Armageddon - Max Hastings [208]
In the heart of Germany, the news from East Prussia and Silesia seemed a harbinger of the doom that was approaching. “The first shattering reports of the terrible happenings were brought to Berlin by refugees . . .” wrote Paul von Stemann. “They told about people being trampled to death on the platforms in the fight to get seats on the last trains, and dead bodies being thrown out of the moving, unheated goods trains, and young mothers who were driven to insanity and would not believe that the babies they carried in their arms were long dead . . . Many women gave birth in the open, and soon followed their newborn in death.” Shocked refugees told stories of German soldiers killing their cattle and horses, even looting their houses. A grand Silesian landowner described in disgust how one of Germany’s supposed defenders had fired a Panzerfaust at a baroque chest in the hall of his mansion. On Berlin station platforms, soup kitchens were established to feed refugees, and clothes provided to replace those they had lost. It is interesting to speculate whether these grieving people would have recoiled had they known that many of the warm woollens which they were given had been collected by the SS from the wardrobes of Jews translated into ashes in the death camps.
“Berliners are receiving the first visible warning that the Red Army stands before the frontiers of the Reich,” wrote the German correspondent of Stockholms-Tidningen on 24 January. “Columns of trucks crowded with refugees and baggage and bags and sacks roll through the streets on their way between one railway station and another. Most of the refugees are typical German peasants from the East, and only women and children—no men. They peep wide-eyed from under their headscarves at the ruined streets of the capital they are now seeing for the first time in their lives.”
Yet Berliners did not receive the easterners with unmingled sympathy. For four years, the people of East Prussia, Saxony and Silesia had lived in tranquillity, while the cities of the west were bombed to destruction. More than a few Berliners were by no means displeased now to see their smug fellow countrymen from the east dragged down into the common misery. The Wehrmacht estimated that 3.5 million ethnic Germans were already in flight, and this number increased dramatically over the weeks ahead. In mid-January in Berlin, said Paul von Stemann, “we expected the Russians to arrive any day. The East was like a flood which had broken all dykes . . . Berlin sat back and prepared itself for the flood to roll over it, only hoping that it would be short and sharp.” Berliners even professed to laugh at the tales of mass rape brought by the eastern fugitives. There was a ghastly joke: “I would rather have a Russian on my belly than a bomb.”
IN THE LAST days of January, seventeen-year-old glider-pilot cadet Joseph Volmar lay in a Königsberg hospital recovering from an arm wound. He talked defiantly about rejoining his comrades and getting even with Ivan. His roommate, an old soldier, dismissed his pretensions: “Look, boy, why not give up on this hero stuff? You’re lucky to have made it this far—don’t push it.” As Russian shells began to fall around them, on 30 January the walking wounded were told to make for Pillau. “What a motley group we were! Soldiers with head wounds, arm wounds and even some leg wounds walking with sticks were making a bid for escape. Anything seemed better than letting the Russians get you.” At the beginning, whenever a shell fell close, he dashed for cover. Another man said: “You can’t do that—you’ll miss the boat. You’ve got to keep moving.” A merciful