 dead bodies lay in the city. They had captured 10,000 German soldiers. Others held out on the tip of the Hela Peninsula where General von Sauken was performing a remarkable job in transporting citizens and troops to Schleswig-Holstein. Some 1,200,000 escaped the Red Army in this way before Sauken capitulated on 9 May. Not all of them survived the crossing. Two out of four barges containing prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp at the mouth of the Vistula failed to make it: one was scuttled by the SS, the other was bombed by the RAF. The two that reached Neustadt, north of Lübeck, were fired on by SS men and naval personnel.
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The Russians did not actually bother to enter Stutthof until 9 May, more than a month after the fall of Danzig. Stutthof was just one of 2,000 camps, great and small, liberated by the Allies between the autumn of 1944 and the late spring of 1945. Most of the prisoners at Stutthof were women, and most of the women Jews. About 3,000 had been shot or thrown into the icy waters of the Bight in January.
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Germany’s prisons were also evacuated. Once again it seemed that the Nazis did not want the world to know what they had been perpetrating. In November prisons had been emptied on the left bank of the Rhine. A month later they emptied the gaols of Königsberg. The inmates were transferred to penal institutions in central Germany. Prisoners were divided into three groups: those who could be released; those who could be despatched to army formations; and those who were under no circumstance to be liberated. This last group was largely made up of racial types that were anathema to the Nazis: Jews and ‘half-Jews’ above all, but gypsies, Poles and Czechs as well. Also in this category were the worst criminals - murderers and psychopaths. These could be shot if necessary.
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The marches took place in a fiercely cold winter, and many died. Nonetheless the death rate was not as high as on the similar treks that took place on the closing of the extermination and concentration camps. It has been estimated there were fifty-two of these ‘death marches’ involving 69,000 people, of whom 59 per cent perished.
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Women prisoners proved frailer, and many were raped by retreating German soldiers, or captured and killed by the Red Army. The prison warders who accompanied the treks were not as brutal as concentration camp guards, and up to a third of the convicts managed to escape. More closely watched were the ‘NN’ or
Nacht und Nebel
(night and fog) prisoners, who had simply been abducted and never formally tried. At best they were to be transferred to a concentration camp; at worst shot.
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In Danzig it was open season for the Russian soldiers once again. They raped, murdered and pillaged. Women between the ages of twelve and seventy-five were raped; boys who sought to rescue their mothers were pitilessly shot. The Russians defiled the ancient Cathedral of Oliva and raped the Sisters of Mercy. Later they put the building to the torch. In the hospitals both nurses and female doctors were subjected to the same outrages after the soldiers drank surgical spirit. Nurses were raped over the bodies of unconscious patients in the operating theatres together with the women in the maternity ward. Doctors who tried to stop this were simply gunned down. The Poles behaved as badly as the Russians. Many Danzigers took their own lives.
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The men were rounded up, beaten and thrown into the concentration camp at Matzkau. From there 800 to 1,000 were despatched to Russia twice daily.

The scene is familiar from Günter Grass’s novel
The Tin Drum
of 1959. Grass was a Danziger, and, although he was serving with the Waffen-SS when Danzig fell, he speaks with authority. When the Russians break into his ‘presumed’ father’s grocers shop they rape the widow Greff while playing with little Kurt. Rapists and child-lovers - two clichés of the invasion. Not all Red Army soldiers spared children by any means, and not all of them were rapists either. The protagonist Oskar Matzerath’s father famously swallows his Nazi Party badge to conceal it, choking to death in the process: a powerful metaphor for Germany in its hour of defeat.
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In his 2002 novella
Im Krebsgang
about the sinking of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
at the end of January 1945 Grass has returned to the theme. The ship was being used as part of the efforts to evacuate the German population. Anything up to 9,000 people died in the icy waters, many of them children. It was the worst maritime tragedy of all time.
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Silesia

As the Red Army approached German Silesia it liberated the camps at Auschwitz. The sight that confronted its soldiers doubtless sharpened their resolve when it came to the Germans. The Russians arrived on the heels of the retreating SS, which had been busy destroying the evidence of what had gone on there. Twenty-nine out of thirty-five storerooms had also been destroyed, but in the six that remained there was more than enough evidence to condemn them: 368,280 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats and dresses and 5,525 pairs of women’s shoes. In the tannery they found seven tons of human hair. Seven thousand inmates survived to greet them. Their places were taken by German POWs and Silesian civilians.

The rest of the victims of Nazi terror had been hurriedly marched towards the Reich to the more political camps that were in German and Austrian territory. Mauthausen, which had not been a Jewish camp before, suddenly became one; Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Buchenwald were similarly transformed. Belsen was crammed to bursting point with Jewish prisoners, many of them already suffering from typhus. Other camps that were restocked in this way were Dora Mittelbau, Gross Rosen and Flossenbürg. Thousands died
en route
.
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The Russians reached the old Silesian frontier as early as 19 January 1945. The Gauleiter had proclaimed, ‘They will not cross the Silesian border.’ The next day he authorised the departure of 700,000 Breslauer, most of them women and children who marched off to Germany in temperatures of twenty degrees below zero.
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Some arrived in Dresden and were camping in the streets when the Anglo-Americans destroyed the city. Others went to Berlin, where they were burned to death in the great February raids. The capital of Lower Silesia, Breslau was surrounded on 16 February; it finally surrendered on 6 May. The day before, Hitler’s last favourite, Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, marched his troops away leaving the commander of the garrison, General Niehoff, to go to the Villa Colonia to sign the capitulation. Niehoff ’s soldiers were led off to captivity in the east. The city had been one of Hitler’s
Kesseln
: fortresses to be defended to the last drop of German blood. It had suffered horribly, and so had its people. Now they hung white flags from their windows and prepared for the ordeal.

Those who escaped from Breslau crossed the Neisse river at Görlitz. Conditions were so bad there that it has been described as ‘the worst city in Germany’ at the time. In one appalling incident thirty women were driven into a barn and raped. When one refused she was shot. The local Soviet commander heard about the atrocity and went to the barn and shot four of his own men. In another incident eight Russian soldiers died after drinking methylated spirits. Forty more were struck blind.
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Apart from hunting down women to rape, the Russians were anxious to weed out the major Nazis of Breslau. On 7 May the Red Army deliberately started fires in the ruins. What was left of the city was looted. On 10 May the library of the university or Leopoldina for which Brahms had written his famous Academic Festival Overture went up in flames; on the 15th it was the turn of the city museum. On the same day the twin towers of one of the city’s great
Backsteingotik
churches - St Mary Magdalene - were blown up. Rival units fought over the remaining food left by the Germans. ‘The idea that Breslau had been completely destroyed by the siege was a post-war fiction.’
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