Two

HITLER’S HOSTAGES

LIFE IN THE EASTERN TERRITORIES

“WAR!” the radio blared. An accompanying choir trumpeted the words of the German national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles.”¹ When the German forces invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, about 10 million German speakers, former subjects of the Hapsburg monarchy, lived in East Prussia, a German enclave with Poland and Russia for neighbors. Some had lived there for generations; others had been only recently relocated there. Horst Woit and his mother, Meta, lived in Elbing in East Prussia; Helga Reuter and her sister, Inge, lived in Königsberg; Irene and Ellen Tschinkur and their cousin Evi were in Gotenhafen. While the late 1930s were economically hard for the eastern parts of the Reich, they were largely untouched by the political upheavals that marked the Nazis’ rise to power and affected their countrymen in the western part of Germany.

Many of these families lived in towns and cities that were ethnically and linguistically mixed. When in 1939 Germany annexed parts of Poland and incorporated them into the rest of East Prussia, the Nazi leaders were surprised to discover some ethnic Poles who spoke only German and some Germans who spoke only Polish.

Just weeks before the invasion, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin had forged an uneasy truce. On August 23, 1939, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a pact that included a plan detailing how the two nations would dismember Poland. This pact, known officially as the Treaty of Non-Aggression, also directed the dislocation and expulsion of ethnic Germans from Russian lands. The Soviets were keen to extend their state west while the Germans were determined to extend their state east. Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin could virtually consume Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well as push Russia’s border 200 miles farther west. Hence, the Soviet Union incorporated the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and North Bukovina, and also recovered some territories that once belonged to the tsarist empire. The Baltic States had been Russian from the time of Peter the Great until World War One.

Officially the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was supposed to prevent hostilities between the Germans and the Russians. In a secret protocol both parties agreed to “spheres of influence.” However, many civilians, like Helga Reuter and her family, had good reason to question the validity of the agreement. In late 1939 and early 1940 Helga’s uncle was serving in the German merchant marine. While stationed in Leningrad, Russia, he wrote home, warning his family in Königsberg of how the Soviets were arming themselves in spite of the treaty. “He said please do not believe the safety contract,” Reuter said. “He had seen the harbor full of war equipment. They were preparing for war.”²

Reuter’s uncle was correct. Laurence Steinhardt, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, duly noted the “extensive secret mobilization” taking place in the Soviet Union in 1939. “Large numbers of recruits still in civilian clothes and reservists up to the present age of 50 are known to be departing from Moscow. Tanks and trucks believed to be conveying ammunition have been seen in the city. Horses rarely observed in Moscow together with a considerable quantity of fodder are in evidence. This extensive mobilization is being conducted with great secrecy.”³ Steinhardt correctly appraised the situation. The Soviets were prepared to occupy part of eastern Poland and were also bracing themselves against a future German invasion.

German troops and mechanized units overran Poland on September 1, annexing the country in a few short weeks. Two days later, on September 3, England and France declared war on Germany. Neither nation, however, fully engaged the Third Reich until the Battle of France began in 1940. Poland’s Foreign Minister Jozef Beck said that “official circles in London and Paris state that British and French planes hesitate to bomb German railways, other communications, power plants and war industry centers because of potential effect on American public opinion.”⁴ Beck understood the American public did not want to enter the war. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to news of the invasion with a telegram appealing to Germany to refrain from bombing civilians. “I am therefore addressing this urgent appeal to every government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities, upon the understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all of their opponents.”⁵

The Tschinkurs, originally from Riga, Latvia, were resettled in the “Home to the Reich” campaign. Thousands of ethnic Germans were moved west with whatever possessions they could carry in 1940 and 1941 after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed. To achieve this, Nazi negotiators presented their case to the respective governments of Latvia and Estonia. Regarding ethnic Germans living in other Soviet lands, such as in Russia or Ukraine, the Nazis negotiated with officials from the NKVD, the Soviet internal secret police. The German envoys accomplished the population swap in part by convincing ethnic Germans that they were moving to paradise. Instead, many of the newly returned immediately were assigned to one of about 1,500 holding camps. There the Nazi authorities assessed their hair and eye color and other traits, such as nose and head shape, to see who among the new arrivals most closely resembled the Aryan ideal. They wanted to weed out those resettlers they considered having genetically inferior foreign elements; namely Jews and those not of purely German origin.⁶ The German authorities made a ceremonial effort to welcome the Baltic Germans to their new home in East Prussia: “We greet our Baltic folk comrades who are now returning home into the Greater German Reich of Adolf Hitler.”⁷ Although the Germans looked at the Slavs as potential underlings, they still invested in the East; they viewed the land as ripe for colonization and settlement, the lebensraum, or living space, touted by Hitler as being Germany’s right.

After the Tschinkurs arrived in East Prussia, they were first sent to Stettin to a dormitory style building called “Baltic Home.” From inside this institutional setting, authorities sorted out the Baltic people, parceling them off to different towns and cities, all of which now bore German names. The Tschinkurs would have been subjected to a certain amount of reeducation including acceptance of Nazi ideology and culture. Members of Hitler Youth often helped process the newly arrived Baltic Germans.⁸

After several weeks the Tschinkurs were sent to Poznan, a city on the Warta River in what was formerly west central Poland. Herbert Christoph and Serafima soon decided to leave for Gotenhafen so they could be closer to the water. Back in Riga Herbert Christoph had belonged to a sailing club, and being near the water was a small comfort to the newly displaced family. Most of Irene and Ellen’s family stayed in Poznan, including her aunt and beloved cousins Wilhelm and Evelyn, whose nickname was Evi. In Gotenhafen the Tschinkurs lived in a nice apartment building overlooking some shops and their father ran the bakery there. “We probably took over somebody’s home,” Irene Tschinkur admits.

In spite of the upheaval, families like the Woits, Tschinkurs, and Reuters still had some years of relative peace remaining before the violence and fear of the mid-1940s arrived. East Prussian children had to join Hitler Youth and schoolteachers increasingly focused on imparting students with knowledge about the front and what it meant to be a good citizen of the Reich. People became increasingly wary about what they said in public and with whom they spoke. Gestapo agents seemed omnipresent. Still, most East Prussians escaped the direct effects of the Nazi regime for a bit longer than those who lived in Germany proper.

“The strange thing is that East Prussia was divided by Poland after World War One. But until the Russians got there, we felt disconnected from Hitler and what was happening,” Helga Reuter said. Almost 70 years after the ship’s sinking, Helga recounts what it was like to come of age during the Nazi era. She recently moved from Arizona to live with her son, David Knickerbocker, in Las Vegas. The desert areas she has lived in bear no resemblance to the East Prussian city where she grew up.

In picturesque, cosmopolitan, seaside Königsberg, Helga Reuter and her sisters, Inge and Ursula, attended a private school together with Jewish, Lutheran, and Calvinist children. Helga never paid much attention to her classmates’ religions until Germany’s Nazi Party imposed draconian laws on the city’s Jewish population. It meant reading Mein Kampf in school and hearing, repeatedly, “Comradeship,” a story by a Hitler Youth member named Hans Wolf. The story extolled the idea that a child in Nazi Germany could only thrive through sacrifice and loyalty to the Führer.⁹

Helga remembers the English teacher who wore a dreadful brown tweed skirt who had to stop teaching them English because England was at war with Germany and opposed to Nazi values. She remembers time out from academics to track Germany’s conquests on a map pinned to the classroom wall, as well as endless rallies, parades, speeches, and rituals. And she recalls playmates who were there one day and gone the next.

“One day, my friend said, ‘Please don’t come with me. I cannot visit you either.’ She was Jewish. This is what it was like to grow up in Hitler’s Germany,” Helga said, her cerulean eyes narrowing at the memory.¹⁰

In 1939, as Helga Reuter struggled to adapt to her disappearing childhood, the Nazis slaughtered thousands of people living in central Poland. Mobile killing squads comprised of the German SS and Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) rounded up victims and drove them on foot or in trucks to secluded sites. There the victims were forced to strip before being shot. Corpses were burned in large pits.

Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr., the American ambassador to Poland, sent news home of the civilian killings. Biddle supplied one of the earliest reports about Nazi atrocities. In his observations the Germans functioned “to terrorize the civilian population and to reduce the number of child-bearing Poles irrespective of category.”¹¹

West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Einsatzgruppen pounced on the populace. In Bydgoszcz, a village over the border, the German military killed an estimated 10,500 Poles in retaliation for anti-German riots. Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man, organized the murderous task force using members from the security police and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) intelligence service of the SS. Blond, tall, and with a narrow face, Heydrich had been appointed to the post in 1933. During one operation alone the Einsatzgruppen murdered 61,000 Poles.¹²

East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Soviets also annexed territory and for the next several years murdered those they deemed a threat to their political ideals. The Soviets were similarly brutal throughout western Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. The Soviet government under Joseph Stalin implemented a strategy to send the affluent and intellectuals to Siberian gulags, where millions were subject to reeducation camps and forced labor in brutal conditions. In this way, the Soviet authorities hoped to rid the population of those who in their eyes undermined the Communist Party.

Born in Lodz, Poland, Ruth Weintraub Kent was one of six children. Her father died before the onset of the war. Of her immediate family, she lost everyone but two brothers.

“We were in the country when Hitler declared war on Poland. We wanted to come back to go to school . . . we were not able to get any transportation. There were no buses, no streetcars, and no trucks. Not even a horse and carriage. Everything was mobilized for the war effort,” Ruth Weintraub said of the immediate hours and days following the Nazi invasion. “When we came back from the country, a lot of soldiers were coming down our street. Although our streets were not very wide, it seemed like masses of soldiers were marching through our streets. And we could see tanks. It was a frightening experience.”¹³

Nazi storm troopers swept through Polish cities arresting, assaulting, and executing anyone deemed an enemy of the Reich. The list included Polish citizens, communists, and Jews. Upon its invasion of Poland, the Germans arrested and imprisoned Polish men of fighting age first in Auschwitz and then in other concentration camps.

After the Third Reich occupied the Polish provinces, it created various Reichsgaue, or administrative subdivisions of those territories. Regional provincial leaders called gauleiters headed each Reichsgau. The gauleiters helped supervise the removal of Polish citizens to make room for ethnic Germans arriving from the Baltic and other regions of the Reich.¹⁴ The Nazi Party imported people into Poland and East Prussia as colonists to augment the labor force.

Thus began an intensive Germanization of the region. On October 7, 1939, Adolf Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler commissioner for the Consolidation of the German Race. The one-time chicken farmer assumed the job of eliminating those that the Third Reich deemed racially and politically inferior. Himmler had served as chief of the Munich police from 1933 until 1936 when he was appointed head of all the German police.¹⁵

Extreme violence descended upon East Prussia. The violence was directed not only at Jews and Poles, but also set its sights on a mosaic of people from vastly different ethnic backgrounds and religious faiths. Lawyers, clergy, and teachers were deported and killed. Arrests and deportations came with little or no warning, most often at night. Families were often separated. Polish citizens left behind dear possessions—a wedding album, a grandmother’s teapot, a favorite doll. “I had the clothing I was wearing and nothing more. Hungry and cold, I sat down on the bench, it was very cold, and then came the grief and sadness that I had known in my life. I was nineteen years old then, and I didn’t know then the world of poverty that fell upon me,” wrote Stanislaw Jaskolski, an ethnic Polish civilian, about his arrest in East Prussia.¹⁶

Germans had actually begun gathering information on Jews and Polish intelligentsia living in East Prussia before the war started. The Nazis scouted locations for a concentration camp long before the first shot hit Westerplatte, a peninsula near Gotenhafen on the Baltic Sea. They chose Stutthof, a small village just about 22 miles from the fairy tale–looking city of Danzig. Occupying wet, muddy land, the camp was along the Danzig-Elbing highway on the road to the Krynica Morska resort on the Baltic Sea. Prisoners built the camp, which originally operated as a civilian internment camp under the direction of the Danzig police chief. The first inmates arrived on September 2, 1939—150 Polish citizens were imprisoned in Konzentrationslager or KZ Stutthof concentration camp.

The number of inmates in Stutthof swelled to 15,000 by September 15. In 1941 Stutthof became a holding center for political prisoners. By the time the Russians liberated the camp in 1944, prisoners from 26 European countries, in addition to the United States and Turkey, had passed through its barbed-wire gates.¹⁷

Many of the prisoners in Stutthof worked at the munitions factories of Deutsche Auskustungswerke, or DAW, in Gotenhafen, Elbing, and other Baltic towns. The Nazi concentration camps spawned subcamps at an exponential rate. Stutthof had 150 subcamps along the Baltic coast near towns and villages, including Elbing, Gotenhafen, Thorn, and Königsberg. As of 1944, camps occupied nearly every region of the Third Reich, though some camps held only 10 prisoners. “When the train stopped and we were told to get out and it was already light, and you could see the sign where in large letters was written Stutthof,” recalled Stutthof survivor Stanislaw Jaskolski. “On all sides stood SS men dressed in black military uniforms, with skull and crossbones on their caps and Ukrainians who served Hitler.”¹⁸

Like Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau, the East Prussian camp of Stutthof became an extermination center where Nazis gassed, shot, and worked prisoners to death. Camp doctors administered lethal injections to more than 60,000 prisoners. The camp doctor reserved the right of selection for the gas chamber. It was in Stutthof that Rudolf Spanner experimented with various methods to render human fat into soap, leather, and book covers. Inside the soap factory “they hauled the bodies, they tore off the skin for another different use and the body was cooked in a huge kettle,” wrote Jaskolski.¹⁹ Every day special commandos pushed carts brimming with corpses to the camp’s crematorium; the corpses burned day and night.²⁰ Stutthof resembled an open graveyard where the only difference between the living and the dead was that the living occasionally moved.²¹

After more than a month in Auschwitz, Ruth Weintraub, the girl from Lodz, was transported to Stutthof. Inmates like Ruth and Stanislaw were used as forced labor in brickyards and private enterprises such as the Focke-Wulf airplane factory.²² They were just a few miles from where the Woits, Reuters, and Tschinkurs lived.

In Königsberg the Reuter furniture factory and showroom shared the block with another business. The Nazis closed the Jewish-owned business and nailed a large sign above the shop’s windows that read Feinde, or Enemy.

Two years before the war, in 1937, the German authorities had ordered the Reuters to relinquish their furniture factory to the Reich. The German authorities turned it into a uniform factory and the Reuters had to knock to be let into their building. While Helga doesn’t know for certain, it’s possible that Polish, Russian, and French prisoners, incarcerated in one of KZ Stutthof’s 150 subcamps, worked in the Reuter factory.²³

Though East Prussian civilians were far away from Berlin, they shared in certain sacrifices from the start, namely food rationing and the conscription of men into the Nazi forces.

“Fortunately, we grew our own food, chicken and rabbit. So we had no problem with food shortages,” Helga said.²⁴ Her father, Kurt, would try to feed the prisoners surreptitiously. Every day two soups simmered on the stove, and Kurt snuck chicken and rabbit into the soup for the workers. They were fortunate to have some meat, because as the war progressed butter, sausage— any kind of meat—became scarcer and scarcer, Helga recalled.

“The Germans found out and called him to the police station. He was called there once or twice a month. Each time my mother wondered if he would come home. The police said he was too friendly with the POWs.”

The Reuters continued to resist in small ways. Helga’s father often referred to Adolf Hitler as a German communist. Every Sunday the Reuters visited with their neighbors for the chance to trade news and sip hot cups of ersatz coffee. Helga remembers her parents suspected that their cook tried to curry favor with the German authorities by informing on them. The Reuters became less carefree in their conversations, but they continued to tune into a Hungarian radio station for information. This was dangerous; listening to outside news warranted the death penalty. The Reich newspapers and magazines reported news of the front only when that news portrayed Nazi Germany in a positive light. Reports extolled the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) and the Volkssturm (Home Guard), but the broadcasts never mentioned the Third Reich’s retreats and surrenders.²⁵

As the war progressed, Berlin’s influence on East Prussian life intensified. By 1939 an estimated 82 percent, or 7.3 million, of German children aged ten and older belonged to Hitler Youth.²⁶ Helga Reuter was one of those children.

Helga remembers the day her notification to join Hitler Youth arrived in the family’s letterbox at their house on General Litzman Street. Her parents were hesitant but they felt compelled to enroll her.

“At first it was lovely. We made toys for Christmas; we went on picnics,” Helga said. “It was fun. But suddenly it turned into drilling. I did not like it.” Soon Helga feigned sickness on meeting days, wanting to avoid the group’s ever-escalating militarism. She didn’t want to train to join the military. She didn’t want to attend the formal meetings in the required starched white shirt, navy skirt, and black neckerchief. She bristled at joining the straight-marching lines of boys and girls. Her father, however tempted he was to disobey the rules, worried about appearing to the neighbors as if he were snubbing the Nazi Party. Kurt Reuter paid the girls’ dues and told his daughters Helga and Inge to attend meetings. It was too dangerous to let them risk being branded as outsiders.

Helga said the group’s teachings regarding Jewish children bothered her. Growing up in Königsberg with its reputation for tolerance, Helga had never thought much about religious or ethnic differences. The city had a relatively small Jewish population; a little more than 3,000 Jews called it home when the Nazis assumed power in 1933. The Reuters worked with, associated with, and studied with Jewish people. As the war continued, Helga and her family knew it was dangerous to talk with Jews, even those who had been friends and colleagues. All around the streets were being emptied. “In my family Jewish was a religion, nothing more. My father’s doctor was Jewish. Once my father saw his doctor cleaning the streets and asked him what he was doing. ‘Please go away and don’t talk to me. Go, go,’ the doctor said. That is when our eyes really opened up. My sister’s friends suddenly weren’t coming around. They were just picked up.” Police reveled in publicly humiliating Jews and it was forbidden for non-Jews to associate with Jews.²⁷

Soon after that incident with his physician, Helga Reuter said her father started warning his three girls every day about the seemingly omniscient Gestapo. Each morning Kurt Reuter told his daughters to pay attention, whether they were riding the streetcar, sitting in school, or walking down one of Königsberg’s sidewalks. Criticizing the government, talking with Jews or others, often meant arrest. He worried the Gestapo might arrest the sisters, or him and his wife, if they spied them in friendly conversation with fellow countrymen now considered subhuman enemies of the state. Kurt Reuter was right to fear his neighbors. Many denunciations came from people harboring the slightest jealousy or wanting to be seen in favorable light.

Irene and Ellen Tschinkur slowly adjusted to life in Gotenhafen, a large, bustling naval port on the Bay of Danzig. When they lived in Latvia their father belonged to a sailing club and they naturally gravitated to the port town, and the family often lingered at the waterfront, looking at the sea. In Gotenhafen, the harbor, once a place of recreation, was now overtaken by the military. Although the two sisters said they hardly noticed the naval ships and German sailors when they walked by the waterfront, they remember that a feeling of dread lingered: The Third Reich mystified and scared them.²⁸

Just outside of town, their first apartment in Gotenhafen was “situated near a hill where Ellen and I would go and pick flowers and where we saw soldiers training German shepherds in a clearing,” Irene said. “One day Ellen and I, we stumbled on a meadow. There were soldiers there, training German shepherds. I felt we shouldn’t be there. We quickly went away.”

The close encounter with the German shepherds unnerved Irene. She took Ellen’s hand and quickly ran down the hill, clutching freshly picked flowers between their fingers.

Once Irene and Ellen and their parents settled in Gotenhafen, they faced a new reality. Because they were volksdeutsch, they were being schooled in what was considered the proper ways of the Reich. On one of Irene’s first days of school the teacher asked her to recite a poem. Irene stood before her new classmates and nervously performed a little ditty about a bunny. As soon as she finished the teacher barked at Irene. He motioned for her to stand in front of his desk, hands turned up. The teacher caned her palms.

“I had said the poem in Russian. Only German was allowed from this point,” Irene said.

On another afternoon in school, teachers led Irene and her classmates out of the building to a sidewalk on one of the city’s main streets. The teachers pressed small, stiff Nazi flags into their hands and told the children to wave and smile at the soldiers and officials marching in lockstep down the street. “There was a beautiful car, an open landeau. A man in a brownish or greenish uniform stood up in it. It was Hitler. He went by in his beautiful car. I couldn’t have cared less,” Irene recounts.

But the neighbors cared who waved, who attended marches, and whether children joined Hitler Youth, and there was always the danger of being snitched on for not attending. Upon turning ten years old Irene was supposed to join the Hitler Youth. Her father Herbert Christoph refused to send her, not caring to hear Irene learn to say “Heil Hitler” or sing national hymns or perfect a stiff-armed salute. The Tschinkurs were also not especially political. However, the next year, when Irene turned 11, “an SS man came to our apartment door and asked why I was not in the youth group. Dad had no excuse—so I went and had a good time. Dad had no good reason to give. It was August 1944,” Irene said. Thus, Irene joined what would eventually be an organization to which more than 60 percent of children aged 10 to 18 belonged.²⁹

Busy with school, piano lessons, and ballet, Irene doesn’t remember having to learn Nazi songs in the first year of Hitler Youth, only what she called “just pretty outdoor songs.” She remembers spending a lot of time outdoors, doing calisthenics on the beach and throwing a medicine ball. Sometimes her group went raspberry leaf picking for tea. Other afternoons they did crafts; they knitted squares of colored wool and pieced them together for lap blankets for sick people. Irene said they learned how to make little farm animals, sheds, and barns out of wood. They painted the little toys and gave them as Christmas gifts for poor children. “All that to me was fun. What would happen later on I wouldn’t know. I think as the girls and boys got older, there must have been more indoctrination of something sinister perhaps. I’m glad I didn’t go there,” Irene said, adding that her father’s discomfort with the organization never lessened. He knew that as the children grew older, what they learned and did in the organization changed. It was that part of the Hitler Youth he didn’t want his daughters to participate in.

The sinister part of Hitler Youth didn’t surface until children reached the age of 14. Children in the older groups were exposed to gleichschaltung, or “bringing into line.” This stage of Hitler Youth injected teenagers with Nazi social and political thought in order to get them to conform to Nazi ideology. Though neither Irene nor any of the children in the Jungvolk might have realized it, the lyrics to those pretty songs often contained Nazi propaganda. Yet, most children at that age didn’t understand the deeper meaning to the songs. Rather, they enjoyed the infectious rhymes and melodies.

Irene only stayed in Bund Deutscher Mädel, BDM, or League of German Girls, for five months before she and her family fled the oncoming Soviet army.

The intense Germanization was designed to assimilate children like Irene and Ellen to life inside Nazi Germany as quickly as possible. German was the official language now; the use of Latvian, Russian, or Polish in public was clearly forbidden. No longer were they to read books, see films, or visit exhibitions that contained anything the Nazi regime might consider even remotely anti-German. The German authorities were determined to smother and suppress every ounce of their old life beneath a parade of racial and political doctrine.

The port of Gotenhafen filled with Kriegsmarine and U-boat sailors training on the Wilhelm Gustloff. Though they heard Adolf Hitler’s fevered radio broadcasts and reports of Stutthof and its nearby subcamps, Irene and Ellen’s parents spoke little of the war in front of their children.

Horst Woit, a grammar school student in Elbing, East Prussia when the war started, remembers buildings draped in Nazi banners and flags hanging from lampposts. Sitting on a sofa in the basement of his lakeside home in Canada, nearly 70 years later, Horst said he remembers hearing Hitler’s speeches on the radio. Yet, it was more background noise than anything else for the young boy. Aside from the fanfare and pomp of marching soldiers and older children dressed in the crisp khaki of a Hitler Youth uniform, the war and Adolf Hitler seemed remote for a young boy more concerned with making friends and eating sticky marmalade sandwiches. Horst’s mother didn’t talk about the war. His father, long gone to the front, never wrote home.

Eva Dorn hated Hitler Youth. She liked the required skirt and blouse all the girls wore because they were the first new clothes she’d had in years. However, she quickly grew to hate what the skirt and blouse represented.³⁰

“I was ten years old when I decided not to be a Nazi,” Eva said, a feisty smile playing across her face at the decades-old memory.

One weekend in 1936 Eva’s Hitler Youth group went camping and hiking near the Baltic Sea. The girls were to spend the night in the tower section of a youth hostel. Each girl received a mat and a blanket. The next morning Eva awoke before the other girls. She asked her group leader permission to go downstairs to the bathroom. The older girl forbade Eva, telling her that she couldn’t go until the entire group was ready. “I had to go, so I went in the corner. Can you imagine? I was humiliated. I knew then I couldn’t be a part of any group that wouldn’t let me take care of myself,” Eva said.

The next incident came three years later during her group’s weekly Tuesday meeting. Eva, then 13, was asked to lead the meeting since their regular leader was sick. Eva looked out the classroom window and saw a carousel in the marketplace. The sun shone. “I told the group, ‘Why should we sit here? It’s so beautiful outside. Let’s go to the fair.’ We did and had fun,” she said. The next afternoon the group’s leaders summoned the teenager. They threw Eva out of the Hitler Youth and told her she would be banned from ever joining the Nazi Party and would never amount to anything. “I was so happy, I couldn’t care less,” Eva Dorn said.

Eva’s views of Hitler differed vastly from her brothers’. Her two half-brothers had joined the German army and they died on the Eastern Front. Her full brother was a believer; he joined the SS. One afternoon when her parents were still together, the doorbell of their apartment rang. “It was the black shirt being delivered. My mother was furious. Only then did I realize she was against the Nazis,” Eva said, avoiding further discussion about her brother and his wartime activities.

In 1938 the Jews of Haale (Saale) were forced to wear yellow stars to identify them. Eva remembers an incident when she was riding the streetcar to school. At one stop, a Jewish couple got on. “If there was one thing my mother taught me it was manners. So I said to the couple, ‘Please sit down.’ They said, ‘We are not allowed to.’” When Eva returned to her seat the other passengers berated her. “‘Don’t you see that they are Jews?’” Eva stared out the window. Jews had started to leave Haale. Many of them had worked in the theater with her parents. One farewell stood out; before a musician from their theater group departed for Palestine, he gave Eva an orange, a rare treat during the war.

On June 22, 1941, Germany abrogated the non-aggression pact and invaded Russia. “Stalin must be regarded as a cold-blooded blackmailer; he would, if expedient, repudiate any written treaty at any time. Britain’s aim for some time to come will be to set Russian strength in motion against us,” Hitler told his commanders-in-chief.³¹

Adolf Hitler, the house-painter-turned-tyrant, declared his intent to turn the Soviet Union into a wasteland. Given the code name Operation Barbarossa, German soldiers marching toward Moscow had carte blanche to use violence against Russian civilians. “The Russians must perish that we may live.”³² As in Poland, the Nazi Party policy included subjugation through dehumanization. It encouraged famine, torture, and execution. A song at the time set this idea to music:

The ancient brittle bones of the world tremble.

Before the Red war.

We have broken its slavery,

For us it was a mighty victory.

We will march on,

Even if everything sinks into dust,

Because today Germany belongs to us

And tomorrow the whole world.³³

The command allowed German soldiers to shoot any civilians seeming to resist, without precisely defining what they meant by resistance. They shot men with cropped hair, deciding anyone with a crew cut was a Soviet soldier. They shot Asiatic Soviets and summarily executed female soldiers, reasoning that armed women mocked German notions of military propriety.³⁴ Soldiers snapped photos of their grisly work.

Three weeks after the invasion, 20 million Soviet citizens lived under German rule and thousands of Soviet soldiers lay in mass graves.

On June 22, 1944, three years after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Russian army launched Operation Bagration, named for Prince Peter Bagration, a Russian hero of 1812. The Soviets pushed forward with overwhelming force; they gave no quarter. The Red Army directed its first attacks against the key German strong points of Vitebsk, Mogilev, Osha, and Bobruisk. Stalin and his military commanders warned soldiers that their counterattack would be grueling, particularly in East Prussia. Stalin told his commanders the Germans would fight for East Prussia to the end. “We could get bogged down there,” Stalin said.³⁵

The Red Army marched toward Berlin with revenge on their minds. Soviets called the Germans “fascist monsters” who destroyed their cities and homes. Soviet troops, from lowly privates to higher-ranking officers, thought the worst Germans hailed from East Prussia.

Many Soviet soldiers knew people who had suffered under German occupation. They were quick to visit violence on German civilians. Reprisals took all forms, particularly physical. The famous chronicler of Soviet gulags, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who served as a captain in the Russian army during the war, later wrote that every soldier knew German girls were fair game to be raped and shot.³⁶ His long poem “Prussian Nights” contains this section “Zweiundzwanzig Horingstrasse” (“Twenty Two Horingstrasse”):

It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled.

A moaning, by the walls half muffled: the
mother’s wounded, still alive.

The little daughter’s on the mattress, Dead.
How many have been on it?

A platoon, a company perhaps?

A girl’s been turned into a woman, A
woman turned into a corpse.

It all comes down to simple phrases:

Do not forget! Do not forgive! Blood for
blood! A tooth for a tooth!

The mother begs, “Kill me, Soldier!”³⁷

Anti-German propaganda incited the Red Army. One leaflet distributed to Russian soldiers read: “Kill. Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the living nor the yet unborn. Follow the words of Comrade Stalin and crush forever the fascist beast in its den. Break the racial pride of the German woman. Take her as your legitimate booty.”³⁸ Some German women chose suicide.

Russian soldiers seized German men and women for forced labor in Siberia. As they pressed forward, the soldiers grabbed weapons, ammunition, food, fuel, livestock, and boots left by retreating Germans. The Soviet troops plundered so that they could send provisions home. They were allowed to send two packages a month, each weighing up to 18 pounds. Officers could send twice as much.

To the Russian invaders, the German’s wartime standard of living, particularly in the eastern territories, seemed frivolously luxurious. The cultivated land and neat houses seemed to look at Soviet soldiers with reproach. Raging, the Red Army burnt to a crisp entire towns, such as Stolp, Zoppot, and Insterburg. Throughout East Prussia, from Königsberg to Elbing, the people were terrified.

In January 1943, barely six months after Germany bombed Stalingrad and advanced into its rubble, somber music accompanied the announcement that the Red Army had wrested the city from German control. Even so, the Nazi authorities tried to persuade people that a final victory was imminent.³⁹ The German public didn’t know that the remains of the 90,000-men-strong German Sixth Army had surrendered. Rather, Hitler, obsessed with portraying the Reich as forever on the verge of triumph, ordered the press to report the siege’s end as a “sublime example of heroism.”⁴⁰ The surrender of Stalingrad became one more instance of martyrdom on the part of the German soldier. Those with access to outside radios and newspapers knew the truth; Hitler’s armies had been defeated.⁴¹ The fall of Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war, the beginning of Germany’s defeat.

That same year Eva Dorn had begun her third semester studying music at University of Leipzig. She wasn’t surprised when the draft notice arrived. Germany had declared total war. The German military gave her a choice between working in an armaments factory or the joining the Women’s Naval Auxiliary. Her mother suggested she choose the Navy so she could at least have fresh air. The day after her birthday, Eva left for training at Flensburg, a German naval base near Kiel on the Baltic Sea. Eva was soon posted to Gotenhafen in East Prussia. There she quietly challenged the rules, wearing lipstick, not giving a full “Heil Hitler” salute when she passed superior officers, and always keeping a pair of high heels in her possession. Eva worked hard, making herself useful beyond her regular duties on the spotlight battery and identifying aircraft. She often worked in the kitchen and infirmary.

By February 26, 1944, the Red Army had recaptured 75 percent of occupied Russian lands and the Allies celebrated news of the Russian advance as one more step toward victory.⁴² News of the Russian offensive also excited Americans in Stalag Luft III, a prisoner-of-war camp in Sagan. Inside the camp, on January 27, 1944, the 10,000 Americans cheered when they heard the Russians were less than 20 miles to the east and coming on strong.⁴³

Meanwhile Helga Reuter’s 21-year-old cousin, Jurgen, a soldier in the Wehrmacht, was killed outside Leningrad. The Russians carved a swastika into his chest. “We got told lies about Leningrad. The Russians had begun to break through after Leningrad. Our soldiers went in and saw that people had been murdered and raped and nailed to a barn . . . nailed to a barn,” Helga said, referring to East Prussians living in the path of the Russian advance. “This scared us to hell. They said the same thing could happen to us. We were planning to leave. We didn’t know where—just to the West. As if the West held milk and honey.”

In East Prussia, Gauleiter Erich Koch insisted victory was nigh, adhering to Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’s maxim that when one tells a lie often enough, the lie becomes true. Born on June 19, 1896, Koch likened himself to a medieval Teutonic knight. He boasted that his gau (province) represented a vanguard of Germanic ideals, ready to stand against marauding Russians.⁴⁴ He banned any talk of flight. Having joined the Nazi Party in 1922, Koch had served as gauleiter since 1938, administering the region from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He also controlled the region’s Gestapo and uniformed police battalions. Koch had earlier served without distinction as a soldier in World War One. In spite of Koch’s declaration that East Prussia fight and die together, he, his wife, and his secretary fled Königsberg long before civilians like the Tschinkurs, Rezases, and Reuters. He did so after vilifying soldiers in the Wehrmacht who tried to retreat. Koch went to Pillau and tried to make a show of helping to organize Operation Hannibal.

Koch ordered the Volkssturm (Home Guard) to mobilize boys as young as 13. Adolf Hitler had called up the Volkssturm in late 1944, selling the idea of it as a similar organization to the Land-sturm, which had fought against the French a century before. At the start it was a volunteer force, but soon men and boys had no choice. Hitler Youth were sent to bolster this home guard, with 16- and 17-year-olds manning machine guns. The youngsters had poor training, wore threadbare uniforms, and were armed only with French long rifles from 1914 that froze in the cold. The Russians slaughtered these adolescents. Reports spread of dead youth lying in ditches with their ears cut off and gouged-out eyes.⁴⁵

Horst Woit of Elbing remembered the Volkssturm as just one more part of Germany’s strategy of self-defense. This notion of sacrifice for the fatherland weighed heavily on many civilians. The German forces relied on the idea that the 80,000-strong Volkssturm and enlisted men wouldn’t shy away from a heldentod (heroic death).

As the Russian army approached the East Prussian border, Erich Koch ordered hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and prisoners of war to build fortified camps and dig antitank ditches. Heinrich Himmler said he didn’t care if 10,000 Russian women died of exhaustion digging antitank ditches for the German army, so long as the ditches were dug.⁴⁶

In addition to the East Prussian civilians, concentration camp inmates were also compelled to dig. Dora Love, who survived three years in the Stutthof extermination camp, worked on the ditches. “They were horrors—four and a half meters deep. I doubt that it ever stopped a single Soviet tank—it was meant for the Soviet tanks but the work was for us.”⁴⁷

On January 12, 1945, about 3 million Russians attacked close to 1 million Germans on a 400-mile front that extended from the Baltic Sea to middle of the Poland.⁴⁸ In the north the Third White Russian Front advanced toward Königsberg in East Prussia. The Second White Russian Front advanced toward Danzig. The First White Russian Front moved toward Poznan. The First Ukrainian Front moved in from the south.

Though Hitler prohibited it, some German army divisions started retreating further west.⁴⁹ News of the German army retreat reached East Prussian locales, including Königsberg, Elbing, and Gotenhafen.

Adolf Hitler’s policies kept civilians ignorant of the Soviet advance and prohibited evacuations. Hitler told East Prussians that he intended to keep every square inch of territory. In mid-July 1944 he told the Germans he would hold the Baltic States at all costs. For Hitler, the war was about more than domination; it represented a test of will for the German people. If they lost, they had only themselves to blame. “If the German people should collapse under the present burden, I would weep no tear after it. It would deserve its fate,” Adolf Hitler told the audience during his last Reichstag speech.⁵⁰

Nearly three years after Adolf Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa, the Russians penetrated the German lines. When news of the breakthrough reached Moscow, celebratory gunfire crackled the air in lieu of fireworks. The Russians moved forward relentlessly, weakening the Germans daily.⁵¹

“The radio was sending only good news about how hard they were fighting,” Horst Woit said, remembering those years. “But nobody was allowed to flee because that would cause capitulation. In the east we did not hear much about the western front. The store windows had propaganda of Russian killing Germans; gruesome.”

In January 1945 Red Army tanks crunched through the snow of East Prussia, obliterating nearly everything in their path. On January 11 and 12, 1945, ten armies of the First Ukrainian Front dealt the first blow of the Soviet offensive on the Vistula. On January 13, the Third Belorussian Front bombarded East Prussia with 120,000 rounds. As Stalin’s soldiers raced to form a new front, tanks and men crushed machine gun positions, mortar-firing points, and mine clusters. The Soviet army now paid back the German brutality in kind. Soldiers in the Wehrmacht who were captured and killed by the Russians were found with ears, tongues, noses, and genitalia cut off.

“In Prussia we had a pretty good life until the fall of 1944, when we had some air attacks,” Horst Woit said. “In general, Germans were not afraid of the English and Americans. Of the Russians? That is another story and for good reason.”

That reason was Nemmersdorf, a small village located 155 miles east of Danzig, in the district of Gumbinnen, near where Horst’s grandparents lived. On October 16, 1944, Soviet forces had entered the town. Soldiers moved through the night, burning homes and torturing civilians. The massacre followed the Red Army’s capture of two other East Prussian districts: Goldap and Gumbinnen.⁵²

Afterward, the mere mention of the village’s name distressed civilians. The authorities used it to persuade civilians that staying and fighting remained their only option. “This, this, my fellow countrymen, is what awaits you if you surrender! We will never surrender! You must fight to the last drop of blood!” said Joseph Goebbels in a speech.⁵³ Goebbels invited international observers to tour the village; he took photos to use in newsreels to scare people. Yes, people were outraged, but his propaganda backfired. Seeing the aftermath let people know what they could expect should the Soviets come to their home. East Prussians wondered whether they could rely on the German forces. More than ever, civilians wanted to leave after hearing about this massacre. When the fighting started, residents living in the city of Königsberg, a mere 60 miles away from the front, shuddered under the artillery.

The East Prussians were desperate to leave before the new year; the Nazi Party strictly forbade such an exodus upon pain of death. “The Nazis would have killed my father for deserting his own business. Stores downtown and furniture factories behind our house and garden had been watched from both sides,” Helga Reuter said. The Reuters had a cruel example of this edict. In early January the Gestapo shot the Reuters’ neighbor for trying to flee.

Even when the Nazi authorities granted permission for the mass flight, some East Prussian civilians stayed, thinking suicide might be a choice against the marauding Red Army. During the war, the US Office for Strategic Services kept an outpost in Stockholm, Sweden. On December 8, 1944, this report was transmitted: “The feelings of the Germans are very mixed—Germans can still be found who believe in German victory by means of ‘new weapons,’ but it would appear as if, on the whole, the Germans believe the war is lost. The terror reports, issued by the German propaganda, of the behavior of the Russians towards German prisoners of war and civilians, has, however, had its effect, and the Germans with whom I have spoken had decided to fight to the last in the conviction that life in a defeated Germany would be unbearable.”⁵⁴

Irene and Ellen Tschinkur’s parents knew that if the Russians reached Gotenhafen, the naval port on the Baltic Sea, it would be catastrophic. They also knew the town officials hadn’t yet planned how to evacuate the population. City officials did not issue any instructions on where to go or how to get there.

On January 12, 1945, the Red Army stood on the banks of the Oder River, the last natural barrier between Moscow and Berlin. Nine days later, on January 21, 1945, Soviets tanks moved into the town of Elbing and shelled the town from the armored vehicles.

Twelve days later, on January 26, the Russians reached the Frisches Haff, a shallow lagoon linking Elbing to Königsberg.⁵⁵ Civilians feared the Red Army, seeking revenge, would show no mercy on a population whose military had unleashed carnage upon them less than a year before.