Four

“WE KNEW WE HAD TO GET OUT”

On the morning of January 26, 1945, ten-year-old Horst Woit sat in his cozy kitchen for the last time. “On this Saturday everything was what we called normal. Mom had made me breakfast. Most likely it was rye bread with marmalade and warm milk; what to eat in those days was not great,” Woit said. “Then hell broke loose. Some young boy in a Hitler Youth uniform knocked on the door and told us the Russian tanks have entered the city Elbing and we have permission to flee. As most people knew this would happen sooner or later, Mom had a suitcase already packed with the exception of sandwiches.”¹

The pair dressed in thick layers for the long walk. They piled on long underwear, ski pants, multiple sweaters, and coats. They wore heavy boots that after a while made Horst’s legs tire with each step. Just before they left the ten-year-old boy slid his uncle’s eight-inch long, black jackknife into his pocket. Outside the snow covered the ground.

“The knife I took out of my uncle’s trunk and hid in my ski pants was the only object I had. Mom did not know about it; I do not remember what she had in that little suitcase either, and I hated the long underwear because it was scratchy. I hated it with a passion,” he said.²

Until this day Horst Woit had lived a relatively normal life in Elbing, a small city located in the northern part of East Prussia. It had a shallow port on the Elbing River, which flows into the Vistula Lagoon, which in turn emptied into the Baltic Sea. The city once belonged to the Hanseatic League, the thirteenth-century trade association that allowed commerce with England, Flanders, France, and the Netherlands. The port lay about 6 miles away from Horst’s home, a long walk for a small boy in any circumstances, but on this frigid day it was a matter of life and death for Horst and his mother.

For days Russian tanks and soldiers had nipped at Elbing’s heels. On the day Horst and Meta Woit left Elbing, Russian troops entered the city to confront the 100,000 German soldiers stationed there. The battle didn’t ignite into full force until after they left. When it did, it lasted two weeks and ended with the Germans’ surrender. Between February and May of 1945 the Soviets virtually destroyed Elbing with its thirteenth-century Gothic architecture. Horst remembers scores of refugees like himself, fleeing with their possessions. The Woits, like so many of their neighbors, had lost faith in the ability of the German army to protect them. They had waited to receive official permission. Helga’s neighbor had tried to leave before official permission was granted; the Germans shot him.

Radio broadcasts still aired Hitler’s directives to “lash out in all directions with fists and claws to gain control of the storm sweeping over our eastern borders.”³ The men who were left were either the very elderly or very young. They were ordered to stand firm, the ailing and sick commanded to fight to the last ounce of their strength. As Irene Tschinkur recalls, her father, Herbert Christoph, wasn’t drafted because he ran a large bakery that employed many people. “He had to stay behind to keep producing bread to feed all those people who had come into Gotenhafen from the eastern parts. Before Mom, Ellen, Evi, and I left, I saw a lot of army trucks roll into the yard to pick up bread—I suppose for the front,” Irene remembered.⁴

Some German citizens in the eastern territories stubbornly held out, choosing to stay on their farms or with their businesses. They believed in the Third Reich’s power to stop the Soviet invaders. Others stayed, hoping the Red Army would show them mercy.

For the most part, women led children and the elderly to safety since so many men were fighting, or wounded, or dead. Many boys over the age of 12 were also gone; the Nazi military had sent them either to the front or to operate antiaircraft guns. In some instances former prisoners who had been sent to work on farms in East Prussia helped their German “hosts” prepare to leave. These prisoners helped properly pack wagons and close up homes. They helped dress children for the long and cold journey, and they stayed with the families through artillery fire, hunger, and the dangerous walk over breaking ice. Hoping to make their way to American or British lines, their fates became inextricably linked with these families.⁵

Horst’s mother, her friend Hildegard, and Hildegard’s eight-year-old daughter Christa decided to leave Elbing together. The two mothers felt they had a better chance traveling in a small group amid the refugees. The heavy suitcases slowed them considerably; it took them two hours to walk the distance to the Elbing River. Horst kept his head down against the cold as they walked. Meta and Horst trudged over the frozen Frisches Haff (the Vistula Lagoon), while the cold wind dipped and swirled, forcing them to bend like saplings in a storm. Gritty dirt blew across the ice. Icy winds swept the land, and snowdrifts rose higher and faster, at times blotting out the roads and trails from view. In some places wooden stakes marked the route to show refugees where to safely cross the ice. Where there were no markers, people followed a trail of broken carts, wagons, and discarded belongings. It had been an uncommonly cold stretch of weather with temperatures hovering at or below zero degrees Fahrenheit; wind gusts caused temperatures to dive as low as minus 25 degrees Celsius (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit) at times. The refugees feared frostbite. People wore fur coats, gloves, mittens, boots, hats pulled low, shawls and scarves; it wasn’t always enough.

All across East Prussia, fleeing civilians pulled sleds heaped with everything from crockery and linens to clothing and carpets. Sharp winds lashed convoys. Wheel ruts scored the icy ground and hundreds of tramping feet, both human and horse, left their mark. Masses of refugees and retreating German army vehicles jammed the narrow roads. Sometimes people had to wait for hours in one spot just to move a few more feet forward. There were also prisoners of war and retreating troops. Refugees saw withdrawing troops dig antitank trenches with their helmets because they no longer had shovels. Later witnesses to the treks described the hundreds of thousands of East Prussians as a piteous stream. Stories of Soviet atrocities drove the refugees forward.

“Russian tanks opened fire on us and drove over refugee columns crushing livestock and people beneath treads with no more thought than someone would swat a fly,” Woit said.⁶ Russian air force planes strafed the Frisches Haff as the refugees fled; the ice cracked under the weight of horse-drawn carts and bodies plunged beneath. Women abandoned their babies, some dead, some gravely ill, to the snow and ice. Many mothers could no longer carry their children after they died. On roads, they left their babies in the deep snow, away from the automobiles and farm wagons.⁷

Frisches Haff (the Vistula Lagoon) is a shallow body of water running alongside the Baltic Sea. It starts about 25 miles east of Danzig and runs northeast to Königsberg along the southern coast of Samland and the port of Pillau. It is less than 60 miles long. Woit’s father had once taken him sledding on this very lagoon. In the days after Horst left, the situation for refugees making their way to the ports grew ever more dire. There were people who had started their journey to the Baltic coast from towns farther east than Elbing. By this point many who were too weak to walk were becoming part of the snowy landscape. Along the way refugees passed stray livestock, ransacked houses, and corpses, some with their skulls bashed, some with their dresses pulled up, all signs that the Soviet army had passed. These were not the hot-blooded atrocities that occurred when fighting units come under hostile fire or experience an onslaught of casualties. Rather, these were cold-blooded, planned actions against people considered lower than animals. A premeditated viciousness never seen on such a large scale in the west marked the eastern front.

Horst remembers that the frozen land felt like ice needles stabbing into the soles of his feet. Irene and Ellen remember eyeing the sky warily, on the lookout for Russian aircraft. Helga remembers hearing stories of children flattened by Russian tanks. The terror of what the Russian soldiers might do propelled them toward the Baltic coast.⁸ Refugees of all ages passed along this frozen route, clutching their belongings, each suitcase, each trundle carrying a lifetime inside: a doll, a wedding picture, family photos. Most took only bare essentials with them, but some took things like baby carriages, mirrors, and flowerpots.

As for the German army, though the retreat was in some cases disorderly, they tried to make sure not to leave behind anything that the Russians could find useful. The military didn’t want to leave a thing for the enemy, not a pound of bread or a drop of oil. Everything had to be given to the army, from livestock and grain reserves to fuel and nonferrous metals. If it couldn’t be transported, it was to be destroyed.⁹ German soldiers blew up bridges, railway junctions, telegraph and telephone wires. However, because the Wehrmacht was on the defensive, their retreat was sometimes as chaotic as the flight of the refugees. In spite of that, German soldiers had almost nothing with them as they retreated; they had no winter clothes, food, or ammunition, and still much equipment was left behind.¹⁰

With few exceptions, the German army was no longer solely fighting on foreign soil in January 1945. This was new to a military machine that even when it surrendered in the past, as it had during World War One, it did so standing on foreign soil. Now foreign troops stood upon German soil.

After a day the Woits and Hildegard and Cristina reached Pillau, about 30 miles northeast of Elbing. Meta Woit knew she and her son were going to get on a transport ship. Eventually she planned to join the rest of her family in Schwerin.

Under cold and cloudy skies the two mothers and two children, along with 30 other people, climbed aboard a 24-foot cutter that was headed on the Vistula River to Danzig. Arriving in the port of Danzig, they boarded another small boat, which sailed to Gotenhafen. Because Meta and Hildegard were traveling with children, and because they were one of the first evacuees to arrive, they easily received boarding passes for the Wilhelm Gustloff.

Horst remembers being impressed by the crowds and the numerous ships. While their little group waited to board the ship, they saw scores of wounded troops arriving in Gotenhafen from the front lines. They joined the thousands of others awaiting evacuation.¹¹

Horst remembers reveling in stories about the great Elbing castle built by the Teutonic knights. During the war, and though Horst doesn’t recall this, the town supported the Nazi Party. He didn’t know about the three subcamps of Stutthof—Elbing, Elbing (Org. Todt), and Schinau. He doesn’t recall “confrontations with prisoners.”¹² He was also just young enough to escape Nazi indoctrination since Hitler Youth membership didn’t start until age ten. Thinking back on his childhood, Horst remembers looking forward to Sundays when soldiers would parade through Elbing’s old town and the band played. Most of Elbing’s men, his father included, were fighting on the eastern front. Horst and his mother never heard from him during the war.

Although the Woits had only peripheral contact with Hitler Youth until the beginning of January, he remembers seeing them all across town. While most children like Horst led quite ordinary lives, the Hitler Youth infiltrated much of daily life by the late autumn of 1940.¹³ Members of Hitler Youth collected streetcar tickets and stood in as workers in munitions factories to replace men sent to the front. They manned antiaircraft guns and dug trenches at the borders of towns and cities. At the end of the war, boys as young as 12 years old were pressed into service on the front. Girls in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM, League of German Girls) worked as nurses’ aides and streetcar conductors. They helped ethnic German farmers settle in annexed Polish territories and even helped with evictions. They also chaperoned Baltic Germans newly arrived to East Prussia.¹⁴

Meanwhile in Königsberg, the Reuter family coped with the war years in their own way.

“We had a lovely childhood, but the teenager time? Forget about it,” said Helga Reuter Knickerbocker, who was born in 1927 to Kurt Reuter and Marta Walloch.¹⁵ The Reuters owned a furniture factory in Königsberg that had dozens of showrooms, each more well appointed than the last, with walnut dining room tables, satin smooth console tables, and elegantly framed mirrors. Helga and her older sisters—Ingeborg, or Inge as she was nicknamed, and Ursula—lived in a spacious home on the same property as the factory. Inge, born in 1921, “was beautiful—outside and such goodness inside. We were so very close.”

Being older than Horst, Helga Reuter had to join Hitler Youth. As part of the Hitler Youth, Helga remembers going door-to-door collecting recyclables and gathering paper, scrap iron, rags, and bones. For years Nazi Germany had been “carrying on a desperate campaign to remedy her acute shortage of raw materials. . . . Kitchen remains are collected, made into fodder for cattle. Old newspapers may no longer be used for kindling fires, sardine cans no longer have individual openers (saving 2,000 tons of iron a year), men’s shirts are made two inches shorter.”¹⁶

Shortages of clothing, food, and fuel meant families across East Prussia depended on ration cards. The Reuters felt fortunate to have a small but bountiful vegetable garden and to raise chickens and rabbits. The family depended on their ration cards for daily staples such as flour, sugar, and butter. They also were allowed milk, available to families with children under 18. However, Helga didn’t like milk, so her mother could cook with the precious liquid.

Before the war the upper-middle-class family employed a cook and housekeeper. They also had a chauffeur until her sister Ursula turned 18 and, to the delight of her father, she could drive. The Reuters were rich, but Helga said the hired help had been mostly because her father suffered from limited eyesight. Helga’s mother, Marta, acted as his eyes; she was always by his side, never wanting or willing to leave him.

Helga’s parents and grandparents had long called East Prussia home. According to family lore, Helga’s great-great grandparents, who had been Lutheran, had moved to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, from Austria to escape tensions between the Calvinists and the Lutherans. Her mother’s parents died when Helga was four. While Helga doesn’t remember either of them, she grew up hearing about how they indulged her. When her parents weren’t busy working in their furniture showroom, they too indulged the three daughters. Each summer Helga’s parents took the girls to a resort town on the Baltic Sea. There the Reuter family delighted in time spent on the shores of the crystalline, cobalt waters. She and her sister swam, sometimes in the smooth inner waters of the lagoons; sometimes they braved the strong Baltic waves.

Before the Wilhelm Gustloff, Helga remembers the Baltic Sea as a beautiful place for fun. “The Baltic Sea was so beautiful,” Helga said. “The sand was very light and fine; there was no pollution. But even when we had a hot summer, the Baltic Sea was still so cold.”

Yet in January 1945 seashore excursions only existed in the postcard of memory. Ice now covered Königsberg Bay, although in some places it wasn’t thick enough to support the unending procession of heavily laden wagons. The ice often cracked beneath horses and people, sending them to their deaths. Refugees leaving Königsberg had to navigate about 15 miles of this bay to reach the fishing port of Pillau, located across a strait from the northeastern tip of a sandy strip of land called Frische Nehrung. Some people made this crossing in six to eight hours; others took days to cross the ice. Blocked roads rendered cars useless. Since the lagoon was frozen, rescue ships couldn’t enter the inner waters and get to the refugees sooner. The evacuees had no choice but to hazard a trip over the lagoon.

Once the authorities lifted the restriction on leaving, Milda Bendrich hurried to gather her belongings, including baby blankets and a change of clothes. Then she closed her home forever.

“On about January 27 I had a very early morning visit from a friend, a Marine Oberleutant,” Milda Bendrich wrote her daughter Inge many years after the war ended.¹⁷ “He came to us to ask if and how we intended to flee. There was no “if” for me, as I had heard enough about the Polish revenge on the Germans who chose to remain in Poland. The “how” I imagined would be by train. Now I learned that the train line ended in Pommern and the refugees were forced to walk the rest of the journey through the snow. I had been offered by my friends, a family by the name of Sika, to join them in fleeing to Sudetengau. I declined and they left Gotenhafen.”

Milda’s parents, ethnic German refugees from central Poland, helped the new mother pack. Together they gathered clothing, linens, crockery, and books. In her letter, Milda noted the precise measurements of how she loaded suitcases and packets on “a 1.8-meter long sledge, the luggage reached 1.7 meters high.” She estimated the height of the sledge because it was just taller than her father, she wrote Inge. Together the five adults pushed and pulled the sledge to the train station. The wind whipped their hair, sending snow into their eyes. A mile-long path separated them from the station. Milda and her parents and their neighbors kept getting stuck in the deep snow. The caravan of refugees planned on taking the train to Ochtersum/Hildesheim in Germany.

“You, Inge, were the only one who enjoyed this trip, as you were comfortably positioned and sheltered from the rough wind in a gap between the luggage as if you were sitting in a lounge chair,” Milda Bendrich wrote in a letter to her daughter. The only thing Milda Bendrich ever saw again from her home was a tattered carton full of wool remnants and an old dressing gown.¹⁸ The package didn’t arrive until well after the war. Inge still marvels that someone had taken the time to pack the box and track her mother down.

From the autumn of 1944 on, European and American newspapers published various versions of this headline: “Berliners are receiving the first visible warning that the Red Army stands before the frontiers of the Reich.”¹⁹ In Berlin, Germany’s beating heart, headlines like these caused alarm.²⁰ However, as several historians have noted, by 1944 it was clear Germany would lose the war.

Yet, before German officials allowed civilians to leave, Nazi administrators were already escaping from East Prussia, in part to set up a base of secure operations on the other side of the Baltic Sea, far from Berlin.²¹ The United States watched this unfold from its Office of Strategic Service station across the Baltic Sea. In September 1944 it reported that Germans have two choices: They could either endure the complete disintegration of the Nazi Party or take a chance for rebuilding their nation on a sound basis. The OSS reported that many in the upper levels of Nazi leadership were trying to drag out the war in order to escape to neutral lands where they might challenge the postwar situation using vast sums of hidden money.²²

The OSS Stockholm station debated how best to exploit these weaknesses. The summer before refugees embarked on the Wilhelm Gustloff, OSS operatives brainstormed on ways to drive a deeper wedge between the Nazi party and the civilians it was forcing to stay in vulnerable lands. The Allies, particularly the Americans, wanted to use the civilians’ growing alarm at the Russian advance as well as any perceptions of privileged treatment given to soldier’s wives and dependents.²³ Inequality between the German people and their party leaders ran rampant. The military continued to force young boys into the Volkssturm home guard or militia. These unfortunate conscripts had no enthusiasm and many failed to fight. Meanwhile, Gauleiter Erich Koch, the provincial governor in charge of East Prussia, sent his family out of harm’s way. He did this in spite of telling people that “No true German would allow himself even the thought that East Prussia might fall into Russian hands.”²⁴ He followed the lead of Adolf Hitler. In December 1944, the Soviet troops threatened Wolf’s Lair, the massive East Prussian field headquarters near Rastenberg, and so the Führer retreated to Berlin. The OSS wanted to publicize any “irrational military orders, which may encourage desertion or surrender or lead to a relaxation of discipline with detail.”²⁵ Helga Reuter certainly considered the advice given to women and children to be most irrational. “They told me and my sister to stay behind and throw boiling water at invading Russian soldiers,” she said, the corners of her mouth tilting upward ever so slightly at the absurdity of the suggestion.

With its grand cathedral and large historic city center, Königsberg became one of what Nazi authorities designated as a fortress city. Fourteen forts surrounded the major East Prussian city. Starting in mid-January more than 700 fighters hunkered inside each stone-walled fort. Civilians joined them. If they had no armaments, they were supposed to help the defense using homemade weapons. Civilians, virtual hostages in these locations, often endured incessant artillery fire from surrounding Soviet forces. Women, children, and those who escaped conscription in the Volkssturm died alongside soldiers. These cities were to be defended at all cost. “Our opponents must know that every kilometer that they want to advance into our country will cost them rivers of blood,” Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler said in October 1944.²⁶ Fires raged across the city.

Before Erich Koch fled, he ordered hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and Russian prisoners of war to fortify the city. They had to build more tank traps, foxholes, gun emplacements, ditches, and bolstered cellars to prepare for street-to-street and house-to-house combat.²⁷ Koch had started the earthworks when the Russians began their 1944 offensive. Koch prohibited civilians from leaving even as war came closer and even as the Soviet army began shelling Königsberg. The thunderous artillery was so strong, it rattled people from the inside out. Königsberg wouldn’t fall until April 9, and until it did, the German military and political leadership cleaved to the idea that so long as the old city remained in German hands, then Germany still held East Prussia.²⁸

On January 20 the Soviet army took Tilsit, located on the south bank of the Nerman River. Between January 21 and 22 the Red Army marched into Allenstein and stormed into Insterburg. Four days later, on January 26, the Red Army arrived on the Baltic coast, surrounding the German Fourth Army on the Frisches Haff, the lagoon extending south from Königsberg. Russian guns trained on Königsberg.²⁹

In the Reuter house, Helga’s parents decided she and Inge would be safer in Berlin with their married sister, Ursula. The girls would have to flee alone. Helga’s father would have been killed for deserting, so her mother stayed by his side. “My parents never argued in front of us, but she, my Mom, used to dream. She didn’t want us to go; she said, ‘Over my dead body.’ But he, my father, banged his fist on the table. He wanted his girls to get to safety,” Helga said.

Kurt Reuter, who was not drafted because of his poor eyesight, was right in fearing the worst. Earlier that morning, Helga and Inge happened to be talking in Inge’s room. They sat on a window seat, occasionally looking down at the street. They weren’t talking about anything serious, just idle chatter to take their minds off the situation, Helga said. A shot cracked through the girls’ talk. Their heads snapped toward the window. On the street below, a group of women huddled. Then the sisters saw an SS soldier dragging a young girl toward their factory driveway. Helga and Inge watched the scene unfold. An SS officer raised his arm and pointed the pistol. Helga and Inge sprinted down the stairs and ran outside. The thin young woman, still warm, lay on the cold pavement; strips of gray fabric wrapped her otherwise bare feet. A shredded gray army blanket swaddled her body.

“Now we knew we had to get out. We were scared,” Helga said.

It was immediately decided that Helga, Inge, and their aunt, Ruth Walloch, would take the train from Königsberg. In his barn, their uncle Erick Reuter had left behind a pair of brown horses, Hans and Farmosa, and a wooden wagon after he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Erick had also owned several cows that were taken by the German army stationed in Königsberg. Helga’s father kept the horses in the factory garage, which had long since been emptied of delivery trucks. A son of a neighboring Polish farmer cared for the horses. And so the three young women mounted the horses and, with the Polish boy, they headed to the train station. Aside from their overstuffed knapsacks, they carried chicken and rabbit meat wrapped in cloth.

Helga remembers she quickly grew tired of riding and walking, but that in frigid temperatures it was the only way to keep warm. Not that she felt cold. She remembers she was so anxious she didn’t feel the bracing air upon her face. She and Inge knew if they rested or sat upon a sledge or wagon for even a few minutes they risked frostbite.

As fuel shortages increased, transportation became chaotic, and the general health among the German home population declined.³⁰ When Helga and Inge reached the train station they realized they’d be lucky to board. The Königsberg train station resembled a zoo. Hordes of people jockeyed for position. There were no working toilets, no available food, and no water. Soldiers pushed ahead of civilians. Refugees remember vicious fights to secure seats on trains. Some people couldn’t shove or beat their way on board and instead sat on top of cars or tried to hang on between cars. The trains reeked of excrement and urine. There was no medical attention. Some passengers who died en route were thrown out of open berths into the snow. Other refugees, chilled to the marrow, recalled how the SS doled out warm clothes. Historians later documented that these clothes were taken from Jews who had been deported to concentration camps.³¹

In January 1945, the Reich’s transport system was fast coming to a standstill. Electricity and gas supplies were rapidly dwindling, telecommunication systems were breaking. At the Königsberg train station, the Reuter sisters and their aunt never had to try their luck because the train never left the station. Allied bombers had destroyed a railroad bridge just down the track. Helga remembers how she, Inge, and Ruth waited for hours in the crowded station before they were finally able to piece together the story. The word was the Germans had reduced the bridge to rubble so the Soviets might not pass. Forced to turn back, the Reuter sisters found their parents, Kurt and Marta, still at home. In fact, the last refugee train had pulled out of Königsberg on January 22, days before the three women arrived.

It was practice at the time to quarter soldiers with families. Wilhelm Krantz, a German officer quartered with the Reuters, lost two sons in the war. One served in the Luftwaffe and was shot down over Russia. His other son served on a U-boat and died in the North Atlantic. Krantz didn’t hide his hatred for Hitler from the Reuters. After Helga, Inge, and Ruth came back, he advised them to leave by another route. He did this although official permission had yet to be granted to civilians. Helga and Inge were lucky to receive assistance since most people who were still in Königsberg, or anywhere in East Prussia, didn’t get help from the military.³² The German Fourth Army, which was in the vicinity of Königsberg, pushed ahead of civilians and frequently ordered them off the roads to make way for them.

That night, about eight officers knocked on the Reuters’ door asking for quarter. They looked calm. They told the Reuters their truck had broken down and asked if they could stay until it could be fixed.

Marta Reuter, Helga’s mother, brewed ersatz coffee, a chalky liquid made out of corn. Later that evening the officers readied to leave. They helped the three girls into the back of the newly repaired truck and off they drove toward Elbing.

The group heard the fighting; the Red Army was nearly upon them. The soldiers, the Reuter sisters, and their aunt reached Elbing, which was about 60 miles away from their home. They tried to travel over land, but they were stopped in Elbing by the same chomping Russian tanks Horst had heard.

“I saw three Russian tanks on the hill. They saw the group of us on the autobahn. We jumped into a ditch to escape the shooting,” Helga recounted. “We just made it. The Russians killed nearly everybody. But it was nighttime and they couldn’t see much.”

It had taken nearly 36 hours for the band of refugees to reach Elbing. It took only two hours for the truck to return to Königsberg and the house on General Litzman Strasse. The driver showed no caution.

The next day, a soldier offered to take the Reuter girls to Pillau, the harbor opening from Frisches Haff to the Baltic Sea. Frisches Haff still remained the most direct route from Königsberg. This little harbor of Pillau, from which 441,000 refugees fled, was the main staging point for Operation Hannibal. Even now, Nazi propaganda continued full force. Authorities told civilians that hundreds of new tanks had been unloaded at Pillau and that the Germans were moving north to save them. The refugees were promised they would be “Home in time for the spring sowing.” They were told it was all part of Führer’s intricate plan “to let the Russians in, the more surely to destroy them.”³³

Again Helga, Inge, and their Aunt Ruth hitched a ride in the back of a truck. The three lay still. SS officers stopped the truck shortly before it reached the harbor. The sisters and their aunt huddled under the benches, using the soldiers’ legs and gear as cover. They heard the soldiers come to the back of the truck. Helga’s heart pounded as the soldiers scanned the open bed with their flashlights. The soldiers didn’t see them hiding.

Along the way the sisters and their aunt had passed soldiers, Waffen SS, and uniformed police. Many of those troops stopped refugees on the roadside, searching them for their identity papers. Often the police stopped older men and teenage boys and shoved them onto trucks to be conscripted into the Volksstrum. Most would only last until their bodies gave out or were felled by a Russian bullet. Meanwhile, the refugees raced to pass the German engineers tasked with destroying the sheets of thick ice covering the rivers to impede the Russians’ advance. The German navy deployed icebreakers to open the way so that three new torpedo boats could pass from Elbing to Pillau without falling into Soviet hands.³⁴

It took Helga, Inge, and Ruth some time to find a boat and captain willing to transport them to Gotenhafen. Finally they found passage aboard a small tugboat, the Elbing IV. Russian fire had damaged the sturdy little boat; its waterlines were broken and some of the wood was splintered. In high seas, water seeped in. They had to return to Pillau to find another boat to Gotenhafen.

The sight of the harbor shocked the Reuter sisters and their aunt. Almost 70 years later Helga remembers that an overpowering stench pervaded the port. Rats ran over mounds of garbage. There were reports of people butchering and eating wayward livestock.

East Prussians used all means of transportation, including wagons, carts, carriages, horses, even cows, to flee the advancing Russian forces. Some people hitched inverted tables to horses, riding on these makeshift sleds with their belongings. Horse hooves slipped on the ice, wagons crashed and splintered. Flight routes constantly changed due to weather and fighting. Although some people walked as many as 50 miles a day, it took weeks for others to traverse the land and frozen harbors. All the while they faced Russian attacks from soldiers, tanks, and airplanes. People dove into snow to hide while the bullets punched through the ice.

Another route to Gotenhafen wound through the Frisches Nehrung, the narrow land spit on the northern side of the Vistula Lagoon. From there one could travel westward to Danzig. Hundreds of thousands of civilians tried that route; snowstorms claimed thousands of them. By the end of January, when the refugees arrived in Gotenhafen, the city of 3 million people had swelled by another million. A system of housing authorities and reception districts, called Aufnahmekrasse, aided the influx of refugees. The authorities wanted to keep people from sleeping in the streets. It was a futile effort; at the end of January 1945 the refugee population overwhelmed the housing authorities and districts. It was difficult to find food and shelter with so many people.

Back at the fishing port town of Pillau, the Reuter sisters and their aunt boarded a torpedo boat. On board the three shared a bowl of hot split pea soup that Inge had gotten from the galley. They warmed their hands on the bowl. Pillau, a small coastal town, normally had a population of 5,000; now more than 40,000 people crowded its streets. Indeed, as the Soviet army advanced, people were pushed further west. In the harbor towns along the Baltic Sea, from Königsberg to Elbing, the population swelled. Knees, elbows, and rucksacks banged into each other on the boats usually used to shuttle to large ships in outer harbors. The boat the Reuters took traveled about 11 knots per hour over choppy water. Seasick, Inge stood near the rail the whole time.

By the time Horst, Helga, and Irene and Ellen reached Gotenhafen by separate routes, their homelands had virtually vanished. Many towns and cities lay in ruins. The Soviets now controlled East Prussia, Silesia, and the parts of Poland previously under German rule. In Gotenhafen ships crowded the harbor. Ocean liners and fishing boats, dinghies and trawlers: anything that floated and could carry people was docked in the port.

Allied propaganda leaflets dropped from airplanes on the retreating German troops tried to lure German officers and soldiers to desert and inform civilians that the end of the war was near. The message was simple: The German people should rise up and renounce Nazism.³⁵ “At all fronts the enemy is advancing while we are unable to offer serious resistance to him. . . . In the East entire armies are dissolving or are hopelessly hemmed in.”³⁶ Other bits of propaganda implored German officers and civilians to lay down their arms. It highlighted the ferocity of the Russian advance and the callousness of their own Fatherland: “Meanwhile the Cossacks and the hordes of foreign workers are turned loose on our women and children. Germany is bombed into rubble and ashes and no one will build it up again.”³⁷

Irene and Ellen Tschinkur never discussed the politics of war with their parents. Everyone was busy surviving. Their nighttime ritual meant never going to sleep without first putting their coats and heavy shoes next to their beds; screaming air raid sirens and runs to bomb shelters regularly interrupted dreams.

“We had dog tags with our name and blood type on them in a little leather case that we wore all during the war. And we had gas masks that smelled terrible; we had them all the time. We were told never to pick up anything on the street—anything that looked interesting, shiny,” Ellen said.

When darkness settled over the house at day’s end, the family lowered the heavy blackout curtains. One of their dearest possessions, somehow saved from home, is a snapshot of Irene, Ellen, and Evi. The lens captured the three girls, all wearing enormous bows in their hair. In it they are seen lighting their advent candles, encircled with a chocolate-decorated wreath. The blackout curtains sit tight against the large windows. Allied bombers flew overhead and illuminated the night sky. But those thick curtains couldn’t protect the littlest Tschinkur. In 1943 the Allied bombing of Gotenhafen intensified. One night, while their little baby sister Dorit slept in her crib a bomb blew out all the windows and French doors. Broken glass fell into the room and the baby died from a brain injury. Another time Irene remembers going to the market with her mother and seeing a hand lying next to a bomb crater.

Then the day came for the Tschinkur sisters and their mother to leave. It was decided that Evelyn, their favorite cousin who lived in Poznan, would accompany Serafima, Irene, and Ellen. Evi was a few years older than Irene, and she looked up to Evi and wanted to be with her all the time. Evi’s mother was sick with tuberculosis and too weak to make the trip. Their father, too old for the draft and thus far not selected for the Home Guard because his job running the bakery was deemed essential, decided to stay behind and vowed to meet them as soon as possible. All Serafima took with her was a briefcase packed with jewels and money.

In January 1945 the Allies bombed Gotenhafen more frequently and Eva Dorn remembers how the light of Russian artillery made the distant sky glow red. She never interacted with civilians now that she served on a navy base. However, Eva recalled going to the city’s hospital to help after one bombing. She saw people burned so badly only their eyes seemed alive.

Eva Dorn had extra duties in the Women’s Naval Auxiliary once the pace of the Russian advance picked up. They were coming closer every day and her spotlight battery was ordered to dig antitank trenches.

“Then we were given a choice—to go on a ship or stay and fight for the Fatherland. I’m not a hero,” Eva said, explaining how she ended up on the Wilhelm Gustloff.

As hundreds upon thousands of East Prussian civilians made their way to ports on the sea, so too did concentration camp inmates from Stutthof. In January 1945 the Nazis started evacuating the concentration camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the first death camp to be evacuated; others quickly followed. Camp guards forced the inmates out and marched them further west; some of these marches lasted four months. The Nazis wanted to relocate prisoners to camps further west and deeper inside Germany to prevent the Allies from learning about their extermination program.

There were nearly 50,000 prisoners left in the Stutthof camp, most of them Jews. About 5,000 prisoners were marched to the Baltic Sea, forced into the water and machine-gunned down to drown. The rest were forced to march west. The march passed through towns, and when locals saw them, they sometimes threw bread at the starving, risking their lives as well as the prisoners’. The prisoners marched until their legs could no longer move. When they fell a guard either shot the prisoner or beat the prisoner with his rifle, then he kicked the body to the roadside. About 2,000 prisoners died on the way. The Soviets cut off the forced march of the barely surviving prisoners in Lauenberg in eastern Germany, and the SS forced the inmates back to Stutthof where thousands more died.³⁸

“Then they evacuated our camp and we started walking,” said camp survivor Ruth Weintraub. “If you couldn’t keep up with the speed, a German would just shoot them right there or club you.”³⁹ Near Danzig they came to a barn where they rested; there were perhaps 300 left of 1,000. “We didn’t even realize we were sleeping on dead bodies,” Ruth continued. When morning came she and her fellow inmates saw Russian tanks, and the Russian soldiers began throwing food at them.

Prisoners suffered from scurvy and other diseases related to vitamin deficiencies. They had skin problems, diarrhea, lung and heart disease, and frostbite. Most wore tattered rags for clothes. They wrapped their legs and feet in mud-covered cloth strips or straw. Stutthof prisoners walked wearing makeshift clogs and thin blankets.

Stutthof survivor Stanislaw Jaskolski described his march: “Then came the day the twentieth of January 1945, the year we stood for the last roll call. It was very cold, minus 4 F to minus 22 F, snow was a blizzard and snow drifts. And then they read to us that we were going to be evacuated and that no one was allowed to rush away from the road or he would be killed. They gave us shirts for the road (trip), long johns, a blanket for two, half a loaf of bread and half margarine.”⁴⁰ Jaskolski continued, “When we were brought to the road to Gdansk/Danzig we looked at how so many of us remained in hell, how [in spite of] the crematorium and gas chamber, gallows, in spite of the frost and sadness, we were doing good. We marched the whole day and we arrived at the prisoner ships from Zatoke Gdanske to the Kaszub side.”

From January through March 1945 inmates of state prisons in the eastern territories were also being marched toward penal institutions in central and western Germany. They were in better physical shape than the concentration camps’ inmates, but they had few clothes or shoes, and little to no food. Many of these prisoners also perished from cold, exhaustion, or starvation along the way. Guards and SS executed those prisoners who couldn’t keep up. Other prisoners were “methodically massacred” when the Russians broke through the East Prussian lines.⁴¹

In 1945, when young children like Helga, Inge, and Horst left, they couldn’t know that gone were train rides to grandparents or traditional first day of school cookie coronets. When parents like Meta and Milda decided to go, they sensed life would never return to the one they knew, that this was not but a brief hiccup. Perhaps they could keep their promises and reunite with the rest of the family when the world quieted.

Yet, for now the population embraced the notion of a German maxim: “Lieber ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende”—“An end with horror is better than a horror without end.”⁴²

Per Admiral Karl Dönitz’s orders, Rear Admiral Conrad Englehardt was fine-tuning Operation Hannibal. The first boats had sailed from Gotenhafen to Kiel without incident. In Gotenhafen German naval officers helped to ensure the evacuation of sick and wounded troops. Civilian or merchant marine counterparts helped oversee the evacuation as well. Every day hundreds of thousands of East Prussians arrived in the Baltic port. The Russians were advancing quickly overland. By the time the refugees reached Gotenhafen, the Red Army was just outside Königsberg.