The Trek Out of East Prussia, 1945

The Great Trek is a documentary by Guido Kopp about the German refugees’ escape from East Prussia, away from the advancing Red Army, in 1945. It uses a narrator’s voice overtop of contemporary film footage of the events and places being discussed, with occasional snippets of Nazi programming “The German Weekly” “NS Weekly”, as well as interviews with about 10 surviving Germans and 5 Russian soldiers present during the advance into East Prussia (2 of the soldiers are female!). These people discuss anecdotes from their own experience.

What follows is my simple summary with a look at the more interesting facts.

When the Russians were advancing towards East Prussia, all preparations to leave were forbidden the population by the Nazi regime? it was seen as a sign of capitulation if the Germans were to evacuate. It is also nothing surprising given the extremely redundant emphasis on fighting to the last man: “We will never capitulate”, etc. Hitler himself had said “In me they have met an opponent who does not know the meaning of the word surrender.” It is well in keeping with the political speeches being delivered that no plans were made to evacuate.

When the rumble of Russian artillery could be heard in the distance, people at last gathered the courage to disobey the government’s orders and leave. They packed up their possessions onto wooden wagons, often bringing livestock, and set out westward, avoiding the major roads. As is typical of these kind of events the world over, many died from exposure, hunger or fatigue while on the trip.

When Marion Countess Dönhoff, a local aristocratic landholder whose book Childhood in East Prussia also makes good reading, went to the local government administration building, hoping they would have plans on what trains or ships to take and how to escape, she instead found something else:

I’ll never forget it. I went to the building, and there was nobody there! Naturally the party members were the first to leave town! Instead there were burnt papers swirling around in the wind, all the windows of the building had been left open.

In fact Hitler had already evacuated his Wolfsschanze, the boys-only tree-house he had built in East Prussia, with the approach of the Red Army, and relocated to Berlin. Similarly, the head Nazi official in charge of East Prussia, Erich Koch, removed to Flensburg in Holstein on a special boat reserved for him, while telegrafing Hitler hearty reassurances such as “I will fight to the end!”. Perhaps this was Koch’s idea of fighting to the end, from the English wikipedia entry:

Thousands… began to flee East Prussia in March 1945, after having been told until the last minute and on orders from NS-Governor Erich Koch, that fleeing was illegal and punishable by death.

Incidentally, Erich Koch had no connection to the East Prussians. He was from the Rhineland; yet now he was entrusted with their fate, and acted as one would expect: he abandoned them at the first sign of trouble. Apparently the video of Koch embracing little East Prussian children at a Christmas party was just Propaganda! Tricked again, by a cathode ray tube! Like DJ Shakespeare advised while mixing beats at my birthday party:

Not working with the eye without the ear, e-e-ear,
And but in purged, p-p-purged, p-p-p-purged judgment trusting neither.

The first place in East Prussia that the Red Army broke through to was Nemmersdorf, with a population less than 100. They killed everyone in the town with the exception of one woman, who survived a shot in the head? she is interviewed in the documentary and claims that no women were raped, they were simply executed wholesale. Goebbels and the producers of the Deutsche Wochenschau apparently disagreed with her: they were quite certain that the women had been raped. (see video).

The government had declared the roads off-limits to evacuees, the roads were strictly to be used for military purposes. So the Trek mostly took place over fields, marshes and farmland, which made it slow and difficult, and necessarily deadly given the cold weather. A Prussian family with horse and wagon could move 10 km per day, whereas the advancing Red Army moved 35 km per day. As they say in the film, “When you could see the tanks, it was already too late.” In the film they show scenes where hundreds of wagons lay abandoned, or are chopped up from munitions fire and strewn with corpses.

Do not go to these areas in search of gold teeth or wedding rings, because those things have already long since been carried away by highly intelligent birds for use in nest-building. Some of the birds even left cyrillic graffiti on what remained of the wagon-wrecks.

Posted by Potential Frolic on Monday, September 10, 2007 at 09:42 AM in
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