commanders by surprise. On Rokossovsky’s right flank, the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps moved rapidly over the frozen landscape and entered Allenstein at 3 a.m. on 22 January. On his left, Volsky’s 5th Guards Tank Army advanced rapidly towards the city of Elbing beside the estuary of the Vistula. Part of the leading tank brigade entered the city on 23 January, having been mistaken for German panzers. A violent and chaotic skirmish broke out in the city centre, and they were forced out. The main body of the army bypassed the city and carried on to the shore of the great lagoon, the Frisches Haff. East Prussia was virtually cut off from the Reich.
Although the German armed forces had expected the assault on East Prussia for several months, disorganization and uncertainty reigned in towns and villages. In rear areas the hated military police, the Feldgend-armerie, exerted a harsh order. The
On the morning of Chernyakhovsky’s attack, 13 January, a leave train bound for Berlin was halted in a station by Feldgendarmerie. They bellowed orders that all soldiers belonging to divisions whose numbers they were about to call were to get out and form up immediately. The soldiers departing on leave, many of whom had not seen their families for two years at least, sat clenched, praying that their division would not be called. But almost all had to descend and line up in ranks on the platform. Anyone who failed to report faced execution. A young soldier, Walter Beier, was one of the few to be spared. Barely daring to believe his luck, he continued on the journey to his family near Frankfurt an der Oder. But he was to find himself facing the Red Army closer to home than he had ever imagined.
The man most to blame for the chaos was Gauleiter Erich Koch, a Nazi leader already infamous for his rule as Reich’s Commissar for the Ukraine. Koch was so proud of his brutality that he does not appear to have objected to his nickname, ‘the second Stalin’. Completely imbued with the Hitlerian obstinacy of fixed defence, Koch had forced tens of thousands of civilians into digging earthworks. Unfortunately, he failed to consult army commanders on where they wanted them. He had also been the first to dragoon boys and old men into the Volkssturm militia, the Nazi Party’s most flagrant example of useless sacrifice. But worst of all, Koch had refused to countenance evacuation of the civil population.
He and his local Nazi Party chiefs, having forbidden the evacuation of civilians as defeatist, then slipped away themselves without warning anybody when the attack came. The consequences were appalling for the wives, daughters and children who tried to escape too late across a landscape a metre deep in snow and temperatures down to minus twenty Celsius. A number of women farm workers, however, remained voluntarily, convinced that they would just be working under new masters and that little would change.
The distant thunder of artillery when the offensives began created terrible fear in the isolated farms and villages of the mainly flat and forested East Prussian landscape. Women in East Prussia had heard of the atrocities at Nemmersdorf the previous autumn, when some of Chernyakhovsky’s troops invaded East Prussia at the end of the headlong advance in the summer of 1944. They may well have seen in a local town’s
‘Red Army soldiers don’t believe in “individual liaisons” with German women,’ wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. ‘Nine, ten, twelve men at a time — they rape them on a collective basis.’ He later described how German women in Elbing, in a desperate attempt to seek protection, offered themselves instead to Soviet marine infantrymen.
The Soviet armies advancing in huge, long columns were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, their T-34S churning up the earth as they dipped and rolled with the ground, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, Lend-Lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, open Chevrolets with tarpaulin-covered mortars in the back and tractors hauling great howitzers, all eventually followed by a second echelon in horse-drawn carts. The variety of characters among the soldiers was almost as great as their military equipment. There were those who saw even young German boys as embryo SS men and believed that they should all be killed before they grew up and invaded Russia again, and there were those who spared children and gave them something to eat. There were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were idealistic, austere Communists and members of the intelligentsia genuinely appalled by such behaviour. The writer Lev Kopelev, then a political officer, was arrested by SMERSH counterintelligence for having ‘engaged in the propaganda of bourgeois humanism, of pity for the enemy’. Kopelev had also dared to criticize the ferocity of Ilya Ehrenburg’s articles.
The initial advances of Rokossovsky’s armies were so rapid that the German authorities in Konigsberg sent several refugee trains to Allenstein unaware that it had been captured by the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps. For the Cossacks, the refugee trains were ideal concentrations of women and booty falling into their hands.
Beria and Stalin back in Moscow knew perfectly well what was going on. In one report they were told that ‘many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers’. Numerous examples of gang rape were given — ‘girls under eighteen and old women included’. In fact victims could be as young as twelve years old. ‘The NKVD group attached to the 43rd Army discovered that German women who had stayed behind in Schpa-leiten had tried to commit suicide’, the report continued. ‘They interrogated one of them called Emma Korn. “On 3 February,” she told them, “frontline troops of the Red Army entered the town. They came into the cellar where we were hiding and pointed their weapons at me and the other two women and ordered us into the yard. In the yard twelve soldiers in turn raped me. Other soldiers did the same to my two neighbours. The following night six drunken soldiers broke into our cellar and raped us in front of the children. On 5 February, three soldiers came, and on 6 February eight drunken soldiers also raped and beat us.” ’ Three days later the women tried to kill the children and themselves by cutting all their wrists, but evidently they had not known how to do it properly.
The Red Army attitude towards women had become openly proprietorial, especially since Stalin himself had stepped in to allow Red Army officers to keep a ‘campaign wife’. (She was known as a PPZh, because the full term, ‘
The lot of a campaign wife was not an easy one when male lust was both intense and indiscriminate. ‘There you are, Vera,’ a young woman soldier called Musya Annenkova in the 19th Army wrote to her friend. ‘See what their “love” is like! They seem to be tender to you but it’s difficult to know what’s inside their souls. They’ve got no sincere feelings, only short-lived passion or love with animal feelings. How difficult it is here to find a really faithful man.’
Marshal Rokossovsky issued order No. 006 in an attempt to direct ‘the feelings of hatred at fighting the enemy on the battlefield’ and to underline the punishment for ‘looting, violence, robbing, unnecessary arson and destruction’. It seems to have had little effect. There were also a few arbitrary attempts to exert authority. The commander of one rifle division is said to have ‘personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up a group of his men before a German woman spread-eagled on the ground’. But either officers were involved themselves, or the lack of discipline made it too dangerous to restore order over drunken soldiers armed with sub-machine guns.
Even General Okorokov, the chief of the political department of the 2nd Belorussian Front, opposed at a meeting on 6 February what he saw as a ‘refusal to take revenge on the enemy’. In Moscow, the authorities were less worried about rape and murder than about the senseless destruction. On 9 February,
Political officers hoped to adapt this approach to the question of rape as well. ‘When we breed a true feeling of hatred in a soldier,’ the political department of the 19th Army declared, ‘the soldier will not try to have sex with a German woman, because he will be repulsed.’ But this inept sophistry only serves to underline the failure of the authorities to understand the problem. Even young women soldiers and medics in the Red Army did not disapprove.
