Armageddon - Max Hastings [207]
On 21 January, Gauleiter Koch, the man personally responsible for refusing to allow any prior evacuation of East Prussia, burst into his secretary’s office on his estate at Gross-Friedrich. “You must go—quickly—tonight,” he told Lise-Lotte Kussner. “Take the rest of the village people.” She responded instinctively: “But I can’t—there are posters everywhere saying that it would be treason.” So indeed there were—drafted by Koch himself. Now, he said: “No, no—that means nothing. Just go.” The gauleiter was distraught. In two hours, a little convoy of tractors and trailers was assembled. There were three Belgian PoWs, five women, a grandfather, eight small children and a fourteen-year-old boy. Lise-Lotte went into the house to tell Koch they were ready. She met his wife, Lilo. “Where are you going?” Frau Koch demanded.
“We’re off,” said the girl.
“No, you’re not.”
“It’s the gauleiter’s order.”
“You’re staying here.”
Frau Koch was visibly confused, no less so when her husband appeared and confirmed his orders, adding that his wife must remain. A Russian prisoner and his Polish girlfriend begged to join the trek. Lise-Lotte said: “But you’re going to be liberated!” The couple said: “No, we want to get out.” Koch, however, refused to let them leave. They took some snow-chains off a Wehrmacht vehicle to equip one of their own. Their privileged little convoy had progressed just six miles when one of its tractors broke down. Lise-Lotte telephoned Koch to ask what to do. He responded furiously: “Just keep going. You must go faster. The Russians are at Elbing already!” Their road, unlike most of those throughout East Prussia, proved curiously deserted. They were flagged down by a Wehrmacht patrol, who told them that the way ahead was closed by the Red Army. They lingered fearfully for hours before the orders changed. German troops had regained some ground. They could drive on. They heard Russian guns every yard that they travelled, but they reached the Vistula ferry without serious incident. Here there was a long, long queue. Irma, one of the women in the convoy, said: “Get the little ones screaming.” They awakened the sleeping children, and set them to howl. The apparent plight of their small charges persuaded the soldiers to allow them to bypass the queue. The tractors drove forward to the ferry, past long lines of silent, resentful refugees.
Even as Lise-Lotte’s group was crossing the Vistula, her mother telephoned Koch from their home, some thirty miles from Königsberg. “Where is my daughter?” she asked. Koch said untruthfully that he had put her aboard a ship: “I got her a place—on the Wilhelm Gustloff.” Frau Kussner demanded to know how she herself was to flee, when her grandmother was immobilized with a broken rib. Koch sent a car manned by two uniformed Party officials to take the Kussner women to an airfield, where he arranged places for them on a plane to Breslau. Even the Kussners’ dulled consciences were pricked by the experience of speeding for miles across East Prussia through columns of refugees who could seek safety only on their feet in the snow.
At Stralsund, Lise-Lotte’s tractors ran out of diesel, but a cousin of hers was stationed in the port, a sailor. He found