1945: The Russians Were Coming: East Prussia And Battle Of KOENIGSBERG (Large Images)

East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army, and to some extent the worst treated. The first incursion, at Nemmersdorf on 21 October 1944, was to be a foretaste. In the course of a single night the Red Army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified. Gauleiter Koch refused to allow the population to flee. Hitler wanted East Prussia to prove the resilience of the German people. That autumn the East Prussians watched the departure of the birds: ‘Yes, you are now flying away! And us? What is to become of us and our land?

After The Reich by GILES MACDONOGH

A dead German soldier lies in the foreground. Devastated Koenigsburg. April 1945. After the massive Russia assault. April 6-9, 1945

EAST PRUSSIA

60 years ago the earth trembled at the front in the east. On 12 January 1945, the Soviet offensive on Hitler's Empire with a force that witnesses describe today as the "worst inferno". From three sides simultaneously attacked the Red Army.

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EAST PRUSSIAN OFFENSIVE

The East Prussian Offensive was a strategic offensive by the Red Army against the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front (World War II). It lasted from 13 January to 25 April 1945, though some German units did not surrender until 9 May. The Battle of Königsberg was a major part of the offensive, which ended in victory for the Red Army. The East Prussian Offensive is known to German historians as the Second East Prussian Offensive. The First East Prussian Offensive (also known as the Gumbinnen Operation), took place from 16-27 October 1944, and was carried out by the 3rd Belorussian Front under General I.D. Chernyakhovsky as part of the Memel Offensive of the 1st Baltic Front. The Soviet forces took heavy casualties while penetrating 30–60 km (19–37 mi) into East Prussia and Poland, and the offensive was postponed until greater reserves could be gathered.

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 In 1944-45 the seemingly irresistible Soviet Army stormed into German East Prussia. The German Army defending East Prussia was strong but poorly led and invariably the Soviet Army broke through. 

Numerous fortified areas covered a major portion of East Prussia. However, German Army Group North that was linked to the defense of East Prussia to the north proved invincible and was not broken by massive Soviet Army assaults. German Army Group North was transformed into Army Group Courland, which held out until after World War II ended. 

Prior to January 1945, in East Prussia, the German Army had experienced a series of Soviet Army offensives rippling across the western Soviet Union from June to August of 1944. Those Soviet offensives included the Belorussian operation, the Lvov-Sandomierz Operation, and the operations in the Baltic States. As a result, Soviet Army forces swept to the boundary of East Prussia and to the Narev and Vistula River lines north and south of Warsaw.
Source



The Soviet threw in Zhukov and Konev's armies totalling 2.2 million soldiers, 6000 tanks and 5000 aircraft.

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"The inhuman warfare troubled me the most. We heard about mass shootings, the rampage of the SS-Einsatzgruppen. But it was dangerous to talk about these changes. And so I  was silent. "

Prince Alexander of Dohna-Schlobitten
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history.zdf.de

 The Russian onslaught had not begun yet. A German sentry in the center of Koenigsberg. February, 1945

The noose tightened around Königsberg on 26 January 1945. Very soon the road to the sea and Pillau was cut off. The city held out until 9 April. The first the surgeon Hans Lehndorff knew of the fall of Königsberg was when Russians soldiers broke into his hospital and robbed his patients of their watches, beating up anyone who stood in their way. Fountain pens were the next craving. The sick and injured were tipped out of their beds, bandages ripped from their wounds, and papers burned to create more light to steal by. All the hospital’s provision in food was consumed or squandered in a matter of hours.  One of the attackers, ‘a really young fellow, suddenly burst into tear because he had yet to find a watch. He struck three fingers in the air. He was going to shoot three people if he did not get one at once.’ They found him a watch. 

General Lasch  capitulated the next day and swarms of soldiers attacked the population as they ventured out of the warrens they had inhabited during the long siege. They were beaten, robbed, stripped and, if female, raped. The women’s screams could be heard everywhere: ‘Schieß doch!’ they shouted. ‘Go on, shoot!’ The sisters in the hospital were raped by ‘blood-crazed children’, sixteen years old at the most. The pious Lehndorff could feel the women’s souls dying. ‘Is not every word an accusation against me? Is there no opportunity to throw oneself between them and through it to find an honourable death?’  Some of the women were laughing hysterically. One of the conquerors was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He wote of the rapes in a poem called ‘Prussian Nights’:

The little daughter’s on the mattress,

Dead. How many have been on it

A platoon, a company perhaps?

A girl’s been turned into a woman.

A woman turned into a corpse.

Bunkers and shelters were simply torched with flame-throwers. A very large number of Königsberger took their own lives to escape the indignity of Soviet revenge. That night the surgeon looked out into the hospital courtyard to see it filled with horses and caravans. It could have been deepest Asia. 10 Lehndorff was touched by the help he had from the French forced labourers. They too were robbed by the Red Army. ‘Adieu, docteur!’ one of them cried out as Lehndorff successfully ran away from a Russian soldier with a submachine gun who was angry that the surgeon had pushed him out of the way, making him fall on his back. Lehndorff removed his white coat, and the soldier did not recognise him again. Episodes of this sort did not make the business of treating the sick and wounded any easier. The instruments were pilfered off the operating table. One glimmer of light came when they were visited by a Russian major who wanted a wart removed. After the hospital staff cut it out, he gave them temporary protection. 

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As General Reinhard Gehlen, head of the secret "Foreign Armies East," the reaction to the turn of 1944/45 threatening numbers of Soviet troop concentrations, made the self-proclaimed German commander (read Hitler) angry: The dossier was called "the biggest bluff since Genghis Khan" and advised that "idiotic editors " of the gloomy prognosis" should be immediately thrown into a mad house. But  the assessment was correct. More than a half million Red Army soldiers marched into East Prussia in January alone. The Nazi propaganda had said that not a single Soviet soldier would ever cross the frontier.

SIDENOTES: WHO WAS REINHARD GEHLEN?

Reinhard Gehlen (3 April 1902 – 8 June 1979) was a General in the German Army during World War II, who served as chief of intelligence-gathering on the Eastern Front. After the war, he was recruited by the United States military to set up a spy ring directed against the Soviet Union (known as the Gehlen Organization), and eventually became head of the West German intelligence apparatus. He served as the first President of the Federal Intelligence Service until 1968. Gehlen is considered one of the most legendary Cold War spymasters.

THE EAST PRUSSIA OFFENSIVE: RUSSIANS ENTERED GERMANY
(Source: Time)

For a week Berlin radio jittered with its strongest superlatives. "One of the war's bloodiest struggles," "mammoth offensive," "grand assault," "unheard-of numerical superiority," "monstrous force." For six days Moscow was officially silent, permitted correspondents to cable that "when the news is finally released it is expected to be ... sensational. . . ." But it was clear that three years and four months after Germany had invaded Russia, the Russians had invaded Germany. The battle for East Prussia — Germany's "bowels of iron and heart of steel" — had begun.

So far, history was repeating itself. Thirty years before, the Russians had driven into the bleak, lake-studded land of many a Junker overlord and his cannon-fodder peasant. In August 1914, General Paul Rennenkampf's Russian army attacked from the east, General Alexander Samsonov from the south. The Germans were routed in the first battle. 

In 1944 the Red Army confidently expected no further repetitions of World War I's East Prussian history. In 1914 the team of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, his brilliant chief of staff General Erich Ludendorff and chief of operations General Max Hoffmann had gone to the rescue of the Reich's defeated army, and made Hindenburg an immortal among Junkers. Among East Prussia's lakes Hindenburg trapped the Russians, cut them to pieces. 

Joseph Stalin's armies would meet no such fate. Besides their overwhelming numerical superiority, they were also well supplied, competently commanded. This time the Russian Army waited two months at East Prussia's frontier, reorganizing and piling up supplies. 

When the attack began on Oct. 16, a frightened Berlin reported: "No battle in the east has ever seen such concentration of Russian air forces and seasoned campaigners can not recall a similar surfeit of Russian artillery and tanks." 

Seven days after the offensive began, Stalin broke his silence, announced that the Red Army had reached 19 miles into East Prussia on an 88-mile front.

 German civilians. Koenigsberg. March-April 1945

The city was burning. Once the fun was over the remaining citizens were assembled for forced marches to camps. Anyone who was too old or too ill was shot there and then, either in their beds or in the gutters. On  April Lehndorff was one of those rounded up and marched out of the city. As he walked out, the Russians cheered, shouting, ‘Gitlair Kapoot!’ (Hitler’s had it!). He marched for twenty-five kilometres. With the help of Polish auxiliaries the women were dragged away from the column with cries of ‘Davai, suda!’ (Come, woman!). Before he left the hospital Lehndorff had found a female patient with a head wound who had been raped countless times without ever being aware of it.  

They were marched to camps, some of which were in Königsberg itself, like the one in the garage of the Rothenstein Barracks. On the promise of better treatment, some Germans acted as kapos – prisoners who had wormed their way into positions of trust – dealing out blows for their Soviet masters. A number of these were allegedly communists, who believed their day had come.  Had they expected to become masters of the city now that the Nazis had been deposed, they were deluding themselves. Königsberg had been awarded to the Soviet Union and it was now administered as a Soviet city. 

The German population would be at best deported, at worst exterminated. The remaining buildings that had escaped the British raid in August 1944, or which had not been filled with Soviet political bureaux – like the Kommandatura, or military command, in the Ziethenstrasse and the old Gestapo Headquarters – were rased to the ground. A Soviet city would be built on the site of the old capital of the Teutonic Knights.

 German prisoners at Zakhaymskih gates of Konigsberg, in April 1945.

It is estimated that there were as many as 110,000 Germans left in Königsberg on 9 April. When the Soviets conducted a head count in June, 73,000 remained. Graf Plettenberg maintained that the Russians had actually tied Hitler Youths to horses and torn them limb from limb, but in the absence of any other reports of this taking place in Königsberg, it has to be discounted. 17 Nonetheless, as one Königsberger maintained, ‘a man was worth less than the watch he wore’.

Exhausted Russian soldiers sleep on the street of Koenigsberg. April 1945

WHAT HAPPENED TO KOENIGSBERG?

Almost eighty percent of the city was destroyed, first by the Royal Air Force in August 1944, and then by Soviet shelling in April 1945. According to the book The Defeat in the East, tens of thousands of females over the age of ten were raped, then murdered. German soldiers who surrendered were taken away, then shot. Almost all German residents who remained at the end of the war, an estimated 200,000 out of the city's prewar population of 316,000, were expelled from the city. After the war, following the transfer of East Prussia to the Russian SFSR, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad, and was installed with predominantly Russian (and, to a lesser extent, Belarusian and Ukrainian) settlers from other areas of the Soviet Union. This area is now known as the Kaliningrad Oblast.

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The East Prussian city of Konigsberg, founded by the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century, became, seven centuries later, a key stronghold for the Third Reich. As the Russians approached it in 1945, Hitler declared that the city be held to the last man. Its governor compounded his master's folly by failing to organize any sensible evacuation plan. And so tens of thousands of refugees streamed out of the city to die of frostbite, starvation, Russian attacks, and drowning in the Baltic when they fell through its ice or when their ships sank. The remaining soldiers and civilians who didn't die in the fighting were often enslaved, either to rebuild the city or to labor in the Soviet gulag. The ruined city, renamed Kaliningrad, was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1946, and it is now one of Lithuania's more prosperous municipalities. But it still shows scars of its ghastly ordeal in 1945. Denny fills in a gap in the historiography of World War II's European eastern front.

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Those who lived in the villages of East Prussia fared no better than the townsfolk. A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the morning. One man was shot and fed to the pigs.  Another woman tried to take the last train from Mohringen, but it was derailed and the passengers proceeded on foot, only to run into the Russians. She describes these soldiers breaking into a farmhouse and finding an Iron Cross, Second Class. The owner of the decoration and his wife were taken out and shot in the back of the head. The narrator herself was raped around twenty times the night she was captured, but there was worse in store. She was carried off by two officers and seven men, whom she suspected were deserters, or temporarily estranged from their unit. They lodged her and eight other females, including a fourteen-year-old girl, in a house in the forest, where they raped them for a week. Their ordeal came to an end only when the GPU, the secret police, found the house

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 Soldiers of Division "Grossdeutschland" go along the coastal cliff peninsula Balga. East Prussia, in March 1945.

Then in January 1945 the Soviet offensive began. The Russians broke through the German lines on the 17th. Insterburg was the first to fall, followed by Tilsit and Gumbinnen. Koch, who had been named commissar for the defence of the Reich, finally gave permission for the civilian population to leave. Almost simultaneously, however, the Red Army reached Elbing on the Baltic, thereby cutting East Prussia off from the Reich. 

The East Prussians resorted to every conceivable means of leaving the beleaguered territory and reaching what was believed to be the safety of the west bank of the Vistula. Trains, however, ran head on into the Russian advance and were stopped in their tracks. Passengers froze in the icy temperatures, and the dead were thrown from the windows.

Ships fared no better. They were sunk as they left the harbour of Pillau outside Königsberg. Hundreds of thousands of refugees trekked across the ice that covered the inland seas of the Frisches and Kurisches Haff in heavily laden carts and proceeded towards Danzig. The Russians warned them they would fire at the ice from their warships on 15 February. The shells hit men and horses. Where the ice was smashed, the trekkers put up temporary bridges and persevered. The night was pitch black. All they could hear was ‘Shooting, screaming and screeching’. When dawn broke they realised the full horror: body upon body, man and horse; and every now and then the chassis of a cart sticking out of the ice. Those who succeeded in making it to the thin strip of land that borders Haff and Nehrung had a choice of heading north to the ships at Pillau or south-west towards Danzig. 

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Balga  was a medieval castle of the Teutonic Knights. Its ruins are in the Pogranichny municipality, Bagrationovsky District in Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia; located on the shore of the Vistula Lagoon north of Mamonovo, about 30 km (19 mi) southwest of Kaliningrad.

Until the end of World War II Balga was in the former German Province of East Prussia; it was the site of one of the final battles of the Wehrmacht with advancing Red Army forces during the East Prussian Offensive, which devastated the castle remains.

SIDELIGHTS: GROSSDEUTSCHLAND

The Großdeutschland Division was a elite Heer combat unit of the Wehrmacht. The Großdeutschland was considered to be the premier unit of the German Army and as such it was one of best-equipped unit of the German Armed Forces, receiving equipment before all other units.


By March 1945, the Panzergrenadier Division Großdeutschland had been reduced to around 4,000 men. These escaped by ferry from the collapsing Memel bridgehead. They landed at Pillau and were put straight back into combat. By 25 April 1945, the division ceased to exist, having been completely destroyed in the battles around Pillau. Of the survivors only a few hundred were able to make their way to Schleswig-Holstein and surrendered to British forces. The majority of the men were left behind and were forced to surrender to the Russians where they often faced a fatal and indefinite amount of time in Russian Labor Camps (Gulags).

Last position of Division "Grossdeutschland" on the coast at Cape Peninsula BalgaEast Prussia, in March 1945

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Soldiers Division "Grossdeutschland" on the positions on the peninsula of Balga. East Prussia, in March 1945.

Soldiers of Division "Grossdeutschland" evacuated from East Prussia. In March 1945.

 A devastated Koenigsberg after the Germans surrendered in April 1945


BATTLE OF KOENIGSBERG

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 violent urban warfare, Soviet forces of the 1st Baltic Front and the 3rd Belorussian Front captured the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). The siege started in late January 1945 when the Soviets initially surrounded the city. There was heavy fighting for the overland connection between Königsberg and the port of Pillau, but by March 1945 Königsberg was hundreds of kilometres behind the main front line. The battle finished when the German garrison surrendered to the Soviets on 9 April after a three day assault made their position untenable.
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BOOK EXTRACT
 

"IVAN'S WAR" BY Catherine Merridale


The men knew that their own conduct was turning brutal. "I have to say that the war has changed me a lot," Aronov wrote. "War does not make people tender. On the contrary, it makes them reserved, rather coarse, and very cruel. That's a fact." But he was not really apologizing, and his comrades would also show little sense of shame. "Our soldiers nave not dealt with East Prussia any worse than the Germans did with Smolensk," a Russian combatant wrote home from a town inside the Prussian border. "We hate Germany and the Germans deeply. In one house, for example, our boys found a murdered woman and her two children. You can often see civilians lying dead in the street, too. But the Germans deserve the atrocities that they unleashed. You only have to think about Maidanek. . .. It's certainly cruel to have killed those children, but the cold-bloodedness of the Germans at Maidanek was a thousand times worse."
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The first atrocity that Lev Kopelev would witness was the burning of a Prussian town. There was no military reason for it. Valuable food and other supplies—blankets, clothing, even medicines—were all consumed in the fire. It was this kind of profligacy, the waste of resources, that would eventually bring the great rampage across Prussia to an end. The interests of the war, as Rokossovsky would insist, called for more discipline. But military thinking seemed to have been suspended in those first wild hours—or rather, a new tactic had become widespread. The order of the day, Kopelev noted, was "smash, burn, have your revenge." Many of his fellow officers were shocked, especially at the wanton waste, but the political officer in charge dismissed the incident. "The Fritzes have plundered all over the world," he said. "That's why they've got so much. They burned down everything in our country, and now we're doing the same in theirs. We don't have to feel sorry for them." Kopelev's own concern would soon be dubbed "bourgeois humanitarianism," and within a few weeks of his first complaint he was arrested for it.

There was nothing bourgeois or humanitarian about most Soviet troops in those cold days. "In the few German areas that have been occupied by the Red Army," German intelligence reported, "the behavior of the soldiers is exactly as predicted earlier in the war—in most cases is horrifying. Brutish killings, rapes of young women and girls, as well senseless destruction are taking place on a daily basis." A prisoner of war told his German captors that a specific order from Stalin had de-creed all this by stating that revenge should be taken for German atrocities. "A confirmation of the Stalin order," the author observed, "is not available yet." It would not be, for nothing as specific as an order to rape and destroy was ever issued. Indeed, all through these months the penalty for rape and looting, technically at least, was death on the spot. But the men read license into every exhortation to revenge. "Red Army soldier!" a poster declared. "You are now on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck! "

A packet of the men's letters intercepted by German intelligence in February 1945 required no editing to make the point. "Happy is the heart as you drive through a burning German town," wrote one man to his parents. "We are taking revenge for everything, and our revenge is just. Fire for fire, blood for blood, death for death." "It was evening when we drove into Neidenburg," Kopelev wrote. It was a small town, meaner than Insterburg, and like all the others it was almost deserted. The Red Army had torched the place. Through the smoke, the officer made out the body of a dead old woman. "Her dress was ripped," he saw, and "a telephone receiver reposed between her scrawny thighs. They had apparently tried to ram it into her vagina." The pretext was that she could easily have been a spy. "They got her by the telephone booth," one of the men explained. "Why fool around?" It was the first of several murders Kopelev would witness in that cursed place. Then came Allenstein, and more fire, more death. Near the post office, he met a woman with a bandaged head, clutching the hand of a young girl with blond pigtails. Both had been crying, and the child's legs were stained with blood. "The soldiers kicked us out of our house," she told the Russian officer. "They beat us, they raped us. My daughter is only thirteen. Two of them did it to her. And many of them to me." She wanted him to help her find her little boy. Another woman begged Kopelev to shoot her.

The Germans prepare for the inevitable. The construction of fortifications, East Prussia, the middle of July 1944.

THE DEFENCES OF KOENIGSBERG

Koenigsberg had twelve large and five small forts, spaced at a distance of 3-4 km, each of which was defended by 300 to 500 soldiers and officers. But to approach it, the Soviet troops had to overcome three powerful defense zones, including the so-called "line of Daimyo" (40 kilometers from the city), equipped with the latest fortification. Directly on the outskirts of the city Soviet troops encountered two powerful defense belt and two milestones that were heavily "larded" with antitank and antipersonnel mines. Streets were blocked by anti-tank obstacles and ditches, barricades and trenches. The approaches to the fort was surrounded by deep, up to seven meters, ditches filled with water. Reinforced concrete casemates could withstand heavy artillery strikes and heavy bombs. Forts were autonomous, with its own underground power station, large stocks of ammunition and food.

The garrison of the city had about 130,000 soldiers. Everything was ready for a long defense of the city. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that "the party held in Konigsberg, very wide-ranging measures for defense, some of which could serve as a model for us here in Berlin."

Refugees fleeing the fierce fighting at Konigsberg move towards Pillau, mid February 1945.

German soldiers in Königsberg with a MG 151/20 gun. The winter of 1945.

SIDELIGHTS: MG 151/20

The MG 151 (MG 151/15) was a 15 mm autocannon produced by Waffenfabrik Mauser starting in 1940. It was in 1941 developed into the 20 mm MG 151/20 cannon which was widely used on many types of German Luftwaffe fighters, fighter bombers, night fighters, ground attack and even bombers as part of or as their main armament during World War II. The 20 mm MG 151/20 was also fitted on the Italian World War II fighter aircraft of the "Serie 5", the most effective Italian fighters of WWII.

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Later, while in captivity, when asked how did he explain the rapid decline of the fortified castles of Koenigsberg, Lyash said that the Russian "secretly managed to concentrate a large amount of artillery and aircraft, the massive use of which destroyed the building and demoralized soldiers and officers. When morale is broken - it is first difficult, then impossible to fight." 
Otto von Lasch - the last German commandant of the town and fortress of Konigsberg
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KAUFEN SIE DAS BUCH

Königsberg zählt zu den am härtesten umkämpften Städten des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Als fünf sowjetische Armeen nach vierteljährlicher Belagerung im April 1945 zum Großangriff auf die Hauptstadt Ostpreußens antraten, stützte sich die Verteidigung im Wesentlichen auf einen alten Fortgürtel aus dem 19. Jahrhundert, der mit unzureichenden Mitteln zu einer Hauptkampflinie ausgebaut worden war. Dies ist der gleichermaßen erschütternde wie detaillierte Bericht der verlustreichen Kämpfe und der einzelnen Stadien ihrer Entwicklung, eingebettet in die verzweifelte militärische Großlage in Ostpreußen 1945. Sie stammen aus der Feder eines unmittelbar beteiligten Zeitzeugen, dessen führende Stellung ihm wohl die am tiefsten gehende Gesamtsicht der Dinge auf deutscher Seite erlaubte. Karten und ein Anhang mit Zeittafel, Aufstellung der beteiligten Verbände und Truppenteile, Stellenbesetzungen, deutschen und russischen Armeeberichten usw. ergänzen die fundierte Dokumentation.Erst im Spätherbst 1955 kehrte General Otto Lasch - seit 27. Januar 1945 Kommandant der Festung Königsberg - nach langen schweren Jahren aus russischer Kriegsgefangenschaft zurück. Dies ist sein erschütternder Bericht über das Ende der zum Bollwerk gegen die anstürmende Rote Armee gewordenen alten Hauptstadt Ostpreußens, zu deren Übergabe sich der General entgegen Hitlers Befehl entschloß, um in aussichtsloser Lage wenigstens noch Menschenleben zu retten. Die Geschichte vom Fall der Festung und die einzelnen Stadien der militärischen Entwicklung sind hier authentisch dargestellt. Zahlreiche Aussagen überlebender Zeitzeugen wurden mit verarbeitet. Dabei vermitteln vor allem die Schilderungen der mit äußerster Härte geführten Abwehrkämpfe durch beteiligte Wehrmachtssoldaten ein anschauliches Bild der dramatischen Ereignisse. Fotos, Karten und ein Anhang mit Zeittafel, Namensaufstellungen, OKW-Berichten usw. bilden eine fundierte sachliche Ergänzung. Eine Dokumentation unvorstellbaren Grauens und des Leidens von Zivilisten und Soldaten während des Kriegsgeschehens in Königsberg von Oktober 1944 bis zur Kapitulation am 9. April 1945. 

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KOENIGSBERG IN APRIL 1945: HELL ON EARTH


Extract From The book: "So Fiel Konigsberg" by Otto von Lasch

"Houses were burning.. Upholstered furniture, musical instruments, kitchen utensils, paintings, china - it was all thrown out of their homes. Between the burning tanks and cars, lay clothing and equipment.  Drunken Russian soldiers roamed about.. Some  shooting wildly at random, others tried to ride a bike, but fell down and remained lying unconscious in the gutters with bleeding wounds. In the house were dragged weeping, struggling women and girls. The children weeped, calling their parents. Before our eyes are brought paintings, which are impossible to describe. The roadside  was filled with corpses. The dead bodies bore traces of unimaginable brutality and rape. Lying around were a lot of dead children. They were hung on the trees - with ears cut off, eyes gouged. In all directions were German women. Drunken Russian fought for nurses. On the roadside under a tree, sat an old woman, both her legs were crushed by a car.  We heard cries for help but we could do nothing. From their homes, raising their hands in prayer, women go out, the Russian drove them back and shoot them if they refused. It was awful. This we could not even imagine.  The wounded, for whom no one cared, moaned from the pain. Almost all were tormented by hunger and thirst. From both sides in the column of prisoners of war squeezed Russian soldiers picking someone's overcoat, cap or a wallet. Everyone wanted something to profit. 'Ury, Ury! "  they shouted."

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 German soldiers in camp near Pillau. East Prussia, in April 1945.

German ZSU FlaK 38. Fishhauzen, East Prussia, in March 1945
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Outskirts of Konigsberg. Russian soldiers. April 1945

A Panther from the 31st Panzer Regiment of the 5th Panzer Division of the Wehrmacht in Goldap (East Prussia), November 1944. Gołdap - one of the first settlements of East Prussia, was taken by the Red Army on October 20, 1944. But as a result of counter-attack the Germans managed to recapture the city.

A column of German tanks Pz.Kpfw. "Panther" moves to the front in East Prussia. In January 1945.

German POW captured by the Red Army in late 1944

Russian soldiers occupy Pillau. April 1945


SIDELIGHTS: PILLAU

During World War II, Pillau had a U-boat training facility. On 16 April 1945, the U-78 was sunk by Soviet artillery fire while she was docked near the electricity supply pier in the German port. This was the only U-boat to be ever sunk by land-based forces in World War II. As the Red Army entered East Prussia, more than 450,000 refugees were ferried from Pillau to central and western Germany. Pillau was eventually captured by Soviets on April 25, 1945

After the war, this part of East Prussia passed to the Soviet Union, and the German inhabitants were expelled. During the Russification campaign, the town's name was changed to Baltiysk in 1946.

The Russians are coming!  Soldiers of the 2nd Guards Taman Division  enter the town of Eylau in East Prussia. February 6, 1945

Soviet troops occupy the city of Frauenburg in East Prussia. In February 1945.


SIDELIGHTS: FRAUENBURG'S HISTORY

Towards and after the end of World War II the German inhabitants were either evacuated or expelled like most of the German population of East Prussia. At the end of World War II, 173 years after the partitions, the city along with the rest of southern East Prussia became again part of Poland by the decisions of the Potsdam Conference. The town was resettled by Poles, many of whom were expellees from Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union.

APC M3A1 with the Soviet soldiers, Eastern Prussia, Koenigsberg, in April 1945

 A column of German prisoners on the streets Insterburg, April 1945


SIDELIGHTS: INSTERBURG

Insterburg became part of the German Empire during the 1871 unification of Germany. On 1 May 1901 it became an independent city separate from the Insterburg District. After World War I, the town was separated from the rest of Weimar Germany, as the province of East Prussia had become an exclave. The football club Yorck Boyen Insterburg was formed in 1921.

 During World War II, Insterburg was heavily bombed by the British Royal Air Force on 27 July 1944. The town was stormed by Red Army troops on January 21–22, 1945. As part of the northern part of East Prussia, Insterburg was transferred from Germany to the Soviet Union after the war as previously agreed between the victorious powers at the Potsdam Conference. The German population was either evacuated or expelled and replaced with Russians. In 1946 Insterburg was renamed Chernyakhovsk in honor of the Soviet World War II General of the army Ivan Chernyakhovsky, who was killed in the Battle of Königsberg.

A column of German prisoners on the streets Insterburg, April 1945

A German soldier armed with assault rifle StG 44 shares a smoke with a crew of gunners of an assault gun StuG III. East Prussia in January 1945. 


SIDELIGHTS: STG 44 ASSAULT RIFLE


The StG 44 (Sturmgewehr 44, literally :"storm (or assault) rifle (model of 19)44") was an assault rifle developed in Nazi Germany during World War II and was the first of its kind to see major deployment, considered by many historians to be the first modern assault rifle. 
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STUG 3

The Sturmgeschütz III (StuG III) assault gun was Germany's most produced armoured fighting vehicle during World War II. It was built on the chassis of the proven Panzer III tank. Initially intended as a mobile, armoured light gun for infantry support, the StuG was continually modified and was widely employed as a tank destroyer.

Transportation of the Soviet 280-mm mortars Br-5 with an artillery tractor "Voroshilovets" in East Prussia. In January 1945. The 280 mm mortar M1939 (Br-5) was a Soviet heavy artillery piece used during World War II.

 April 1945. Pillau has fallen. Russian soldiers with German civilians


In Danzig it was open season for the Russian soldiers once again. They raped, murdered and pillaged. Women between the ages of twelve and seventy-five were raped; boys who sought to rescue their mothers were pitilessly shot

 March 29, 1945. Grim looking survivors of the Grossdeutschland division in Pillau after they were evacuated from East Prussia. Only 4000 men were left. They were immediately thrown into the fighting.

 Soviet soldiers in carts pass corpses of dead German soldiers. East Prussia. 1944.

 A destroyed German Stug 3 lies near the Kronprinz Barracks. April 1945. The barracks were one of the strongest German fortifications in Koenigsberg.

BATTLE OF KOENIGSBERG: JAN-APRIL 1945

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 violent urban warfare, Soviet forces of the 1st Baltic Front and the 3rd Belorussian Front captured the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). The siege started in late January 1945 when the Soviets initially surrounded the city. There was heavy fighting for the overland connection between Königsberg and the port of Pillau, but by March 1945 Königsberg was hundreds of kilometres behind the main front line. The battle finished when the German garrison surrendered to the Soviets on 9 April after a three day assault made their position untenable.

 German POW in Koenigsberg. April 1945

 More German POW in Koenigsberg. Happy to be alive or just broken men?

A German Stug 4 in Elbing, East Prussia. February 1945

 Russian officers inspect a fortress at Koenigsberg

Russian soldiers in action on the street of Koenigsberg. April 1945

An abandoned German 10 5 mm leFH 18-42 howitzer at Koenigsberg

A German 150 mm sFH 18 heavy artillery gun lies forlorn at Koenigsberg after it was all over. April 1945.

SIDELIGHTS: sFH 18 150 mm HOWITZER

The 15 cm schwere Feldhaubitze 18 or sFH 18 (German: "heavy field howitzer, model 18"), nicknamed Immergrün ("Evergreen"), was the basic German division-level heavy howitzer during the Second World War, serving alongside the smaller but more numerous 10.5 cm leFH 18. It was based on the earlier, First World War-era design of the 15 cm sFH 13, and while improved over that weapon, it was generally outdated compared to the weapons it faced. It was, however, the first artillery weapon equipped with rocket-assisted ammunition to increase range. The sFH 18 was also used in the self-propelled artillery piece schwere Panzerhaubitze 18/1 (more commonly known as Hummel). The sFH 18 was one of Germany's three main 15 cm calibre weapons, the others being the 15 cm Kanone 18, a corps-level heavy gun, and the 15 cm sIG 33, a short-barreled infantry gun.

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As The Russians Closed in.... 1945

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At the beginning of August 1944, when the Red Army reached East Prussia, neither Stalin nor anyone else in his entourage suspected that the conquering of the easternmost province of the Third Reich would take more than eight months and would cost an enormous amount of effort and the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

The first two attempts of the young Soviet General Chernyakhovsky to penetrate deep into the enemy territory failed miserably, which, in turn, forced Stalin to redeploy considerable forces to that area and allow them to prepare thoroughly for the final assault. 

The assault in question commenced in the small hours of 13 January 1945 and continued for almost four months. It would go down in history as one of the most ferocious battles of World War II. 

This new study by the Bulgarian author Kamen Nevenkin scrutinizes that third and final attempt by powerful Soviet forces to capture East Prussia. Using a considerable number of German archival documents, as well as formerly classified Soviet General Staff studies, the author discusses in detail all aspects of the battles that took place in East Prussia from January to April 1945 including the objectives, plans and buildup prior to the offensive, the opening onslaught of the Red Army, the initial Soviet penetration of the front and subsequent breakout and onward drive, including the bitter fighting for Konigsberg, the destruction of the German 4th Army and the closing stages of the offensive around Samland. 

Special attention is paid to the decision-making processes in the headquarters of the two opposing forces. Thanks to the author's utilization of a variety of primary sources, objective answers to some central questions are given, as well as the debunking of a number of resistant myths that have emerged in the post-Second World War period.

The text is well supported by a number of photographs, maps, references, tables and detailed appendices, including orders of battle.