Youtor
East Prussia 1945 German refugees and the failure of Dönitz
>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=mQIoSt1PBho
After the war, the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz boasted that two million people owed their lives to him personally: Rescuing people from the East German provinces was a priority in the spring of 1945,’ he repeated in many interviews he gave. Many believed him including the organisation of people who had once lived in East Prussia which treated him as a hero. However it is not true, indeed it is perhaps the reverse of the truth. The proof was then available if anyone had looked for it, in the war diary of the Naval War Staff. • In this video, I shall outline the tragedy of the German population of East Prussia and its efforts to escape from the on coming Red Army and the indifference of the Nazi leadership to their fate which came about directly as a result of its war and its racial policies. The plan of Operation Hannibal, as it was called, is often portrayed by historians as being the evacuation of civilians from East Prussia however in my opinion, this is completely erroneous. The objective of Operation Hannibal was not to evacuate people but that of military equipment which could be repaired and used again whilst leaving German civilians to their fate. Rather than a success of Grand Admiral Doenitz, it was, I think, the betrayal of hundreds of thousands of Germans by the Nazi regime indifferent to their fate. I shall highlight the video with maps which may help you understand what is going on where, photographs from the period and my videos – most of which was not taken in the dead of winter when these events were taking place but from the summer. • In the first days of January 1945, a deceptive silence lay over the front between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathians. It is the calm before the storm along the front stretching from the border of East Prussia through central Poland. As the bulk of the German armed forces had been frittered away in pointless assaults in the west, the eastern front was as Leuitenant General Heinz Guderian told Hitler, a pack of cards waiting to collapse. On 12 January 1945, the attack came. The Red Army easily broke out of the bridgeheads on the Vistula and Narew rivers and within a few days forced wide-ranging breakthroughs which took it through Poland and deep into the German heartlands. • In the central sector their formations smashed Army Group A and at the end of January they were on the Oder near Küstrin, 60 kilometers from Berlin. In the early morning hours of 31 January 31, 1945, advance detachments of the Soviet 5th Shock Army and the 2nd Guards Tank Army crossed the Oder and formed a bridgehead on the western bank of the river around the village of Kienitz. East Prussia was surrounded on 26 January 1945 when Stalin's troops reached the Vistula Lagoon near Tolkemit, today Tolkmicko. Three days later the siege ring around Königsberg, the historic capital of East Prussia closed. Here, Army Group Center was split into three pockets: at Heiligenbeil today Mamonowo, at Königsberg today Kaliningrad and on the Samland peninsula to the north west of Königsberg. There were still German units in Pomerania and Danzig-West Prussia, but it was obvious that they too would soon be overrun. • A major refugee crisis developed throughout eastern Germany with probably probably around five million people trying to get to safety by the end of the month. Terrified by Goebbels rhetoric about Red Army crimes, either real or imaged, the civilian population wanted to get out. The Nazi authorities did have some evacuation plans in place in the event of limited Soviet incursions, but those that existed had been rendered useless by the speed of the Soviet advance. In addition, Gauleiters like Erich Koch in East Prussia showed their total disregard for the population calling for perseverance and withheld the evacuation orders for the general public whilst ensuring that their own escape routes were clear. But now there was no holding back. Women, children and old men left everything behind and made their way west whilst males aged from 16 to 60 were forced into the Volkssturm, the Nazi version of the Home Guard. • It was an icy winter, at night the thermometer could drop to minus 20 degrees. Thousands upon thousands, especially small children and old people, froze to death. Perhaps remembering how refugees had held up the Allied movements in Belgium and France only four and a half years earlier, Wehrmacht columns often brutally pushed these refugees out of the way into the drainage ditches beside the roads and ordered them to keep off the thoroughfares in order to maintain military freedom of movement. • Terrible things awaited those who stayed behind or who never even got out of their villages. Soviet soldiers shot anyone who did not suit them, they plundered, raped and burned down entire towns. • Please consider supporting me on Patreon. / alanheath
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