Forgotten Land (32 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
Johannes came back in April 1945, leaving his medical duties to return to his parish. One of the few pastors who did not flee west, he was taken ill himself, spending some days in the small hospital near the church with eczema and furunculosis. The village was dark with fear of what its people could expect, fed by the stories from towns further east that had been captured by the Red Army, a manifestation of the belief in East Prussia as the last bastion of western civilization. The January massacre of the Jews on the beach had been of those whom they had been taught to think of as sub-humans – certainly not civilized.
Refugees were already dying in Palmnicken, from disease and weakness. By 15 April, Johannes Jänicke was well enough to take a service in the church, choosing as his text for the sermon the lines from the Gospel of St John: ‘Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my father’s house are many mansions.’ Shortly after the service, earlier than people had thought, after much fighting further east and with Soviet planes swooping over the town to fire on the houses while people sheltered in the cellars, the Russians arrived.
A Red Army sergeant, searching for German troops, entered the rectory, finding instead the pastor in his black Lutheran robes. Jänicke said he had been a hospital orderly and was a priest. The soldier accepted this before searching all the rooms except the bedroom, where Jänicke’s field-grey uniform from his time at the front lay on a chair; if that had been found the pastor would have been taken prisoner or, more likely, shot. Later Jänicke wondered if an angel had been standing at the bedroom door.
Others were not so lucky. The rumours turned out to be true; Germans were evicted from their houses, forced to live in cattle stalls or in barns, the men sent off to camps or murdered, the village wrecked. The Jänickes left the church and rectory in May, taking refuge in the abandoned house of the manager of the brickworks. On what she thought would be her last day in her home,
13 May 1945, Eva looked at the garden in spring – the apple blossom, the trees in bloom, a sickle moon in the sky – and remembered the many sunlit hours and the laughter of friends. She thought that their life could never be so beautiful again.
13 May 1945, Eva looked at the garden in spring – the apple blossom, the trees in bloom, a sickle moon in the sky – and remembered the many sunlit hours and the laughter of friends. She thought that their life could never be so beautiful again.
In the autumn of 1944, Hans von Lehndorff watched that unfailing event in the East Prussian year: the storks leaving for the south. November gales stripped the trees and snow came before the last Christmas. Extraordinarily, the remnants of the Junker society arranged shooting parties, even celebrations of the New Year.
Lehndorff had moved from Insterburg to work in a hospital in Königsberg. As the Red Army closed in, order and hope began to break down. The parents of his closest colleague and soul mate – a woman doctor whom he calls ‘the Doktora’ in his diary – killed themselves. News came that the Red Army had reached far into the west, to Elbing and to the Vistula. Königsberg was surrounded; its commander, General Lasch, had been forbidden to surrender, for it had been designated one of Hitler’s ‘fortress’ cities – islands against the enemy, supposed to tie down Russian troops and to await German successes in the west or Germany’s much-touted wonder weapon or a Soviet collapse. Wouldn’t the capitalists and the imperialists, the Americans and the British, soon fall out with Stalin’s Soviet Union, allowing Germany to escape again? By the standards of one of the great gamblers of history, this last throw of the dice doesn’t seem too harebrained. A route to the port of Pillau remained open. Lehndorff recalled the Bible’s words, ‘Pray ye that your flight be not in winter.’
Looting began, in the snow and the frozen ruins. Lehndorff felt that his work was completely of the hour, that the great test had come – ‘the Last Judgement’ that moved him to sing a hymn in tears of joy. Many still thought that Hitler had lured the Red
Army deep into the Reich to bring about its annihilation. Nazi propaganda insisted that everyone fleeing East Prussia would be back in time for the spring sowing.
Army deep into the Reich to bring about its annihilation. Nazi propaganda insisted that everyone fleeing East Prussia would be back in time for the spring sowing.
In March the thaw came, swans flew over the city and a red deer was seen near the cemetery. People were already learning Russian forms of greeting and one hospital mess had a photograph of Churchill, in preparation for the surrender. Sometimes Hans von Lehndorff amputated ten legs in succession. He and his fellow hospital workers were living, he knew, an ardent life – and he dreamed of a thatched cottage by a wooded snow-covered slope, with Russians moving through dark trees holding torches that flickered below their wild, strange faces. Rumours came that surrender was imminent. Late one night the firing stopped.
On 9 April Hans von Lehndorff saw his first Russians: two soldiers rummaging in a trunk, having dashed a nurse to the ground and broken her jaw. To him, they seemed a lesser species as they took his fountain pen, spurning his shoes – alien short-legged creatures with hands dropped so low that they were almost on all fours like apes, a mob of them squabbling over tinned food in the hospital stores, one weeping because he couldn’t find a watch. Their strange growling speech, the way these maddened adolescents threw themselves on women: these were, to Lehndorff, nothing to do with Russia but what happened when mankind abandoned God. This was the old East Prussian fear of barbarism coming from across the border, transformed into horrific reality. Later Johannes Jänicke took issue with Lehndorff’s contempt.
Alexander Dohna never met the conquerors. In November 1944, he had Christmas at Schlobitten and joined his family in Thuringia for the New Year before returning to East Prussia, surprised by the ease of travel.
The last weeks at Schlobitten were eerily calm. Often alone, Dohna watched others work as if there was no threat and found
it almost macabre to ride through the woods and over the fields. Would they never again harvest the crops here or plan the woodland planting or cut the timber? He knew that the house would be a mass of rubble. In January 1945 the place filled up with refugees – strangers, friends and relations on carts, wagons or sledges. A German army officer responsible for art on the northern part of the eastern front – who in 1943, outside Leningrad, had supervised the German dismantling of the Amber Room in Tsarskoe Seloe in order to ‘rescue’ it – arrived to save the Dohna treasures, but could only take a small number. They failed to find room on one of the lorries for the part of the ‘silver’ library of Duke Albrecht which had been moved from Königsberg to a house near Schlobitten.
it almost macabre to ride through the woods and over the fields. Would they never again harvest the crops here or plan the woodland planting or cut the timber? He knew that the house would be a mass of rubble. In January 1945 the place filled up with refugees – strangers, friends and relations on carts, wagons or sledges. A German army officer responsible for art on the northern part of the eastern front – who in 1943, outside Leningrad, had supervised the German dismantling of the Amber Room in Tsarskoe Seloe in order to ‘rescue’ it – arrived to save the Dohna treasures, but could only take a small number. They failed to find room on one of the lorries for the part of the ‘silver’ library of Duke Albrecht which had been moved from Königsberg to a house near Schlobitten.
Dohna sent some mementoes of their East Prussian life to his family with the last post – a piece of amber, an old ring, a seal – but these never arrived. He left Schlobitten at 3.00 in the morning of 21 January, travelling by wagon beneath clear star-filled skies to Prökelwitz, his family’s other property, across frost-hardened land that was white with powdered snow. Rifles and a telescope lay next to him, the lights were dead in the villages, but all seemed calm, apparently oblivious to the coming destruction. Dohna removed his best hunting trophies and shot his dogs, letting loose the other animals – cows, foals, pigs, sheep – thinking that it would be better for them to die free rather than to starve in captivity. Then briefly he faltered. Should he stay and try to claim neutrality through his family’s Swiss relations, putting the Swiss flag above the house? Now the idea that the Red Army would have respected this island of Swissdom seems absurd. Dohna quickly abandoned it.
Elaborate plans had been made for the columns of estate people to meet, from Schlobitten and from Prökelwitz – and the westward journey began, fraught with searches for bridges that had not been destroyed, for places to stay, and with the constant need to jettison baggage. Dohna was proud of the discipline that kept together a party of more than three hundred people. Old
people and sick children fell away, babies were born and died on the trek. Historic names – Kleist, Bülow, Thadden, Arnim – sheltered or joined them. Further west, he imagined that they must soon be safe, little knowing that the Red Army would cross the Vistula, then the Oder and the Elbe, and they passed scenes of misery, a breakdown of order – although the freemasonry of aristocrats ensured that they were welcomed in castles or big houses on the route. Nine children died on the journey, all under a year old. The trek consisted of three hundred and thirty people, a hundred and forty horses and thirty-eight wagons and lasted nine weeks, a journey of nine hundred miles. Dohna claims it was the largest group to come out of the east. What made him proud was to have got so many out – a sign, he thought, that even in a terrible crisis the care for what he thought of as his people had held.
people and sick children fell away, babies were born and died on the trek. Historic names – Kleist, Bülow, Thadden, Arnim – sheltered or joined them. Further west, he imagined that they must soon be safe, little knowing that the Red Army would cross the Vistula, then the Oder and the Elbe, and they passed scenes of misery, a breakdown of order – although the freemasonry of aristocrats ensured that they were welcomed in castles or big houses on the route. Nine children died on the journey, all under a year old. The trek consisted of three hundred and thirty people, a hundred and forty horses and thirty-eight wagons and lasted nine weeks, a journey of nine hundred miles. Dohna claims it was the largest group to come out of the east. What made him proud was to have got so many out – a sign, he thought, that even in a terrible crisis the care for what he thought of as his people had held.
Perhaps the most celebrated aristocratic refugee of that winter is Marion Dönhoff, a lone rider – on her foxhunter Alaric, with an old Spanish cross in her saddle-bag: a scene that still resonates because of her position in post-war Germany and her bestselling memoirs. Her workers, at the Dönhoff property of Quittainen, not far from Schlobitten, had started out with her before the trek stalled in deep snow; she wrote later that her companions urged her to go on without them. She, the landowner (they said), was the one whom the Russians would kill whereas they, the workers, would be needed to milk the cows, to work the fields and to keep everything going.
In Dönhoff’s account, the way westwards becomes crowded with symbols. She saw three wounded German soldiers hobbling across the bridge over the Nogat at Marienburg, near the castle of the Teutonic Knights – and thought this symbolized a passing civilization: the defeated men and herself, a woman whose ancestors had come into what was then an eastern wilderness six hundred years before. When Marion Dönhoff reached Varzin, the Bismarck estates in Pomerania, she found that the widow of the Iron Chancellor’s son (who’d been Governor of East Prussia before the First World War) had already had her grave dug in the
garden and was supervising the loading of the Bismarck archives onto farm carts for the journey west. Dönhoff stayed at Varzin for two days, fascinated by the reminiscences and the character of this survivor from imperial times as the refugees trailed by outside and an ancient butler served bottles of vintage wine. When her young visitor rode off, the old lady waved a small handkerchief before turning back into the house to wait for the Red Army and for the death its troops must bring.
garden and was supervising the loading of the Bismarck archives onto farm carts for the journey west. Dönhoff stayed at Varzin for two days, fascinated by the reminiscences and the character of this survivor from imperial times as the refugees trailed by outside and an ancient butler served bottles of vintage wine. When her young visitor rode off, the old lady waved a small handkerchief before turning back into the house to wait for the Red Army and for the death its troops must bring.
Two years later, in 1947, Marion Dönhoff heard in a letter from Friedrichstein what had happened to those who had thought that they would be needed by the conquerors. Many had been shot; others sent to camps in the Urals, where most died; those who did stay to work for the Russians became victims of disease or starvation. For Alexander Dohna, however, the old links stayed stronger. At the reunions, held every two years, of those who had come out with him on the trek, it seemed possible to recover, briefly, the old spirit of the place; photographs show large numbers, swelled increasingly by children and grandchildren. On 23 January, only a few days after the trek had left, Soviet tanks reached Schlobitten station – and the big house and the smaller Dohna property at Prökelwitz were both destroyed.
Further east, another landmark fell. Some of the contents of Rominten – the grandiose paintings of stags, the best trophy heads, a few of the statues of deer from the grounds of the lodge – were taken west. Walter Frevert and the foresters decided not to destroy the high seats; with these, he wrote later, there was to be no scorched-earth policy, for the enemy should enjoy them. With one of his bloodhounds, Frevert raised the Lieutenant, a fine stag that Göring had hunted only a few days before, and killed it with three shots. It was, he thought, an appropriate farewell to the old Rominten, a determined assertion of the place’s identity – with Red Army parachutists rumoured to be landing nearby.
Having sent his family west, Walter Frevert prepared to defend Rominten with his ‘fighting group’. Already room had been found for his favourite bloodhound on the special train that
Göring had organized for the lodge’s contents – and his luck came again; a knee injury was serious enough to lead to his evacuation to hospital in Berlin, sparing him the final battle, when his colleagues were killed or taken into brutal captivity. Frevert’s last experience of war was as commander of German forces in The Hague where, the night before surrendering, he dined with a Dutch baron in his ‘very tastefully furnished house’, staying up late to talk about ‘God and the world’, consigning these ‘to the Devil’. The next morning he waited, ‘like a great war lord’ with his staff officers opposite the Hôtel des Indes to hand the city over to the Canadian divisional commander.
Göring had organized for the lodge’s contents – and his luck came again; a knee injury was serious enough to lead to his evacuation to hospital in Berlin, sparing him the final battle, when his colleagues were killed or taken into brutal captivity. Frevert’s last experience of war was as commander of German forces in The Hague where, the night before surrendering, he dined with a Dutch baron in his ‘very tastefully furnished house’, staying up late to talk about ‘God and the world’, consigning these ‘to the Devil’. The next morning he waited, ‘like a great war lord’ with his staff officers opposite the Hôtel des Indes to hand the city over to the Canadian divisional commander.
Released from a prisoner-of-war camp in Holland in early 1947, Frevert established his family near Hanover. He earned money as a night watchman, sold fox skins on the black market, picked up forestry work on some private estates and, by October, was chief of the forestry district of Murgthal in the Black Forest. An investigation began into what Frevert had done in Białowies and seemed to run out of steam; he was classified a Nazi ‘fellow-traveller’ but could show that some officials had thought him politically unreliable because of his apparent detachment from the movement, although he had been a party member since 1933. What seemed a release from all this came in 1953: the ‘dream’ position of Oberforstmeister of Kaltenbronn in Gernsbach in Baden-Württemberg, in the northern part of the Black Forest.
For Frevert, the east remained unforgettable. Pieces of it had survived: some of the contents of the lodge at Rominten; the trophies, including the head and antlers of the Lieutenant, which hang today in the German Hunting Museum in Munich; and the memories of a world that had been built up over centuries. Rominten might have become the Russian Krasnolesye – but, as if to show that at least the name could survive with him, Frevert called his house in Gernsbach ‘Rominten’. Already, soon after his release from prison, he had begun to write about the forest: a description partly of its natural world but also of the people – the grandees, Göring and, more in the shadows, himself. It took a
long time; Frevert was determined to be accurate and contacted old colleagues and experts. Post-war letters took ages or didn’t arrive, and many of the old Rominten team were dead or in Soviet prisons. But he had his old photographs and records. It was, his wife recalled years later, very emotional, a cathartic task.
long time; Frevert was determined to be accurate and contacted old colleagues and experts. Post-war letters took ages or didn’t arrive, and many of the old Rominten team were dead or in Soviet prisons. But he had his old photographs and records. It was, his wife recalled years later, very emotional, a cathartic task.
The end of the book seems to reach furthest into its author’s feelings. What he had tried to do, Frevert wrote, was to convey the idealism and achievement of those days in a place that had been German for seven hundred years, shaped by German ingenuity and effort. He wanted to bring back the stags, the elk and the Trakehner horses (‘the best horses in Europe’). But this was also an evocation of a lost province: of the wildlife in the Memel delta; of the tall pines; of the cattle and the well-worked farms, of the amber; of the university of Königsberg, which had nurtured one of the most famous men in the world, Immanuel Kant. Seven hundred years of history had gone after one lost war, he wrote. Frevert’s purpose was to prompt memory and also to sustain the belief that this former German land would return to its former people and be rebuilt.
Walter Frevert’s old life started to come back. His skill as a dog-handler made him much in demand as a judge of competitions and an adviser to breeders and owners. At the International Hunting Exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1954, the biggest in Germany since the Berlin extravaganza of 1937, he organized a display of old Rominten heads. Frevert wrote of hunting and dog training in magazines and books. But it was the publication of
Rominten
in 1957 that brought him fame. The photographs – of the landscape, the lodge and the trophies, of the pictures by Richard Friese of stags in the wild, of the memorial to the first husband of Frevert’s wife (Paul Barckhausen, killed in September 1939 outside Warsaw), of the uniformed foresters, of pine logs burning at night beside dead stags – made the evocation even more sharply nostalgic alongside the clear, occasionally humorous, quietly impassioned writing. To some, the bestseller was a work of fine evocation; to others, it seemed menacing and grim.
In an introduction, a former Freikorps member, National Socialist and hunting official under Göring, Ulrich Scherping, set the tone. The story of the German Rominten, Scherping declared, was not at an end, though the wrenching change of identity still brought pain. The loss shown by Frevert must affect even those who had never known the forest.
Rominten
in 1957 that brought him fame. The photographs – of the landscape, the lodge and the trophies, of the pictures by Richard Friese of stags in the wild, of the memorial to the first husband of Frevert’s wife (Paul Barckhausen, killed in September 1939 outside Warsaw), of the uniformed foresters, of pine logs burning at night beside dead stags – made the evocation even more sharply nostalgic alongside the clear, occasionally humorous, quietly impassioned writing. To some, the bestseller was a work of fine evocation; to others, it seemed menacing and grim.
In an introduction, a former Freikorps member, National Socialist and hunting official under Göring, Ulrich Scherping, set the tone. The story of the German Rominten, Scherping declared, was not at an end, though the wrenching change of identity still brought pain. The loss shown by Frevert must affect even those who had never known the forest.
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