Nemmersdorf massacre: Difference between revisions
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The Polish editor National Geographic, Marcin Jamkowski, said in a ( February 2005) article "German residents knew all too well what an encounter with the incoming Soviet army could mean, having heard the story of Nemmersdorf, a village in East Prussia overrun by the Soviets the previous autumn. There the Red Army had taken bloody revenge for three years of suffering caused by the German invasion of Russia... the soldiers had first raped all women, regardless of age, then had crucified them on doors of barns and houses. Men and children had been clubbed to death, shot, or run over with tanks". |
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After 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union, new sources became available and the dominant view among scholars became that the massacre was embellished, and actually exploited, by Goebbels in an attempt to stir up civilian resistance to the advancing Soviet 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.<ref name="Fisch_192">Fisch [[#References|References]] 192 pp</ref> He interviewed many witnesses still alive on both sides (e.g., Soviet General Kuzma N. Galitsky, former commander of 11th Guards Army) 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 liberties were taken with at least some of the photographs, that some victims on the photographs were from other East Prussian villages, and that the notorious crucifixion barn doors were not even 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. |
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Later research by historian [[Gerd R. Ueberschaer]] and German TV Channel [[ZDF]] further reduced the number of executions at Nemmersdorf to 23 (leaving ten unexplained deaths). |
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==See also== |
==See also== |
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Revision as of 03:28, 14 August 2008
Nemmersdorf in East Prussia (today's Mayakovskoye, Kaliningrad Oblast) was one of the first pre-war German villages to fall to the advancing Red Army on October 22, 1944 at 07:00 hours and the scene of a war crime perpetrated by the Soviet army against German civilians.
Incident
A Russian military unit, the 25th Guards Tank Brigade of the 11th Guards Army,[1] tried to take the Angerapp bridge but soon found it was facing strong German forces, with heavy artillery shelling and a Luftwaffe plane strafing them. A number of Soviet soldiers found an improvised bunker, occupied by 14 men and women. The Russians shot them at short-range (one woman, Gerda Meczulat, survived). Meanwhile, although they managed to destroy a number of German tanks, the Soviet brigade 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.[2]
However, the German army only claimed control of Nemmersdorf two days later. German authorities (using the Völkischer Beobachter and the cinema Wochenschau) accused the Soviet Army of killing tens of civilians at Nemmersdorf. Nazi propaganda claimed that many noncombatants, 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 Volkssturm member Karl Potrek of Königsberg states, in part:
"In the farmyard stood a cart, to which more naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position...Near a large inn, the 'Roter Krug', 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, including children, and one old man, 74, all dead....Some babies had their heads bashed in."[3]
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels organized a neutral medical commission, which subsequently reported that all the dead females, who ranged in age from eight to 84, had been raped. The Nazi propaganda ministry disseminated its description of the event to boost the motivation of German soldiers.[4] The reaction of the home front, particularly that of civilians, was immediate. The number of volunteers to join the Volkssturm was indeed boosted,[5] but the larger number of civilians responded with panic, and started to leave the area en masse.[6][7]
The name "Nemmersdorf" is a symbol of war crimes of the Red Army, as an example of the worst behavior in Eastern Germany. The post-war co-publisher of the weekly Die Zeit, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, who 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]
The Polish editor National Geographic, Marcin Jamkowski, said in a ( February 2005) article "German residents knew all too well what an encounter with the incoming Soviet army could mean, having heard the story of Nemmersdorf, a village in East Prussia overrun by the Soviets the previous autumn. There the Red Army had taken bloody revenge for three years of suffering caused by the German invasion of Russia... the soldiers had first raped all women, regardless of age, then had crucified them on doors of barns and houses. Men and children had been clubbed to death, shot, or run over with tanks".
See also
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.
- Template:En icon 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.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help); External link in|chapterurl=|chapterurl=ignored (|chapter-url=suggested) (help) - Template:Pl icon Thorwald, Jürgen (1998). Wielka ucieczka (Große Flucht). Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. ISBN 83-08-02890-X.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Template:En icon Weiss Brandenburg, Christel. Ruined by the Reich: Memoir of an East Prussian Family, 1916-1945. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-1615-7.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|chapterurl=(help); Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help)
Further reading
- Gerd R. Ueberschaer, (Hrsg.): Orte des Grauens. 2003
- Website which quotes the Junge Freiheit article on the book by Bernhard Fisch, the witness account by Joachim Reisch and other earlier German accounts, usually based on Karl Potrek (in German)
- German TV channel ZDF on Nemmersdorf
Footnotes
- ^ Hastings, Max, Armageddon, Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 2004, pp.264-5; Sharp, Charles C., Soviet Orders of Battle, Vol. III, Red Storm, Nafziger, 1995, pp.39-40, 70.
- ^ Thorsten Hinz Kein Erinnerungsort nirgends: Eine deutsche Opferstätte: Vor sechzig Jahren verheerte die Rote Armee das ostpreußische Nemmersdorf published in Junge Freiheit, 22 October 2004
- ^ Hastings, ibid.
- ^ Samuel References Page ?
- ^ Thorwald References Page ?
- ^ Thorwald References Page ?
- ^ Samuel References Page ?
- ^ Dönhoff References Page ?
External links
- Image of victims: http://www.vigrid.net/Bilder%20til%20artikler/nemmersdorf2mini.jpg
- Image of victims: http://www.vigrid.net/Bilder%20til%20artikler/nemmersdorf4mini.jpg
- Image of victims: http://www.lietuvos.net/istorija/communism/communism_photos1/23Nemmersd.jpg
