The flight from East Prussia

Around 20 January 1945 the roads of East Prussia filled with columns of horse-drawn wagons. A week after the start of the Soviet East Prussian offensive, troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front had broken through the fortifications in the east of the province, while the 2nd Belorussian Front was driving into it from the south, from Masovia. The Party authorities, who for months had punished people merely for preparing to leave, only now authorised the evacuation of one district after another – often when Soviet tanks were already a few kilometres from the village. So began the flight of hundreds of thousands of women, children and old people through frost and snow, one of the most tragic episodes of the end of the war in Europe.

Popular war chronologies record under 20 January that the Red Army entered East Prussia and that the Germans resumed their retreat. This needs to be made more precise. Soviet troops had stood on East Prussian soil since October 1944, when during the first attack on East Prussia they had taken a strip of borderland including Goldap and the village of Nemmersdorf; the Germans recaptured Goldap in November, but the easternmost fringes of the province remained in Soviet hands. What began around 20 January, then, was not an invasion but the collapse of the German defence and the decisive advance into the heart of the province. During the night of 19–20 January Soviet troops took Tilsit (today Sovetsk), on 21 January Gumbinnen (today Gusev), and on 22 January Insterburg (today Chernyakhovsk). On the same day the cavalry of the 2nd Belorussian Front burst into Olsztyn (Allenstein). Nor was the “retreat” the chronologies speak of only a military one: above all it was the flight of the civilian population.

The ban on evacuation

Before the war East Prussia had some 2.5 million inhabitants. According to the findings of Theodor Schieder’s West German commission in the 1950s, based on the number of ration cards, at the beginning of 1944 about 2.65 million people were living in the province – including evacuees from the bombed cities of western Germany and forced labourers. There were few men of military age; those who remained were the elderly, women and children.

Since 1928 the province had been ruled by Gauleiter Erich Koch, who was also Oberpräsident (governor) of East Prussia, in 1941–1944 Reich Commissioner for Ukraine, notorious for his brutality towards its people, and from 1941 head of the civil administration of the Białystok District as well. In the summer and autumn of 1944 Koch mobilised tens of thousands of civilians to dig trenches and anti-tank ditches, and as Gauleiter he was also responsible for the Volkssturm, formed from October. Evacuation plans for individual districts had existed since the second half of 1944, but the Gauleiter and his apparatus treated any attempt to put them into effect – even the private packing of belongings – as defeatism. Leaving one’s place of residence without permission risked a charge of undermining military morale, and according to many accounts Party officials threatened those who fled with shooting. In October 1944, after the first Soviet attack, only the inhabitants of the most threatened eastern districts and of the Memel Territory were moved out – about 500,000 people, according to the Schieder commission.

The reasons for the delay were both ideological and practical. Adolf Hitler and the Party leadership believed that evacuation would weaken the soldiers’ will to resist and surrender land to the enemy without a fight; civilians were to stay and work on the fortifications. The railways and roads were reserved for the army. At the same time Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda frightened the population with exaggerated descriptions of the crimes at Nemmersdorf. The inhabitants thus knew what to fear, but were not allowed to prepare.

Columns in the frost

When the Soviet offensive opened on 13 and 14 January, the warnings came too late. Permission to leave was issued district by district when the front was already close, and in many villages it never arrived at all – Party officials were themselves the first to leave. Most refugees set off in horse-drawn farm carts, since the army had long since requisitioned cars and fuel. They loaded bedding, food, the old and the children; behind the carts walked people with handcarts and sledges. Cattle and horses were driven along with the columns, among them the famous Trakehner horses from the state studs.

January 1945 was exceptionally cold: according to accounts, temperatures fell at night to −20 °C and lower, and the roads lay under deep snow. The refugee columns became mixed up with Wehrmacht units, supply trains and guns, which had priority on the roads and bridges. Carts stood for hours in traffic jams, and people spent the nights in barns or in the open. Exposure claimed the most victims – especially among infants and the old – along with bombing and strafing from the air, for Soviet aircraft attacked the roads without distinguishing military transport from civilian. Evacuation trains from Königsberg and other towns were overcrowded, with people travelling in open goods wagons; the last refugee train left Königsberg for the west on 22 January. Some trains were sent to Olsztyn, in ignorance that the town was already in Soviet hands.

Many columns failed to get away. Fast-moving Soviet armoured spearheads caught up with them on the roads: tanks crushed the carts, soldiers shot at people and horses, looted belongings and carried off women. Other columns turned back on discovering that the road west had already been cut.

Across the ice of the Vistula Lagoon

The most important escape route – westwards through Elbląg and Malbork towards Gdańsk – was cut at the end of January. On the evening of 23 January Soviet tanks of the 5th Guards Tank Army broke into Elbląg (Elbing), whose garrison nevertheless held out until 10 February, and on 26 January (according to some sources as early as 24–25 January) Soviet troops reached the Vistula Lagoon near Tolkmicko (Tolkemit). The German Fourth Army, the remnants of the Third Panzer Army and hundreds of thousands of civilians were cut off from the rest of the Reich.

Two routes remained: through the ports – Pillau and Königsberg – and across the frozen lagoon. From the end of January columns of carts went down onto the ice near Braniewo (Braunsberg), Frombork (Frauenburg) and Heiligenbeil (today Mamonovo) and a few kilometres further on reached the Vistula Spit, along which they moved west towards Gdańsk or north towards Pillau. Engineers marked out routes across the ice with branches, but the ice cracked under the weight of the carts and around bomb craters, and Soviet aircraft attacked the columns, which had no cover whatever in the open. The crossing of the lagoon continued – as far as the ice allowed – into the second half of February; by German estimates hundreds of thousands of people made it, but no one counted how many drowned or froze to death.

Operation Hannibal

The evacuation by sea was prepared by the Kriegsmarine. On 21 January Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz instructed the Baltic naval command to prepare the transfer of soldiers, wounded and civilians from ports threatened by the Red Army; the operation was code-named Hannibal and began in practice on 23 January. It was directed by Admiral Oskar Kummetz, himself a native of East Prussia, and Rear Admiral Konrad Engelhardt. From Pillau, Gdańsk, Gdynia (Gotenhafen) and later from Hel, passenger liners, freighters, warships, fishing cutters and tugs put to sea. According to the most frequently cited estimates, over a period of some fifteen weeks, until May 1945, between about 500 and more than 1,000 vessels carried 800,000–900,000 refugees and some 350,000 soldiers across the Baltic to western Germany and occupied Denmark, although researchers differ over these figures.

For thousands of people the escape by sea ended in death. During the night of 30–31 January the Soviet submarine S-13 under Captain 3rd Rank Alexander Marinesko sank the liner Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic off Łeba; she had sailed from Gdynia with refugees, wounded and Kriegsmarine personnel on board. The death toll, estimated at between about 5,300 and more than 9,000, makes it the deadliest sinking of a ship in maritime history.

Violence against civilians

Civilians who had not managed to flee, or whose columns were overtaken, suffered mass violence at the hands of Soviet soldiers. Historians – German, British (among them Antony Beevor) and Russian alike – have described, on the basis of eyewitness accounts, military reports and the records of Soviet tribunals, the killing of civilians, mass rape of women and girls, looting and the burning of villages and small towns. Liberated female forced labourers from the USSR and Poland were also among the victims of rape. The scale of these crimes cannot be established precisely.

Historians see the causes of this wave of violence above all in a desire for revenge for the crimes committed by the Germans in the USSR, which Soviet soldiers had seen with their own eyes in the burnt villages of Belarus and in the camps they liberated, and in years of hate propaganda, whose loudest voice was the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. In the eyes of many soldiers the first German province the Red Army entered was the “nest” of Prussian militarism. For the first weeks the command did practically nothing; the few officers who tried to stop the crimes exposed themselves to reprisals. Major Lev Kopelev, a front-line propaganda officer who opposed violence against the population, was arrested in April 1945 and sentenced to ten years in the Gulag, among other things for “pity for the enemy”; Captain Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who crossed East Prussia with a sound-ranging battery, later described those days in his poem Prussian Nights. None of this alters the fact that the victims were overwhelmingly defenceless civilians.

Prisoners of war, camp inmates and forced labourers

In January 1945 East Prussia also held hundreds of thousands of people who were there against their will: prisoners of war, forced labourers from Poland and the USSR (the so-called Ostarbeiter), and French, Belgians and Italians working on farms. Their fates varied. Some farm labourers set off west together with their employers’ columns; others hid and waited for the Red Army to arrive. Soviet citizens freed from forced labour and captivity then passed through NKVD filtration points, and many of them – suspected of collaboration – ended up in the Gulag or in penal battalions. Prisoners from the camps, among them Stalag I A Stablack near Preußisch Eylau, were driven west on foot by the Germans.

The fate of concentration camp prisoners was the most tragic. At the end of January the SS evacuated the subcamps of Stutthof in East Prussia and around Königsberg. Several thousand prisoners, most of them Jewish women from Hungary, Lithuania and Poland, were driven on a death march through Königsberg to the coast at Palmnicken (today Yantarny) on the Samland Peninsula. Many froze to death or were shot on the way, and during the night of 31 January – 1 February SS men, helped by local members of the Hitler Youth, drove the survivors onto the ice and the beach and murdered them; according to researchers about 3,000 people died there, and only a handful survived.

The scale

The figures for the flight cannot be given precisely. According to the Schieder commission, of the province’s 2.65 million inhabitants about 2 million left it before the end of the war – some 500,000 in the autumn of 1944 and about 1.5 million from January 1945 – while about 600,000 remained in the areas occupied by the Red Army. In its 1965 report the West German Red Cross tracing service confirmed the deaths of some 32,000 civilians from East Prussia and the Memel Territory during the flight itself, but the fate of hundreds of thousands of people from the two areas remained unexplained. The total losses of East Prussia’s civilian population in 1945–1948 – during the flight, under Soviet occupation, in deportations for labour in the USSR and in the post-war expulsions – are estimated by various authors at between about 300,000 and more than 500,000; the higher estimates, which include the missing, are disputed by some historians.

Aftermath

The winter flight from East Prussia was the beginning of a great exodus of the German population from the lands east of the Oder. Between mid-January and mid-February 1945 an estimated several million people fled the eastern provinces of the Reich. In East Prussia the fighting went on for many more weeks: General Friedrich Hossbach’s encircled Fourth Army tried to break out westwards at the end of January, Königsberg surrendered on 9 April, and the last units held out on the Vistula Spit until May. The commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front, General of the Army Ivan Chernyakhovsky, was killed on 18 February near Pieniężno (Mehlsack). Erich Koch left Königsberg at the turn of January and February, went on to direct the evacuation from Pillau, and himself escaped from there on 23 April aboard the icebreaker Ostpreußen. After the war he hid in the British zone of occupation; extradited to Poland, he was sentenced to death in 1959 for crimes against the Polish population, chiefly in the Białystok District; the sentence was not carried out because of his health, and Koch died in 1986 in the prison at Barczewo.

Those who stayed behind endured hunger, epidemics, deportation for forced labour in the USSR and, in the end, expulsion over the following months. Under the decisions of the Potsdam Conference the northern part of the province, with Königsberg, went to the Soviet Union and the southern part to Poland. For Germans the fate of the refugees from East Prussia became one of the symbols of their own wartime suffering; historians stress at the same time that this tragedy was a consequence of the war unleashed by the Third Reich and of the policy of its leaders, who until the very last moment forbade the rescue of the population.