The
Evacuation of East Prussia refers to the events that took place in
East Prussia, especially evacuation of
German population from that area as well as from other
Prussian lands in
1944 and
1945.
When the
Soviet army invaded the German province of East Prussia, a
war crime is reported to happen in August 1944 in two East Prussian villages called Nemmersdorf (now
Mayakovskoye, Kaliningrad) and
Goldap. According to
German side, all the inhabitans (men, women, and children) were slaughtered, as well as French prisoners-of-war. Many women were raped before they were murdered, and in at least one farmyard the women were stripped naked and nailed through their hands in cruciform position. To each of the two doors of a barn near the village inn a naked woman was crucified. At least 72 women with children were slaughtered, while their babies had their heades smashed in. This genocidal pattern would in the following months repeat itself across entire East Prussia, and then spread to
West Prussia,
Pomerania,
Brandenburg, and
Silesia — in other words the lands east of the
Oder-Neisse Line that were to be taken away from Germany in light of
Potsdam conference agreements.
These events were widely spreaded by
German propaganda to increase motivation of German soldiers in their efforts to stop the Soviet Army. However, the main result was eruption of panic amongst the
German civilians. Fleeing from the advanicing
Soviet forces, the
German refugees trudged in great columns through the snow at -25°C, while Soviet aircrafts performed shellfire raids on them. Possibly, more than 2 million people in eastern provinces of
Germany died, great majority of them with frost, starvation and fightings but some were killed in massacres commited by
Soviet forces. One of the symbols of those events was the tragedy of German cruise
Wilhelm Gustloff, which had been sunk by Soviet submarine with more than 9,000 people (majority of them civilians) abroad.
The name of Nemmersdorf is considered to be a symbol of the
war crimes of the
Red Army. Others consider it a symbol of
propaganda aimed at shifting the attention away from Nazi's crimes by equalizing
Wehrmacht and
Red Army in terms of war crimes.
Bookmarks