After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  He resisted all moves to shift him across the border, however - he wished to die in Silesia. The chief concern was the dwindling stock of brandy in Haus Wiesenstein. The old man was used to a life-saving glass every day, and now there remained just a few drops left in the last bottle. Becher and Weiss decided to do Hauptmann a last good turn and headed into Liegnitz to see the Soviet commander. Naturally this Russian knew Hauptmann by reputation too: ‘In the evening we returned to Agnetendorf with a whole car full of food and with twenty bottles of cognac [sic] of the best Caucasian brand.’112 Hauptmann finally expired on 6 June, three days after uttering his last words ‘Bin - ich - noch - in - meinem - Hause?’ (Am I still in my house?). The Poles preserved the great man’s residence, turning it into a children’s home. His body was expelled along with the living and the dying. Contrary to his wishes he was buried at Hiddensee on the Baltic coast.113

  Transit Camps

  The Normanns received their marching orders on 29 June 1946. Barkow was to be evacuated within two hours. The 200 or so inhabitants were to pack for two weeks. Accompanied by Polish soldiers and policemen they went as far as Plathe in the gruelling heat. The first stop was to be Wollin, where they were to stay in a camp until they could be shipped across the Oder.

  Transit camps like Wollin existed all over the new Poland. Once notified, Germans had to assemble in their town or village squares with one suitcase. Some Poles were worried what the outside world might think of them: Lehndorff was asked to speak to the 400 Germans in his camp to explain that their treatment had been ordered from above, and that it only imitated what the Germans had done to the Poles.114 For the people of Breslau, the camps were at Freiburg Station and Kohlfurt. Once the railways were ready to handle them, they were put in bolted railway trucks to be taken west. For those living in the depths of the country, the journey to the transit camp was an ordeal in itself. Frau von Normann’s cart lost a wheel in the next village, but she was lucky to find help from the old Polish village policeman, Dombrowski, whose wife she had protected from the SS. He loaded her belongings on to his bicycle. The twenty or so Polish soldiers who accompanied the troop were not too hard on the refugees in general.

  Treks of this kind were hindered by disputes between the Russians and the Poles. When Frau von Normann’s posse arrived in the village of Trieglaff, the Russian garrison ordered them back to Barkow, blocking off the road with men brandishing machine guns. Night fell and the refugees squatted together on the road. Then came the order to return. It had all been for nothing.

  Home to the Reich

  The Krockows’ decision to leave was prompted by an unseasonal descent by a pack of Russian soldiers demanding ‘Uri!’ The watches had all gone months before. One of their number panicked, however: she knew of a watch. It was up in the attic. It had belonged to Robert von Puttkamer, Libussa von Krockow’s grandfather, a right-wing minister of the interior whose sacking in 1889 had been the only successful action of the so-called liberal empire of the Emperor Frederick’s English-born wife Vicky. The watch had been a present from Emperor William I, and it had the imperial signature engraved on the cover. The loss of this one last contact with a more glorious past prompted them to make the journey. Libussa would go first, to see how the land lay.115

  On 20 November 1945 the Allied Control Council had worked out the finer details of the Potsdam Agreement. The ‘orderly and humane’ deportations were to go ahead. The first tranche covered 3.5 million Germans from the east. Of these one and a half million were to go to the British Zone and the other two to the SBZ. Another two and a half million were coming from Czechoslovakia, half a million from Hungary and 150,000 from Austria. These were to be housed in the Soviet Zone (750,000), the American Zone (2.25 million) and the French Zone (150,000). A year later the British Zone had grown by 3.1 million souls, the American by 2.7 and the Russian by 3.6. Berlin’s population had risen by 100,000 and the French Zone had taken in 60,000. The population of Germany in its reduced state had grown by 16.5 per cent.116

  By mid-winter 1946 Stolp possessed a proper office with ‘Emigration’ written in German over the door and an official who spoke the language without a hint of accent. Forms had to be filled in using the new Polish names: Rumbske (which was Slavic anyhow) had become Rumsko; Pommern or Pomerania, Pomorze. The applicant had to swear that he or she was leaving of his or her own free will, and would not return on pain of punishment. The certificate cost 150 złotys. That was two months’ wages for Lehndorff, once the Poles began to pay for his services. A kilo of bacon cost 400 złotys, and 500 grams of sugar, 90.117

  It looked deceptively simple: there was a train leaving that morning at 10.14 arriving in Stettin at two. From there it was only an hour or two to Berlin. The ticket cost another 150 złotys. Already half Libussa’s money had been spent. She was taken to a cattle truck, the door was pulled open, she was pushed in, and then it was slammed shut. In the gloom she began to pick out the shapes of other refugees - women, children and old people. The train stopped at the main towns: Schlawe, Köslin, Belgard. With every halt the door flew open and more refugees were crammed into the crowded space. It was dark by now. Then it came to a stop. A shot rang out. Then there were more shots.

  The door was ripped open - cries of terror, lanterns flickering, a horde surging in: wild figures dimly glimpsed amid the chaos and the confusion, men, but also youths and women, savage women, perhaps the worst of all, screaming, slavering, striking, snatching. More pistol shots, right over out heads, booming like cannon in the small space, numbness, knives and axes, fists, kicks, feet trampling over bodies, and always this bellowing, and the cries of fear and pain. Suitcases and crates, boxes and bundles, sprouted wings, flew up in the air and out of the door. The horde followed them out, and the door banged shut.118

  The bandits had done their business in a matter of minutes, perhaps five at the most; but it was just the first attack. At one point militiamen opened the door and pretended to be concerned. When the Germans said they had been attacked, the men laughed. As they no longer possessed suitcases, the next wave went for the clothes on their bodies, stripping off coats, jackets and dresses. Libussa lost her precious rucksack in the second attack, her złotys in the third and her boots in the fourth. The train stopped in Stargard. So much for the timetable: they reached Scheune, near Stettin, in the middle of the night.

  Stettin, on the left bank of the Oder, had been awarded to Poland, but many would have seen it as a safe haven. It was anything but. After the train had been shunted around for a while the doors were opened and everyone ordered out. There were guards with submachine guns ordering them to line up in twos. It was snowing hard. A crowd of some 400 was marched towards an old sugar factory, and beaten with rifle butts to make them move faster. One girl understood Polish. She told Libussa that anyone caught with letters would be punished, as a spy. Libussa tore up her letters and threw them into a hedge. The Poles did not want the world to know about life in the Recovered Territories. The sugar factory offered no more than a concrete floor and broken windowpanes, with a couple of full buckets for bodily needs. Dawn came, they waited, then sunset. The Poles ‘needed darkness for whatever they had in mind’.119 The Germans were marched out in pairs. They were beaten with rifle butts again until they reached a hall half lit by candles. Behind a table sat an official. He had a book in front of him and a pile of valuables. They were told to strip naked and throw their clothes to two men who were ready with knives to discover any hidden valuables. Libussa lost her last RM2,000.

  They dressed from the pile, lucky to find something of their own. Then they had to sign the book that their money and valuables had been lawfully deposited. Libussa managed to steal a bit back while the attention of the official at the desk wandered over to two women stripping on the far side of the room. As they left, more militiamen examined them by lantern light, sizing them up. Fearing the worst, Libussa escaped through a window and hid in a ruined tank until dawn. Then she saw her fellow passengers coming out of th
e sugar factory. She caught up with them as they marched back towards the railway line. They had been robbed of all but a few rags. Women were sobbing hysterically. There was a train, and an old-fashioned German conductor in a uniform with a cap: ‘All right, it’s all right, everything’s going to be all right . . . Climb aboard please, all aboard, we’re leaving soon, going home.’120 The refugees admitted they no longer had money for tickets. The conductor assured them that this time it was free. The train took them to Angemünde, where they all had to get out. A Russian gave Libussa a piece of bread. Then a new train was put together to take them to Berlin.

  Libussa von Krockow’s experience was not the worst. The refugees were often packed so tightly that they could not move to defecate and emerged from the trucks covered in excrement. Many were dead on arrival.121 During the winter months the near-naked expellees literally froze to death. Women went insane as they watched their children die and they had to be tied up with rope to prevent them from clawing the other passengers. When they arrived in the remains of Germany they tried to carry off the corpses of their infants; they didn’t want to believe they were dead.122 One of the Germans reported that her baby had been dashed against the wall as it had come between her and her rapist. Children had been robbed of their swaddling clothes and allowed to freeze to death.123

  Libussa had still not had enough. At the end of March 1946, together with her friend Otti von Veltheim, she decided to go back and rescue the remaining members of her family. After crossing into the Russian Zone, they reached the comparative safety of Zehlendorf in the American Sector of Berlin. Near the old Stettin Station they found an East Prussian girl who had an impressive document in Russian that allowed her to go ‘home’, although where ‘home’ was was not stipulated. It cost them a packet of Luckies. There were no more friendly Russians in the railway station in Angermünde, just Russians with their minds on rape. Libussa and her friend escaped again. They found a friendly Russian commandant who assured them, ‘Poles bad. Very, very bad. But Russians good. Just ask Russians. Russians always help against Poles.’124

  After an initial reluctance to countenance the trip, they had won over the reluctant German railwaymen who were due to drive the train to Stettin. It would be a chance to put one over the Poles. Potatoes stolen from the Russians were cooked up in the locomotive steam and after an hour or two the signals turned green and the train set off. The Russians tried their luck with the girls, but accepted their rejection manfully enough and carried on protecting them from the Poles until the train reached Stettin harbour and the sugar factory. The Russian lieutenant even escorted them past the Polish guards outside the free port, before leaving them to fend for themselves in the bombed-out city.

  Stettin was not yet cleared of Germans. They could be recognised by the tatters that served as clothes and by their furtive looks. Libussa and Otti found an old lady who offered them a room and very soon after a purported Graf Heinrich Kinsky from Prague who was working as a lorry driver for the Poles. German POWs who were fitting up the building for the Polish authorities provided them with furniture, heat and bedding. The next morning, however, the count disappeared, never to return. They found a less fabulous lead in a Polish railway official from Posen, who had fought in the German army in the First World War and who had been in the Polish resistance in the Second. He obtained tickets for them to Stolp and issued them with a couple of Polish newspapers as camouflage.

  The journey went relatively smoothly. When the militia arrived they feigned sleep. The only really tense moment came when they lit up their Luckies and the unfamiliar smell appeared to arouse suspicion among their Polish fellow travellers. One was bought off with a cigarette. The journey to Stolp, which had taken the Royal Prussian Railway a mere three and a half hours, took the new Polish authorities closer to ten. When the train reached the outskirts of the city, they panicked and rushed for the door. One of the passengers said to them in German, ‘Try the other side, Fräulein!’ The women froze, but the Poles in the carriage were laughing. In a chorus they said. ‘Auf wiedersehen!’125

  Libussa waited for mid-summer to bring the rest of the family back to the ‘Reich’. By then a new administrator had arrived and gone to live in the manor house in Zipkow. The women found him courteous, and he spoke excellent German. Indeed, much was familiar in his office: the desk was from Libussa’s house and on the wall was a portrait of one of the Glowitz Puttkamers. The Pole asserted that the reason he had hung it there was that he numbered Puttkamers among his own forebears. Likewise Lehndorff was able to impress Polish officials that his family had once borne the name Mgowski, and he was issued with a pass in that name.126

  The sympathetic - and aristocratic - Polish official had friends in the railways in Stolp. The mood was changing in Poland. A camp had been set up at Neu Torney near Stettin to process the refugees. Attacks on the trains had come to a complete halt, he maintained. The Germans from Pomerania were to be taken to the British or Soviet zones; most wanted to go to the latter. The British authorities were horrified by the physical state of the Germans when they reached the end of their journey. In April 1946 they issued a formal protest, and began to refuse to accept refugees under these conditions. In December they stopped accepting refugees altogether.

  Whole villages were being shipped out now. They all had to wait at assembly points until the order came to join the train. The train Libussa and her family took required two days and two nights to travel the 237 kilometres to Stettin. They were allowed out at the stations, and there were indeed no attacks. The end of the journey was a DP camp. There Libussa found her friend Otti and her relatives, one of whom had already gone out of his mind. They spent three weeks in the camp.

  When in mid-March 1946 Käthe von Normann heard that her deportation was nigh, it was time to pack and conceal the last remaining objects of value. Cushions were suspended from the rucksacks so that they could travel more comfortably in the cattle trucks, and a bucket was found, for the long hours in the train. A gold pin was hidden in a matchbox, rings wrapped in wool, necklaces sewn into bags or concealed in the food. A pearl necklace was rolled in oats, a wedding ring sewn into one of her son’s clothes.

  They left on Good Friday. They walked to Greifenberg where they were taken to a camp beside the railway line. The train departed on Easter Sunday with some twenty refugees to a truck. Someone had the good idea of securing the doors with wire from the inside to prevent the bandits from opening it. This proved wise, because there were attempts to rip it open as the train went slowly. The Polish guards obliged them to sing. They opened up with ‘Eine feste Burg’. They came to Kreckow, a suburb of Stettin, whence it was a two-kilometre hike to the camp. They were driven on by militia men who threatened them with rubber truncheons. The following day they were all beaten on their way to the luggage inspection: ‘the children were beside themselves with terror’.127 At the counter the Pole failed to locate Frau von Normann’s remaining jewellery. They seemed more interested in the bacon that others were carrying. Leaving in May 1947, Hans Lehndorff seems to have had a reasonably easy time of it, or maybe it seemed like nothing after everything he had been through in the previous two years.

  Käthe von Normann had suffered much, but possibly the greatest sufferers had been the East Prussians. One transport that left in 1945 crammed 4,500 people into forty-five cattle trucks. In the witnesses’ wagon there were 116 men, women and children. The train took eleven days to reach the new German border. During that time there was robbery upon robbery and two or three people died every day. The Poles did not just strip them of their possessions; they took the young girls as well.128 A third of the East Prussians were dead by the time they reached their homeland. On 28 October 1948 a survey was carried out among young East Prussian girls in Rüdersdorf camp. There were 1,600, most of them country girls who had been taken to Russia before being brought back to Germany. Between 50 and 60 per cent had died on the way, and more had perished since. Their average age was 19.7 years and their weig
ht 45.38 kilos. Most no longer had monthly periods; 48 per cent had been raped, 20 per cent more than ten times and 4 per cent over a hundred times.129

  Back in the train that night, plunderers descended on the Normanns and the other impotent refugees, trying to steal their cases. They waited two days and then were marched back to the station and driven back into the cattle trucks. The train set off towards Scheune, where Libussa von Krockow had had such terrible experiences. From there a train took them directly to Pöppendorf near Lübeck in the British Zone. The British Zone was also the principal destination for Silesians heading west.130

  Nor was the search for valuables as draconian as it had been. When Libussa crossed the border for the second and last time she had managed to conceal some family effects in a false bottom to her daughter’s pram. The effects of camp food on the baby’s stomach had been so terrible that the official declined to search it. To their glee, the train took them to Lübeck in the British Zone. At Lübeck they arrived to find that tables had been set up under the trees and that hot soup was being served to adults and porridge and hot milk to children. Bananas were handed out to the children afterwards. One of them, suspicious of this novelty, refused: ‘What the farmer don’t know, he don’t eat.’131

  It was the same treatment that Käthe von Normann had received. After all she had experienced, Frau von Normann was speechless. A British officer went between the tables offering seconds. The women were so unused to this solicitude that they burst into tears and tried to kiss his hand. It was not the satisfactory food that relieved them so much, but the feeling of security: ‘We were human beings again, and treated as human beings. Who can understand this feeling? To be honest, only those who had been through the many months of horror we had suffered, and from which we had now escaped.’132