Armageddon (60 page)

Russian after-action reports on the battle for Königsberg paint a picture of confusion, improvisation and often bloody mistakes among the attackers. In the west and north-west of the city, the Russians were compelled to use flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails to set ablaze buildings in which the defenders had emplaced themselves for a fight to the death. There were frightful “friendly fire” incidents, in which artillery observers lost contact with the infantry, and called down shelling on their own men. Rubble and ditches dug by the Germans made it necessary to manhandle Russian field guns forward under fire, by human exertion alone. A severe shortage of radios hampered communication. There was no room for tactical sophistication here, merely murderous hammering at the German positions line by line, until each in turn collapsed.

When the Russians reached the streets of Königsberg, the first white sheets appeared at shattered windows. Shelling and bombing intensified. In the operating theatre of a German hospital, Dr. Hans von Lehndorff found the lights crashing down on to him from the ceiling after a direct hit. German troops ran back among the buildings, emptying their rifles in futility at the strafing aircraft. Von Lehndorff, whose hospital now lay in no-man’s-land, watched his countrymen re-forming a defence line among ruins behind the once-beautiful lake that stood in front of Königsberg castle. “The further side of the pond looks like a cabbage patch destroyed by hail,” he wrote on 7 April.

One is involuntarily reminded of pictures of Douaumont and other shattered fortifications of the First World War, except that those had been erected specially for war, whereas the Königsberg pond seems to have taken a perpetual lease of civilian quietude. Now it is being completely ravaged. Nerves are beginning to give way among us . . . Lest the idea of suicide become infectious, I gave a little address in the operating theatre on the text “Fear not those which kill only the body, but cannot kill the soul. But fear that which can destroy both body and soul.”

General Lasch, commanding the garrison, at last concluded that no more could be done. He surrendered Königsberg on 10 April. Berlin demanded explanations from Fourth Army’s commander. General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller had achieved notoriety when he was unwillingly propelled into command six weeks earlier by telling Army Group HQ: “I am a good NCO and I know how to carry out orders, but strategy and tactics are quite beyond me. Just tell me what I ought to do!” Now, Müller signalled: “The reasons for the fall of Königsberg, beyond Russian superiority of men and tanks and aircraft, concerns the morale of our own troops. The impression of the city lit up by flames and strewn with unburied dead dampened the spirits of the defenders. Whether the commander also failed in his duty cannot with certainty be established.” Hitler was uninterested in either rationality or obfuscation. He declared Lasch a traitor, arrested his family and sentenced him
in absentia
to death by hanging. One hundred and twenty police and SS fought to the end in the old castle, even after the capitulation. In long, wretched columns, 60,526 prisoners and refugees marched out, according to NKVD figures, watched by Russian soldiers who plundered them as they passed. Beria reported that there were 32,573 Germans, 13,054 Soviet citizens—slave labourers—and 13,054 people of other foreign nationalities. Some Volkssturm in civilian clothes were shot out of hand as partisans, just as the Wehrmacht in Russia had executed their counterparts in thousands. The Russians claimed to have killed 42,000 Germans and captured 92,000 prisoners, including 1,800 officers, in the Königsberg operation, but this was probably an exaggeration. Beria announced to Stalin that eight NKVD groups, each of 120, were searching Königsberg for “spies, traitors and collaborators.” These had already detained 14,901 people, though their progress through the streets was rendered difficult by mountains of rubble. Eight NKVD regiments had formed a cordon around the city, to deny escape to fugitives.

Germans on the Samland peninsula, north-east of the city, held out for two weeks longer. The final position to fall, Major Karl Henke’s Battery Lemburg, was defended to the last man until 1530 on 27 April. Dr. Karl Ludwig Mahlo, a Luftwaffe medical officer, was among the final party to escape from Pillau. For months, he had been struggling to treat thousands of wounded people, soldiers and civilians alike, to whom he could offer pitifully little: “What we could do was a drop in the ocean.” He found that he had become frighteningly inured to suffering, consumed by fatalism: “Germany was destroyed. There was a feeling that, after us, there would be nothing.” Mahlo owed his escape to friends in the navy. His bitterness about what happened in East Prussia, his own birthplace, never abated.

W
HEN
C
APTAIN
Abram Skuratovsky and his 168th Signals Unit of the Red Army reached the Baltic at Pillau, he dipped a bottle into the sea and filled it as a souvenir of their campaign. “We were in tearing spirits.” Skuratovsky had somewhere acquired a splendid horse, which he rode until some Lithuanians stole it one night. He marvelled at the empty landscape they had inherited, with its fruit trees just coming into blossom, abandoned houses and lowing cattle. “The cowsheds in East Prussia seemed grander than the houses we lived in at home,” he said. Skuratovsky came from Kiev, where his father sold fish. It was a revelation for his men to find themselves in billets with running water, to see livestock confined by miles of barbed-wire fencing, a commodity which in his own experience was employed only on battlefields.

Corporal Anatoly Osminov’s unit was exhausted by the long, brutal campaign. Outside Königsberg, they leaguered their tanks. Osminov’s driver, Boris, a veteran who had served eight years in the same unit and had experienced eight tanks burning under him, took his tommy-gun and went off into a nearby forest in search of something edible. Suddenly, he came upon a group of men digging trenches. Thinking they were Germans, he raised his tommy-gun and called “
Hände hoch!
” They were Russians. Their officer killed him, for which he could scarcely be blamed. They brought Boris’s body in to the tank leaguer just as the signal came through announcing the capitulation of Königsberg. The soldier was much beloved in the unit. The men clubbed together and sent thirty-six gold watches, spoils of the battle, to his widow.

Even by the standards of the Red Army, the cost of triumph on the Baltic was very high. Between 13 January and 25 April, 2nd Belorussian Front lost 159,490 men dead and wounded, and 3rd Belorussian Front 421,763. During three months in East Prussia, therefore, the Red Army suffered almost as many casualties as the Anglo-American armies in the entire north-west Europe campaign.

THERE WERE HUNDREDS,
if not thousands of suicides when the Russians took Königsberg. The family who lived above Margaret Mehl’s apartment, a bank director and his wife and daughter, made a cool decision to kill themselves. Others died in less spectacular fashion. Margaret Mehl’s aunts Helena and Else decided to stay behind and await the return of their husbands from the war. They simply starved to death. Dr. Hans von Lehndorff saw terrible scenes of murder and pillage: “We stood close together, awaiting the end in some form or other. The fear of death . . . had been entirely dispelled now by something infinitely worse. On every side we heard the despairing screams of the women: ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’ But the tormentors preferred a wrestling match to any actual use of firearms.” Some women were raped in hospital maternity wards, within days of giving birth.

Through the siege of Königsberg, the Jewish Wieck family had clung to life in their cellar. The Wiecks’ first glimpse of the forces of freedom was a solitary soldier on a bicycle. The men of the Red Army always seemed fascinated by the opportunity to ride bikes. Soon afterwards, a single T-34 drove by. Finally, a self-propelled gun halted in front of their apartment building. Soviet troops streamed through the streets. Dreadful disillusionment now befell the Jewish survivors. “It was hell,” said Michael simply. “We wanted to receive the Russians as liberators, but how could we? They killed every man they saw, and raped every woman between seven and seventy. We heard the screams and cries for help far into the night. They locked some people in the cellars and then set fire to the houses above. They herded civilians from the city to the battlefield outside to be shot or burned.” The boy, his mother and his father, whose beloved violin was snatched from him, were herded under guard with a crowd of others into a field, at first without food or water.

“My father had led a very sheltered life. He could not cope with these circumstances at all. My mother, who was ten years younger, managed a little better.” She escaped rape only, said Wieck, “because the Russians found enough younger ones.” Their Mongol captors had no idea of the significance of the yellow stars on their sleeves. The Wiecks experienced a spasm of hope when they met a Jewish Russian officer, who spoke both German and Yiddish. Their optimism was swiftly crushed. “If you were really Jewish,” said the soldier contemptuously, “you would be dead. Since you are alive, you must have thrown in your lot with the Germans.” And so the family tore off their yellow stars and shared the plight of their fellow prisoners.

There had been 120,000 civilians in Königsberg before the siege. The Wiecks were among 15,000 people who now remained. They were herded back into the city under guard to bury the dead. “I saw the murdered women,” said Michael Wieck, “the corpses that had lain in cellars for weeks. We found people who had hanged themselves in their houses. We put them all in bomb craters in the streets, horses and humans together, before a snow plough filled them in.” The burial parties lived on the verge of starvation, suffering in turn malaria, dysentery, lice and inflamed lungs. Wieck’s father caught typhoid.

By a supreme irony, in the midst of their misery the Wiecks “rediscovered a certain community with the Germans.” In April, Michael was taken to a notorious special camp run by the NKVD at Rothenstein, where Dr. Hans von Lehndorff was also incarcerated. Persons under investigation were held in a large cellar, jammed so thickly together that they could not lie down or even sit. They stood or kneeled, hour after hour and day after day. “We were glad when people started to die, because the living got more room.” Once a day, they were let out for exercise. At night, the Russians descended by torchlight to fetch suspects for interrogation. The victims returned bleeding, sometimes lacking teeth. One man with tuberculosis coughed incessantly. Food was given only to those who possessed a receptacle to put it in. Michael Wieck unscrewed the globe of a lamp above their heads to hold his portion of mouldy bread. He offered to let the TB case share it with him. “No, no,” said the man, “keep away from me—you will only catch my disease.” He died three days later. Wieck said: “Those sixteen days in the cellars at Rothenstein were no less terrible than Auschwitz. First Hitler and the Nazis had tried to destroy us, now it was the Russians. I had given up, I wanted to die. I began to refuse food and water. Then someone persuaded me to accept a spoonful of sugar. I felt the desire to live seeping back.”

Wieck, an impish, electric personality possessed of both brilliance and charm, was finally released by the Russians after an officer befriended him. Unlike one fellow prisoner who, despairing of the future, hurled himself off a bridge and drowned when freed from Rothenstein, Wieck proved a survivor. For three years after the fall of Königsberg, he eked out a living playing a violin to entertain the Russian occupiers, before escaping to West Germany in 1948 and forging a distinguished career as writer and musician. His parents also survived. Was he robbed of his childhood? He shrugged. “It does as much harm to have a normal childhood as to have a difficult one.” His story and his moral generosity represent a triumph of the human spirit.

T
HE NUMBERS OF
those who died in the flight from East Prussia will never be precisely established. By the end of the war, some eight million people were thought to have abandoned or been driven from their homes in the eastern provinces of the Greater Reich, and a further eight million followed during the first years of Soviet hegemony. It is known that 610,000 ethnic Germans were killed in Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Well over a million disappeared, and are presumed to have died, escaping from East Prussia, Silesia and other areas of Hitler’s eastern empire. They perished from exposure, cold, hunger and Russian gunfire. To this day a profound rage persists in Germany, that a world still obsessed with the events of the Second World War knows so little, and appears to care less, about the horrors in the east in 1945. “The bulk of those who fled, and of those who died, were not the kind who can write books, or even tell their stories,” remarks Helmut Schmidt. “They were very ordinary people.” One East Prussian woman’s choice of words would find scant modern favour outside Germany, but reflects a common passion among her fellow countrymen: “It was our holocaust, but nobody cares.” Both before and after the coming of peace, the Western media was economical in its reporting of the horrors that took place in East Prussia and Silesia, despite a multitude of witnesses occupying the displaced-persons camps of Germany. Revelations were still fresh about the concentration camps, the mass slaughter of Jews, Russians, Gypsies and other victims of Hitler’s homicidal mania. The victors were in no mood to perceive Germans as victims. The Nazi gauleiters in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia bore a heavy responsibility for their refusal to permit, far less to facilitate, the flight of the population before the Red Army came, but inevitably they pleaded orders from Berlin. To seek compassion from the Nazis even for their own people was, of course, an absolute contradiction.

For the victorious Americans and British, it was far more difficult to pass judgement upon the conduct of the Russians, and it remains so today. “You have, of course, read Dostoevsky?” demanded Stalin of Milovan Djilas, when the partisan leader complained of the rape of Yugoslav women by liberating Russian soldiers.