By Friday 4 May, most of the fires had been put out. Thin columns of smoke still rose from the charred heaps of rubble, but behind them the silhouette of the church tower could be seen again and was surprisingly unscathed. Many townspeople who had spent the last few days sheltering in barns, or in the fields or the woods outside Demmin, took this as a sign to venture back to their houses. The combat troops had moved on with their tanks over the temporary bridges, and the triumphant fury of those who remained behind had blown over.
Ursula Strohschein walked through the streets of the old town with her father, stumbling over smouldering piles of debris. Smoke-blackened holes where windows had been gaped out of the facades. At 16 Luisenstrasse, they stood before the mountain of rubble that had been Ursula’s father’s mineral-water factory. Here and there, machine parts and iron girders jutted into the air, looking strangely defiant. Nothing was left of what had once been Ursula’s childhood home—no house, no garage, no stables, no sheds. Her father managed to get hold of an undamaged flat in Anklamer Strasse, but only, as Ursula soon realised, because the people who had lived there had died:
The deserted dental practice had belonged to Dr Enders, who’d been found with his wife in Sandbergtannen Wood, half buried…shot dead. Only now did we discover the extent of the horror.
The dead bodies in the rivers and woods and houses hadn’t yet been retrieved and buried. Returning from the fields outside town, having narrowly escaped death at the hands of his own mother, ten-year-old Karl Schlösser saw corpses lying in the water, swollen to shapeless masses in the warm spring weather, some of them tied to one another with ropes. He saw hanged bodies swaying in the wind. Decades later, Karl Schlösser could still see those people hanging in the apple trees when he shut his eyes. ‘A heavy blanket of smog lay over the town for days, partly from the smoke and fire, and partly from the sickly sweet smell of all those dead bodies.’
In some of the burnt-out houses, people returning home found the charred remains of those who had hanged or shot themselves. Many only discovered now that their relatives, neighbours or friends had taken their lives. On Soviet orders, the bodies were hastily buried in gardens and yards. Orders were also given for corpses to be retrieved from the rivers and canals before they became a source of disease and a threat to the living. There were still horses pulling covered carts up the hill to the cemetery weeks later. Drowned bodies continued to wash up on the shallow, reedy banks, and with each day that passed they became harder to identify.
Medical student Lotte-Lore Martens spent days looking for her invalid father. He was no longer in the flat in Campstrasse where she’d left him with relatives; he’d gone off, saying that he was going to kill himself. The bank of the Tollense was only a few yards from Campstrasse. As Lotte-Lore and her uncle paced up and down beneath the blossoming willows of the winding flood plains, she shuddered at the spring countryside’s indifference to the disaster.
The sight of the riverbank moved me more each day. The meadows by the river, resplendent in their spring finery, were edged, like the border of a dress, with about 1.5–2 metres of baby’s clothes and other garments—expensive frocks and furs in particular—and identity papers and passports. Money, too—a lot of money—but nobody stooped to pick it up; it seemed to us worthless.
Lotte-Lore Martens never found her father, but she did find his military ID and his fur coat, on the bank opposite the waterworks. She also found coats belonging to her aunt and grandmother.
• • •
On 6 May, Marga Behnke, the daughter of the cemetery gardener, began to keep a record of the suicides in Demmin. On this day alone, the first day of mass burials, she made thirty-four entries, and for more than nine weeks afterwards she kept daily records. Here and there a name or date has been added in her mother’s handwriting. Rather than use the official register, they recorded everything in the cemetery nursery’s slim black receipt book. The names and origins of the dead (insofar as they were identifiable) were entered in the column headed Lieferer or ‘supplier’. The next two columns were reserved for as precise a record as possible of the day and the manner of death. When this information could not be established, as was often the case with the drowned bodies, Marga Behnke had to make do with registering an unknown woman, man, boy or girl. Refusing to consign hundreds of people to anonymity and oblivion, she noted even the slightest clue to a person’s identity: the initials on a handkerchief, a red blouse, a missing index finger.
Cemetery nursery receipt book
On the twenty-eight pages of this improvised death register, which they kept until 15 July, Marga and her mother recorded the deaths of more than six hundred people, most of whom had either committed suicide or, in the case of children, died along with their parents. More than half, many of them refugees or unidentified, were buried in a mass grave, including the family of schoolteacher Gerhard Moldenhauer, who had shot at the Soviets from his window after killing his wife and children. Many other residents of Demmin, though, were buried in individual graves—the furrier Herr Wockersin and his family, for example, who had drowned themselves in the Trebel; Gustav Sembach, the forester, who had shot himself in the head and died of the wound some time later; and military vet Dr Melzer and his wife, who had poisoned themselves in Deven Wood. Often it was dependants of the deceased who arranged for them to have graves of their own. The Kuhlmanns’ family maid, Else, ends her account of the family’s demise as follows:
Another thing I should like to tell you, my dear Werner, is that your mother and Ilse were buried in a grave in the cemetery. Your father couldn’t be recovered from the rubble, because there was too big a fire in the dispensary. Your mother and Ilse were found in the ruins of the dining room, their bodies charred. I have put a cross on their grave. I’m afraid it’s only a wooden one, but it can always be replaced at a later date.
In the black receipt book, Marga Behnke had at first listed Werner’s father, Dr Kuhlmann, under grave no. 240, after his wife (grave no. 238) and daughter (grave no. 239). Eventually, though, when his body wasn’t found, she had to strike ‘veterinary surgeon’ off the list.
• • •
Official record keeping of the recent events in Demmin also began at about this time. On 19 May, Sorge, the registrar, opened a makeshift office, because the old town hall had been reduced to a gaping facade. As the death records from 1945 had burnt along with everything else in the registry office, Sorge had to begin at the beginning and start his records at number one. He received long lines of husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, uncles, nieces, mothers-in-law and grandmothers who had survived, and came to Sorge to register their relatives’ deaths. Sometimes it was neighbours or friends who came to him; sometimes people whose connection to the dead was in no way obvious. Within two weeks, Sorge’s figures had soared into the hundreds, though some deaths weren’t reported until weeks or even months after the event.
All through that summer and far on into the autumn, Sorge the registrar listened to the grim stories of death in Demmin. In many cases, the misery of the survivors overshadowed even the horrors suffered by the dead. On 25 May, Elfriede Schultz, whose son-in-law had already been missing for some time, came to report the suicide of her daughter and grandchild. The death of three-year-old Gerd Wedhorn in a canal was registered by his mother, whose own suicide attempt had evidently failed. A musician reported that his wife had drowned herself and their child in Swan Pond. On 12 June, Marie Büchner told Herr Sorge of the deaths of her son, daughter-in-law, grandchild and three other members of her family, who had all been found together, hanged.
On the one-page death certificates on which the registrar set his seal, he recorded, sometimes in the spiky Sütterlin script then common in Germany, the dead person’s age, denomination, place of residence and birth, and marital status. He recorded the place and time of death and noted down the personal details of the individual reporting the case. There was no space on the form, however, for the circumstances of death, let alone the cause or motives. Herr Sorge seemed to regard this as unsatisfactory, and began to add postscripts such as ‘Death by suicide (hanging)’ to the final time-of-death section. Before long, he had switched to inserting footnotes at the bottom left-hand side of the page. If, at first, Sorge restricted himself to the single word ‘suicide’, he was soon elaborating on this: ‘suicide by hanging’, ‘suicide by poison’, ‘suicide by slit wrists’, ‘suicide by shooting’, ‘killed by mother’, ‘killed by parents with poison’. Sometimes he intimated the nature of an individual’s death by replacing the word ‘deceased’ with the expression ‘found dead’. Such minor tweaks allowed the registrar to pull aside the curtain of bureaucratic formalism and give a glimpse of the events of those days.
On 19 October, he signed the last two suicides reported to him: numbers 926 and 927, the wife and youngest son of senior medical officer Dr Herbst. By this point Sorge had heard, recorded and certified almost two hundred deaths. The few that followed bear the signature of a different clerk.