The End

cries came from his house. ‘They’ve got my thirteen-year-old daughter for the fifth time already this morning.’⁴¹ Such horror was commonplace. Some estimates reckon that 1.4 million women—close to a fifth of the female population—were raped in the eastern provinces conquered by the Red Army in these weeks.⁴² Fortunate indeed were women who managed to hide or otherwise avoid the bestiality. Those Germans who survived such horrors were, however, condemned to endless further misery: to the harshness of further maltreatment and forced labour under Soviet occupation, or—the fate of about a quarter of a million Germans—to transport in the most dire conditions, accompanied by huge death rates, to labour camps mainly in the industrial regions of the USSR, where brutal working conditions extracted a further heavy toll.⁴³

What happened in East Prussia also occurred, with variants, throughout the German east. Whereas the flight of the East Prussian and Silesian population took place over the best part of four months, the German minority living in the parts of Poland that had not fallen to the Soviets had only about two weeks to make their escape as Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies raced towards the Oder. Only around a half of them, mainly from the western regions closest to the Reich, could avoid being overtaken by the rapidly advancing Red Army. East Brandenburg, with an almost entirely German population of over 600,000, had been taking in refugees from the Wartheland in western Poland for days before huge panic at the imminent arrival of the Russians led to a stampede to reach safety across the Oder. The Nazi authorities of the region had until almost the end of January refused to give orders to evacuate the province in the optimistic belief that the lines of fortifications would provide a formidable barrier to the Red Army. Consequently many Germans fell into enemy hands as the area was swiftly overrun.⁴⁴

The largest German population east of the Oder–Nei?e line was in Silesia, home of more than 4.5 million at the beginning of 1945. In Silesia, not far from the Reich border and from routes into the Sudetenland and Bohemia, not all the territory fell immediately to the Red Army, and, unlike in more easterly regions, there was also some warning of the Soviet advance. Conditions for flight were, therefore, more favourable than in East Prussia and other eastern regions. More than 3 million were able to flee by one means or another into parts of former Czechoslovakia or westwards into the Reich towards Saxony and Thuringia. In the Upper Silesian industrial district to the south, however, which was in Soviet hands by the end of January, only women and children had been permitted to leave. The local Gau leadership, following Speer’s demands, ordered the men to remain behind to keep production going as long as possible. Many nevertheless fled on overcrowded trains and buses, on lorries or on foot. Important industrial installations were sometimes reportedly left intact in the panic. There was no time to detonate them.⁴⁵ Even so, hundreds of thousands were overrun by the Red Army.

To the north, in Lower Silesia, the evacuation order, pressed for by the military authorities (who had, however, elsewhere at times also played their part in delaying evacuation to prevent blocking supply routes⁴⁶), had in most instances been given out earlier, and most inhabitants were able to get away—often trekking in wagons or on foot in icy weather since the means of transport by rail and road rapidly proved inadequate. In Breslau, the capital and by far the biggest city in Silesia, the thunder of artillery on 20–21 January brought urgent orders—backed by heavy pressure from the Party—for women, children, the old and the sick to leave the city. There were, however, not enough trains or motor vehicles to cope with the mass evacuation. There were reports of children being trampled to death in the stampede to board the few trains available and station waiting-rooms being turned into morgues.⁴⁷ Without transport, around 100,000 people, mainly women, were forced to head off into the winter night and brave the extreme cold on foot, hauling prams, sledges and carts along the icy roads, battling through snowdrifts, carrying just a few belongings. Bodies of infants who had perished in the bitter weather had to be left in the roadside ditches. Many women, unable to go on, returned and were among the 200,000 or so civilians in Breslau when the vice closed on the city in mid- February.⁴⁸

Further north, an enclave of the West Prussian coast, centred on Danzig and Gotenhafen (Gdynia), was also engulfed in the refugee crisis. From mid-January onwards the area became the temporary destination of countless thousands fleeing northwards from the path of Rokossovsky’s armies and pouring westwards from East Prussia as the province was cut off, across the last opening of the Frische Nehrung or arriving by boat from Pillau. By the end of the month, the area was teeming with close to a million refugees to add to its 3 million population. The NSV and German Red Cross were overwhelmed by the numbers. It was impossible to offer anything like sufficient care for the many who were ill, weak or injured from the terrible treks. Barracks and temporary camps had to be used to accommodate the mass influx. Many tried to travel further as soon as they could, but could find no place on the hugely overcrowded trains and ships. Among the vessels carrying away refugees, many of them sick and wounded, was the big former ‘Strength through Joy’ cruise vessel, the Wilhelm Gustloff, that eventually set sail from Gotenhafen, after long delays, on 30 January, crammed with perhaps as many as 8,000 persons on board—four times its peacetime complement. That evening the ship was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and sank into the icy waters after little more than an hour. Possibly around 7,000 drowned in the worst maritime catastrophe in history, with nearly five times as many lost as in the sinking of the Titanic.⁴⁹ It was one of many disasters at sea over the following weeks. Nevertheless, between late January and the end of April, some 900,000 escaped over the Baltic and a further quarter of a million by land through Pomerania, before this region, too, was swallowed up by the Soviet advance.⁵⁰ A final horror still awaited the 200,000 or so, many of them refugees who had earlier managed under the greatest difficulties to flee from East Prussia, as Danzig and the surrounding area were taken in a maelstrom of violence by the Red Army in the last days of March.⁵¹

Even when the refugees escaped the worst, they still faced immense difficulties—and were far from assured of a warm welcome at their destination. By the end of January, 40,000 to 50,000 were arriving each day in Berlin, by train for the most part. The overwhelmed authorities, unable to cope with the mass influx and fearful of importing infectious diseases, did their best to move them on or have trains rerouted around the Reich capital.⁵²

In this unending catalogue of misery and suffering, it is hard to conceive of anything worse than the fate of those in the eastern regions of Germany fleeing from the Red Army in the appalling conditions of that dreadful January. Yet the fate of the regime’s racial victims was indeed worse: their horror was far from at an end. Even at this time the murder machinery of the SS showed no respite.

For around 6,500–7,000 Jews, rounded up from subsidiary camps in East Prussia of Stutthof concentration camp (itself located in West Prussia), hastily closed down on 20–21 January as the Red Army approached, scarcely conceivable days of terror began as they were marched off, not in a westwards direction like other inmates, but eastwards. The initial aim seems to have been to march them to a small satellite camp at Konigsberg prior to transporting them by sea to the west, presumably from the port of Pillau, in order to retain them in German hands and prevent their liberation by the Red Army. But they never arrived in Pillau.

The prisoners, sent in recent months to Stutthof from the Baltic regions, Poland and elsewhere, were guarded on their forced march by over twenty SS men and up to 150 members of the Organisation Todt (including Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Belgians and Frenchmen). After the lengthy trek, in horrific conditions, to reach Konigsberg, they were marched onwards to the small and once attractive Baltic town of Palmnicken, on the picturesque Samland coast. Many Jews were shot even on the way to Konigsberg. Still more were killed, their bodies left on the streets of the East Prussian capital, as the death march to Palmnicken began. The remainder were herded off, clothed in little more than rags and wooden clogs. Though hardly able to walk on the snow and ice, any Jews lagging behind or falling down were shot. The guards killed more than 2,000 on the 50-kilometre march from Konigsberg to Palmnicken, leaving the bodies by the roadside. Some 200–300 corpses were found on the last stretch of little over a kilometre as the remaining 3,000 or so prisoners straggled into Palmnicken on the night of 26/7 January.

When it became plain that there was no prospect of ferrying the prisoners to the west, the question of what to do with them took an even more lethal turn. Ideas now surfaced about getting rid of them altogether. The head of the state-run amber works in Konigsberg and the East Prussian Gau leadership eventually agreed that the guards would drive the Jews into a disused mineshaft and seal up the entrance. The frozen, exhausted and bedraggled Jews nevertheless met a rare expression of sympathy as the estate manager ordered food for the prisoners and said that as long as he lived nobody there would be killed. His mine-director bravely refused to open up the shafts that they were to be driven into.

On 30 January, however, the courageous estate manager was found dead. He had received threats from the SS and was thought to have taken his own life; either that, or, as some thought, he had been murdered. The idea of entombing the Jews in the mine was, nevertheless, abandoned. That same evening, the local mayor, a long-