Armageddon - Max Hastings [209]
The waterfront was a shambles of abandoned carts and wagons. Refugees and wounded men clustered in thousands around a small ship with a great jagged bomb hole in its foredeck. The column of casualties was forced through the mob, clambering over discarded trunks, crates, suitcases and at last up the gangway. A stench of blood, urine and excrement drifted up the companionway. They lay shivering until darkness fell and they put to sea. Thus they retched and vomited their way to Swinemünde, and onward by train to Lübeck, where an X-ray revealed that a bone in Volmar’s arm was shattered. He cared only that he had escaped from East Prussia and gained a month’s reprieve from the war.
Twenty-year-old Elfride Kowitz was likewise struggling on the dockside at Pillau. She watched people fighting to gain space aboard ships, sometimes crashing into the water as they lost their hold on the quayside or were thrown overboard by rivals. Russian warships intermittently shelled the harbour. Elfi nearly secured a place in a ship loaded with coffins, only to be frustrated at the last moment. Finally, she abandoned the struggle and returned to the Luftwaffe unit outside Königsberg, in whose offices she had been working. She departed in its truck convoy westwards and crossed the ice of the Frisches Haff amid the familiar scenes of terror and horror. “Again and again I thought: ‘We’re doomed.’ All that mattered was to escape the Russians. There were so many people struggling ruthlessly to survive—including myself.” The temperature was 25 degrees centigrade. Women were abandoning babies in the snow. The lorry beside them was obliterated by a direct hit from a Russian shell. Their little contingent was one of the few military convoys driving west. One of the trucks broke down and had to be towed by another.
Among the refugees, the very young and the very old suffered most of all. Once, military police sought to have Elfi evicted from the Luftwaffe truck, to make room for old people. She felt no urge for self-sacrifice. She was only grateful when their lieutenant insisted: “She’s one of us.” Some trekkers, seeing the dead and dying around them in the snow, turned round and went home, saying: “Maybe the Russians aren’t as bad as people say,” a judgement they later regretted. Elfi Kowitz reached the Vistula ferry to find cows abandoned by their owners mooing hopelessly in their unmilked agony: “We knew what was happening. The poor animals did not.” At last, the Luftwaffe convoy was able to cross. The unit was posted to a new airfield in Mecklenburg. Elfi Kowitz never returned to East Prussia, “but the memory still hurts. Sometimes, it seems as we had dreamed it all.” For the rest of her life, she could not bear to hear the grinding of tank tracks, because of the frightening memories the sound evoked.
“The highway along the Frisches Haff is now the only route open between the German garrison in Königsberg and Brandenburg,” the Soviet 1st Baltic Front reported to Moscow early in February 1945.
It is under systematic fire from our artillery, machine-guns and mortars. But the enemy is still getting food and ammunition through on foggy days and at night. According to our intelligence reports, in addition to the garrison there are still a million civilians in the city [Königsberg], both residents and refugees. They include many senior fascist figures, landowners, businessmen, and government officials and their families. People are living in huts and cellars. Food is short . . . Typhoid is rife. There are many wounded and sick in the city. Some refugees have tried to get to Pillau across the ice, but they drowned. The ice is now very thin, after so much shelling by our guns. Every day, the Gestapo arrest and execute hundreds of people