After the Reich (34 page)

It seemed better to stay put for the time being. Lehndorff heard of the perils of deportation to Germany, of the brutality of the Polish guards and of the marauding bands that robbed the refugees in the trains. In November 1945 CARE parcels began to arrive from America, providing some extra food for the starving Germans.
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Together with what he could glean from grateful patients, the small German community in Ponarien could survive.

Danzig had been one of the first German cities to fall. On 3 May the German men inhabiting prisons and camps were brought out and marched down ‘Victory Alley’. All men aged between sixteen or seventeen and fifty-five were required to go to Russia and work. The women came out to watch the departure of their menfolk, and strewed the streets with spring flowers. Of those men (and a few women) who were taken from Gleiwitz in Silesia to Rudlo near Stalino, many were to die before they reached their destination. Their bodies were stripped naked and buried by the side of the road. Most of the men of Gleiwitz were put to work in the mines. The lucky ones returned to a town depopulated of Germans in October. Many failed to return at all. Of the Gleiwitzer a third of the 300 men died.
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The large camp of Laband in Silesia held between 30,000 and 50,000 men, most of whom were deported to Russia to work in the Siberian mines. Few had returned by the end of 1946. The lucky ones escaped the mines and worked on large
kolkhoz
farms instead.
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In Gleiwitz, Hans-Günther Nieusela’s father was marched off to Kazakhstan, and did not return until 1948.
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German and Polish women were impressed into clearing the streets of rubble. Reusable bricks were set aside, establishing the pattern for other German cities. Even the Jews from Stutthof camp were made busy with restoring Danzig’s beautiful façades. More than 60 per cent of the city had been destroyed.

At the end of May a Special Commission had been convened to ‘Polonise’ the place names in the district. Langfuhr - ‘long drive’ - was somehow rendered as Wrzeszcz, or ‘you scream’. The place names were altered some two months before the Allied leaders met at Potsdam. It was clear that the conference would not alter the
de facto
situation.

For the most part the famous Junkers lived in large if modest manor houses and farmed their own estates. There were relatively few grand houses or absentee landlords. The grandest of all were the Grafen Hochberg or Princes Pless, who lived at Fürstenstein in Upper Silesia and owned a large chunk of the coal mines. Their estates had been split between Germany and Poland after the First World War, and a prolonged legal dispute had robbed the last prince - Hansel Pless - of most of his income in the 1920s and 1930s. During the war the castle was inhabited by Magda Goebbels’s lover, Gauleiter Karl Hanke, who carried off anything of value he could find once the Russians appeared on the horizon.

The Russians arrived on 5 May. Later, the last chatelain, Paul Fichte, went back to the castle to survey the scene:

I crept over to Fürstenstein to see what went on . . . Everything broken up and robbed, our flats were totally empty, all windows broken. All inhabitants were expelled by the Russians so that Fürstenstein could be pillaged, it didn’t look as if humans had been there, indescribable. The beautiful fountains on the terraces are broken, the Donatello Fountain was pulled down. The library was loaded to go to Moscow. The most valuable books, even the Sachsenspiegel [thirteenth-century book of law], had been walled in but they were found and burned. The old castle also burned down.

Now the family mausoleum was also plundered, the sarcophagi broken into, the contents thrown around. We had quickly buried Princess Daisy outside the vault, but she was dug up and robbed. Scholz had planted such pretty flowers on her grave that it attracted attention. We reburied the Fürstin [princess] straight away . . . But the mausoleum had been broken up and couldn’t be closed again. Now a migration of people to the mausoleum began. Everyone wanted to see what it was like inside, most of them became scared and ran off, for the contents of coffins lay on the floor. The skeleton of a Fürstin
née
Kleist we couldn’t find any more, only the head lay there. Andersek from the stud shot himself and his family. The stable boys buried their bodies behind Kummer’s goat shed.
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The Poles made off with the late princess’s jewellery.

Käthe von Normann heard a rumour that Berlin and Stettin had fallen on 5 May and that both Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide. The next day she had news that Germany had laid down its arms. The Frenchmen billeted in the same house celebrated with barley coffee and began to sing. Rumours were running wild. On the following day she heard that Pomerania would remain German as far east as Stolp, and that her family had a chance of hanging on to the Barkow estate. Uncertainty meant that a lot of people who had fled at the appearance of the Russians made their way home again. More than a million people did this, only to be driven out, once and for all.
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The stories were confirmed by a Polish policeman on the 8th. That night the Normanns sang the Leuthen Chorale: ‘Nun danket alle Gott!’ Since Frederick the Great’s time it had been Prussia’s unofficial national anthem.

As Lehndorff had discovered, the French were generally sympathetic to the defeated Germans, despite the indignities they had suffered during the war: ‘their opinion of the Russians and the Poles is just as bad as ours’. One of them, a tall, blond young man, gave Frau von Normann a present of some much needed clothing material. He wanted a crust of bread in return, but she had none to give, just a little butter and a liver sausage. He told her that the French had been hiding a few German noblemen in their ranks. She thought he might also have been German.
³⁷

The big city of Breslau had yielded only on the 6th. Two days later the war officially ended. It made little difference for the survivors. On the 9th a party of thirteen Poles arrived to claim the city for their country. They moved into a house on the Blücherstrasse and set up a Polish eagle over the door. On the 10th more Polish pioneers joined them, together with a group of men from the Polish Office of the Public Security.
³⁸

On 13 May a delegation of ‘Lublin Poles’ headed by Bolesław Drobner travelled to Sagan in Silesia to report to their Soviet masters. Edward Ochab had already been appointed plenipotentiary for the euphemistically named ‘Recovered Territories’. Such men were as much ‘Muscovites’ as the German communists who landed outside Berlin as the Red Army took the city. They assumed power with nil popular support; their mandate based on nothing more than Soviet patronage. Their claims to much of the Recovered Territories derived merely from Soviet policy.
³⁹

The Russians and Poles divided the spoils, with the best bits naturally going to the former, which resulted in their occasionally coming to blows over the booty.
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Meanwhile the Red Army was still scavenging, with no regard for leaving any useful equipment behind for the puppet state they were setting up in Poland. In some instances the Poles and the Germans made common cause in order to preserve something that would otherwise have gone east.
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The Poles also fell out with the Czechs over the Teschen pocket of Silesia.

In Neustadt in Upper Silesia a thousand head of cattle went east, leaving around a score to feed the locals. The harvest for 1945 was confiscated.
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Treks had been straggling through the towns and villages of the region for months now. At first they were made up of Germans from the General Gouvernement who had fled at the Russian advance. Now they were joined by the Silesians themselves. Some Upper Silesians fled to the Sudetenland, like the doctor Theofil Peters from Pitschen who went to Leitmeritz before the Czechs threw him out. It might have been worse for him: he was opting for the fire in preference to the frying pan.
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Later in May Käthe von Normann heard that the British and the Americans were already releasing POWs. This was not true, but it gave her leave to hope that her own husband might return. The absence of men was a torture to the women in more senses than one. They were nightly victims to Russian bands, which, even if they did not succeeded in capturing their quarry in the form of female flesh, food or valuables, nonetheless shattered all hope of sleep. After the troops had been there a few days, the attacks died down, but each new billeting renewed the problem. When Frau von Normann decided to go to the local town of Plathe to receive treatment for blood poisoning, she learned that the German doctors had been replaced by Russian and Polish medics who were not allowed to treat Germans. She found a German doctor in a pitiful state in her own flat - she had a three-year-old daughter, and was pregnant with another, Russian baby.

In the vicinity of Stolp in eastern Pomerania the Krockows and the Puttkamers were less well informed than the Normanns. The first indication they had that the war was over came a fortnight later at Whitsun. The Russians paraded through the villages shooting into the air and shouting, ‘Woina kaputt! Woina kaputt!’ Whether it was true or not, no one could tell. They had no newspapers and no wireless sets. Even if they had managed to hide a wireless, there was no electricity to make it work.

The Pomeranian gentry heard a good deal about ‘Russki kultura’ which decreed cleanliness and order in the villages and towns behind the Oder-Neisse Line. Pigs had to be scrubbed until they gleamed. Pomeranians of all classes were put to work cleaning the pigsties or milking the cows (until they, like so much else, went east), and sometimes they earned a crust of bread for their pains. A squire’s wife like Käthe von Normann had to learn how to milk a cow, although she had to admit that she was less proficient at it than the meanest peasant girl.
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Many of the cows were sick, suffering from foot and mouth disease, and looked bad. When the cattle were driven off to Russia Frau von Normann was relieved of the chore of looking after them and producing milk and butter. In Ermland, where Lehndorff was holed up, there were a few well-concealed hens, and here and there a ‘milk-ewe’ or a pig hidden in a cellar, but the situation there was much the same.
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Yet the formal relationship between squire’s wife and peasant woman continued for the time being, despite the fact that both were very much in the same boat - preyed upon by Russians and Poles, and, when not sexually molested, obliged to work as their slaves. Käthe von Normann thought it inappropriate that one former worker should call her ‘gnädige Frau’ rather than Frau von Normann. She thought the use of ‘my lady’ silly when they were both milking cows, feeding pigs or mucking out sties together. But the old forms of address died hard. Even when Frau von Normann was finally banished from the family fief, pushing her few belongings on a cart towards a transit camp, she called out to the coachman of her nearest grandee neighbours to ‘tell both the baron’s daughters that we have all been told to leave Barkow!’
⁴⁶

The male sex was restricted to old men and boys. Even in May, a few ancient landowners were still living in their houses, often protected from the Russians by their former workers. The wisest policy was to stay away from the manor or its ruins, and as much as possible to disguise yourself as a peasant. All agricultural instruments and machines had been carried off. The fields were lying fallow for want of implements to farm them. Between Dangeröse and Stolp the railway lines had been taken away and there was no access to the provincial capital. Lehndorff had a similarly frustrating journey when he attempted to get to the town of Allenstein. The Russians had already carried off one set of lines.
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The suicides continued. In the village of Horst, Käthe von Normann heard that the sixteen-year-old Christel M. had been repeatedly raped by the Russians. The next day she drowned herself in the Stau Lake. In Ermland a woman responded to her daughter’s abduction by the Russians by revealing the presence of all the concealed girls in the village.
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Frau von Normann was even more distressed when she heard her eight-year-old son Henning say that Christel had done the right thing. Leni S. poisoned herself and her ‘cute’ children, but a Russian doctor brought her back to life - but not her offspring. Frau von Normann wondered whether he had really done her a service.
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Death could come at any time. An old couple in the Krockows’ village, were chased into an icy pond and forced to stay there until they drowned; a man was tied to a plough and driven until he fell, then finished off with a submachine gun. The nobles were often the first to go: Graf Lehndorff’s mother and brother were killed by the Russians as soon as they learned who they were. The lord of Grumbkow, Herr von Livonius, had his arms and legs cut off and was tossed into the pigsty to be eaten by its denizens. Frau von Normann’s neighbour, Baron von Senfft, was found beaten to death in a swamp in June. He was still dressed in his coat and shoes. His orphaned daughters had been to see her just the day before. They were living in the coachman’s house and working in the garden. Frau von Thadden-Trieglaff, of the family of Bismarck’s pietist friends, was still living unharmed, however, in the village of Vahnerow. She and her daughter inhabited one wing of the manor while the Russians inhabited the rest with their cows.