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Authors: Max Egremont

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Outside parliament, a campaign began against the expulsions; British churchmen condemned them and George Orwell wrote of ‘this enormous crime’. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz told an English friend he couldn’t understand such sentimentality, which was apparently founded on the unrealistic belief that the hatred elsewhere in Europe could be stopped. Appalling destruction had already hit East Prussia when the Red Army crossed its borders in
October 1944. Two months earlier, in August, the RAF had bombed Königsberg, smashing the city’s historic centre. After the raids, fires burnt for days. Smoke, loosened timber, rubble and the stench of corpses had formed a cordon around what had once been thought of as one of the last redoubts of western European civilization.
Its tight streets, wooden buildings, packed warehouses and winds from the Baltic had always made Königsberg prone to fires which, centuries before, had terrified its most famous citizen. The dying philosopher Immanuel Kant often fell asleep while reading, and one night his head nodded into some nearby candles that set fire to his cotton night cap. Already nightmares plagued him; old street songs heard in childhood and ghostly murderers became fearful torments; when his servant answered his cries, Kant thought the man had come to kill him. In daylight, the philosopher wrote, ‘No surrender now to panics of darkness.’ Until then he had insisted on a silent bedroom, without light: not even a glimpse of the moon through a shutter’s crack. Now, in the new dark terror, he brought in a lamp and a clock whose tick and striking of the hours helped towards peace.
Kant did much to give his home city its identity, not only as part of an intellectual revolution that rocked Europe but as an outpost of civilization. Hadn’t this ‘civilizing’ impulse been the essence of the land since the thirteenth century and its conquest for Christianity by the Teutonic Knights? To the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, East Prussia meant something else, especially in comparison with his Soviet homeland: material progress and efficiency. Ever since arriving there with the Red Army at the end of the war, Solzhenitsyn had never lost his astonishment at those neat farms, villages and towns where he had tried to control his men in the terrifying riot of looting and violence:
Tiles, tiles – and see the towers,
All the turrets and the spires,
And houses built of solid brick
Before:
– Our columns pour ahead like lava
– With wild cries, whistling, headlights’ glare
Klein Goslau, Gross Goslau –
Every village – is now a fire!
It was the huge Soviet offensive of June 1944 that began the last months of German East Prussia. Previously the province had been spared the worst of the fighting, although the wounded had passed through Königsberg and those with sons or husbands on the eastern front would have heard about the change from advance to retreat. Many imagined a short Russian occupation, quickly followed by liberation, as in 1914, or a negotiated peace and return of their land. This time, however, the spirit and power of the invaders was different. In October 1944, Soviet troops were on German soil, near Gumbinnen, between Stallupönen and Rominten Heath. The small town of Nemmersdorf was captured, then retaken by the Germans – but not until the Red Army had unleashed terror on an unimaginable scale.
Goebbels and the Nazi propaganda machine thundered against the ‘fury of the Soviet beasts’, evoking the ancient ghosts of the Asiatic hordes. Now, however, there could be no help from the rest of Christendom. The German occupation of the western Soviet Union had been horrifically cruel – Communist Party members hanged instantly, Jews either shot or sent to extermination camps, women raped, men carted off to the Reich to work as slaves, ‘the fascists’ laughing as they burnt their victims’ corpses. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war died in German camps in a regime of terror and starvation. The Wehrmacht shot or hanged innocent people in villages suspected of harbouring Russian partisans; the requisitioning of food led to widespread famine. Nearly seven and a half million Soviet civilians are thought to have been killed under German occupation. The Germans had found local collaborators, particularly in Ukraine or on the Baltic, who had suffered under Stalin; but
Teutonic contempt, made worse by Nazi racism, prevented more extensive help.
In July 1944, the Red Army entered the first extermination camp to be liberated, at Majdenek, near Lublin and the Polish – Soviet border. The thousands of victims were Jews and also Russians and Poles. Soviet anti-Semitism notwithstanding, propaganda made the most of Majdenek, emphasizing the message that accompanied the massive Red Army offensives in the last year of the war. The Germans were beasts; Soviet rage and revenge were just. Even intellectuals and admirers of western European culture shared these feelings. The writer Lev Kopelev (a Red Army officer at the time who later settled in Germany) ordered his men to get out of their jeeps and relieve themselves on the hated German soil after they had crossed the border into East Prussia.
In the middle of November, the front fell silent, with the Red Army on Rominten Heath. The offensive seemed to have faltered; Christmas and New Year were calm. On 13 January 1945, the surge began again. Captain Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an officer in the Soviet artillery, received a bundle of leaflets bearing Marshal Rokossovsky’s message to the troops – that this was the last great offensive and ‘Germany lies before us’. Earlier, Stalin’s decision had been revealed to the troops by political commissars – that moral scruples should be cast aside in a campaign of revenge, looting and terror. Repelled, Solzhenitsyn told his men that they should represent ‘a proud magnanimous Russia’. Once the advance began it proved to be impossible to enforce this. The writer was horrified by the violence inflicted on the orderly land, yet even he couldn’t resist taking some Russian books that were banned in the Soviet Union, and, from a German post office, piles of fine paper, handfuls of German pencils, paper clips, labels, folders and bottles of ink. He also seized, from the house of a German miller – who had fled – illustrations from a book on the First World War, photographs of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II and the generals of both sides who had once fought here, on the
eastern front: the Germans Ludendorff and Hindenburg, the Russians Samsonov and Brusilov. Captain Solzhenitsyn walked through the devastated towns – Neidenburg in flames, Allenstein where trains of German refugees were still arriving. It was in Wormditt (now the Polish Orneta) on 9 February that he took the fatal telephone call – an order to report to brigade headquarters, where he was arrested for having made jokes about Stalin in a letter to a friend. Solzhenitsyn’s time in the Gulag had begun.
 
 
As I read about the ghosts that I’d found on my East Prussian journeys, their experiences often seemed oddly symbolic. The young Martin Bergau, marching before the war with the Hitler Youth near the Baltic, glimpsed an elk loping away as if in mockery of their intrusion into its wilderness. In July 1944, Heinrich von Lehndorff, whose ancestors had come east some four centuries before, fled the German police through his own woods. In 1945, Johannes Jänicke’s wife opened the door of their rectory in a Baltic seaside village to confront Red Army soldiers in search of loot and women. In the autumn of 1944, the forester Walter Frevert killed his last stag in Rominten forest, the rifle shot mingling with the sound of the approaching Soviet guns. In Königsberg, the nineteen-year-old Michael Wieck, from a cultured family of musicians, tossed bodies into bomb craters that served as graves, many of the dead having killed themselves rather than face the Red Army. All these dead Germans, perhaps once proudly Aryan, overwhelmed him with the miracle of his own survival, as a Jew.
Four years later, the last Germans were shipped out. The Wieck family bribed a Soviet official before being told to report to the train station with hand luggage and enough food for seven days. A thousand Germans were loaded onto freight cars and the chaste, shy Michael found himself lying next to women and girls who giggled at his confusion. Very slowly they moved across Poland, let out at intervals for exercise, the weather warm at last
in Soviet-occupied Germany where, in a quarantine camp, the Wiecks decided to try for freedom in the west.
Friends and relations got them out but to adapt was hard. Taken to a film at the British Information Centre in Berlin, Michael found it depressingly trivial after what he had seen. He settled in West Berlin, enrolled at the Berlin Conservatory of Music and was joined by his mother, his parents having separated. Shyness and anxiety and thoughts about the past plagued him. In 1950 he married Hildegard, from a Prussian gentile family, becoming aware that people wanted him, as a Jew, to absolve them of responsibility. Weren’t the bombing of the German cities and the Red Army’s brutality just as bad? they asked.
He thought of emigration and went alone to Israel but felt the country would be difficult for his gentile wife. By now he was a violinist in an orchestra, still having nightmares, frightened that his cries would wake his colleagues in hotels when they were on tour. He recalled how in a camp outside Königsberg he had sworn to God that he would always be easily satisfied, never greedy for things. Why was happiness so hard to find? What and when should he forgive and forget? Even now Michael Wieck’s heart jumps when he hears talk of ‘the Jews’.
In post-war Berlin, the world couldn’t quite be re-ordered. The Wiecks made friends with a man who revealed he had been in the army in the Lichterfeld barracks, an SS headquarters; a cousin, the actress Dorothea Wieck, told of banal conversations with Hitler, how charming he was; Michael’s father-in-law said scornfully that the Jewish scientists had saved themselves by emigrating early. Michael thought that his wife’s family weren’t pleased that she had married a Jew.
Perhaps emigration would be better – and they chose New Zealand, a lovely land he’d seen while on a tour with the Berlin Chamber Orchestra. Michael Wieck encountered anti-Semitism there and missed German culture so much that, after seven years, he, his wife and their four children came back. Everyone had, he
thought, a potential for hatred and timidity, for obsequiousness and cruelty – and the past was inescapable. On a concert tour in the Soviet Union, he and the orchestra flew over the Baltic coast and the Curonian Spit and he trembled, felt feverish; then they were above Königsberg, where he had lived in joy and terror, a contrast now to his much calmer life. After he had moved to Stuttgart, to join its Radio Symphony Orchestra, he was on tour in Jerusalem. At the Wailing Wall, a small boy, resembling the young Michael, recited the Torah, with a rabbi and the boy’s family. Taken back to his own youthful faith and innocence, Michael wept, engulfed by joy and pain. Were the tears a warning not to forget? Were they an apprehension of God?
Statue of Kant in Kaliningrad.
In Berlin, Michael Wieck had yearned for a particular landscape, for the Baltic; he was, he thought, still an East Prussian. He had seen the dramatic changes – how when the Red Army came, the Nazis turned into grovelling creatures; how liberated Poles became bullies. His Jewishness – so vital in the Hitler years – was forgotten under the Russians when the Germans helped him. He thinks now that persecution often comes out of a search for identity. It’s enough, he thinks, to be a human among other humans; to be an outsider in a community is to be intellectually independent. Perhaps real security and peace come only after death. It’s hard to see this coming soon to the spry eighty-three-year-old who welcomes me to his Stuttgart house.
On 12 September 1911, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Knox, the British Military Attaché in St Petersburg, put his bicycle onto a train bound for Warsaw in Russian Poland. Knox had written to the Russian general staff about his wish to study the Napoleonic campaigns of 1807 and 1812. This ostensibly innocent enthusiasm for military history would allow him to go on a spying mission into the potential battlefields of the German and Russian borderlands, to report on what he saw there to the British War Office. The colonel had no doubt that war was coming, having a distrust of German intentions which he thought were not taken seriously enough by the politicians in London. Britain should, he believed, officially join the alliance of France and Russia against the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Knox thought also that the next war would be decided as much in the east as in the west.
Alfred Knox – large, forthright, dark-haired with a moustache – was proud to be a ‘simple solder’. Born in 1870 – the son of an army officer – he claimed that his family had been in Ireland for about two hundred and seventy years. But this Ireland was Ulster, the Protestant enclave in the north; originally from Presbyterian Scotland, the Knoxes had been part of a migration from mainland Britain that came to dominate the whole country. Like most conquerors, they thought their civilization was superior to the one they had conquered.
Before Russia, it was British imperial India that shaped Alfred Knox. As ADC to the viceroy, Lord Curzon, from 1899 to 1900, and as an officer on the turbulent north-west frontier, he knew
how tenuous British control of the sub-continent was: how dependent on prestige. Often he lived in what he saw as extreme isolation: five months, for instance, in an outpost surrounded by barbed wire, ‘without a single white man near.’ Any hint of weak imperial government would, he thought, be exploited, by agitators or revolutionaries. Knox was a gifted linguist, learning Pashto at Peshawar and, in 1906, Russian while on language leave in Moscow. From 1908 he was at the War Office, working in the Russian sub-section; in 1911, he became military attaché in St Petersburg.
Russia was the great mystery: the oppressor of Poland, an affront to liberals – a vast land of revolutionaries, secret police, backward peasants, rapid industrialization, untold natural resources, an absolutist monarchy and potentially the largest army in Europe. Knox knew that the defeats of 1905, when Japan had humiliated Russia, need not have been so catastrophic. When the Tsar and his ministers, fearful of the political cost at home, asked for peace, Russian forces, after early disaster, were fighting well. He knew also the German fear of this great empire. ‘A bold raid into East Prussia’ and an attack on Königsberg, coronation city of the Prussian kings, would have an effect upon Germany which Prussia had dominated since German unification in 1871. ‘Prussian territory’, Knox wrote, ‘has not been invaded for nearly one hundred years.’
This ostensibly secure state had in fact been often invaded, by the Poles, Swedes, French and Russians. Since its defeat by Napoleon, however, Prussia had risen again. In the early nineteenth century, the Prussian Reform movement overhauled the education system (already the most advanced in Europe), abolished serfdom, promoted free trade, introduced compulsory military service and, in 1812, made full citizens of the Jews. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Prussia, as one of the victorious powers, had its territory extended westwards. It now had the Rhineland, Westphalia and what became the centre of German industry, the Ruhr. Prussia dominated the German customs union,
the Zollverein, founded in 1834 – an arrangement which the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not join. The climax of all this was the post-1871 domination of the new German Empire.
Alfred Knox in ceremonial uniform.
The eastern part of the country partly benefited from this ascent yet also stayed its poorest region. In Königsberg, trade with Russia boomed. But in East Prussia’s country districts, particularly the wild, poor lands of Masuria, the scene was different. Agricultural reforms and the abolition of serfdom undermined the sense of responsibility that some large landlords felt towards their dependents, leaving small farmers and tenants unprotected from low prices, cattle disease, failed harvests and a harsh climate. The decade from 1840 to 1850 brought misery – deaths from starvation, typhus and cholera. Emigration became a flood; from 1850 to 1870 almost one and a half million people travelled westwards from East Prussia in search of work.
For the Jews, however, the place seemed a refuge – and many fled there from the Russian pogroms. Between 1817 and 1861 the Jewish population of Königsberg increased from 953 to 2,572 amid a liberal atmosphere. Even in the rural parts of East Prussia tolerance lingered until the rise of nationalism that followed German unification in 1871. In 1825 the Philiponnen, a sect persecuted by the Russians, settled among the Masurians; their descendants still live near the town of Johannisburg (now the Polish Pisz). A large Polish minority, mostly in Masuria, saw the King of Prussia as their protector. Their Prussian patriotism created an atmosphere different from the tensions and violence that beset the British in Ireland, Alfred Knox’s home.
To the rest of Europe, Prussia’s identity, since the mid-eighteenth-century expansionist times of Frederick the Great, was rooted in efficiency, military power and absolutism. The imposition of reform – which aimed to achieve equality, an uncorrupt bureaucracy and educational improvement – could seem high-handed. The pitiless, brilliant Frederick brought greatness, yet also a confused identity behind the remarkable victories. The East Prussian critics of the Enlightenment – J. G. Herder and J. G. Hamann – were in part rebelling against a French intellectual domination that was shown by the King’s friendship with Voltaire and his contempt for the German language and culture. East Prussia he saw as a wild, barbaric place with a vile climate – much too hot and insect-ridden in summer, freezing in winter, better for bears than for human beings.
Frederick’s absolutism couldn’t last, even with its overtones of enlightenment, and in 1848, revolutionary protest forced King Frederick William IV to make Prussia a constitutional state. But the new constitution, with a powerful upper house appointed by the king, entrenched the power of the conservative Junkers, a bulwark of the ruling Hohenzollern family, particularly east of the Elbe. An odd fact about the East Prussian aristocracy is how long its significance lasted. The 1848 upheavals raised other questions of identity. Polish cultural nationalism, suppressed by the
Russians and calmed by Prussian tolerance, stirred among East Prussian Poles. Yet many of them still looked to the king as their protector; and King Frederick William IV was cheered on his visits to Masuria.
King William I, Frederick William IV’s brother and successor, appointed Otto von Bismarck as his prime minister. Bismarck, who came from a Pomeranian Junker family, was sympathetic to the landowning class in the east. He distrusted democracy, loathed liberalism, and, like Louis XIV and Napoleon, used military force to make his country into the greatest power in continental Europe. Three wars – against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 – created first a dominant Prussia and then, in 1871, the colossus of a German empire.
Bismarck, who became the empire’s first chancellor, moved swiftly to make peace – but the anxiety created throughout Europe by this quick, brutal display of military power lasted until 1914. The army stayed outside democratic control and the many uniforms in the streets, particularly in Berlin, seemed to show the basis of imperial Germany’s strength. With this came a new nationalism, as if to solidify the young empire. Bismarck’s so-called
Kulturkampf
directed against the Roman Catholic Church; disapproval of the use of the Polish and Lithuanian languages; a renaming of Polish-named towns; the new red-brick schools (the same colour as the castles of the Teutonic Knights): all these showed an increasing intolerance of minorities. A myth took hold – that the eastern territories needed a form of colonial rule to civilize their drunken, lazy Slavs. The public pronouncements of the new Emperor William II – who dismissed Bismarck in 1890 – reflected this. East Prussia sought refuge in this new aggressive assertion of identity. In the elections of 1907, only Königsberg voted liberal.
In Bismarck’s time, Germany had been in alliance with Russia. But, after the ‘Iron Chancellor’s’ dismissal by William II, the latest version of this alliance, known as the Three Emperors’ League – of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia – broke up, largely over
the Balkans, where Russia, champion of the Slavs, opposed Austro-Hungarian attempts at greater domination. The French, smarting from their 1870 defeat, seized their chance, making a full alliance with Russia in 1894. Both countries now saw the new Germany as the threat. Britain, joined in a loose entente with France since 1904, began to take a more sympathetic view of the autocratic Tsarist regime.
This was the land that the Englishman Alfred Knox entered in September 1911: a country of vast estates, struggling small farms and poor agricultural workers sometimes not much better off than when they had been serfs: an anxious region of Europe, apparently threatened by a resurgent Russia, a land – with its red-brick castles and Lutheran churches – where isolation fuelled identity yet in whose capital city of Königsberg traces of the liberalism of its greatest citizen, Immanuel Kant, could still be found. What interested Knox was what might happen in a war between the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) and the Dual Alliance (Russia and France). He had heard that Germany would leave at most five corps on the eastern frontier, delegating to Austria the task of fighting Russia ‘while she deals with France’. Knox thought that the Russian cavalry would launch raids across the border into East Prussia. The psychological effect on Germany of any invasion would be immense.
In Warsaw Knox was told he should carry a revolver while bicycling in Poland but he felt safe on reaching the law-abiding atmosphere of Germany. At Neidenburg (now the Polish Nidzica), in the shadow of the rectangular fortress of the Teutonic Knights, he took his bicycle off the train. He asked ‘a street loafer’ how to get to Hohenstein (now Olsztynek), to be asked, in his turn, where he came from. One can sense the hauteur in the response – ‘I told him that I was an Englishman’. This was either not enough or too much. A policeman came and took Knox to the local courthouse where an official questioned him for two hours, going through his papers, which included a French map of Eylau, where General von Bennigsen had fought Napoleon. The German
said he was sure there were British agents in the region, studying the new system of fortification.
Knox believed he knew what had attracted attention – his bicycle. ‘A British machine,’ he wrote, always fascinated foreigners ‘owing to its superior make’. Crowds collected round it – so much so that henceforth he took the bicycle up to his hotel room to prevent further hysteria. He had, he thought, learnt another lesson – ‘that it was better to enquire from women: they were more obliging and less inquisitive than men.’ Back in Russian Poland, he had a more threatening encounter; after coming down from a hill where Napoleon had once stood above the River Nieman, he found four secret policemen and a gendarme who had beaten up his cab driver for having let a foreigner roam across these places of possible future military significance.
Knox’s report describes this frontier land. The Russian position seemed to be weakened by the disaffection of what he called ‘subject’ races: Lithuanians, Poles and Jews. The Lithuanians were, he thought, ‘fairly contented’; the Poles had been crushed; and the third ‘subject’ race, the Jews, had endured vicious pogroms under the tsars. Knox felt, not surprisingly, that ‘neither Pole nor Jew can be depended upon as loyal Russians’. Things were more harmonious in East Prussia. In German Masuria, on the frontier, the languages were Polish and Lithuanian but the people were ‘Lutherans’ and ‘good Germans’, and (the Edwardian anti-Semite Knox noted) ‘there are fewer Jews.’ The landowners created a rural conservative atmosphere; the large towns, however, were ‘socialistic’. Like Solzhenitsyn later, Knox was amazed by the contrast; in Russia the population was decreasing, the settlements ‘invariably filthy’, with bedraggled horses and broken-down carts trundling along wretched roads, whereas the German towns and villages were neatly ordered. The extensive East Prussian railway network ran with startling efficiency compared to the primitive, meagre Russian system. Trade also showed German organization, admittedly counter-balanced by the impressive Russian potential. The port of Königsberg, for instance,
worked well yet depended on its grain export trade, two-thirds of which came from Russia’s western provinces.

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