Nemmersdorf massacre

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Nemmersdorf, in German East Prussia (today's Mayakovskoye, Kaliningrad Oblast) was one of the first German villages to fall to the advancing Red Army on October 21, 1944 at 07:00 hours. The Russian army group, a 25th Guards Tank Unit, tried to take the Angerapp bridge but soon found it was facing strong German forces, with heavy artillery shelling and even a Luftwaffe plane strafing them. A number of Soviet soldiers found an improvised bunker, occupied by 14 men and women. As the German civilians refused to leave the bunker on being told so, they were shot at short-range (one woman, Gerda Meczulat, survived). Meanwhile, although they managed to destroy a number of German tanks, the Soviet army group was unable to take the bridge or hold onto the village, and after incurring heavy losses (around 200 killed), left the village after a few hours' occupation. Joachim Reisch, who had been at the bridge in the early morning, arrived back at Nemmersdorf at 11:00 hours and saw no Russians there.^[1]

However, the regular German army took control of Nemmersdorf only two days later, and there is speculation about the whereabouts of an SS unit on the scene in the meantime. German authorities (using the Voelkischer Beobachter and the cinema Wochenschau) immediately accused the Red Army of killing tens of civilians at Nemmersdorf. Nazi propaganda claimed that many non-combatants, including about 50 French POWs, had been summarily shot, and others were alleged to have been killed by blows with shovels or gun butts. A report filed by one Karl Potrek of Königsberg states, in part:

"... down the road stood a cart, to which four naked women were nailed through their heads in a cruciform position. ... parallel to the road stood a barn, and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands in a crucified posture. In the dwellings we found a total of 72 women ... children and one old man ... all dead. ... some babies had their heads bashed in."

Many of the facts were immediately controversial, because it was soon found out that a convoy of refugees, including French and Belgian POWs, (who, according to one source (Joachim Reisch), had been ordered to take care of thorough-bred horses^[2]) had just passed through the village, and was blocked before the Angerapp bridge perhaps leading to many casualties killed and wounded in crossfire. Joseph Goebbels organized a "neutral" medical commission, which subsequently reported that all the dead females, who ranged in age from 8 to 84, had been raped. However, an attempt by the Nazi regime to make an international incident of the Nemmersdorf massacre failed, due to the opprobrium the Nazis had brought upon themselves by mass atrocities in Poland and the Soviet Union^[3].

Nazi propaganda machine disseminated its description of the event, in gruesome and graphic detail, to boost the motivation of German soldiers^[4]. The reaction of the home front, particularly the civilians, was immediate. The number of volunteers to join the Volkssturm was indeed boosted^[5], but the larger part of the civilians responded with panic and started to leave the area en masse^[6]^[7].

If Goebbels and Gauleiter Erich Koch had hoped to stiffen East-Prussian civil resistance, their actions backfired, as the reporting on Nemmersdorf was at least partly to blame for the panic which was to accompany the evacuation of civilians from East Prussia three months later, and thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy. However like some of Goebbels's other propaganda, the effects have far outlived the author. The name "Nemmersdorf" is to many Germans, a symbol of war crimes of the Red Army, as an example of the alleged worst behavior in Eastern Germany. This has been re-inforced by people repeating the accusations who would not normally be associated with Nazi propaganda, for example the post war co-publisher of the weekly Die Zeit, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, at the time of the reports, lived in the village of Quittainen (Kwitany) in western East Prussia, near Preussisch Holland (Pasłęk), wrote in 1962 that:

"In those years one was so accustomed to everything that was officially published or reported being lies that at first I took the pictures from Nemmersdorf to be falsified. Later, however, it turned out that that was not the case."^[8]

After 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union, new sources became available and the dominating view among scholars became that most of the massacre was actually set up under the command of Goebbels, in an attempt to stir up civil resistance before the advancing Red Army. Bernhard Fisch in his book Nemmersdorf, October 1944. What actually happened in East Prussia (the first book to also include the Russian view of the event) was the first to present this picture of the events. Fisch, an East Prussian and a soldier at the time, had been in Nemmersdorf a few days after it was re-taken, and remembered a totally different scene from the one depicted by the Wochenschau^[9]. He interviewed many witnesses still alive on both sides (e.g. Soviet general Galitsky) and crossing out faulty memories against each other, he found out some disturbing details: the German army itself was responsible for destroying the strong German defensive position in front of Nemmersdorf (so the whole affair may even have been a trap, planned from the very start) and after the event, no attempt had been made to identify the photographed victims by name. He was able to conclude that there had been enactment when the photographs were taken, that some victims on the photographs were from other East Prussian villages and that the notorious crucifixion barn doors were not in Nemmersdorf. There also was the tight time schedule of witness Joachim Reisch, reducing the Soviet presence at Nemmersdorf to less than four hours of heavy fighting in front of the bridge.

Later research by the historian Gerd R. Ueberschaer and the German TV Channel ZDF further reduced the number of executions at Nemmersdorf to 23 (leaving ten unexplained deaths). The events at Nemmersdorf in a strange way mirror those at Vinkt in 1940, where civilians were executed, refugees got killed in crossfire before a bridge and at least one claim was made to embellish the story and increase the number of executed victims by adding refugees killed in the crossfire. A counter-claim that the German Army lured the Soviet Army into a trap, sacrificing the lives of refugees blocked at the bridge as they started the counterattack, in order to later claim a massacre by the Soviet Army, has never been substantiated.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Fisch, Bernhard, Nemmersdorf, Oktober 1944. Was in Ostpreußen tatsächlich geschah. Berlin: 1997. ISBN 3-932180-26-7.
Dönhoff, Marion. Namen die keiner mehr nennt. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbucher Verlag, GmbH., 1962.
(English) Samuel, Wolfgang. "War on the Ground", The War of Our Childhood: Memories of World War II. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-57806-482-1.
(Polish) Thorwald, Jürgen (1998). Wielka ucieczka (Große Flucht). Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. ISBN 83-08-02890-X.
(English) Weiss Brandenburg, Christel; Laing, Dan. Ruined by the Reich: Memoir of an East Prussian Family, 1916-1945. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-1615-7.