Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

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PART VI

1945 and Germanic

Eastern Europe

CHAPTER 24

The Catastrophe

The Germanic East Before the Catastrophe

God forbid that the land should ever relapse into its former state, that

the Slavs should ever drive out the German settlers and again un-

dertake its cultivation.

(Prince Wizlaw of Rügen, 1221)

BEFORE THE DISASTERS of the 1940s the German presence in

Eastern Europe was rich and varied, and all the more because

it was the product of peaceful settlement and trade more than

outright conquest. Even in the 'Prussian' heartland of Bran-

denburg and Pomerania, the mixing of races was more far-

reaching than Nazi theorists cared to admit.

North-east along the Baltic coastlands the architecture of

towns like Danzig, Königsberg, Libau, Revel and Dorpat ex-

pressed a Germanic trading life which went back hundreds of

years. In Czechoslovakia the University of Prague counted as

the second German university of Europe, and along the north-

ern borders of the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia the Su-

detenland formed a deep belt of German settlement, where the

style of life differed in no way from that in political Germany.

In Russia Catherine the Great (herself a German princess)

invited German settlers to farm the rich lands of the Volga in

the second half of the eighteenth century. By the twentieth

century the number of their descendants reached the millions,

and Lenin respected their culture by forming a German Re-

271

public within the Soviet Union. By then German influence had

penetrated the Russian bureaucracy, professions and army so

thoroughly that it is difficult to establish whether such a tra-

dition can be accounted Russian or Germanic.

South-eastern Europe contained both the communities of

'Saxons,' who had been invited to Transylvania in the twelfth

century, and the Germans of the sandy Banat of Temesvar,

who were the descendants of the Catholic Swabians and Vi-

ennese prostitutes who were settled there by the Austrian mon-

archy in the eighteenth century. A variety of still quainter

communities was to be found in out-of-the-way places like Slo-

vakia (the old Upper Hungary), Galicia, Bessarabia and Do-

bruja.

Certain unities could be discerned among all this diversity,

and they came from a general reputation for hard work, dis-

tinctive styles of architecture (like the stepped gables of the

Baltic ports, or the railway stations, opera houses and coffee

salons of the old Habsburg lands) and the German language—

and above all the variety called Yiddish, which was employed

by the Jews of Poland and western Russia, who made up the

largest German-speaking group in eastern Europe.

It is curious to reflect that the Nazis qualified in two respects

as the greatest enemies of the Germanic presence in the East

—as the authors of the destruction of the Jews, and the ones

who led Germany to war and defeat.

The Cycle of Revenge

In our time the cruelty of man towards man is the result of the lack

of religion.

(Tolstoy)

There is something indecent about trying to explain, let alone

justify, the atrocities which contributed to the unimaginable

scale of suffering in the Second World War. Millions of the

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victims were innocent civilians, and the word 'innocent' applies

just as well to the further millions of frightened, powerless

soldiers who themselves died in dreadful circumstances.

Perhaps it requires a training in philosophy, like that of Ernst

Nolte, to qualify one to pronounce whether hideous deeds in

one time or place may be equated with hideous deeds in others.

However, the historian cannot avoid an obligation to set his

tale in context, and in this case he must try to establish why

the Russians behaved so savagely in the Germanic lands in

1945.

Racialism, ideology and nationalism combined to make Hit-

ler's war aims very wide-ranging indeed when he went to war

with the Soviet Union in June 1941, for the Nazis intended to

drive more than 30 million Russians into Siberia and open the

four Reichskommissariaten of the Baltic Coast (Ostland), Mus-

covy, the Ukraine and the Caucasus to German colonisation.

West of the Urals the surviving Russians were to be reduced

to slaves and vassals, and their children were to be given only

as much education as fitted them for their menial tasks. The

German forces began to massacre civilians as soon as they

crossed the border (as had happened in Poland in 1939), and

the work of the SS Einsatzgruppen in the captured areas, together

with casual slaughters by the other forces, already accounted

for hundreds of thousands of deaths even before the industri-

alised murder of the Holocaust opened in 1942.

By 1945 Russian military men of every rank went to war with

personal scores to settle. Stalin knew that his son Yakov, a

prisoner of the Germans, was as good as dead (see p. 19).

Colonel-General Rybalko, the commander of the Third Guards

Tank Army, led his forces with such notable energy not just

because he was a good soldier, but because his daughter had

been carried away by the Germans from the Ukraine in 1942.

In a single regiment (the 242nd Rifle) it was established that

158 of the men had close relatives who had been killed or

tortured. The families of fifty-six had been deported to forced

labour, and 445 of the troops knew that their homes had been

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destroyed or ruined (Kartashev, 1980, 99). In Silesia a group of

Russian officers encountered one of those herds of cattle which

had been rounded up on German farms and were being driven

to the rear:

A lieutenant unsheathed a knife, walked up to a cow, and

struck her a death-blow at the base of the skull. The cow's

legs folded under, and she fell, while the rest of the herd,

bellowing madly, stampeded and ran away. The officer

wiped the sharp edge on his boots and said: 'My father wrote

to me that the Germans had taken a cow from us. Now we

are even. . . .' (Koriakov, 1948, 67)

Further evidence of the character of the Nazi state was un-

covered on 24 July 1944, when the Russians overran the con-

centration camp at Maidanek, near Lublin. When the Soviets

continued their drive across Poland, they discovered Treblinka,

Auschwitz-Birkenau and other massive establishments which

served to fuel the Red Army's mission of hatred. Almost as

revolting in their way were the little camps in the woods which

stood next to the comfortably furnished villas of their overseers

(see p. 193).

The urgings of the propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg reached ex-

tremities of excitement early in 1945, lest there should be any

flagging in dedication. He reminded the troops of the blood-

soaked soil of Belorussia when they were advancing through

Pomerania, and at the gates of Danzig millions of leaflets flut-

tered from the air bearing a message which had been composed

by him and signed by Stalin:

Soldiers of the Red Army! Kill the Germans! Kill all Germans!

Kill! Kill! Kill!

One of the defenders of Danzig unhesitatingly declares that

the majority of the Soviet combat troops were too humane to

put this order into literal effect (Schäufler, 1979, 67). It must

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

274

also be conceded that the Russians had nothing to compare

with the SS special groups, which combed the country system-

atically in pursuit of a policy of mass extermination. We are

left, however, with cruelty on a scale which far exceeds that

which might have been expected from men who had been bru-

talised by a pitiless war. While many of the atrocities must be

laid to the account of low-grade rear-echelon troops such as

released prisoners of war and newly conscripted peasants, it is

clear that the lead was often taken by the best-trained and best-

equipped elements of the armoured spearheads. Again and

again we hear of the Russian tank forces opening fire on trains,

or driving straight down columns of civilian refugees, crushing

people and animals and machine-gunning the survivors in the

ditches and fields.

Massacre, rape and plunder contributed to the very marked

decline in discipline that was evident in the last ten days of

January, when the Russians moved into German territory. The

marshals were appalled, and in his ferocious order of 27 January

Konev cited a number of spectacular lapses and gave a long

list of commanders who had been consigned to penal battalions.

One of his officers remarked on a tank battalion where

the tanks were so tightly packed with loot and plunder

that the members of the crew could not move inside and

would have been unable to go into action in case of emer-

gency. ... I heard a story about the members of one tank

crew who were so drunk that they took their tank into the

front line, opened fire on Russian units, destroyed four gun

emplacements, and crushed one gun. (Koriakov, 1948, 61)

The Russian barbarities were also important because they

stiffened the German resistance and contributed to the survival

of the Reich until the early summer of 1945. The Russian way

with German civilians first became known after the Germans

recaptured the town of Nemmersdorf in East Prussia, which

was the scene of a wholesale massacre of the population in

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October 1944. This experience was relived on every theatre of

the Eastern Front, and on every occasion it provoked in the

German troops an intense desire for revenge. In Silesia the

grisly findings extended into March. At Sagan the Germans

beat Russians to death with shovels and rifle butts; at Striegau,

which was cleared by the 208th Infantry Division, the few sur-

viving civilians were wandering around literally out of their

minds. 'After Striegau there was no question of giving quarter.

When the soldiers were asked to hold themselves back, they

replied in words to the effect that: "After what we saw and

lived through at Striegau, you can't ask us to take prisoners" '

(Ahlfen, 1977, 169; see also Neidhardt, 1981, 379).

In notable contrast to their behaviour on the Western Front

(see p. 54), the Volkssturm in the East fought with real de-

termination, and without their help the defence of Breslau and

the other 'fortresses' would have been impossible. Command-

ers did not need to be members of the SS or devotees of Hitler

to be convinced that they were now fighting a 'just' war, mo-

tivated by the mission to save the millions of refugee civilians.

In truly desperate situations the troops formed a protective shell

and tried to fight their way through the enemy forces, as was

attempted by Hossbach in the Heiligenbeil Cauldron in late

January, and actually accomplished by the von Tettau group

when it broke through to Dievenow on 11 March. More typi-

cally, the troops held a contracting bridgehead, and fought on

to gain time for the civilians, wounded and combatants to be

evacuated by sea. General von Saucken described his task in

the Gulf of Danzig:

We . . . formed a shield for all the people who were seeking

to reach the West from the area of Danzig, Pillau and Hela.

Well over a million Germans—children, women, old folk,

wounded and sick—had found protection behind that shield.

As the commanding general, I assumed personal control of

the whole operation, for I had refused to accept a subordinate

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position under the gauleiter. (Kurowski, 1987, 300. For sim-

ilar sentiments concerning Königsberg, see Lasch, 1977, 82.)

The Experience of the Catastrophe

As early as 28 January 1945, the Wehrmacht calculated that 3.5

million German civilians were on the move in the East. By the

end of the war the number of German non-combatants fleeing

from the Russians had nearly doubled to about 7 million. Most

of those who tried to stay in their homes were evicted after the

war, a process which by 1950 brought the number of Germans

displaced by the Russians and their clients to a final total of 11

million. More than 610,000 ethnic Germans were killed by local

regular or irregular forces in Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia

and Yugoslavia, and a further 2.2 million from Eastern Europe

generally remain unaccounted for, many of them undoubtedly

killed. The rest of this chapter will seek to convey a little of

what these figures mean.

It was only at the beginning of 1945 that the peoples of the

Germanic lands as a whole began to learn some of the common

experiences of war in a mechanised age. As had happened in

Poland, France, Belgium and western Russia, we find crowds

of shoppers staring at columns of tanks in unfamiliar livery

which were unaccountably driving away from the battlefront.

Again we encounter dedicated civilian telephone operators,

plugging and unplugging at their switchboards after the mili-

tary men had disappeared.

The ordeal of the eastern Germans in 1945 nevertheless had

some remarkable features of its own. The suffering was aug-

mented to a significant degree by the complacency and brutality

of most of the gauleiters, who would have agreed with Erich

Koch of East Prussia that 'it is cowardice to consider even the

possibility of misfortune' (Gaunitz, 1987, 19). Since Nazi Party

credibility was bound up with the pretence that everything in

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