Authors: Giles MacDonogh
The Russians were weeding out the Nazis by means of interrogation. The big fish had either fled via Pillau or had committed suicide; what remained was decidedly small fry. Confessions were beaten out of the men, and many died. Those Pgs that survived were taken to holding camps in Gumbinnen or Insterburg before being marched off to the Soviet Union. Someone informed Lehndorff that there were a number of Old Masters being kept in a damp room in the camp, which would be ruined if no one did anything about them. Lehndorff was unsympathetic: ‘Let them be used for temporary window-panes, or find some useful end in an oven.’ He was more impressed by the bravery of the women: ‘It is always astonishing what man will put up with.’ That day he heard that the war was over.
12
A daily grind set in at Rothenstein camp. Lehndorff was the doctor once again, a man you needed. If you are wise you don’t kill the doctor. A Russian woman came to him for treatment. She had also been raped, and now she had VD. In gratitude she brought him food - margarine for the potato soup. One woman he treated - known only as Wanda - had been raped 128 times. They brought in an old man who was so covered in lice that he looked like an ant-heap. He turned out to be the local railway director. He died an hour later.
13
At the beginning of June, Lehndorff had a surprise visit from Doktora. She was still working at the German hospital and nurtured plans to get her friend out of Rothenstein to work alongside her once more. There were a thousand Germans being treated in the former Finance Department in Königsberg. The Nervenklinik had been turned over to those suffering from plague. When typhus broke out the victims were taken to the hospitals in the Yorckstrasse and the Elisabeth Krankenhaus. There were 2,000 cases lying two to a bed, four in the case of children.
14
Doktora brought him wheaten biscuits. Three days later she was back with Lehndorff’s rucksack filled with his things. They included a pistol with fifty bullets. This was carefully hidden. After that she came almost daily.
15
The commandant allowed him out one day, and he went foraging looking for medicine. ‘The city is really fantastic. The eye no longer attempts to reconstruct it, but rather allows itself to be overpowered, drawn in by the entirely transformed landscape.’ He found the red-rimmed glasses in which he had drunk his last glass of Martell cognac. As the Russian car took him back to the camp he spotted Doktora on the city walls, picking flowers to take to him.
16
In the middle of June Lehndorff was released through Doktora’s intervention and was allowed to work with her in the German hospital. The Finance Department was one of the few undamaged buildings in the city. There was food of sorts - a grey pea soup, typical of East Prussia.
17
The summer was slightly better, when grasses and dandelions could be gathered by the roadside, rye grains could be filched from the fields and mussels from the overgrown city pond. The idyll did not last long. Once again it is difficult to avoid the impression that the Russians were hoping that the Germans would die, to rid themselves of the responsibility of feeding and repatriating them, although a little fat was made available for children. Lehndorff’s German hospital was turfed out of the Finance Department. They had twenty-four hours to move 1,500 patients into the old Barmherzigkeit - the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy.
The chief problem was famine now. Lehndorff was forever seeing patients suffering from oedema who were skeletal from the waist upwards, but whose legs were filled with water. The only solution was to amputate, but how were the Germans to live in post-war Königsberg without legs? Was it not better just to let them die? ‘Famine leads to a remarkable death. There is no fight. The sufferer gives the impression that death is already behind them.’ One woman was brought to him who had lain ten days in a market garden eating unripe blackcurrants. She was completely blocked up. She nearly died while Lehndorff endeavoured to sort her out. Blackcurrants were quite a boon that summer - there was a glut of them in the allotments behind the now ruinous houses.
18
Somehow the hospital acquired three cows, providing valuable milk, for the children in particular. It was not long, however, before they discovered that the throat of the best milker had been cut. Later the animal’s udder was found floating in a vat of soup. Officially the hospital received thirty-five kilos of meat daily, but the Russians interpreted this to encompass heads and feet, hooves and horns. One recipient of the precious flesh was the dying mother superior, who had had to live through the worst of it while her nuns were constant prey to the Russians.
19
There were plenty of books in the ruined houses, and literature was consolation for some, but there was next to no food. Cases of cannibalism were reported, with people eating the flesh of their dead children. Of the 73,000 Königsberger alive in June 1945, only 25,000 survived the experience.
20
Hermann Matzkowski, a communist sawmill worker the Russians installed as mayor of the Königsberg suburb of Ponarth, reported that 15,000 Königsberger had disappeared or died in the main prison during May. On 20 June 1,000 people were beheaded before his eyes.
21
Lehndorff and Doktora made an expedition to suburban Preyl. They had no shoes and went barefoot. On the way they plucked cornflowers - the floral symbol of Prussia. Russians were supplementing their diet by fishing in the vast Schlossteich that provided water for the city. Later Lehndorff saw two boys swimming in the pond. Given how malnourished they were, he was amazed by their energy. When he told them not to swallow the water, they replied in a matter-of-fact way: ‘Oh, what does it matter how we die, no one is going to get out of here!’
22
When they reached their goal they found the house of Doktora’s relatives burned out. She began to cry. They hitched a lift to Juditten in the suburbs where Doktora’s house was. There were Germans living in it. When Doktora tried to enter they attacked her. Lehndorff ’s beloved was losing her will to live. She discovered that she was infested with lice - the final indignity. When he went to see her in the morning she had taken poison. Lehndorff was shocked at his lack of emotion. He too would find a more appropriate time to mourn.
23
Autumn 1945 arrived. There were rumours that the Königsberger were to be shipped west under Western supervision, typhus cases first. Hopes were temporarily raised. The news caused a drop in prices for winter clothes as the city-dwellers thought they would be out before the bad weather started. A woollen jacket could be obtained for six potatoes, a coat for a tin of meat. You had to be careful, however, as fraudsters had found a way of replacing the contents of tins with clay and leaves. Meanwhile the ripe corn rotted in the fields as there was no one to harvest it.
24
The fate of those living in the villages was no kinder than that of the Königsberger. The distinguished journalist Gräfin Marion Dönhoff was the daughter of one of the region’s great magnates. The family home, Friedrichstein, was the local Versailles. In 1945 it was burned to the ground. In 1947 Gräfin Dönhoff received her last letter from home. It described what had happened in her village when the Russians came. They arrived on a Tuesday, setting fire to various houses and shooting two old coachmen and the bell-ringer who summoned the workers to the fields. Her correspondent wrote:
A few days later they shot Magda Bohaim, Lotte Pritt and her child and Grandma Plitt; in Wirrgirren they killed five workers on the estate and the forester Schmidt’s wife, who took eight days to die and must have suffered terribly. Old Plitt then hanged himself. In February they began the transports to the Urals. My husband went with them; as did the innkeeper Dreier and his daughter Ulla, Stellmacher’s two daughters, Frau Jung, Frau Krüschmann, Frau Oltermann, the four Marx girls, Christel and Herta Heinze and the smith’s daughter. I received news from Karl Marx [
sic
] a few months ago that my husband and most of the others died in the Urals. You can see how death has moved into our little village. First of all the lads all died at the front and now the old, and even the girls.
25
Typhus had cut a swathe though the population of the village. Sister Hedy, who had nursed them through the epidemic, had now been ill for a fortnight. They had all had to change their lodgings many times, as more and more surviving buildings were requisitioned by the Red Army. Marion Dönhoff’s correspondent had lived at the mill, until her lodger, the
Oberinspektor
(senior estate manager), had been shot in the stomach, and she had moved back into the village in fear for her life. She took the wounded man to the hospital in a wheelbarrow. ‘The women from Wittgirren lent a hand, for it was no easy task, moving the heavy old man who was suffering from terrible pains. We laboured for four hours. At the [parish] boundary he asked us to stop, saying “Women, let me see my beautiful Quittainen
bi
once more.”’ He was dead by the time they reached the hospital.
26
The way to survive was to work for the conquerors. Marion Dönhoff’s informant was one of them. The only ray of light in her slavery was the sight of Sister Hedy’s two-year-old daughter while she waited for permission to go to the new Germany across the Oder. The Soviet authorities were gradually repopulating their new territory, but there were a few menial jobs to be performed. There was a little work to be had in the hospitals and factories, and there was an industrial outfitter and a baker where casual labour was required. Germans worked in the power stations and in the carpenters’ workshops until they were replaced by Russians. One man made a living by selling the books he dug out of the rubble. A number of priests and pastors continued to operate in Königsberg, as their work - particularly for orphaned children - was tolerated by the Russians. Nine of the clergymen died of starvation or dysentery; three were killed.
On 4 July 1946 Königsberg lost its ancient name. It became Kaliningrad. With the change of nomenclature came Russian physicians to replace the Germans operating in the hospitals, and Russian workers took over from the Germans in the factories. A few roubles could be made from teaching the Russians German or to play the piano. A sort of calm reigned in which Germans could read their own newspapers, listen to broadcasts in their own language and send their children to their own schools. There was even a German Choir made up of doctors, nurses and others at the Yorck Hospital.
This lasted until repatriation began in the summer of 1947. The transports took off in earnest on 22 October that year. On 10 September Ruth Friedrich recorded the arrival in Berlin of 6,000 Königsberger, people who had lived on carrion and rubbish and were ‘more cattle than human beings, more dead than alive’. Their advent in the capital was followed by the last remnants of Breslau’s German population.
27
By the time they had finished, no Germans were left in what had been Königsberg. A 700-year history had drawn to a close.
bj
Country Life
Hans Lehndorff had left Königsberg two years before the transports removed the remaining Germans, because he had heard a rumour that he was about to be arrested. He made a wise choice even if the story was false: on 6 and 7 November 1945, the Russians celebrated their Revolution by beating the Germans bloody and raping the women again. One of the victims was Mayor Matzkowski’s seventy-one-year-old mother. The only women spared were those carrying Russian babies.
28
As Lehndorff fled through the shattered streets he watched Russian soldiers clearing Germans out of their houses near the Friedland Gate. From now on they had to live in the allotments. He wanted to reach the Polish half of East Prussia and find out what had happened to his family, particularly his mother, who was the daughter of the right-wing political wheeler-dealer Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau. In Hanshagen he was taken in by two old ladies who revealed their hidden hens. He hadn’t seen a hen for six months. They put him to bed and fed him on wild mushrooms. Later he found boletus mushrooms in the woods and ate them raw with sugar.
29
He headed for Ponarien, near Allenstein, where some of his relatives had lived. Near their estate he ran into the retainer Preuss, who gave him the usual news of rape, murder and suicide. Poles had moved into the big house, but he found his aunt, Frau von Stein, living in the gardener’s cottage. She had initially left the house to make way for the Russian commandant, who had since pursued the war to the west. Finding his mother’s sister was a source of great joy: ‘To see a person again now who belongs to me, after all that has happened, is like a foretaste of our reunion in heaven.’
30
He learned of his cousins: two of Frau von Stein’s daughters had been interned with their father; the sons had been at the front and she had no news of them. The women, his aunt included, had developed a
modus vivendi
with the Poles. They worked as agricultural labourers in the fields and received in payment half a litre of skimmed milk every day. The women brought home two basketfuls of potatoes. These were sorted by variety in order to make the diet less monotonous. The furniture from the big house was being gradually broken up to feed the fires.
31