Forgotten Victims of War: Memories Unknown and Unwelcome by Germans from East Prussia
Freya Klier: Wir letzten Kinder Ostpreußens. Zeugen einer vergessenen Generation, Herder Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau 2015, 448 pp. (We, the Last Children of East Prussia: Testimony of a Forgotten Generation)
I.
Historical memory is anything but a commonly shared recollection of the past. Rather, it occurs on divergent, if not separate levels: in the works of historians, in the historical self-perception and symbols of a nation or an ethnic group, and, much less visibly, in the consciousness – and subconsciousness – of individuals. For millions of human beings the history of the 20th century is filled with memories of war, death, destruction, and extermination. Nonetheless, in most of our history books their specific traumatic experiences are reduced to footnotes. In particular, shocked by so many horrifying images related to the Nazi past and with the Holocaust in mind, we hesitate to accept this observation when it comes to recognizing Germans in the role of victims. It takes historians like Ian Kershaw (in his book The End: Hitler´s Germany, 1944-45, first published in 2011) or Giles MacDonogh (After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation, 2007) to remind contemporaries of the consequences of the failure of the 20th July 1944 plot against Hitler: If the plot had succeeded, innumerable lives would have been saved, many cities in their unique beauty would have been spared from destruction, mass murder in the concentration camps would have ceased.
In contrast to such an empathetic approach we can observe in present-day Germany a tendency to minimize, if not to exclude from historical memory the recollection of suffering and pain experienced by millions of Germans during and after WW II. When Jörg Friedrich, highly awarded as a historian of the Holocaust, depicted the horrifying effects of the area bombing of German cities as an Allied strategy in his book „Der Brand“ (The Fire, first published in 2002), critics accused him of „relativizing“ Germany´s war guilt and Nazi crimes. Evidently, being confronted with their country´s total catastrophe under Hitler, many Germans find themselves trapped in a historical minefield. Hence quite a few intellectuals have taken the easy way out by proclaiming that the Germans got what they deserved. Cynicism in moral disguise is a favorite among some political activists. In its most aggressive and primitive form, it is exhibited by so-called „anti-Fascist“ groups displaying banners in Dresden with the slogan „Bomber Harris, Do It Again!“
II.
Against this background, Freya Klier stands out as an author of uncompromised integrity, as evidenced by her biography. Born in Dresden in 1950, she was packed off in 1953 to a children´s home after her father had been imprisoned in the aftermath of the 17th June uprising in the GDR. In her teens, she last saw her brother, who had „provoked“ the authorities with his enthusiasm for Beatles music, in a psychiatric ward before he committed suicide there. In 1968 she found herself in jail for a failed attempt to escape from the GDR („Republikflucht“). In a bitterly absurd way, her brother´s death helped her to be released and to be admitted for studying theatre and acting. Being one of the protagonists of the independent peace movement in East Germany, she was arrested and expelled to West Germany in 1988. When the Berlin Wall came down – Freya can claim her share in achieving its collapse – she started her career as a writer and documentary film-maker.
Freya Klier´s writings and activities are devoted to the human victims of inhuman history. In one of her early books, she wrote about women who were tortured in Ravensbrück, the concentration camp some 80 km north of Berlin, serving as guinea pigs for „medical experiments“ by the Nazi doctors in WW II. Next she followed the traces of German women who, in the wake of the Red Army´s advance and victory in Eastern Central Europe, were torn from their families and children to be deported „unto the end of the world“, to do forced labour in Siberia or elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Not by chance, a reader´s comment on „Amazon“ expressed in somewhat oblique words: „Being over 60 years-old, I hadn´t known all that before! Incredible, all those things that happened in the war. A highly recommendable read!“ („Das habe ich als über 60-jähriger alles nicht gewusst! Unglaublich, was da im Krieg alles passiert ist. Sehr lesenswert!”)
III.
In her most recent book, Freya Klier draws attention to the memories of „the last children of East Prussia“. Klier focused on the biographies of three men and four women born in that eastern-most of Germany´s provinces lost in the aftermath of WW II. Drawing her material from their personal recollections, in the case of Michael Wieck also from his autobiographical writings, as well as from historical literature, she is depicting the ordeal that struck East Prussia in 1944/45.
We get to know Karla Browarcyk, who died in 2014 after the completion of this book. She was the daughter of a steadfast communist who was determined to support the Red Army in the liberation from Nazi rule by hiding an amount of Panzerfaust bazookas in a cache near the harbor of Königsberg. He died in February 1944, his death sparing him from learning the realities of liberation. With her mother and five brothers and sisters Karla, the second-oldest, was caught in the inferno of the British air attacks on Königsberg late in August 1944. Some five thousand inhabitants were killed and 200,000 lost their homes when the bombs laid Prussia´s ancient coronation capital into ashes.
The Red Army´s winter offensive opened up with 2.2 million soldiers on January 12, 1945, smashing through the German lines all along the eastern front. In the weeks to come, the Nazi authorities began to issue evacuation orders in East Prussia and elsewhere after absurdly long delays – before taking off themselves, like the East Prussian Gauleiter Erich Koch, who left on an ice-breaker to hide in Schleswig-Holstein. Karla´s mother took her children to Rauschen, one of the sea resorts near Königsberg. The clinic serving as their quarter was bombed. The next morning her youngest child, a baby of eight months, was found frozen to death.
In the weeks, months and years to follow, Karla lost another brother, who died of typhus. After giving one daughter to an Estonian woman who promised to take care of the girl, their mother died of exhaustion and depression at 43 years of age. Roswitha-Anna Browarcyk´s was raised as Anne Avik in Talinn, which provides another, somewhat less depressing story in the book. By 1946, Karla Browarcyk found herself left alone but for her 11-year old brother Peter. The two of them were among the thousands of „Wolfskinder“ (children of wolves) who, orphaned, lost, and exposed to starvation – there were cases of cannibalism reported by Soviet authorities - were wandering around the devastated region in efforts to survive, hiding in the woods or in deserted villages. A number of them crossed into Lithuania, where they were hidden and adopted by Lithuanian peasants who, like their Latvian and Estonian neighbors, were often enough engaged in a partisan war against the Soviet Russian occupants. In the summer of that year, Karla was sitting on the window sill of a cellar, waiting for days for her brother to return from Lithuania, where he had gone to gather some food. An officer chanced to see her and, after promising her some food, went on to rape the eight-year old child. Her brother never returned. Years later, Karla learned that he had been shot as a suspected Nazi because of a swastika on his belt buckle.
Then there is the story of Doris Mayer, born as the only child into a pious Prussian family in Königsberg. She survived the siege and surrender of Königsberg (April 9, 1945) in a cellar serving as an air raid shelter. As an eight-year old child, she watched a Polish woman being taken upstairs by her would-be liberators, then coming back down, dishevelled and raped. A few days later, Doris was dragged to a barn by a horde of dehumanized soldiers to let her inspect their trophies of victory: the mutilated corpses of raped women.
Decades later, when veterans were interviewed by the Russian human rights organization „Memorial“, no one would admit to having witnessed – let alone committed - any atrocities. Nonetheless, scenes like the above have been coined into verse by Alexander Solzhenitcyn in his famous poem „East Prussian Nights“. There were exceptions to this gruesome picture, as reported by Doris Mayer herself. In a village not far from Königsberg, she and her mother, who had taken to tailoring, encountered a unit of well-disciplined soldiers with whom they made friends.
Brigitte Possienke was born in Schuditten, 30 km west of Königsberg, the youngest of three daughters of a well-to-do farmer serving - as a German patriot, but non-Nazi - as the mayor in his village. When the Eastern front came nearer, he was drafted into the „Volkssturm“ (Hitler´s last-minute reserves of little military use).Years later he was reported as „missing in action“. When - due to a shortage of men - many women and young girls were picked up to be deported to Russia, mothers with children had a chance of being exempted. The Possienke family was made to work on a newly established military agrarian sovkhoz. There, 4-year old Brigitte watched her mother die of typhus. Then her oldest sister Edith (8 years) fell ill and was taken to some ramshackle „hospital“. Brigitte last saw her in a catatonic state before being told a couple of days later that her sister had died.
For a while, Stalin´s new rulers of northern East Prussia meant to keep the remaining Germans in their home region and make them into Soviet patriots. In 1947, suspecting them of being potential spies in the newly established military district, the Soviets switched their policy to deporting the Germans. In 1947/48 these survivors, the majority of them women and children, were collected and shipped west to the Soviet Zone of Germany. A Soviet general´s final report to Moscow of 18 November 1948 bureaucratically listed 102,125 evacuees. The trains left Königsberg carrying 2,000 people each; the journey in box cars could take up to a week. A number of the expatriated did not survive that passage, mostly due to old age and weakness. At train stops, the corpses were simply disposed of on the embankment.
After arriving in Frankfurt/Oder, Brigitte Possienke and her older sister Birgit tried to take off their clothes and clean themselves from filth and lice. They burst out into screams as their rags were sticking to their body, covering open wounds. When Karla Browarcyk, by that time nine years of age, arrived in Eisenach (Johann Sebastian Bach´s city of birth in Thuringia), the doctor examining her estimated her to be five, not old enough to attend school. The authorities were eager to find parents to adopt the orphaned children. The boys who were often passed by because many of the prospective parents feared losing another son in the next war; they hence preferred girls.
IV.
Among the biographies related in this book, Michael Wieck´s story of survival is striking for its specific features. Born in 1928, Michael grew up in a family of renowned musicians. On his father´s side, his family tree leads back to Clara Wieck, pianist and wife of the composer Robert Schumann. His mother, of Jewish descent, gave music lessons to Hannah Arendt in Königsberg. After the Nazi takeover Michael, considered as a „half-Jew“, was humiliated by a female teacher and beaten by class-mates. As a boy of ten, he saw the ruined synagogue set on fire and defiled during the pogrom of November 1938. While his sister Miriam was fortunate to leave Germany for Britain thanks to a Quaker relief initiative, the rest of the family stayed behind in Könisberg. Until the very end of the war, Michael and his mother, both stigmatized by the yellow star, were forced to work in a chemical plant.
The Soviet soldiers whom the Wiecks, crowded together with others in their cellar, encountered in the ruins of Königsberg did not show the least interest in their tale of having survived Nazi persecution. In fact, the NKVD intelligence officers interrogating Michael did not accept his ID card identifying him and his mother as Jews and suspected him of being a young German soldier. In May 1945, Michael was arrested and marched to a former Wehrmacht barracks now serving as an NKVD camp for some 4,000 prisoners. He found himself thrown into a stinking cellar together with other „suspects“, most of them elderly men. Near starvation, having given up hope to stay alive, he was suddenly called out of this dungeon and sent back to Königsberg, only to find his parents in despair. Later in the year Michael, like many others, contracted malaria and spent five months in a hospital where Russian and German personnel collaborated to save those who still had a chance to survive in the ghastly winter of 1945/46. For many of them, chances diminished after the military administration was replaced by civilian authorities in May 1946. The doctors at the hospital with the old German name „Barmherzigkeit“ (Mercy) gave orders to collect any kind of edible plants found in the ruins and meadows around Königsberg to feed the patients.
In one of the last trains emptying northern East Prussia of all Germans in 1948, Michael Wieck and his parents – the only two on the train in the age group above 60 years - were shipped to the Soviet Zone, arriving at a quarantine camp near Potsdam. Michael managed to escape to West Berlin, becoming witness to the final phase of the Berlin airlift. He passed the exam for the conservatory, and, practising up to ten hours a day, graduated from the Berlin High School of Music (Hochschule der Musik) to begin his career as a renowned virtuoso.
Michael Wieck was filled with bitterness when he visited Kaliningrad in 1992. The new city of 400,000 inhabitants erected on ruins bore no resemblance to the Königsberg he knew. The happy years of his early childhood in mind, he reflects upon the relentless logic of history: „If the 20th July 1944 had brought an end to the war, Königsberg would have remained undestroyed, the population of East Prussian would not have had to flee, and the preconditions for a total incorporation of the city into Russia would not even have existed.“
V.
Siegfried Matthus, who was to become a renowned conductor and composer in the GDR, was born in 1934 in a village just 10 km from infamous Nemmersdorf. This was one of the two villages close to the Lithuanian border where Soviet troops committed horrible crimes against the civilians when they entered German territory victoriously for the first time. These atrocities, dated 21 October 1944, were disclosed when German units re-conquered that area in the very east of the Reich. The scenes were exploited by Nazi propaganda to mobilize resistance „to the very end“ to the „Asian Bolshevik“ enemy.
Matthus´ father owned a farm and, following a family tradition, he used to play the polka on the accordion and to sing popular songs at village events or in the district town of Darkehmen (renamed Angerapp by Hitler in 1938). Having made it across the frozen bay near Königsberg to get onto a boat, his mother gave birth to a baby in Danzig. Siegfried assisted in burying his 84-year-old grandmother there. While his mother was close to death, his 8-year-old sister took the lead in continuing their flight further west. In Pomerania, his baby sister died. In the turmoil of refugee treks, of retreating Germans troops and advancing Soviet tanks, Siegfried was separated from his mother and his four siblings. His odyssey ended in Mecklenburg, where he was reunited with his family in 1946, including his father, who had been drafted late in 1944 but had survived the war.
Siegfried Matthus was lucky to attend high school in near-by Rheinsberg (known as young Frederick the Great´s favorite place of sojourn) and from there to start his exceptional career in music. As for his feelings about having lost his home in East Prussia, in the early years, there was little room for nostalgia. His family was busy with building up a new existence on a small farm they had been assigned as „Umsiedler“ (or „resettlers“ - a euphemism coined in the Soviet zone for the people deprived of their homes in the East ). „Yearning for our village in East Prussia re-awoke only later, when we were living under somewhat better circumstances.“
Thanks to the ingenuity of a GDR film team, Matthus, then 54 years old, managed to see the place of his birth and childhood in the precluded military region of Kaliningradskaja oblast again in September 1988 for the first time. Some buildings, including his old school house, still existed in his half-destroyed village. Elsewhere, people returning for a visit today cannot find a trace of their former homes, as some 3,000 villages have disappeared in this section of East Prussia, either wiped off the map in the war or torn down to serve as farmland for the badly administered Soviet collective farms.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing collapse of the Soviet Union, Matthus repeatedly returned to Königsberg to conduct concerts there. Like many other Germans from the eastern regions, he has been engaged in promoting reconciliation and amicable contacts with the new inhabitants of Kenigberga, the name often (re-)used by young Russians for their city with its German past.
Matthus is outspoken in pointing out some political aspects of the current situation. The German government has never shown any real interest in establishing and strengthening ties with the Russians now living in and ruling that region. This is to no small degree due to the political sensitivities of Poland and Lithuania, both of whom hold ambitions of their own vis-à-vis the wedge-like Russian exclave on the Baltic coast.
VI.
For all diversity of their backgrounds and later lives, these „last children of East Prussia“ have one biographical trait in common: By no means responsible for what happened to them in their childhood or early youth, innocent in the full sense of the word, they became helpless victims of war and violence. In many ways, they represent the cruel absurdity and the paradoxes of history. Although deeply wounded in their young bodies and souls, these „last children of East Prussia“ were capable of somehow re-entering „normal“ human life. Despite recurring traumatic memories, they were spared permanent despair and mental depression. On the other hand, we learn from Brigitte Possienke that her sister Birgit, who seemed to be the stronger one during the years of torment and suffering, never recovered from the wounds inflicted upon her as a child, remaining in a state of mental anguish for the rest of her life. Similarly, Siegfried Matthus´ sister was prone to dejection for the rest of her life.
It is to Freya Klier’s credit to have elucidated these psychological aspects of a painful past. Gifted with intuition and sensitivity, she also sketches out West Germany´s atmosphere in the 1950ies. At that time, the great majority of the refugees – not in the least welcomed and often derided by their luckier compatriots in the West - were still cherishing hopes of returning „home“ to the East. Raised in the GDR, Freya has a precise perception of the „generation of 1968“. The student movement in West Germany was swayed by an emotional mixture of revulsion vis-à-vis the Nazi crimes and of moral arrogance towards their parents’ generation, which was reluctant to face up that past. Furthermore, the student revolt was colored by ideology and carried by absurd misperceptions of reality, including widespread indifference to the oppressive regime in the GDR.
As part of her technique of weaving her witnesses´ autobiographical reports with the post-war historical stages, Freya Klier connects the „generation of 1968“ with her narration of East Prussia. In her chapter titled „Hippies gegen Faltenrock-Ordnung. 1960er Jahre“ (“Hippies against the Order of the Pleated Skirts. 1960ies“) - she returns to the horrifying topic of the Palmnicken massacre, which had already been addressed in an earlier chapter on „The Great Winter Battle. 1945“. When, in view of the German front´s collapse, orders were given to evacuate civilians from East Prussia, there were still some 7,000 Jews who had survived working in factories and camps in the region. They were rounded up by an SS commando in Königsberg to be marched to the Baltic coast, wearing wooden clogs and their shiny striped clothes through ice and snow. In a trial held in Lüneburg in 1967 against some perpetrators of the Palmnicken massacre, testimony was given by a witness who had counted 386 corpses on a short section of the road on the way to join his „Volkssturm“ unit. The SS intended to kill their captives by driving them into the amber mine of Palmnicken. Hans Feyerabend, the director of the amber mine, managed to prevent that scheme for three days. When he realized that the SS had double-crossed him and was proceeding with the murder, he shot himself. Only few people in Germany today are familiar with the name of Hans Feyerabend, who, in November 2015, was posthumously honoured by the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations“- (See Naomi Bader: “Mut und Menschlichkeit“ in: Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung 11-15-2015. - According to this article, the circumstances of Feyerabend's death are unclear to this day.)
VII.
Freya does not write as a historian. Hence, a few historical inaccuracies have slipped in. For example, „spheres of influence“ were not explicitly delineated in the agreement of Yalta (11 February 1945). This interpretation of the „Division of Europe“ was a favourite among Polish dissidents in the 1980ies. Also, distasteful as the idea of dissecting numbers of death and murder must appear, the figure of six million dead Poles encompasses the millions of Polish Jews (p. 138).
By necessity, an underlying theme of the book is the question of causality: Did the brutalized divisions of the Red Army – there were remarkable exceptions to the rule – simply engage in retaliation? There were more than just a few abhorrent atrocities committed by the German invaders. As just one example, there are reports of a woman from Belarus who, as a nurse, saw mentally ill patients being torn away from the hospital by a group of SS to be killed in a truck by exhaust fumes
(p. 130).
Thus, throughout her book, Freya takes pains to put the stories of the horror and suffering experienced by innocent German children into historical perspective. As a narrator, she is very much aware of the futility – and immoral arrogance – of making sense of human suffering in any way other than by illustrating the suffering caused by war and human inhumanity.
Herbert Ammon
I.
Historical memory is anything but a commonly shared recollection of the past. Rather, it occurs on divergent, if not separate levels: in the works of historians, in the historical self-perception and symbols of a nation or an ethnic group, and, much less visibly, in the consciousness – and subconsciousness – of individuals. For millions of human beings the history of the 20th century is filled with memories of war, death, destruction, and extermination. Nonetheless, in most of our history books their specific traumatic experiences are reduced to footnotes. In particular, shocked by so many horrifying images related to the Nazi past and with the Holocaust in mind, we hesitate to accept this observation when it comes to recognizing Germans in the role of victims. It takes historians like Ian Kershaw (in his book The End: Hitler´s Germany, 1944-45, first published in 2011) or Giles MacDonogh (After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation, 2007) to remind contemporaries of the consequences of the failure of the 20th July 1944 plot against Hitler: If the plot had succeeded, innumerable lives would have been saved, many cities in their unique beauty would have been spared from destruction, mass murder in the concentration camps would have ceased.
In contrast to such an empathetic approach we can observe in present-day Germany a tendency to minimize, if not to exclude from historical memory the recollection of suffering and pain experienced by millions of Germans during and after WW II. When Jörg Friedrich, highly awarded as a historian of the Holocaust, depicted the horrifying effects of the area bombing of German cities as an Allied strategy in his book „Der Brand“ (The Fire, first published in 2002), critics accused him of „relativizing“ Germany´s war guilt and Nazi crimes. Evidently, being confronted with their country´s total catastrophe under Hitler, many Germans find themselves trapped in a historical minefield. Hence quite a few intellectuals have taken the easy way out by proclaiming that the Germans got what they deserved. Cynicism in moral disguise is a favorite among some political activists. In its most aggressive and primitive form, it is exhibited by so-called „anti-Fascist“ groups displaying banners in Dresden with the slogan „Bomber Harris, Do It Again!“
II.
Against this background, Freya Klier stands out as an author of uncompromised integrity, as evidenced by her biography. Born in Dresden in 1950, she was packed off in 1953 to a children´s home after her father had been imprisoned in the aftermath of the 17th June uprising in the GDR. In her teens, she last saw her brother, who had „provoked“ the authorities with his enthusiasm for Beatles music, in a psychiatric ward before he committed suicide there. In 1968 she found herself in jail for a failed attempt to escape from the GDR („Republikflucht“). In a bitterly absurd way, her brother´s death helped her to be released and to be admitted for studying theatre and acting. Being one of the protagonists of the independent peace movement in East Germany, she was arrested and expelled to West Germany in 1988. When the Berlin Wall came down – Freya can claim her share in achieving its collapse – she started her career as a writer and documentary film-maker.
Freya Klier´s writings and activities are devoted to the human victims of inhuman history. In one of her early books, she wrote about women who were tortured in Ravensbrück, the concentration camp some 80 km north of Berlin, serving as guinea pigs for „medical experiments“ by the Nazi doctors in WW II. Next she followed the traces of German women who, in the wake of the Red Army´s advance and victory in Eastern Central Europe, were torn from their families and children to be deported „unto the end of the world“, to do forced labour in Siberia or elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Not by chance, a reader´s comment on „Amazon“ expressed in somewhat oblique words: „Being over 60 years-old, I hadn´t known all that before! Incredible, all those things that happened in the war. A highly recommendable read!“ („Das habe ich als über 60-jähriger alles nicht gewusst! Unglaublich, was da im Krieg alles passiert ist. Sehr lesenswert!”)
III.
In her most recent book, Freya Klier draws attention to the memories of „the last children of East Prussia“. Klier focused on the biographies of three men and four women born in that eastern-most of Germany´s provinces lost in the aftermath of WW II. Drawing her material from their personal recollections, in the case of Michael Wieck also from his autobiographical writings, as well as from historical literature, she is depicting the ordeal that struck East Prussia in 1944/45.
We get to know Karla Browarcyk, who died in 2014 after the completion of this book. She was the daughter of a steadfast communist who was determined to support the Red Army in the liberation from Nazi rule by hiding an amount of Panzerfaust bazookas in a cache near the harbor of Königsberg. He died in February 1944, his death sparing him from learning the realities of liberation. With her mother and five brothers and sisters Karla, the second-oldest, was caught in the inferno of the British air attacks on Königsberg late in August 1944. Some five thousand inhabitants were killed and 200,000 lost their homes when the bombs laid Prussia´s ancient coronation capital into ashes.
The Red Army´s winter offensive opened up with 2.2 million soldiers on January 12, 1945, smashing through the German lines all along the eastern front. In the weeks to come, the Nazi authorities began to issue evacuation orders in East Prussia and elsewhere after absurdly long delays – before taking off themselves, like the East Prussian Gauleiter Erich Koch, who left on an ice-breaker to hide in Schleswig-Holstein. Karla´s mother took her children to Rauschen, one of the sea resorts near Königsberg. The clinic serving as their quarter was bombed. The next morning her youngest child, a baby of eight months, was found frozen to death.
In the weeks, months and years to follow, Karla lost another brother, who died of typhus. After giving one daughter to an Estonian woman who promised to take care of the girl, their mother died of exhaustion and depression at 43 years of age. Roswitha-Anna Browarcyk´s was raised as Anne Avik in Talinn, which provides another, somewhat less depressing story in the book. By 1946, Karla Browarcyk found herself left alone but for her 11-year old brother Peter. The two of them were among the thousands of „Wolfskinder“ (children of wolves) who, orphaned, lost, and exposed to starvation – there were cases of cannibalism reported by Soviet authorities - were wandering around the devastated region in efforts to survive, hiding in the woods or in deserted villages. A number of them crossed into Lithuania, where they were hidden and adopted by Lithuanian peasants who, like their Latvian and Estonian neighbors, were often enough engaged in a partisan war against the Soviet Russian occupants. In the summer of that year, Karla was sitting on the window sill of a cellar, waiting for days for her brother to return from Lithuania, where he had gone to gather some food. An officer chanced to see her and, after promising her some food, went on to rape the eight-year old child. Her brother never returned. Years later, Karla learned that he had been shot as a suspected Nazi because of a swastika on his belt buckle.
Then there is the story of Doris Mayer, born as the only child into a pious Prussian family in Königsberg. She survived the siege and surrender of Königsberg (April 9, 1945) in a cellar serving as an air raid shelter. As an eight-year old child, she watched a Polish woman being taken upstairs by her would-be liberators, then coming back down, dishevelled and raped. A few days later, Doris was dragged to a barn by a horde of dehumanized soldiers to let her inspect their trophies of victory: the mutilated corpses of raped women.
Decades later, when veterans were interviewed by the Russian human rights organization „Memorial“, no one would admit to having witnessed – let alone committed - any atrocities. Nonetheless, scenes like the above have been coined into verse by Alexander Solzhenitcyn in his famous poem „East Prussian Nights“. There were exceptions to this gruesome picture, as reported by Doris Mayer herself. In a village not far from Königsberg, she and her mother, who had taken to tailoring, encountered a unit of well-disciplined soldiers with whom they made friends.
Brigitte Possienke was born in Schuditten, 30 km west of Königsberg, the youngest of three daughters of a well-to-do farmer serving - as a German patriot, but non-Nazi - as the mayor in his village. When the Eastern front came nearer, he was drafted into the „Volkssturm“ (Hitler´s last-minute reserves of little military use).Years later he was reported as „missing in action“. When - due to a shortage of men - many women and young girls were picked up to be deported to Russia, mothers with children had a chance of being exempted. The Possienke family was made to work on a newly established military agrarian sovkhoz. There, 4-year old Brigitte watched her mother die of typhus. Then her oldest sister Edith (8 years) fell ill and was taken to some ramshackle „hospital“. Brigitte last saw her in a catatonic state before being told a couple of days later that her sister had died.
For a while, Stalin´s new rulers of northern East Prussia meant to keep the remaining Germans in their home region and make them into Soviet patriots. In 1947, suspecting them of being potential spies in the newly established military district, the Soviets switched their policy to deporting the Germans. In 1947/48 these survivors, the majority of them women and children, were collected and shipped west to the Soviet Zone of Germany. A Soviet general´s final report to Moscow of 18 November 1948 bureaucratically listed 102,125 evacuees. The trains left Königsberg carrying 2,000 people each; the journey in box cars could take up to a week. A number of the expatriated did not survive that passage, mostly due to old age and weakness. At train stops, the corpses were simply disposed of on the embankment.
After arriving in Frankfurt/Oder, Brigitte Possienke and her older sister Birgit tried to take off their clothes and clean themselves from filth and lice. They burst out into screams as their rags were sticking to their body, covering open wounds. When Karla Browarcyk, by that time nine years of age, arrived in Eisenach (Johann Sebastian Bach´s city of birth in Thuringia), the doctor examining her estimated her to be five, not old enough to attend school. The authorities were eager to find parents to adopt the orphaned children. The boys who were often passed by because many of the prospective parents feared losing another son in the next war; they hence preferred girls.
IV.
Among the biographies related in this book, Michael Wieck´s story of survival is striking for its specific features. Born in 1928, Michael grew up in a family of renowned musicians. On his father´s side, his family tree leads back to Clara Wieck, pianist and wife of the composer Robert Schumann. His mother, of Jewish descent, gave music lessons to Hannah Arendt in Königsberg. After the Nazi takeover Michael, considered as a „half-Jew“, was humiliated by a female teacher and beaten by class-mates. As a boy of ten, he saw the ruined synagogue set on fire and defiled during the pogrom of November 1938. While his sister Miriam was fortunate to leave Germany for Britain thanks to a Quaker relief initiative, the rest of the family stayed behind in Könisberg. Until the very end of the war, Michael and his mother, both stigmatized by the yellow star, were forced to work in a chemical plant.
The Soviet soldiers whom the Wiecks, crowded together with others in their cellar, encountered in the ruins of Königsberg did not show the least interest in their tale of having survived Nazi persecution. In fact, the NKVD intelligence officers interrogating Michael did not accept his ID card identifying him and his mother as Jews and suspected him of being a young German soldier. In May 1945, Michael was arrested and marched to a former Wehrmacht barracks now serving as an NKVD camp for some 4,000 prisoners. He found himself thrown into a stinking cellar together with other „suspects“, most of them elderly men. Near starvation, having given up hope to stay alive, he was suddenly called out of this dungeon and sent back to Königsberg, only to find his parents in despair. Later in the year Michael, like many others, contracted malaria and spent five months in a hospital where Russian and German personnel collaborated to save those who still had a chance to survive in the ghastly winter of 1945/46. For many of them, chances diminished after the military administration was replaced by civilian authorities in May 1946. The doctors at the hospital with the old German name „Barmherzigkeit“ (Mercy) gave orders to collect any kind of edible plants found in the ruins and meadows around Königsberg to feed the patients.
In one of the last trains emptying northern East Prussia of all Germans in 1948, Michael Wieck and his parents – the only two on the train in the age group above 60 years - were shipped to the Soviet Zone, arriving at a quarantine camp near Potsdam. Michael managed to escape to West Berlin, becoming witness to the final phase of the Berlin airlift. He passed the exam for the conservatory, and, practising up to ten hours a day, graduated from the Berlin High School of Music (Hochschule der Musik) to begin his career as a renowned virtuoso.
Michael Wieck was filled with bitterness when he visited Kaliningrad in 1992. The new city of 400,000 inhabitants erected on ruins bore no resemblance to the Königsberg he knew. The happy years of his early childhood in mind, he reflects upon the relentless logic of history: „If the 20th July 1944 had brought an end to the war, Königsberg would have remained undestroyed, the population of East Prussian would not have had to flee, and the preconditions for a total incorporation of the city into Russia would not even have existed.“
V.
Siegfried Matthus, who was to become a renowned conductor and composer in the GDR, was born in 1934 in a village just 10 km from infamous Nemmersdorf. This was one of the two villages close to the Lithuanian border where Soviet troops committed horrible crimes against the civilians when they entered German territory victoriously for the first time. These atrocities, dated 21 October 1944, were disclosed when German units re-conquered that area in the very east of the Reich. The scenes were exploited by Nazi propaganda to mobilize resistance „to the very end“ to the „Asian Bolshevik“ enemy.
Matthus´ father owned a farm and, following a family tradition, he used to play the polka on the accordion and to sing popular songs at village events or in the district town of Darkehmen (renamed Angerapp by Hitler in 1938). Having made it across the frozen bay near Königsberg to get onto a boat, his mother gave birth to a baby in Danzig. Siegfried assisted in burying his 84-year-old grandmother there. While his mother was close to death, his 8-year-old sister took the lead in continuing their flight further west. In Pomerania, his baby sister died. In the turmoil of refugee treks, of retreating Germans troops and advancing Soviet tanks, Siegfried was separated from his mother and his four siblings. His odyssey ended in Mecklenburg, where he was reunited with his family in 1946, including his father, who had been drafted late in 1944 but had survived the war.
Siegfried Matthus was lucky to attend high school in near-by Rheinsberg (known as young Frederick the Great´s favorite place of sojourn) and from there to start his exceptional career in music. As for his feelings about having lost his home in East Prussia, in the early years, there was little room for nostalgia. His family was busy with building up a new existence on a small farm they had been assigned as „Umsiedler“ (or „resettlers“ - a euphemism coined in the Soviet zone for the people deprived of their homes in the East ). „Yearning for our village in East Prussia re-awoke only later, when we were living under somewhat better circumstances.“
Thanks to the ingenuity of a GDR film team, Matthus, then 54 years old, managed to see the place of his birth and childhood in the precluded military region of Kaliningradskaja oblast again in September 1988 for the first time. Some buildings, including his old school house, still existed in his half-destroyed village. Elsewhere, people returning for a visit today cannot find a trace of their former homes, as some 3,000 villages have disappeared in this section of East Prussia, either wiped off the map in the war or torn down to serve as farmland for the badly administered Soviet collective farms.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing collapse of the Soviet Union, Matthus repeatedly returned to Königsberg to conduct concerts there. Like many other Germans from the eastern regions, he has been engaged in promoting reconciliation and amicable contacts with the new inhabitants of Kenigberga, the name often (re-)used by young Russians for their city with its German past.
Matthus is outspoken in pointing out some political aspects of the current situation. The German government has never shown any real interest in establishing and strengthening ties with the Russians now living in and ruling that region. This is to no small degree due to the political sensitivities of Poland and Lithuania, both of whom hold ambitions of their own vis-à-vis the wedge-like Russian exclave on the Baltic coast.
VI.
For all diversity of their backgrounds and later lives, these „last children of East Prussia“ have one biographical trait in common: By no means responsible for what happened to them in their childhood or early youth, innocent in the full sense of the word, they became helpless victims of war and violence. In many ways, they represent the cruel absurdity and the paradoxes of history. Although deeply wounded in their young bodies and souls, these „last children of East Prussia“ were capable of somehow re-entering „normal“ human life. Despite recurring traumatic memories, they were spared permanent despair and mental depression. On the other hand, we learn from Brigitte Possienke that her sister Birgit, who seemed to be the stronger one during the years of torment and suffering, never recovered from the wounds inflicted upon her as a child, remaining in a state of mental anguish for the rest of her life. Similarly, Siegfried Matthus´ sister was prone to dejection for the rest of her life.
It is to Freya Klier’s credit to have elucidated these psychological aspects of a painful past. Gifted with intuition and sensitivity, she also sketches out West Germany´s atmosphere in the 1950ies. At that time, the great majority of the refugees – not in the least welcomed and often derided by their luckier compatriots in the West - were still cherishing hopes of returning „home“ to the East. Raised in the GDR, Freya has a precise perception of the „generation of 1968“. The student movement in West Germany was swayed by an emotional mixture of revulsion vis-à-vis the Nazi crimes and of moral arrogance towards their parents’ generation, which was reluctant to face up that past. Furthermore, the student revolt was colored by ideology and carried by absurd misperceptions of reality, including widespread indifference to the oppressive regime in the GDR.
As part of her technique of weaving her witnesses´ autobiographical reports with the post-war historical stages, Freya Klier connects the „generation of 1968“ with her narration of East Prussia. In her chapter titled „Hippies gegen Faltenrock-Ordnung. 1960er Jahre“ (“Hippies against the Order of the Pleated Skirts. 1960ies“) - she returns to the horrifying topic of the Palmnicken massacre, which had already been addressed in an earlier chapter on „The Great Winter Battle. 1945“. When, in view of the German front´s collapse, orders were given to evacuate civilians from East Prussia, there were still some 7,000 Jews who had survived working in factories and camps in the region. They were rounded up by an SS commando in Königsberg to be marched to the Baltic coast, wearing wooden clogs and their shiny striped clothes through ice and snow. In a trial held in Lüneburg in 1967 against some perpetrators of the Palmnicken massacre, testimony was given by a witness who had counted 386 corpses on a short section of the road on the way to join his „Volkssturm“ unit. The SS intended to kill their captives by driving them into the amber mine of Palmnicken. Hans Feyerabend, the director of the amber mine, managed to prevent that scheme for three days. When he realized that the SS had double-crossed him and was proceeding with the murder, he shot himself. Only few people in Germany today are familiar with the name of Hans Feyerabend, who, in November 2015, was posthumously honoured by the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations“- (See Naomi Bader: “Mut und Menschlichkeit“ in: Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung 11-15-2015. - According to this article, the circumstances of Feyerabend's death are unclear to this day.)
VII.
Freya does not write as a historian. Hence, a few historical inaccuracies have slipped in. For example, „spheres of influence“ were not explicitly delineated in the agreement of Yalta (11 February 1945). This interpretation of the „Division of Europe“ was a favourite among Polish dissidents in the 1980ies. Also, distasteful as the idea of dissecting numbers of death and murder must appear, the figure of six million dead Poles encompasses the millions of Polish Jews (p. 138).
By necessity, an underlying theme of the book is the question of causality: Did the brutalized divisions of the Red Army – there were remarkable exceptions to the rule – simply engage in retaliation? There were more than just a few abhorrent atrocities committed by the German invaders. As just one example, there are reports of a woman from Belarus who, as a nurse, saw mentally ill patients being torn away from the hospital by a group of SS to be killed in a truck by exhaust fumes
(p. 130).
Thus, throughout her book, Freya takes pains to put the stories of the horror and suffering experienced by innocent German children into historical perspective. As a narrator, she is very much aware of the futility – and immoral arrogance – of making sense of human suffering in any way other than by illustrating the suffering caused by war and human inhumanity.
Herbert Ammon