The chief problem was famine now. Lehndorff was forever seeing patients suffering from oedema who were skeletal from the waist upwards, but whose legs were filled with water. The only solution was to amputate, but how were the Germans to live in post-war Königsberg without legs? Was it not better just to let them die? ‘Famine leads to a remarkable death. There is no fight. The sufferer gives the impression that death is already behind them.’ One woman was brought to him who had lain ten days in a market garden eating unripe blackcurrants. She was completely blocked up. She nearly died while Lehndorff endeavoured to sort her out. Blackcurrants were quite a boon that summer - there was a glut of them in the allotments behind the now ruinous houses.18 Somehow the hospital acquired three cows, providing valuable milk, for the children in particular. It was not long, however, before they discovered that the throat of the best milker had been cut. Later the animal’s udder was found floating in a vat of soup. Officially the hospital received thirty-five kilos of meat daily, but the Russians interpreted this to encompass heads and feet, hooves and horns. One recipient of the precious flesh was the dying mother superior, who had had to live through the worst of it while her nuns were constant prey to the Russians.19
There were plenty of books in the ruined houses, and literature was consolation for some, but there was next to no food. Cases of cannibalism were reported, with people eating the flesh of their dead children. Of the 73,000 Königsberger alive in June 1945, only 25,000 survived the experience. 20 Hermann Matzkowski, a communist sawmill worker the Russians installed as mayor of the Königsberg suburb of Ponarth, reported that 15,000 Königsberger had disappeared or died in the main prison during May. On 20 June 1,000 people were beheaded before his eyes.21
Lehndorff and Doktora made an expedition to suburban Preyl. They had no shoes and went barefoot. On the way they plucked cornflowers - the floral symbol of Prussia. Russians were supplementing their diet by fishing in the vast Schlossteich that provided water for the city. Later Lehndorff saw two boys swimming in the pond. Given how malnourished they were, he was amazed by their energy. When he told them not to swallow the water, they replied in a matter-of-fact way: ‘Oh, what does it matter how we die, no one is going to get out of here!’22
When they reached their goal they found the house of Doktora’s relatives burned out. She began to cry. They hitched a lift to Juditten in the suburbs where Doktora’s house was. There were Germans living in it. When Doktora tried to enter they attacked her. Lehndorff ’s beloved was losing her will to live. She discovered that she was infested with lice - the final indignity. When he went to see her in the morning she had taken poison. Lehndorff was shocked at his lack of emotion. He too would find a more appropriate time to mourn.23
Autumn 1945 arrived. There were rumours that the Königsberger were to be shipped west under Western supervision, typhus cases first. Hopes were temporarily raised. The news caused a drop in prices for winter clothes as the city-dwellers thought they would be out before the bad weather started. A woollen jacket could be obtained for six potatoes, a coat for a tin of meat. You had to be careful, however, as fraudsters had found a way of replacing the contents of tins with clay and leaves. Meanwhile the ripe corn rotted in the fields as there was no one to harvest it.24
The fate of those living in the villages was no kinder than that of the Königsberger. The distinguished journalist Gräfin Marion Dönhoff was the daughter of one of the region’s great magnates. The family home, Friedrichstein, was the local Versailles. In 1945 it was burned to the ground. In 1947 Gräfin Dönhoff received her last letter from home. It described what had happened in her village when the Russians came. They arrived on a Tuesday, setting fire to various houses and shooting two old coachmen and the bell-ringer who summoned the workers to the fields. Her correspondent wrote:A few days later they shot Magda Bohaim, Lotte Pritt and her child and Grandma Plitt; in Wirrgirren they killed five workers on the estate and the forester Schmidt’s wife, who took eight days to die and must have suffered terribly. Old Plitt then hanged himself. In February they began the transports to the Urals. My husband went with them; as did the innkeeper Dreier and his daughter Ulla, Stellmacher’s two daughters, Frau Jung, Frau Krüschmann, Frau Oltermann, the four Marx girls, Christel and Herta Heinze and the smith’s daughter. I received news from Karl Marx [sic] a few months ago that my husband and most of the others died in the Urals. You can see how death has moved into our little village. First of all the lads all died at the front and now the old, and even the girls.25
Typhus had cut a swathe though the population of the village. Sister Hedy, who had nursed them through the epidemic, had now been ill for a fortnight. They had all had to change their lodgings many times, as more and more surviving buildings were requisitioned by the Red Army. Marion Dönhoff’s correspondent had lived at the mill, until her lodger, the Oberinspektor (senior estate manager), had been shot in the stomach, and she had moved back into the village in fear for her life. She took the wounded man to the hospital in a wheelbarrow. ‘The women from Wittgirren lent a hand, for it was no easy task, moving the heavy old man who was suffering from terrible pains. We laboured for four hours. At the [parish] boundary he asked us to stop, saying “Women, let me see my beautiful Quittainenbi once more.”’ He was dead by the time they reached the hospital.26
The way to survive was to work for the conquerors. Marion Dönhoff’s informant was one of them. The only ray of light in her slavery was the sight of Sister Hedy’s two-year-old daughter while she waited for permission to go to the new Germany across the Oder. The Soviet authorities were gradually repopulating their new territory, but there were a few menial jobs to be performed. There was a little work to be had in the hospitals and factories, and there was an industrial outfitter and a baker where casual labour was required. Germans worked in the power stations and in the carpenters’ workshops until they were replaced by Russians. One man made a living by selling the books he dug out of the rubble. A number of priests and pastors continued to operate in Königsberg, as their work - particularly for orphaned children - was tolerated by the Russians. Nine of the clergymen died of starvation or dysentery; three were killed.
On 4 July 1946 Königsberg lost its ancient name. It became Kaliningrad. With the change of nomenclature came Russian physicians to replace the Germans operating in the hospitals, and Russian workers took over from the Germans in the factories. A few roubles could be made from teaching the Russians German or to play the piano. A sort of calm reigned in which Germans could read their own newspapers, listen to broadcasts in their own language and send their children to their own schools. There was even a German Choir made up of doctors, nurses and others at the Yorck Hospital.
This lasted until repatriation began in the summer of 1947. The transports took off in earnest on 22 October that year. On 10 September Ruth Friedrich recorded the arrival in Berlin of 6,000 Königsberger, people who had lived on carrion and rubbish and were ‘more cattle than human beings, more dead than alive’. Their advent in the capital was followed by the last remnants of Breslau’s German population.27 By the time they had finished, no Germans were left in what had been Königsberg. A 700-year history had drawn to a close.bj
Country Life
Hans Lehndorff had left Königsberg two years before the transports removed the remaining Germans, because he had heard a rumour that he was about to be arrested. He made a wise choice even if the story was false: on 6 and 7 November 1945, the Russians celebrated their Revolution by beating the Germans bloody and raping the women again. One of the victims was Mayor Matzkowski’s seventy-one-year-old mother. The only women spared were those carrying Russian babies.28 As Lehndorff fled through the shattered streets he watched Russian soldiers clearing Germans out of their houses near the Friedland Gate. From now on they had to live in the allotments. He wanted to reach the Polish half of East Prussia and find out what had happened to his family, particularly his mother, who was the daughter of the right-wing political wheeler-dealer Elard von
Oldenburg-Januschau. In Hanshagen he was taken in by two old ladies who revealed their hidden hens. He hadn’t seen a hen for six months. They put him to bed and fed him on wild mushrooms. Later he found boletus mushrooms in the woods and ate them raw with sugar.29
He headed for Ponarien, near Allenstein, where some of his relatives had lived. Near their estate he ran into the retainer Preuss, who gave him the usual news of rape, murder and suicide. Poles had moved into the big house, but he found his aunt, Frau von Stein, living in the gardener’s cottage. She had initially left the house to make way for the Russian commandant, who had since pursued the war to the west. Finding his mother’s sister was a source of great joy: ‘To see a person again now who belongs to me, after all that has happened, is like a foretaste of our reunion in heaven.’30 He learned of his cousins: two of Frau von Stein’s daughters had been interned with their father; the sons had been at the front and she had no news of them. The women, his aunt included, had developed a modus vivendi with the Poles. They worked as agricultural labourers in the fields and received in payment half a litre of skimmed milk every day. The women brought home two basketfuls of potatoes. These were sorted by variety in order to make the diet less monotonous. The furniture from the big house was being gradually broken up to feed the fires.31
It seemed better to stay put for the time being. Lehndorff heard of the perils of deportation to Germany, of the brutality of the Polish guards and of the marauding bands that robbed the refugees in the trains. In November 1945 CARE parcels began to arrive from America, providing some extra food for the starving Germans.bk Together with what he could glean from grateful patients, the small German community in Ponarien could survive.
Danzig had been one of the first German cities to fall. On 3 May the German men inhabiting prisons and camps were brought out and marched down ‘Victory Alley’. All men aged between sixteen or seventeen and fifty-five were required to go to Russia and work. The women came out to watch the departure of their menfolk, and strewed the streets with spring flowers. Of those men (and a few women) who were taken from Gleiwitz in Silesia to Rudlo near Stalino, many were to die before they reached their destination. Their bodies were stripped naked and buried by the side of the road. Most of the men of Gleiwitz were put to work in the mines. The lucky ones returned to a town depopulated of Germans in October. Many failed to return at all. Of the Gleiwitzer a third of the 300 men died.32
The large camp of Laband in Silesia held between 30,000 and 50,000 men, most of whom were deported to Russia to work in the Siberian mines. Few had returned by the end of 1946. The lucky ones escaped the mines and worked on large kolkhoz farms instead.33 In Gleiwitz, Hans-Günther Nieusela’s father was marched off to Kazakhstan, and did not return until 1948.34 German and Polish women were impressed into clearing the streets of rubble. Reusable bricks were set aside, establishing the pattern for other German cities. Even the Jews from Stutthof camp were made busy with restoring Danzig’s beautiful façades. More than 60 per cent of the city had been destroyed.
At the end of May a Special Commission had been convened to ‘Polonise’ the place names in the district. Langfuhr - ‘long drive’ - was somehow rendered as Wrzeszcz, or ‘you scream’. The place names were altered some two months before the Allied leaders met at Potsdam. It was clear that the conference would not alter the de facto situation.
For the most part the famous Junkers lived in large if modest manor houses and farmed their own estates. There were relatively few grand houses or absentee landlords. The grandest of all were the Grafen Hochberg or Princes Pless, who lived at Fürstenstein in Upper Silesia and owned a large chunk of the coal mines. Their estates had been split between Germany and Poland after the First World War, and a prolonged legal dispute had robbed the last prince - Hansel Pless - of most of his income in the 1920s and 1930s. During the war the castle was inhabited by Magda Goebbels’s lover, Gauleiter Karl Hanke, who carried off anything of value he could find once the Russians appeared on the horizon.
The Russians arrived on 5 May. Later, the last chatelain, Paul Fichte, went back to the castle to survey the scene:I crept over to Fürstenstein to see what went on . . . Everything broken up and robbed, our flats were totally empty, all windows broken. All inhabitants were expelled by the Russians so that Fürstenstein could be pillaged, it didn’t look as if humans had been there, indescribable. The beautiful fountains on the terraces are broken, the Donatello Fountain was pulled down. The library was loaded to go to Moscow. The most valuable books, even the Sachsenspiegel [thirteenth-century book of law], had been walled in but they were found and burned. The old castle also burned down.
Now the family mausoleum was also plundered, the sarcophagi broken into, the contents thrown around. We had quickly buried Princess Daisy outside the vault, but she was dug up and robbed. Scholz had planted such pretty flowers on her grave that it attracted attention. We reburied the Fürstin [princess] straight away . . . But the mausoleum had been broken up and couldn’t be closed again. Now a migration of people to the mausoleum began. Everyone wanted to see what it was like inside, most of them became scared and ran off, for the contents of coffins lay on the floor. The skeleton of a Fürstin née Kleist we couldn’t find any more, only the head lay there. Andersek from the stud shot himself and his family. The stable boys buried their bodies behind Kummer’s goat shed.35
The Poles made off with the late princess’s jewellery.
Käthe von Normann heard a rumour that Berlin and Stettin had fallen on 5 May and that both Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide. The next day she had news that Germany had laid down its arms. The Frenchmen billeted in the same house celebrated with barley coffee and began to sing. Rumours were running wild. On the following day she heard that Pomerania would remain German as far east as Stolp, and that her family had a chance of hanging on to the Barkow estate. Uncertainty meant that a lot of people who had fled at the appearance of the Russians made their way home again. More than a million people did this, only to be driven out, once and for all.36 The stories were confirmed by a Polish policeman on the 8th. That night the Normanns sang the Leuthen Chorale: ‘Nun danket alle Gott!’ Since Frederick the Great’s time it had been Prussia’s unofficial national anthem.
As Lehndorff had discovered, the French were generally sympathetic to the defeated Germans, despite the indignities they had suffered during the war: ‘their opinion of the Russians and the Poles is just as bad as ours’. One of them, a tall, blond young man, gave Frau von Normann a present of some much needed clothing material. He wanted a crust of bread in return, but she had none to give, just a little butter and a liver sausage. He told her that the French had been hiding a few German noblemen in their ranks. She thought he might also have been German.37
The big city of Breslau had yielded only on the 6th. Two days later the war officially ended. It made little difference for the survivors. On the 9th a party of thirteen Poles arrived to claim the city for their country. They moved into a house on the Blücherstrasse and set up a Polish eagle over the door. On the 10th more Polish pioneers joined them, together with a group of men from the Polish Office of the Public Security.38
On 13 May a delegation of ‘Lublin Poles’ headed by Bolesław Drobner travelled to Sagan in Silesia to report to their Soviet masters. Edward Ochab had already been appointed plenipotentiary for the euphemistically named ‘Recovered Territories’. Such men were as much ‘Muscovites’ as the German communists who landed outside Berlin as the Red Army took the city. They assumed power with nil popular support; their mandate based on nothing more than Soviet patronage. Their claims to much of the Recovered Territories derived merely from Soviet policy.39
The Russians and Poles divided the spoils, with the best bits naturally going to the former, which resulted in their occasionally coming to blows over the booty.40 Meanwhile the Red Army was still scavenging, with no regard for leaving any useful equipment behind for the puppet state they were setting up in Poland. In some instances the Poles an
d the Germans made common cause in order to preserve something that would otherwise have gone east.41 The Poles also fell out with the Czechs over the Teschen pocket of Silesia.
In Neustadt in Upper Silesia a thousand head of cattle went east, leaving around a score to feed the locals. The harvest for 1945 was confiscated.42 Treks had been straggling through the towns and villages of the region for months now. At first they were made up of Germans from the General Gouvernement who had fled at the Russian advance. Now they were joined by the Silesians themselves. Some Upper Silesians fled to the Sudetenland, like the doctor Theofil Peters from Pitschen who went to Leitmeritz before the Czechs threw him out. It might have been worse for him: he was opting for the fire in preference to the frying pan.43
Later in May Käthe von Normann heard that the British and the Americans were already releasing POWs. This was not true, but it gave her leave to hope that her own husband might return. The absence of men was a torture to the women in more senses than one. They were nightly victims to Russian bands, which, even if they did not succeeded in capturing their quarry in the form of female flesh, food or valuables, nonetheless shattered all hope of sleep. After the troops had been there a few days, the attacks died down, but each new billeting renewed the problem. When Frau von Normann decided to go to the local town of Plathe to receive treatment for blood poisoning, she learned that the German doctors had been replaced by Russian and Polish medics who were not allowed to treat Germans. She found a German doctor in a pitiful state in her own flat - she had a three-year-old daughter, and was pregnant with another, Russian baby.
After the Reich Page 24
