Armageddon (57 page)

Stalin was irked by Chernyakhovsky’s failure quickly to secure Königsberg. As he watched from Moscow the sluggish progress of 3rd Belorussian Front, on 20 January he ordered Rokossovsky’s armies of 2nd Belorussian Front to wheel north, towards the Baltic coast, and sever East Prussia from the rest of the Reich. The weight of two Soviet fronts smashing into Prussia and thence Pomerania wrought havoc among millions of German soldiers and refugees. Yet this was achieved at the cost of opening a wide gap between Rokossovsky and Zhukov, who was appalled to find his right flank exposed—here was the blunder which destroyed any possibility that Zhukov could have reached Berlin “on the run” in February. It was the Stavka’s worst strategic decision of the last phase of the war—and the Stavka was, of course, Stalin. Rokossovsky’s forces became embroiled in a long succession of battles along the Baltic coast. In all of these the Soviets triumphed, yet they seemed strategically irrelevant. Once Berlin fell, surviving pockets of German resistance could be addressed at leisure. By sending Rokossovsky north, Stalin importantly weakened the drive for Hitler’s capital. The Stavka’s decision did not, of course, threaten final victory, but it may have delayed this by two months.

Rokossovsky’s tanks crashed into the long, exposed flank of Fourth Army around the Frisches Haff—the vast frozen coastal lagoon south-west of Königsberg—and into hundreds of thousands of trekking refugees. On 21 January, Soviet spearheads began shelling throngs of fugitives struggling to escape through Elbing towards the Reich. The Russians reached Allenstein on 22 January, overrunning German reinforcements detraining there from the east. On 23 January, Fifth Guards Tank Army entered Elbing, temporarily halting the refugee trek. Having suffered substantial casualties from local defenders and Panzerfausts, the Russians were obliged to withdraw. They did not enter the town again for a fortnight, but now held much of the near shore of the Frisches Haff. Only a thin, sandy tongue of land between the lagoon and the sea—the Frisches Nehrung—still offered a passage for a host of fugitives, if Rokossovsky’s armies could be pushed back a few miles.

With considerable courage, the German commanders on the Baltic decided to defy Berlin, to save their 400,000 troops and the great mass of civilians milling helplessly across thousands of square miles of snowbound countryside, searching for a path westwards. On the moonlit night of 26 January, Fourth Army launched a counter-offensive which drove back the Russian Forty-eighth Army and broke through to Elbing. Once again, a land passage for the refugees was open. Reinhardt of Army Group North was sacked for his disobedience, as was Fourth Army’s commander, Hossbach. Hitler was wholly uninterested in the plight of his suffering people. Hundreds of thousands of fugitives, however, had cause to be grateful to the dismissed generals.

Across the entire battlefield between the Baltic and Yugoslavia, the rival forces’ tanks, artillery, infantry, machine-guns were now conducting their deadly contest amid throngs of civilians fleeing westwards, and the merciless winter weather. The plight of East Prussia’s fugitives was worst of all. Women and infants huddled upon columns of carts laden with possessions, figures shuffling through the snows with children crying out in their wake, became doomed extras in the drama of the armies. The civilians’ sufferings, the march of so much despairing humanity towards extinction, became to the combatants a spectacle as familiar as the frozen rivers, snowbound forests and burning villages among which they met their fate.

Russian attitudes towards the refugees ranged from indifference to deliberate brutality. When advancing T-34s met trekkers, the tanks smashed through their midst, mere battlefield flotsam. Again and again, Russian artillery and machine-guns raked columns of trekkers or blocked their flight. Cold and hunger also killed huge numbers. To this day, surviving East Prussians place the heaviest burden of blame for their fate upon Gauleiter Koch, who denied them licence to flee before the Russians came. But Soviet gunfire was directly responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands. The Russians’ policy owed little to military necessity and everything to the culture of vengeance fostered within the Red Army over almost four years by such manic Moscow propagandists as Ilya Ehrenburg.

Once the Soviet commitment to fire and the sword became evident, the German army in East Prussia performed extraordinary feats of courage and sacrifice, to hold open paths to safety for the civilians. The saga of East Prussia’s winter of blood and ice is one of the most awful of the Second World War. Russians said: “Remember what Germany did in our country.” It was indeed true that for each German killed by the Red Army could be counted the corpses of three, four, five Russians killed by the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe and the SS in their glory days. Yet few modern readers can escape revulsion in contemplating the fate of the East Prussian people in the first months of 1945. Since the expulsion of the German population from East Prussia had already been agreed between the Allies, it is scarcely surprising that the Russians were untroubled by the mass flight of refugees. It seems strange, however, that when the depopulation of the province was a matter of Moscow policy, the Red Army acted so savagely to impede the westward passage of people who were anyway doomed to expulsion.

W
ALTRAUT
P
TACK
was only thirteen, but in her schoolroom early in the new year all the children’s chatter was about possible suicide when the Russians came. There was a rumour that the Ivans would use poison gas. Waltraut was the daughter of a cobbler in Lötzen who made boots for the Wehrmacht. The family had spent a sad Christmas, lacking even the decorated tree the children had wanted so much. Her eldest brother Günther had died in the battle for Aachen. On 23 January, they left home a few hours ahead of the Russians, towing a family sled. This carried only the barest essentials—food and blankets. The child pleaded to take her doll, but her father sternly insisted that it must stay behind. Every few hundred yards of the trek to the nearest station, some family treasure was abandoned to lighten the sled. When they reached the tracks amid the familiar mob of hysterical people, they waited hours. Passing trains carried only troops forward, wounded back. At last, a soldier took pity on the misery of the Ptack children. He allowed them to climb on a freight train, which crawled through the countryside for many hours, stopping repeatedly. Then they heard that the Russians were in Elbing. The trucks and their despairing human cargo were shunted eastward again. After a few miles, all the passengers were ordered off. They stumbled through darkness the few miles to the edge of the Frisches Haff. Through the days that followed, they scavenged for food and a path to safety, as Russian artillery fire grew steadily closer. They slept in barns, cowsheds, abandoned houses.

On 5 February, their father was successful in begging places for the children and his eighty-year-old mother on a truck crossing the lagoon. At the military police checkpoint, there was a bitter argument when the soldiers wanted to insist that sixteen-year-old Horst Ptack stayed to join the Volkssturm. “My father knew that it must mean death for him.” Herr Ptack won the battle for his son, but lost it for himself. At the age of fifty-seven, he was now required to fight for his fatherland. He left the family at the edge of the ice. It was raining hard, and the snow was turning to slush. They began to fear that the ice underfoot would melt. Waltraut stared curiously at the frozen corpse of an old man lying beside her. They crossed the lagoon safely and, on the far side, crowded into a earthen shelter among scores of others to rest: “Human warmth kept us alive.” Next morning, the skies cleared, the sun shone and the Soviet Air Force came. They watched the bombs leave the aircraft above, so small in the air, and then saw huge explosions all around them, blasting holes in the ice and killing many people who stood upon it. The aircraft maintained a shuttle all through the daylight hours: “Many, many people died that day.” Waltraut’s eleven-year-old brother Karl-Heinz caught a stampeding horse and stood trying to calm it through the attacks, while everyone else lay prostrate, hugging their fear.

At Pillau, they lingered for three days, praying that their father would be able to rejoin them: “People were roaming the streets demented with grief, searching for loved ones.” Their father did not come. The Russian guns were getting closer again. They fought their way on board a freighter and lay terrified on a bed of straw in its hold through the sea passage to Danzig, where they arrived on 20 February. The family spent the balance of the war as refugees in an abandoned seaside villa in Pomerania. They never heard of their father again.

Twenty-year-old Eleonore Burgsdorff had returned to her mother’s home in East Prussia in December 1944, after serving her statutory two years with the Reich Labour Service. The family lived in a beautiful baroque house named Wildenhoff, which belonged to her stepfather, Graf von Schwerin. A typical German aristocrat, he had declined to join the July plot against Hitler. “First, the Russians—then the Nazis,” he said. The family shared Christmas together with their staff of twenty and the miscellany of Russian, Polish and French PoWs who worked on the estate. They gave each other small gifts of wool, to knit clothes. “We all recognized that we were living on a volcano. Our Russians knew that, for them, the coming of the Red Army meant death.” For the last time in their lives, the prisoners sang carols in the courtyard. There was plenty to drink at Wildenhoff, because over the years of Germany’s triumphs visiting officers had brought Scotch whisky, Grand Marnier and champagne to fill the cellars.

As soon as the festivities were over, “Kaps” von Schwerin departed for the front. Almost certainly because the Nazis suspected his loyalty, he was given a thankless role, commanding a Volkssturm unit. He always wore a cherished gold pin. When he left home for the front, he did not take this with him. “I know I shan’t be coming back,” he said. On 16 January, Eleonore picked up the telephone at Wildenhoff and took a call from her stepfather’s unit. Her mother had gone into Königsberg the previous day. Eleonore took the train to the city, and went to her mother’s room at the Park Hotel. She walked in and said simply: “Kaps is dead.” Her mother slumped back, dragging the bedclothes over her head. The two women sobbed together for a time. Thereafter, the forty-one-year-old widow behaved as if she had been turned to stone. To her daughter’s despair, she would not focus at all upon practical issues—above all, flight. When they returned to Wildenhoff, the girl felt that she could not leave her mother, lest she kill herself. Day after day, though they knew they should flee, they postponed the decision. Many of the treasures of Königsberg Museum had been evacuated to Wildenhoff. Gauleiter Koch had told Gräfin von Schwerin that, if it ever proved necessary to evacuate the area, he would arrange special railroad space for the works of art. None of this came to pass.

As the Red Army drew near, the von Schwerins walled up family papers and valuables in the cellars, and tried to choose a few special favourites to take with them. Eleonore looked wonderingly upon the shelves of priceless volumes in the library, and finally selected those which looked oldest and most splendid, with seals hanging from their leather bindings. A Ukrainian woman art historian was billeted with them as curator of the art treasures, which included a priceless hoard of icons looted by the Wehrmacht from Kiev. She refused to abandon her cherished charges. “When the Russians come,” said the Ukrainian, “I shall set fire to the whole place and everything in it.”

The estate tenants and staff also declined to leave. “We had the Russians here in 1914,” they said, “and in the end they went away again. It’ll be the same this time.” Eleonore asked a French prisoner to look after Senta, the family’s beloved Great Dane. At last, they set off for the station in horse-drawn carts. After an emotional farewell, their coachman took the horses back to the house. The two women boarded a train for the hour-long journey to Braunsberg, where a cousin lived. The trip took eighteen hours. They arrived to find their cousin preparing his own trek. The women clambered on to a cart. The roads were crammed, and the pace was painfully slow amid the chaos of the living and dead. Worst of all were the corpses of babies lying in the frozen snow. Their party was fortunate enough to be among the first to cross the ice of the Frisches Haff, on 24 January. Soldiers helped them with the wagons. At one point they came close to disaster as a wheel tilted over open water, and their horses almost slipped into the abyss. Yet, travelling by night and resting by day, they escaped westwards into Germany. The horrors of their war were not yet ended, but they had left behind the nightmare of East Prussia. They never saw Wildenhoff again. The Ukrainian art historian fulfilled her dreadful promise. She immolated the house, its contents and herself in a great blaze as the Russians approached, a vision reminiscent of the burning of Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s novel
Rebecca
.

On 21 January, Gauleiter Koch, the man personally responsible for refusing to allow any prior evacuation of East Prussia, burst into his secretary’s office on his estate at Gross-Friedrich. “You must go—quickly—tonight,” he told Lise-Lotte Kussner. “Take the rest of the village people.” She responded instinctively: “But I can’t—there are posters everywhere saying that it would be treason.” So indeed there were—drafted by Koch himself. Now, he said: “No, no—that means nothing. Just go.” The gauleiter was distraught. In two hours, a little convoy of tractors and trailers was assembled. There were three Belgian PoWs, five women, a grandfather, eight small children and a fourteen-year-old boy. Lise-Lotte went into the house to tell Koch they were ready. She met his wife, Lilo. “Where are you going?” Frau Koch demanded.

“We’re off,” said the girl.

“No, you’re not.”

“It’s the gauleiter’s order.”

“You’re staying here.”

Frau Koch was visibly confused, no less so when her husband appeared and confirmed his orders, adding that his wife must remain. A Russian prisoner and his Polish girlfriend begged to join the trek. Lise-Lotte said: “But you’re going to be liberated!” The couple said: “No, we want to get out.” Koch, however, refused to let them leave. They took some snow-chains off a Wehrmacht vehicle to equip one of their own. Their privileged little convoy had progressed just six miles when one of its tractors broke down. Lise-Lotte telephoned Koch to ask what to do. He responded furiously: “Just keep going. You must go faster. The Russians are at Elbing already!” Their road, unlike most of those throughout East Prussia, proved curiously deserted. They were flagged down by a Wehrmacht patrol, who told them that the way ahead was closed by the Red Army. They lingered fearfully for hours before the orders changed. German troops had regained some ground. They could drive on. They heard Russian guns every yard that they travelled, but they reached the Vistula ferry without serious incident. Here there was a long, long queue. Irma, one of the women in the convoy, said: “Get the little ones screaming.” They awakened the sleeping children, and set them to howl. The apparent plight of their small charges persuaded the soldiers to allow them to bypass the queue. The tractors drove forward to the ferry, past long lines of silent, resentful refugees.