Evacuation of East Prussia

The Evacuation of East Prussia refers to the events that took place in East Prussia, especially the evacuation of German population from that area as well as from other Prussian lands in 1944 and 1945. Some have claimed that it was a case of ethnic cleansing, or even genocide, and they use the term Prussian Holocaust to describe these events.

The evacuation started under the threat of Soviet invasion. Evacuation was performed both by sea and by land. Both routes were perilous. Land columns were often target of bomb raids, while sea have seen numerous sinking of refugee ships by Soviet and British navy, most notable being the sinking of Wilhelm Gustloff by Alexander Marinesko.

Entering Soviet troops often treated German population brutally. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Lev Kopelev, during their Soviet military service, had objected to the brutal treatment of German civilians of East Prussia. Lev Kopelev wrote about the events in East Prussia in the autobiographic trilogy To Be Preserved Forever (Хранить вечно, Khranit Venchno).

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas in his book A Terrible Revenge collected testimonies of German military and civilians about Soviet war atrocities. Opinions about the book are controversial. Soviet brutalities were also reported in other memoirs of the witnesses.

Evacuation was completed according to the decision of the Potsdam conference about the expulsion of Germans from territories outside the post-war Germany.

Soviet war atrocities in East Prussia

The Soviet army initiated an offensive into East Prussia on October 1944, but after two weeks it was temporarily driven back. After that, the German Ministry of Propaganda reported that war crimes had taken place in East Prussian villages, in particular in Nemmersdorf (now Mayakovskoye, Kaliningrad) and Goldap. According to the German side, all the inhabitants of those villages were horrifically murdered. All the inhabitants (men, women, and children) were killed, as well as French prisoners-of-war. Many women were raped before they were murdered, and in at least one farmyard the women were stripped naked and nailed through their hands in cruciform position. To each of the two doors of a barn near the village inn a naked woman was crucified. At least 72 women with children were slaughtered, while their babies had their heads smashed in.

The idea was soon supported by the German Ministry of Propaganda and the number of alleged victims started to grow in press releases. According to some historians, the purpose of that campaign was to strengthen the morale of German troops by portrayal of Soviet Army as barbaric, blood-thirsty beasts. Even though the number of victims of those initial crimes was highly overstated, the names of these places serve as a symbol ever since.

This version of events was widely disseminated by German propaganda to increase the motivation of German soldiers in their efforts to stop the Red Army. However, the main result was eruption of panic amongst the German civilians. Columns of the German refugees fled from the advancing Soviet forces under harsh conditions of late autumn and winter while often being raided by Soviet aircraft. Possibly, more than 2 million people in the eastern provinces of Germany (East Prussia, West Prussia, Pomerania) died, many of hardships, but many were killed by Soviet armed forces.

The pattern of violence against civilians repeated in the following months across all of East Prussia, and then spread to West Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Silesia, the historic Prussian provinces east of the Oder-Neisse Line, which were to be taken away from Germany by the Potsdam conference.

Since the times of Imperial Russia, Russians associated Prussia with militarism. In the Soviet Union 'Prussian militarism and reaction' was presented as the cause of the First World War. Allegedly, Soviet propaganda put the blame for the Second World War on "Prussian militarism" as well.

Since many Soviet soldiers had lost close family and friends at the hands of the Germans (16,900,000 Soviet civilians died in World War II, more than in any other country and nearly three times more than the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust), there was a desire to take reprisals on the Germans. Cases of shooting unarmed prisoners of war and German civilians were known even from cases at Soviet military tribunals. Also, when Soviet troops moved into Prussia, a significant number of enslaved Ostarbeiter ("Eastern workers") were freed, and knowledge of those workers' suffering certainly did not improve the attitude of Soviet soldiers towards Prussians.

The name of Nemmersdorf is presented as a symbol of the war crimes of the Red Army in Germany during the WWII. Others consider it a symbol of propaganda aimed at shifting the attention away from Nazi crimes, equalizing the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in terms of war crimes.

See also

• Pursuit of Nazi collaborators
• Expulsion of Germans after World War II
• Federation of Expellees
• A Terrible Revenge
• Nazi-Soviet population transfers

References

• The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945–2002 – William I. Hitchcock – 2003 – ISBN 0385497989
  • excerpt

• A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 – Alfred-Maurice de Zayas – 1994 – ISBN 0312121598

• Barefoot in the Rubble – Elizabeth B. Walter – 1997 – ISBN 0965779300

• Deutschlands Gebietsverluste: 1919–1945 – Handbuch und Atlas – Manfred Weinhold – 1999 – ISBN 3887411978

• Ruined by the Reich: Memoir of an East Prussian Family, 1916–1945. – Christel Weiss Brandenburg – ISBN 0786416157

• The Vanished Kingdom: Travels Through the History of Prussia. – James Charles Roy – ISBN 0813337933

• Prussia: myth and reality: The role of Prussia in German history. E.J Feuchtwanger. – ISBN 0854961089

External Links

• The expulsion of Germans
• Preussen Gloria