On the same day, at around noon, Adolf Hitler announced in his bunker in Berlin that his time was up, and that he would commit suicide that afternoon with his wife, Eva, whom he had married the day before: ‘I myself and my wife choose to die, rather than face the ignominy of deposition or capitulation.’ Hitler had given a great deal of thought to his death and the surest method of killing himself; an SS doctor in the bunker kept a ready supply of brass capsules of prussic acid—the liquid form of hydrogen cyanide. The Führer had convinced himself of their efficacy by having his Alsatian poisoned in the Reich Chancellery garden. Nothing could go wrong at this final stage; he was determined not to fall into Soviet hands alive. He knew the fate of his old political role model Mussolini, executed only two days before and strung up by his legs, along with his mistress, in front of an angry crowd in the middle of Milan. Hitler was determined not to fall into his opponents’ hands, alive or dead. Nothing was to remain of him: ‘It is our will to be cremated immediately in the place where I have done most of my daily work during my twelve years’ service to my people.’
Soviet grenades rained down without cease throughout the Reich Chancellery garden and the government district. The thunder of cannon fire grew ever fiercer. Walls and houses were collapsing on all sides. A thick haze of acrid smoke and dust smothered the entire area, and sand crunched between people’s teeth. While Hitler’s adjutant and chauffeur hurried to fetch the canisters of petrol they would need to carry out his final order, their Führer sat down to lunch with his cook and secretaries. After lunch, he said goodbye to them and his other trusted employees—among them his close confidant Martin Bormann, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his wife, Magda, and a few high-ranking officers. A weary handshake, a few mumbled words. His wife stood beside him. He was wearing his habitual brown uniform jacket and a pair of black trousers.
• • •
As the soldiers of the 1st Belorussian Front pushed forward into the heart of Berlin, their comrades from the 2nd Belorussian Front were outside Demmin. Late on the morning of 30 April, the first troops of the 30th Tank Brigade reached the small southern district of Vorwerk, just across the River Tollense from the old town. They had seventeen IS-122 heavy tanks, a number of armoured personnel carriers and self-propelled guns, and about four hundred infantry soldiers. On the twenty-kilometre march to Demmin that morning they had captured 805 prisoners, 120 cars and ten motorbikes, and destroyed a battery of three flak guns that had been supposed to hold off their steel behemoths. There were still boy-faced soldiers lying dead by the roadside days later. Towards noon, the tanks got stuck at the Tollense, because the bridge had been blown up. Soviet pioneers set to work to build a temporary bridge over the not quite twenty-metre-wide river.
Before long, the Soviets were also making inroads from the east along Reich Road 110, heading for the tree-lined stretch known as Jarmener Chaussee, which led towards the town centre. Here on the edge of town, in the abandoned house by the cemetery, Irene Bröker and Dr P. and his wife had known since morning that their attempt to get away had failed, and that the advancing Soviets would overrun them. ‘We heard desolate cries and shots in the distance,’ she later remembered. In vain they searched the cellar and attic for somewhere to hide. Out in the garden, Irene came across a brick-lined shelter dug into the ground beneath a compost heap, its narrow entrance concealed by raspberry canes. They would soon need it:
When we heard explosions and then gunfire, it was clear to us all that the Russian army had caught up with us. The four of us fled into the hole beneath the compost heap with a blanket. I saw soldiers’ legs in the garden next door and heard my heart pounding in my ears.
She sat at the entrance to the passageway, the reek of slurry and the roar of the advancing army all around her. Alarmed by the noise and his mother’s whispers, two-year-old Holger set up a wail. Irene saw a soldier’s boot trampling twigs, inches from her face, and heard a shot whistle past her neck into the shelter. A solitary Soviet soldier, with an old, broad peasant’s face, grey and fierce and furrowed, drove her out of the hole at gunpoint. Irene Bröker’s flight from the Russians was over. The soldier took her back to the house and told her in stuttering German that he’d been taken prisoner by the Germans in the First World War. They saw him often after that; he’d drop in on them to make sure that the little boy was all right. The soldier warned Irene and her companions to be careful:
He told us that not all soldiers were good—there were a lot more coming and we ought to hide. We saw Russian planes passing over town. The town centre was swathed in thick smoke. There were fires all over the place. When I looked out of the attic window, I could see flames blazing up into the sky.
• • •
Driving back from Nossendorf with the petrol on board and his heart in his mouth, Gustav Skibbe only just made it to the west bank of the Peene before his comrades blew up the bridge. In his war journal, his usually neat handwriting becomes a nervous scrawl, as if he were reliving that drive back across the Peene with the hot breath of war on his neck:
When we got back to the bridge by the harbour, the Russians were there, having come in over Tollense Bridge! Shelling in town from Tutow at the same time. Hasty retreat…as far as Gnoien.
That was Gustav Skibbe’s last entry on Demmin. He never saw the town again.
• • •
After the Wehrmacht and the SS had, for reasons of military strategy, spared Demmin a final battle, some of the townspeople found the courage to ignore the fanatics’ threats. White flags, hastily cobbled together out of poles and sheets or towels, were hung out of windows. There was even one rigged up on the church tower, visible for miles. At the vicarage, a sheet was fixed in the dormer window. The vicar’s wife, Maria Buske, and her father had spent the day before on their hands and knees, chiselling out the bars of their cellar windows with household tools. They had eventually managed to break open an escape route, but now that the bridges had been blown up, there was nowhere to escape to.
Maria Buske and her two small sons had been waiting for the boys’ father to return since he’d been called up at the beginning of the war. She worked for the Red Cross and remained in the vicarage, a two-storey house marked out from the others on Baustrasse by its distinctive gable. Over the past days it had become something of a refuge: eighteen people, including a refugee family from Stettin with seven children, were crammed into the small house. The Buskes had abandoned their last-minute attempt to leave, because there was no longer any way out of town. Maria would later describe that night for her son:
We young women sat in the cellar with the children. My parents went into the garage at the end of the garden to avoid the risk of shrapnel, and so as to be on hand in case we were buried under debris. We were the only people left on our block. The others had fled to the country to escape the shock of the first Russian attack.
In the cellar, they heard shots all the way from Treptower Strasse, as the first Russian tanks moved into Demmin. But the final battle wasn’t fought by the Wehrmacht or the SS, by reservists or a trained guerrilla force; it was fought by a lone civilian, Gerhard Moldenhauer, a schoolmaster from Demmin. When fellow teacher Wilhelm Damann met him in the early 1930s—they had flats in the same building—Moldenhauer was an opponent of Hitler. As Damann later explained, this meant that his neighbour faced a dilemma when Hitler came to power:
He was too intelligent to be taken in by the hocus-pocus of the Third Reich, but at the same time too ambitious and too young to be willing or able to be relegated to the sidelines. Frau Moldenhauer and their three children were keen Hitler supporters, the girls in particular.
Like millions of other Germans, he’d had to make a choice: either he could toe the line and silence his inner voice, or he could stay true to his convictions and be ostracised. On this choice hung, on the one hand, his future and the unity of his family and, on the other, his peace of mind and self-respect. Unlike his colleague Damann, who was fired when the Nazis came to power, Moldenhauer decided to take a gamble on life in the ‘new’ Germany rather than resist the pressure of circumstances and the expectations of his family. He joined the Nazi Party, opening the door to a teaching career in the Third Reich.
At around noon on 30 April 1945, the entire Moldenhauer family was sitting in the cellar beneath the building at 6 Treptower Strasse. They heard the three bridges being blown up. They heard the rumble and roar of the approaching tanks. After a while, Gerhard Moldenhauer took out his gun and shot his wife and three children, one after the other. Then he made his way upstairs. Damann heard the details from a neighbour:
Old Frau Rentner, who lived on our corridor and stayed in the same flat until the day she died, later told me that Herr Moldenhauer had come out of the cellar and said: ‘I’ve just shot my wife and children. Now I’m going to do in a few Russians!’
From the window of his flat, Moldenhauer fired a few shots at the advance guard of Soviet soldiers who were moving in along Treptower Strasse. It was a short, violent skirmish. Before the soldiers could storm the house, Moldenhauer had shot himself in the head.
When Wilhelm Damann came to write his report on Demmin a decade after these events, he tried to make sense of this desperate act. But he cited neither Moldenhauer’s hatred and fear of the Russians, nor his desire to defend Demmin at whatever cost. As Damann saw it, the root cause lay in Moldenhauer’s past life and the betrayal of his principles—a betrayal which caught up with him in the moment of defeat. ‘I see his act as that of a gambler who’d staked everything on one card and knew he’d lost. Presumably shame played a part too.’
• • •
Soon afterwards, there was another gunfight in the town centre. Some Hitler Youth boys apparently decided to do their bit for final victory by firing shots from the gatehouse windows in the thick walls of Luise Gate, and the Soviets responded by blasting anti-tank grenades into the facade of the ancient gatehouse—at the foot of which, beneath the ground, the Strohscheins were sheltering in their cellar. Ursula Strohschein later described what it was like:
Gunshots cracked, shells roared against the east side of Luise Gate. We sat there, just on the other side of it, afraid it might collapse at any moment. But we didn’t have to wait long. The shooting was soon over. All was quiet. Very cautiously, we ventured out of the cellar.
Out on the street, Ursula risked a glance through the gate and immediately shrank back. A young officer in an earth-brown uniform jumped off a cart and came hurtling towards her—but ran off again, after giving her a quick pat on the shoulder. She had seen her first Russian. It was the encounter they had all been dreading for months.
• • •
On 23 October 1944, the Germans had been confronted with a reality for which Nazi propaganda, with its terrifying slogans about ‘Bolshevik Mongol hordes’, had long prepared them. On this day, Wehrmacht soldiers reclaimed the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf from the Red Army and found traces of a massacre. Soviet soldiers, setting foot on enemy soil for the first time after three and a half years of war, had killed a number of German civilians. The Wehrmacht soldiers’ first reports spoke of about twenty deaths—women, children and elderly people. Other facts were harder to ascertain, not least because the propaganda machine in Berlin immediately sent in photographers and cameramen to mount a sensationalist campaign.
In the days and weeks that followed, party newspapers reported repeatedly on ‘the horrors of Nemmersdorf’. Shocking photo spreads showed close-ups of murdered Germans, their heads punctured with shot wounds, their skulls crushed, their faces battered beyond recognition. They showed long rows of dead children and of women who had clearly been raped, their skirts pushed up and their underwear ripped away. Cinemas ran newsreels showing looted refugee carts, twisted children’s bodies in muddy pits, horrified onlookers gawping at rows of corpses, and the ubiquitous shot of the village sign, so that it wasn’t long before almost everyone had heard of Nemmersdorf. The aim was to show the Germans what to expect in the case of a Soviet invasion, and there is no doubt that the images left their mark. But rather than fuel a loathing of the ‘Soviet beasts’ and a fierce spirit of resistance, they terrified the civilian population. Although the Nazi leadership held out against evacuation to the end, there was soon a steady flow of people leaving East Prussia. Three months later, this flow had swelled to a mass exodus, with handcarts and horse-drawn wagons.
In January 1945, the Red Army launched its winter offensive against East Prussia as it pushed on towards Berlin. Those who didn’t escape in time felt the full force of retribution for the crimes committed during the German war of extermination. Many refugees were trapped between the Allied and Soviet fronts or caught up with by Russian panzer spearheads. Hardened by the war, whipped up by Russian propaganda and stripped of their inhibitions by alcohol, the Red Army soldiers went on a massive crime spree. German women and girls, in particular, from the very young to the very old, were exposed to horrific violence. It is estimated that up to two million women were raped by Red Army soldiers in the final stages of the war. The frenzy of the troops was such that even their own leaders considered them a risk to military operations. The commander of the 2nd Belorussian Front called for severe punishment for looting, violence and wanton destruction, but to no real effect. As the Red Army advanced, the atrocities begun in East Prussia continued in West Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania: everywhere houses were burnt down, women raped, civilians murdered. As the columns of refugees moved westwards, fears spread that the hysterical Nazi propaganda might have been spot on for once. By the time the first real-life Red Army soldiers reached Western Pomerania, everyone had heard the stories.
• • •
Roaring diesel engines, the rattle of tank treads on cobblestones, the tramp of boots marching in double time. After two brief exchanges of fire in the early afternoon of 30 April, the fight for Demmin was over and the town occupied by Soviet troops. There was no doubt who had won control. Now the two armoured brigades that had captured Demmin were to continue their rapid pursuit of the German forces heading for Rostock, on the north coast. But when they reached the destroyed bridges at Meyenkrebs and by the harbour, they could advance no further. The quietly flowing Peene, forty metres across and five metres deep, was the most effective obstacle that the Red Army troops encountered that day. Desperate though they were to bring the campaign to an end at last, the soldiers had no choice but to park their tanks and other vehicles at the riverside. There were dozens of them; the line of armoured behemoths extended far into the old town, a herd of steel beasts, raring to go, but forced to inaction. More and more moved in from the east. A Soviet battle log records the time of Demmin’s capture as 4.30 pm. The log was kept in Moscow time. In Berlin, it was an hour earlier—3.30 pm.
• • •
It was at half past three in the afternoon that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin. After lunch, he had withdrawn to his study, followed by Eva Braun—or Eva Hitler, as she was now. No one in the bunker seems to have heard the shot to his temple. The two of them were found sitting side by side on a little sofa. His valet described the scene:
His head was tilted slightly towards the wall; there was blood spattered on the rug next to the sofa. To his right sat his wife, her legs drawn up onto the sofa. A grimace betrayed the cause of her death: cyanide poisoning. Its ‘bite’ showed clearly on her face.
This prosaic and unglamorous death was followed by a brisk cremation. Hitler’s corpse was carried out into the Reich Chancellery garden wrapped in a military blanket. The two bodies were laid side by side on a patch of sand next to the entrance to the bunker, doused with petrol and set alight. A tower sentry looking on pointed this scene out to the watch master. ‘Look, that’s Adolf Hitler there—he’s on fire.’ As the flames shot up in a ball of fire, a barrage of Soviet artillery grenades rained down. The small funeral gathering hastily returned to the bunker. None of Hitler’s retinue cared to witness the burning of the Führer’s body for any longer than was necessary. None of them looked back to make sure that his final instructions had been thoroughly carried out.
• • •
In Demmin, meanwhile, there were tanks backed all the way up Baustrasse. Four Soviet officers and twenty soldiers billeted themselves in the vicarage, which was now the only inhabited house on the block. They belonged to a pioneer squad that was putting up a temporary bridge over the Peene. ‘Why they came to our house, when all the neighbouring houses were empty, I do not know. Nobody asked at the time,’ Maria Buske said. The vicar’s wife and her family had to clear the second floor, but were allowed to stay on in their house. Although the soldiers took Maria’s watch and wedding ring when they first searched the house, they were to prove more friend than foe in the hours that followed. Thanks to them, the vicarage escaped the brunt of the first attack.
A guard was posted in the hall to act as an intermediary. Fellow soldiers who came looking for women were sent packing with the words ‘officers’ quarters’. My father had a small quantity of tobacco over and gave him some in the long hours of his watch.
The battle noise had blown over like a minor storm front, rattling the windows of Demmin and smashing the occasional pane, but without bringing the devastation that people had feared. Many families emerged from their cellars and went back up to their flats. Some even dared hope that Demmin might, once again, escape unscathed. Ursula Strohschein had been scared rigid when she met the Russian soldier, but he had only given her a comforting pat and gone on his way. At the flat in Luisenstrasse, her family looked about in astonished disbelief, as if seeing the place for the first time.
My mother was crying for joy: ‘Thank the Lord! They’ve left us our flat…’ She kept running her hand lovingly over the upholstery. Cautiously, we peered out of the paneless window. Glass all over Luisenstrasse.
A menacing face stared up at them from under a black leather cap. Ursula’s mother shrank back from the window. The next thing they knew, the man was in their flat with two soldiers, charging around, shouting, looking for fascists. Over the desk hung a certificate belonging to Ursula’s father, honouring him as a member of Demmin’s historical marksmen’s guild. A militarist! The Russian refused to be calmed. After he’d left, they noticed palm-sized black circles on the outside of the doors, front and back. They had no idea what they signified, Ursula said, ‘but an uneasy sense of foreboding crept over us’.
• • •
Parallel to Luisenstrasse and connected to it by a series of alleyways was Frauenstrasse; here, next to the red-brick boys’ school and up from Swan Pond, lived the Schlössers, an extended family comprising grandparents and great-grandparents as well as a mother and her two sons. The boys’ father had gone off to fight at the beginning of the war; a few weeks before they had heard that he’d been killed in East Prussia in March. Ten-year-old Karl Schlösser was the elder son, and since his father had been away at war, more and more duties had fallen to him; he had been catapulted out of his sheltered, petty-bourgeois childhood into premature adulthood. He had to tend and slaughter the chickens, geese and rabbits in the garden. War had been part of everyday life for as long as he could remember. Now, though, that familiar world was falling apart: no father to come back to them, no lessons to attend. Karl had seen waves of refugees surging through Demmin and knew the Red Army soldiers were coming. He had grown up on Nazi propaganda—‘The Russians cut off children’s tongues!’—and was afraid. When the air-raid siren sounded that morning, he’d run down to the cellar. But the people around him spoke only of ‘collapse’, not of defeat—as if the ground had been pulled from under their feet, not as if they’d lost the war.
Once the gunfire was over, the Schlössers went back upstairs. From the window, Karl watched Soviet soldiers creeping along the walls of the houses, stooped, cautious and silent. As in every German town, the Russians anticipated ambush—a Hitler Youth boy with a bazooka, taking aim at them from a coalhole, or an SS squad hiding behind a window. There had been two gun battles. Now the Red Army’s advance troops were combing the houses one by one in search of any remaining German soldiers, kicking down door after door with their heavy boots.
No one had prepared Karl Schlösser for this moment. None of the grown-ups had any idea what was going to happen or what to do. The family took refuge in Karl’s parents’ bedroom at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. They sat there and waited—great-grandparents, grandparents, the two boys, their mother, an aunt. It was a bright afternoon and the overcrowded room was stuffy. When the Russians arrived, Karl was surprised. The two men who came into the bedroom where the family was gathered were ridiculously young. They looked nothing like the Bolshevik soldiers he’d imagined—the murderous arsonists, child abusers and rapists whose pictures he’d pieced together in his head from posters, newspapers and overheard conversations. In their mud-coloured uniforms, they looked more like schoolboys playing dressing-up. They stood there, clutching their weapons, at as much of a loss as the Schlössers. Nobody spoke; there was nothing to say and no common language to say it in. Those awkward moments of silence would stay with Karl Schlösser for the rest of his life.
This was partly because of what happened next: ‘One of them grabbed Mother and disappeared with her, while the other guarded the door with his rifle.’ The family sat there, powerless to move, while, in another room, the Soviet soldier threw himself on Magdalena Schlösser and raped her.
• • •
At Deven Farm, Marie Dabs stood at the attic window with a whole crowd of other refugees, watching Soviet soldiers storming towards them. They belonged to advance divisions that had crossed the Peene that afternoon without tanks or heavy guns, and were pushing ahead into the parts of Demmin that lay to the west of the river. Among them was a young man with a camouflage tarpaulin draped around his shoulders like a cape, and white ladies’ gloves on his hands. He explained to them in German that they needn’t be afraid of the Russian soldiers.
But come evening, they were ordered to evacuate. ‘The lovely big farm was empty,’ Marie Dabs said. ‘Not a cart in sight, no animals, no horses, no cows, no pigs, not so much as a chicken. Everything had been driven out or carried off by the Russians and Poles.’ Carrying their remaining belongings, Marie Dabs and her children set off, accompanied by Martha, their maid, but soldiers stopped them and ordered nineteen-year-old Nanni back into the farmhouse. Another soldier was waiting for her in the smoking room and locked the door on the inside, leaving Marie Dabs pleading and crying in the hall. Some high-ranking Soviet officers turned up and released the girl. Mother, daughter, son and maid ran off towards Deven Wood, but were caught by more soldiers before they got there.
Several Russians charged at us, grabbed Martha and disappeared with her behind a barn. They took my handbag and rummaged through it. They drank a big bottle of eau de Cologne, every last drop, and tossed Otto’s little medal, which I was keeping safe for him in my bag, over the field in a high arc.
The family broke away, Martha with them, and tore off into the thick of the woods, deeper and deeper into the dense undergrowth, until they were out of sight of the soldiers.
• • •
At the house of veterinary surgeon Dr Erich Kuhlmann, in Bahnhofstrasse, the morning of 30 April had begun much as usual. The fifty-two-year-old vet and his wife, Maria, had waited for the arrival of the Soviet soldiers along with their fifteen-year-old daughter, Ilse, their maid, Else, and some other residents of the building. Werner, Ilse’s older brother, was not with them. He was at the front and wouldn’t find out about what happened in his parents’ house that day until six months later, when the maid wrote to him in British captivity. In her letter, Else told him of their original plan to flee the Soviets and go to Hamburg, more than two hundred kilometres to the west. ‘But in the end your parents decided we should stay. They said things couldn’t possibly be as bad as people were saying.’
The Kuhlmanns, Else and several others, among them Else’s future husband, spent the hours leading up to the invasion in the cellar, taking with them food, bedclothes and their valuables. In the early afternoon, Erich Kuhlmann saw the first Russian soldier and hoisted a white flag. In this part of Demmin, tucked away on a wooded hillside next to the cemetery, a little way from the old town, the invasion went off peacefully. A few Russians demanded their watches and schnapps. One or two wanted medical treatment and had Dr Kuhlmann minister to them. In the cellar, Else laid the table for dinner. It looked as if Werner and Ilse’s parents might be right after all. The doctor and his wife took their bedclothes and carried them back up to their room. Their daughter and the maid thought about sleeping in the attic, but couldn’t find a good place to hide and decided to remain in the cellar.
That night they heard strangers’ voices overhead and the tramp of boots. Their faint hope was dashed in a moment. Else described for Werner how they had squeezed themselves into the darkest corners of the cellar, terrified:
We immediately started shaking and trembling again from head to foot. Upstairs we heard several heavy footsteps—they even came as far as the cellar stairs, but no further. By the time things went quiet up there, we’d been trembling for a good hour.
When the soldiers had gone, Erich and Maria Kuhlmann joined the girls in the cellar. They explained that under the soldiers’ insistent questioning, another tenant, Frau Lorenz, had claimed to be the Kuhlmanns’ daughter, and been raped four times in a row. The doctor and his wife had abandoned all hope of escaping their fate.
Ilse was quite desperate and said to me: ‘It would be best if Daddy just shot us. What’s the point in carrying on playing hide-and-seek like this?’ Then your mother said to me: ‘Else, brace yourself—we’re going to take our lives.’ I didn’t think she was serious and only replied unsuspectingly: ‘You can’t do that! It’s not possible!’
Else failed to hear the note of determination in their words, evidence of a long-hatched plan. Shortly before midnight, Dr Kuhlmann returned to the cellar, two Soviet officers on his heels. The soldiers didn’t stay long. They took two women back upstairs with them—other tenants who had also been hiding in the communal cellar. Everyone knew what was in store for them.
• • •
Since the October Revolution of 1917, Labour Day, held annually on 1 May, had been one of the most important public holidays in the Soviet Union. The Russian soldiers in Demmin knew that on this day all eyes were turned to Berlin, where their comrades from the 1st Belorussian Front were going to destroy the fascist beast in its lair. That year, the May Day celebrations in Moscow, the greatest victory celebrations in the history of Russia, were held to honour the heroes who had taken Berlin. No one was interested in Demmin. But the soldiers wanted a May Day of their own all the same.
The officers sat in the vicarage’s easy chairs by candlelight, drinking wine from the vicar’s cellar out of large preserving jars. The delicate wineglasses Maria Buske had offered them were too small for the Russians. They knocked back jar after jar. On the other side of the room, as far away from the easy chairs as they could get, the family lay huddled up against the wall. ‘We cowered there on the rug,’ Maria Buske said, ‘a big bundle of fear.’
The officers asked them—the vicar’s wife and children, the grandparents and other relatives—to join in their celebrations. They wanted the grandfather to make music, to play their Russian songs on the piano for them to sing along to, in celebration of their victory over Germany, the end of the war, their liberation from the Nazis, the big May Day holiday. But the family lay there, clinging to each other, too tense to move or speak. The grandfather didn’t know any of the songs the officers wanted to hear. Maria’s son, Norbert Buske, never forgot that night: the victors by candlelight with their preserving jars full of wine, the family on the floor in front of them, and his own flickering fear.