East Prussia (red) was separated from Germany and Prussia proper (blue) by the Polish corridor in the inter-war era. The area, divided between the Soviet Union and Poland in 1945, is 340km east of the present-day Polish–German border.
The evacuation of East Prussia was the movement of German civilian population and military personnel from East Prussia between 20 January and March 1945, that was initially organized and carried out by state authorities but quickly turned into a chaotic flight from the Red Army.[5][6]
The evacuation, which had been delayed for months, was initiated due to fear of the Red Army advances during the East Prussian Offensive. Some parts of the evacuation were planned as a military necessity, Operation Hannibal being the most important military operation involved in the evacuation. However, many refugees took to the roads on their own initiative because of reported Soviet atrocities against Germans in the areas under Soviet control. Both spurious and factual accounts of Soviet atrocities were disseminated through the official news and propaganda outlets of Nazi Germany and by rumors that swept through the military and civilian populations.
Despite having detailed evacuation plans for some areas, the German authorities, including the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, delayed action until 20 January, when it was too late for an orderly evacuation, and the civil services and Nazi Party were eventually overwhelmed by the numbers of those wishing to evacuate. Coupled with the panic caused by the speed of the Soviet advance, civilians caught in the middle of combat, and the bitter winter weather, many thousands of refugees died during the evacuation period. The Soviet forces took control of East Prussia only in May 1945.[citation needed] According to the West German Schieder commission, the civilian population of East Prussia at the beginning of 1944 was 2,653,000[2] people. This accounting, which was based on ration cards, included air raid evacuees from western Germany and foreign workers. Before the end of the war an estimated 2 million people[1] were evacuated, including 500,000[7] in the autumn of 1944 and 1,500,000[1] after January 1945. An estimated 600,000[1] remained behind in Soviet-controlled East Prussia in April–May 1945.[8]
According to a 1974 West German government study, an estimated 1% of the civilian population was killed during the Soviet offensive.[3] The West German search service reported that 31,940 civilians from East Prussia, which also included Memel, were confirmed as killed during the evacuation.[9]
The Red Army initiated an offensive into East Prussia in October 1944, but it was temporarily driven back two weeks later. After that, the German Ministry of Propaganda reported that war crimes had taken place in East Prussian villages, in particular in Nemmersdorf, where inhabitants had been raped and killed by the advancing Soviets.[10] Since the Nazi war effort had largely stripped the civil population of able-bodied men for service in the military, the victims of the atrocity were primarily old men, women, and children. Upon the Soviet withdrawal from the area, German authorities sent in film crews to document what had happened, and invited foreign observers as further witnesses. A documentary film from the footage obtained during this effort was put together and shown in cinemas in East Prussia, with the intention of bolstering civilian and military resolve in resisting the Soviets.[11] A Nazi information campaign about the atrocities at Nemmersdorf, as well as other crimes committed in East Prussia, convinced the remaining civilians that they should not get caught by the advancing enemy.[12]
Soviet
Murders of Axis prisoners of war and German civilians are known from cases at Soviet military tribunals. Also, when Soviet troops moved into East Prussia, large numbers of enslaved Ostarbeiter ("Eastern workers") were freed, and knowledge of the suffering and deaths of many of these workers hardened the attitude of many Soviet soldiers towards East Prussians.[13]
Lev Kopelev, who took part in the invasion of East Prussia, sharply criticized atrocities against the German civilian population. For this he was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to a ten-year term in the Gulag for "bourgeois humanism" and for "pity for the enemy".[14]Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also served in East Prussia in 1945 and was arrested for criticizing Joseph Stalin and Soviet crimes in private correspondence with a friend. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp.[15] Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for German atrocities committed in the Soviet Union.[16]
Evacuation
East Prussian refugeesRefugees
The evacuation plans for parts of East Prussia were ready in the second half of 1944. They consisted of both general plans and specific instructions for many towns. The plans encompassed not only civilians, but also industry and livestock.[17]
Initially, Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, forbade evacuation of civilians (until 20 January 1945), and ordered that civilians trying to flee the region without permission should be instantly shot. Any kind of preparations made by civilians were treated as defeatism and "Wehrkraftzersetzung" (undermining of military morale). Koch and many other Nazi functionaries were among the first to flee during the Soviet advance. Between 12 January and mid-February 1945, almost 8.5 million Germans fled the Eastern provinces of the Reich.[18][19] Most of the refugees were women and children heading to western parts of Germany, carrying goods on improvised means of transport, such as wooden wagons and carts, as all the motorized vehicles and fuel had been confiscated by the Wehrmacht at the beginning of the war. After the Red Army reached the coast of the Vistula Lagoon near Elbing on 23 January 1945, cutting off the overland route between East Prussia and the western territories,[20] the only way to leave was to cross the frozen Vistula Lagoon to reach the harbours of Danzig or Gotenhafen to be evacuated by ships taking part in Operation Hannibal. Mingled with retreating Wehrmacht units, and without any camouflage or shelter, the refugees were attacked by Soviet bombers and fighter aircraft. Many wagons broke through the bomb-riddled ice covering the brackish water. Furthermore, horses and caretakers from the Trakehner stud farms were evacuated with the wagon trains.[21][22] The evacuation was severely hampered by Wehrmacht units, which clogged roads and bridges.
Volkssturm in East Prussia
The remaining men aged 16–60 were immediately incorporated into the Volkssturm. However, some Volkssturm members, without basic military knowledge and training, escaped into the woods, hoping to simply survive.[23] Refugee trains leaving East Prussia were also extremely crowded, and due to the very low temperatures, children often froze to death during the journey. The last refugee train left Königsberg on 22 January 1945.[20]
Berlin military writer Antony Beevor wrote, in Berlin: The Downfall (2002), that:[24]
Martin Bormann, the Reichsleiter of the National Socialist Party, whose Gauleiters had in most cases stopped the evacuation of women and children until it was too late, never mentions in his diary those fleeing in panic from the eastern regions. The incompetence with which they handled the refugee crisis is chilling, yet in the case of the Nazi hierarchy it is often hard to tell where irresponsibility ended and inhumanity began.
Operation Hannibal was a military operation that started on 21 January 1945, on the orders of AdmiralKarl Dönitz, withdrawing German troops and civilians from Courland, East Prussia, and the Polish Corridor. The flood of refugees turned the operation into one of the largest emergency evacuations by sea in history– over a period of 15 weeks, somewhere between 494 and 1,080 merchant vessels of all types and numerous naval craft, including Germany's largest remaining naval units, transported about 800,000–900,000 refugees and 350,000 soldiers[25] across the Baltic Sea to Germany and occupied Denmark.[26] This evacuation was one of the Kriegsmarine's most significant activities during the war.[27]
The greatest recorded loss of life from a ship sinking occurred during this operation, when the transport ship Wilhelm Gustloff was hit by three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea on the night of 30 January 1945. She sank in under 45 minutes; figures for the number of deaths vary from 5,348,[28][29] to 7,000[30][27] or 9,400.[31] The 949 survivors[32] were rescued by Kriegsmarine vessels led by the cruiserAdmiral Hipper,[30] although it is claimed that "the big warship could not risk heaving to, with a submarine close by".[33] Also, on 10 February, the SS General von Steuben left Pillau with 2,680 refugees on board; it was hit by torpedoes just after departure, killing almost all aboard.[34]
Soviet assault on Königsberg from 6 to 9 April 1945
On 24 January 1945, the 3rd Belorussian Front, led by General Chernyakhovsky, surrounded the capital city of East Prussia, Königsberg. The 3rd Panzer Army and around 200,000 civilians were trapped inside the city.[35] In response to this, General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, commander of the Army Group Center, warned Hitler of the imminent Soviet threat, but the Führer refused to act. Due to the rapid approach of the 2nd Belorussian Front led by General Rokossovsky, Nazi authorities in Königsberg decided to send trains full of refugees to Allenstein, without knowing that the town had already been captured by the Soviet 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps.[14]
During the Soviet assault, the Frische Nehrungspit became the last means of escape to the west. However, civilians who tried to escape along the spit were often intercepted and killed by Soviet tanks and patrols.[36] Two thousand civilians left Königsberg every day and tried to reach the already crowded town of Pillau. The final Soviet assault on Königsberg started on 2 April with a heavy bombardment of the city. The land route to Pillau was once again severed and those civilians who were still in the city died by the thousands. Eventually, the German garrison surrendered on 9 April, and as Beevor wrote, "the rape of women and girls went unchecked in the ruined city"[37]
The widely publicized killings and rapes in places like Nemmersdorf by the Soviets led to a severe degree of fear in the entire German population of East Prussia. Those that could not escape the advancing Soviets were left to their fate. Wealthy civilians of East Prussia were often shot by Soviet soldiers, their goods stolen, and their houses set on fire.[38] Zakhar Agranenko, a playwright serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia, wrote:
"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women. Nine, ten, twelve men at a time – they rape them on a collective basis."[39]
Even Russian women liberated from forced labor camps were raped by Soviet soldiers.[40] The rear-guard units of the advancing Soviet armies were responsible for a large proportion of the crimes committed by Red Army personnel.[41] Soviet Officers like Lev Kopelev, who tried to prevent crimes, were accused of pity for the enemy and became Gulag prisoners.[39]
These acts of violence were influenced by a desire for revenge and retribution for crimes committed by the Nazis during their invasion of the Soviet Union, collectively driven by Soviet propaganda.[42][43] The propaganda was a purposeful goad to the Soviet soldier and reflected the will of the political authorities in the Soviet Union right up to Stalin.[44][45] There is no question that Stalin was aware of what was happening.[46] Given the strict control of the Communist party over the military hierarchy, the pillage and rape in Prussia was the result of the Soviet command at all levels. Only when Stalin saw that it was in the Soviet Union's interests to check the behaviour of the Red Army did he take steps to stop it.[47]
Aftermath
Germany's territorial losses after World War II highlighted in green and pink
The Red Army eliminated all pockets of resistance and took control of East Prussia in May 1945. The exact number of civilian dead has never been determined, but is estimated to be at least 300,000. However, most of the German inhabitants, which at that point consisted mainly of children, women, and old men, did escape the Red Army as part of the largest exodus of people in human history.[48] Antony Beevor said:
"A population which had stood at 2.2 million in 1940 was reduced to 193,000 at the end of May 1945."[49]
The Schieder commission in 1953 estimated casualties in the 1945 campaign at 30,000 civilian dead in East Prussia,[50] and overall civilian losses in the entire Oder–Neisse region at 75–100,000.[51]
The West German Statistisches Bundesamt figures from 1958 estimated total civilian losses in East Prussia of 299,200 including 274,200 in the expulsions after May 1945 and 25,000 during the war.[52][53] According to the Statistisches Bundesamt, in total, out of a pre-war population of 2,490,000, about 500,000 died during the war, including 210,000 military dead and 311,000 civilians dying during the wartime flight, postwar expulsion of Germans and forced labor in the Soviet Union; 1,200,000 managed to escape to the western parts of Germany, while about 800,000 pre-war inhabitants remained in East Prussia in summer 1945. The figure of 311,000 civilian deaths is included in the overall estimate of 2.2 million expulsion deaths that is often cited in historical literature.
The West German search service issued its final report in 1965 detailing the losses of the German civilian population due to the flight and expulsions. The West German government authorized its release in 1986, and a summary of the findings was published in 1987 by the German scholar de:Gert von Pistohlkors.[54] According to the West German search service, the civilian population of East Prussia (including Memel) before the flight and expulsions was 2,328,947.[9] They put civilian dead and missing at 514,176[9] persons. The number of confirmed dead was 123,360 (9,434 violent deaths, 736 suicides, 9,864 deportation deaths, 7,841 in internment camps, 31,940 deaths during the wartime flight, 22,308 during the expulsions and 41,237 from unknown causes).[9] There were an additional 390,816[9] cases of persons reported missing whose fate could not be clarified. Some historians in Germany maintain that the search service figures of confirmed dead provide a realistic view of the total losses due to the flight and expulsions; they believe that the cases of persons reported missing whose fate could not be clarified are unreliable.[55][56] The German historian Rüdiger Overmans maintains that the statistical foundations of the West German government search service report to be unreliable; he believes that new research on the number of expulsion deaths is needed.[57][58] However, the German government and the German Red Cross still maintain that the higher figures which include the persons reported missing whose fate could not be clarified are correct.[59][60]
The German Federal Archives estimated that about 1% (100–120,000 of the estimated 11–12 million total German civilian population) in the Oder–Neisse region lost their lives due to military activity in the 1944–45 campaign as well as deliberate killings by Soviet forces.[61]
According to other sources, in summer 1945 about 800,000 Germans were still living in East Prussia.[53] The Red Army's brutality towards civilians during the East Prussian campaign, coupled with years of Nazi propaganda regarding the Soviet Union, led many German soldiers on the Eastern Front to believe that "there could be no purpose in surviving Soviet victory". This belief motivated many German soldiers to continue fighting even though they believed that the war was lost, and this contributed to higher Soviet casualties.[32]
Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble. A clean sweep will be made.
After World War II, as also agreed at the Potsdam Conference (which met from 17 July until 2 August 1945), all of the area east of the Oder-Neisse line, whether recognized by the international community as part of Germany before 1933 or occupied by Germany during World War II, was placed under the jurisdiction of other countries. The relevant paragraph regarding East Prussia in the Potsdam Agreement is:[63]
The Conference examined a proposal by the Soviet Government to the effect that pending the final determination of territorial questions at the peace settlement, the section of the western frontier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which is adjacent to the Baltic Sea should pass from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig to the east, north of Braunsberg-Goldap, to the meeting point of the frontiers of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia. The Conference has agreed in principle to the proposal of the Soviet Government concerning the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the City of Koenigsberg and the area adjacent to it as described above subject to expert examination of the actual frontier.
The President of the United States and the British Prime Minister have declared that they will support the proposal of the Conference at the forthcoming peace settlement.
1 2 German Federal Archive Spieler, Silke. ed. Vertreibung und Vertreibungsverbrechen 1945–1948. Bericht des Bundesarchivs vom 28. Mai 1974. Archivalien und ausgewählte Erlebnisberichte.. Bonn: Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen. (1989). ISBN3-88557-067-X. pp. 38–41
↑ Schieder commission 1954, p.65 Schieder estimated the loss of 75,000–100,000 German civilians in the territory of "Ostdeuschland" eastern Germany due to "Gewaltmassenahmen" violent acts. The total base population of the Schieder study was 11,924,000 persons
↑ Schieder commission 1954, p.41 Schieder presented a different set of figures for the territory of East Prussia and Memel that excluded 310,000 persons in the western regions that were included with the population of the province Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia. Total population beginning of 1944: 2,350,000. Evacuated-In the fall of 1944: 500,000; after January 1945: 1,350,000. The balance of 500,000 were captured by the Soviet forces.
1 2 3 4 5 Gesamterhebung zur Klärung des Schicksals der deutschen Bevölkerung in den Vertreibungsgebieten. München: Zentralstelle des Kirchl. Suchdienstes. See Separate table "Heimatortskartei für Ostpreussen"
↑ Overy notes the total pre-war German population of East Prussia as about 2.9 million (Overy 1996, p.111), so the rest of those making up Beevor's 8.5 million must be from other places, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia (with a combined pre-war ethnic German population of just over 8 million).
↑ Irwin J. Kappes[full citation needed] states 5,348. He does not cite his sources but recommends: A. V. Sellwood, The Damned Don't Drown: The Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff (a fiction title about the tragedy); and Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans 1944–1950.
↑ Jason Pipes[full citation needed], citing Heinz Schon (no page number) claims the loss of life was 9,343
↑ Beevor 2002, p.35, "The destructive urge of Soviet soldiers in East Prussia was truly alarming. ... Without thinking they torched houses which could have given them warmth and shelter for the night.".
↑ Beevor, Antony (1 May 2002). "They raped every German female from eight to 80". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 September 2008. The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian attempts to justify Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union.
↑ Beevor, Antony (1 May 2002). "They raped every German female from eight to 80". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 September 2008. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on behind. Their prediction proved entirely accurate.
↑ Beevor 2002, p.197, "The Soviet leadership had finally realized that the horror inspired by the Red Army's onslaught on the civilian population was increasing enemy resistance and would complicated the post-war Soviet occupation of Germany.".
↑ Pistohlkors, Gert: Informationen zur Klärung der Schicksale von Flüchtlingen aus den. Vertreibungsgebieten östlich von Oder und Neiße. Published in Schulze, Rainer, Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte: Bilanzierung der Forschung und Perspektiven für die künftige Forschungsarbeit Hildesheim: A. Lax, 1987
↑ Herausforderung Bevölkerung: zu Entwicklungen des modernen Denkens über die Bevölkerung vor, im und nach dem Dritten Reich Ingo Haar, Bevölkerungsbilanzen“ und „Vertreibungsverluste. Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der deutschen Opferangaben aus Flucht und Vertreibung Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2007 ISBN978-3-531-15556-2
↑ Hans Henning Hahn and Eva Hahn: Die Vertreibung im deutschen Erinnern. Legenden, Mythos, Geschichte. Paderborn 2010, ISBN978-3-506-77044-8
↑ Dr. Rűdiger Overmans – Personelle Verluste der deutschen Bevölkerung durch Flucht und Vertreibung. (A parallel Polish summary translation was also included, this paper was a presentation at an academic conference in Warsaw Poland in 1994), Dzieje Najnowsze Rocznik XXI-1994
↑ Christoph Bergner, Secretary of State in Germany's Bureau for Inner Affairs, outlines the stance of the respective governmental institutions in Deutschlandfunk on 29 November 2006,
↑ Archived 11 June 2017 at the Wayback Machine |Willi Kammerer; Anja Kammerer- Narben bleiben die Arbeit der Suchdienste – 60 Jahre nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg Berlin Dienststelle 2005, p. 12 (Published by the Search Service of the German Red Cross.)
During the later stages of World War II and the post-war period, Germans and Volksdeutsche fled and were expelled from various Eastern and Central European countries, including Czechoslovakia, and from the former German provinces of Lower and Upper Silesia, East Prussia, and the eastern parts of Brandenburg (Neumark) and Pomerania (Hinterpommern), which were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union.
East Prussia was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1772 to 1829 and again from 1878 ; following World War I it formed part of the Weimar Republic's Free State of Prussia, until 1945. Its capital city was Königsberg. East Prussia was the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast.
Wolf children or Little Germans were German and Prussian Lithuanian street children that existed in East Prussia at the end of World War II. Wolf children were mostly orphans left behind in the Evacuation of East Prussia and Red Army invasion in early 1945, with many living homeless in the forests of East Prussia or adopted by Lithuanian families.
World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history. An estimated total of 70–85 million people perished, or about 3% of the estimated global population of 2.3 billion in 1940. Deaths directly caused by the war are estimated at 50–56 million, with an additional estimated 19–28 million deaths from war-related disease and famine. Civilian deaths totaled 50–55 million. Military deaths from all causes totaled 21–25 million, including deaths in captivity of about 5 million prisoners of war. More than half of the total number of casualties are accounted for by the dead of the Republic of China and of the Soviet Union. The following tables give a detailed country-by-country count of human losses. Statistics on the number of military wounded are included whenever available.
Erich Koch was a Gauleiter of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in East Prussia from 1 October 1928 until 1945. Between 1941 and 1945 he was Chief of Civil Administration of Bezirk Bialystok. During this period, he was also the Reichskommissar in Reichskommissariat Ukraine from September 1941 until August 1944 and in Reichskommissariat Ostland from September 1944. After the Second World War, Koch stood trial in Poland and was convicted in 1959 of war crimes and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison and Koch died of natural causes in his cell at the Barczewo prison on 12 November 1986.
Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union was considered by the Soviet Union to be part of German war reparations for the damage inflicted by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union during the Axis-Soviet campaigns (1941–1945) of World War II. Soviet authorities deported German civilians from Germany and Eastern Europe to the USSR after World War II as forced laborers, while ethnic Germans living in the USSR were deported during World War II and conscripted for forced labor. German prisoners of war were also used as a source of forced labor during and after the war by the Soviet Union and by the Western Allies.
Operation Hannibal was a German naval operation involving the evacuation by sea of German troops and civilians from the Courland Pocket, East Prussia, West Prussia and Pomerania from mid-January to May 1945 as the Red Army advanced during the East Prussian and East Pomeranian Offensives and subsidiary operations. The operation was one of the largest evacuations by sea in history.
From 1917 to 1991, a multitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity were carried out by the Soviet Union or any of its Soviet republics, including the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and its armed forces. They include acts which were committed by the Red Army as well as acts which were committed by the country's secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the direct orders of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet policy of Red Terror as a means to justify executions and political repression. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.
The Battle of Königsberg, also known as the Königsberg offensive, was one of the last operations of the East Prussian offensive during World War II. In four days of urban warfare, Soviet forces of the 1st Baltic Front and the 3rd Belorussian Front captured the city of Königsberg, present day Kaliningrad, Russia. The siege started in late January 1945 when the Soviets initially surrounded the city. Heavy fighting took place for control of overland connection between Königsberg and the port of Pillau, however by March 1945 Königsberg was hundreds of kilometres behind the main front line in the eastern front. The battle ended when the German garrison surrendered to the Soviets on 9 April after a three-day assault made their position untenable.
Demographic estimates of the flight and expulsion of Germans have been derived by either the compilation of registered dead and missing persons or by a comparison of pre-war and post-war population data. Estimates of the number of displaced Germans vary in the range of 12.0–16.5 million. The death toll attributable to the flight and expulsions was estimated at 2.2 million by the West German government in 1958 using the population balance method. German records which became public in 1987 have caused some historians in Germany to put the actual total at about 500,000 based on the listing of confirmed deaths. The German Historical Museum puts the figure at 600,000 victims and says that the official figure of 2 million did not stand up to later review. However, the German Red Cross still maintains that the total death toll of the expulsions is 2,251,500 persons.
The flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland was the largest of a series of flights and expulsions of Germans in Europe during and after World War II. The German population fled or was expelled from all regions which are currently within the territorial boundaries of Poland: including the former eastern territories of Germany annexed by Poland after the war and parts of pre-war Poland; despite acquiring territories from Germany, the Poles themselves were also expelled from the former eastern territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. West German government figures of those evacuated, migrated, or expelled by 1950 totaled 8,030,000. Research by the West German government put the figure of Germans emigrating from Poland from 1951 to 1982 at 894,000; they are also considered expellees under German Federal Expellee Law.
The expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II was part of a series of evacuations and deportations of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe during and after World War II.
The German evacuation from Central and Eastern Europe ahead of the Soviet Red Army advance during the Second World War was delayed until the last moment. Plans to evacuate people to present-day Germany from the territories controlled by Nazi Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, including from the former eastern territories of Germany as well as occupied territories, were prepared by the German authorities only when the defeat was inevitable, which resulted in utter chaos. The evacuation in most of the Nazi-occupied areas began in January 1945, when the Red Army was already rapidly advancing westward.
The Metgethen massacre was a massacre of German civilians by the Red Army in the Königsberg, East Prussia, suburb Metgethen, which is now Imeni Alexandra Kosmodemyanskogo in Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, circa January–February 1945.
History of Pomerania between 1933 and 1945 covers the period of one decade of the long history of Pomerania, lasting from the Adolf Hitler's rise to power until the end of World War II in Europe. In 1933, the German Province of Pomerania like all of Germany came under control of the Nazi regime. During the following years, the Nazis led by Gauleiter Franz Schwede-Coburg manifested their power through the process known as Gleichschaltung and repressed their opponents. Meanwhile, the Pomeranian Voivodeship was part of the Second Polish Republic, led by Józef Piłsudski. With respect to Polish Pomerania, Nazi diplomacy – as part of their initial attempts to subordinate Poland into Anti-Comintern Pact – aimed at incorporation of the Free City of Danzig into the Third Reich and an extra-territorial transit route through Polish territory, which was rejected by the Polish government, that feared economic blackmail by Nazi Germany, and reduction to puppet status.
Statistics for German World War II military casualties are divergent. The wartime military casualty figures compiled by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht through January 31, 1945 are often cited by military historians in accounts of individual campaigns in the war. A study by German historian Rüdiger Overmans concluded that total German military deaths were much higher than those originally reported by the German High Command, amounting to 5.3 million, including 900,000 men conscripted from outside Germany's 1937 borders, in Austria and in east-central Europe. The German government reported that its records list 4.3 million dead and missing military personnel.
Theodor Schieder was an influential mid-20th century German historian. Born in Oettingen, Western Bavaria, he relocated to Königsberg in East Prussia in 1934 at the age of 26. [p. 56] He joined the Nazi Party in 1937. During the Nazi era, Schieder became part of a group of German conservative historians antagonistic towards the Weimar Republic. He pursued a racially-oriented social history (Volksgeschichte), and warned about the supposed dangers of Germans mixing with other nations. During this time, Schieder used ethnographic methods to justify German supremacy and expansion. He was the author of the "Memorandum of 7 October 1939", calling for Germanization of the recaptured Polish territories after the Invasion of Poland. His suggestions were later incorporated in the German Generalplan Ost. After the war, he settled in West Germany and worked at the University of Cologne.
Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe is the abridged English translation of a multi-volume publication that was created by a commission of West German historians between 1951 and 1961 to document the population transfer of Germans from East-Central Europe that had occurred after World War II. Created by the Federal Ministry for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims, the commission headed by Theodor Schieder consisted primarily of well-known historians, however with a Nazi past. Therefore, while in the immediate post war period the commission was regarded as composed of very accomplished historians, the later assessment of its members changed. The later historians are debating how reliable are the findings of the commission, and to what degree they were influenced by Nazi and nationalist point of view.
The Federal Ministry of Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims was part of the West German federal government from 1949 till 1969.
As Allied troops entered and occupied German territory during the later stages of World War II, mass rapes of women took place both in connection with combat operations and during the subsequent occupation of Germany by soldiers from all advancing Allied armies, although a majority of scholars agree that the records show that a majority of the rapes were committed by Soviet occupation troops. The wartime rapes were followed by decades of silence.
Spiegel, Silke, ed. (1989). Vertreibung und Vertreibungsverbrechen 1945–1948. Bericht des Bundesarchivs vom 28. Mai 1974. Archivalien und ausgewählte Erlebnisberichte. Bonn: Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen. pp.38–41. ISBN3-88557-067-X.
Schieder commission (1954). Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa. Vol.1. Bonn.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Williams, David (1997). Wartime Disasters at Sea. Nr Yeovil, UK: Patrick Stephens Limited. p.225.
Hitchcock, William I. The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945–2002, 2003, ISBN0-385-49798-9
Walter, Elizabeth B. Barefoot in the Rubble, 1997, ISBN0-9657793-0-0
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