In Europe

of it on foot. The trucks were kept rolling with impromptu repairs, the countless female soldiers looked like professional boxers, the sway-backed horses were driven along as though by Ben Hur himself, there seemed to be neither order nor plan, but according to Gellhorn it was impossible ‘to describe the sense of power radiating from this chaos of soldiers and broken-down equipment’. And she thought how sorry the Germans must be that they had ever started a war with the Russians.

Chapter FORTY-SIX
Dresden
    THE MONUMENT AT TORGAU IS COATED IN GREYISH -GREEN. IT SHOWS Soviet soldiers being welcomed by joyful German women bearing flowers, cheering men and children, and above that in big letters stand the words ‘RUHM DEM SOWJETVOLK, DANK FÜR SEINE BEFREIUNGSTAT’. It is one of those DDR plaques that should immediately be put under the protective care of UNESCO, as a classic monument to the lie. Phill Sinott and his countless American comrades have been skilfully edited from the snapshot of history, and no one wants to be reminded of that screaming from across the river. For in the real Torgau of 1945, the cheerful German mothers were gang-raped by their Soviet liberators, and in the cities their children were pulverised by the thousand in the firestorms of British and American bombardments. That was the real end of the war, the retaliation, the fire and the shame, the intense humiliation about which only half a century later can cautious mention be made in Germany.
    The retaliation came in all varieties. One variety came largely from the Soviet soldiers. When they entered East Prussia in January, their propaganda officers hung up huge banners: ‘Soldier, you are now entering the lair of the fascist beast!’ The village of Nemmersdorf (now Mayakovskoya) was taken by the 2nd Red Army Guard, a few days later German troops launched a counteroffensive and entered the town again. They found bodies everywhere: refugees crushed under tanks, children shot in their gardens, raped women nailed to barn doors. The cameras rolled, the images were shown all over Germany: this is what happens when the Russians come in.
    Some two million German women were raped during that period, most of them several times. The Red Army leadership was fully awareof what was happening, but did nothing to stop it. Half a century later, in the state archives of the Russian Federation, Antony Beevor found a great many NKVD documents describing ‘negative phenomena’ and ‘immoral acts’, as rapes were called in Soviet jargon. Women who had been raped were regularly reported to have committed suicide afterwards, sometimes even entire families took their own lives. Russian girls who had been deported to Germany were referred to as ‘German dolls’. A memorandum drafted on 29 March, 1945 contains a description of how Soviet officers and soldiers all along the front entered the dormitories of newly liberated Soviet women and committed ‘organised mass rapes’. The report cites a woman by the name of Klavdia Malashtshenko: ‘It was very bad under the Germans. But now our fortunes are worse. This is no liberation. They treat us terribly. They do terrible things to us.’
    The ‘Russian fury’ prompted a huge, panicked migration. The roads witnessed scenes identical to those during the German campaigns of conquest into Poland and beyond, but now in the other direction: from east to west. From mid-January 1945, millions of Germans began fleeing from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, on foot, with prams and horse-drawn carts, in the snow at temperatures of twenty below zero, and later by ship and train as well. By mid-February, more than eight million Germans – mostly women and children, for the men were still at the front – were on their way west. On the afternoon of 30 January, the enormous holiday cruiser
Wilhelm Gustloff
, run by Kraft durch Freude, set sail onto the Baltic, packed with somewhere between 6–10,000 refugees, including some 4,000 children. In the middle of the ice-cold night that followed, the ship was struck by a torpedo from a Soviet submarine. About 1,300 evacuees made it into lifeboats or were rescued by navy vessels that came to the scene. Thousands were trapped below deck when the water rushed in. The
Wilhelm Gustloff
went down with a ‘final collective scream’, a catastrophe many times greater in scope than that of the
Titanic
, which became known in wider circles due to the work of the writer Günter Grass