Cruel World (77 page)

The despair of the hunted Greek women and children would soon be a common phenomenon in the frontier areas of the New Reich, long since breached by the Allied armies. Flight and evacuation had been taking place on every front, but nowhere would it be more traumatic than in the vanishing Eastern
Lebensraum
. The liberation of the Western nations would cause thousands to flee their homes during battle, and require major efforts by the Americans and British to supply food and shelter and to sort out displaced persons of myriad nations. In the East, the situation was quite different. The millions of ethnic Germans resident there knew that they could expect little good from either the Red Army or the local populations. Revenge would be harsh, and the prospect of life in the Stalinist state was frightening. The numbers involved were vast. In addition to the various forms of Germans who had been resettled or were permanent residents, there were now hundreds of thousands of temporary residents who had been evacuated from bombing targets in Germany, or who were working in the Nazi administrations. Then there were all the
slaves, incarcerated in the world of labor and concentration camps, who could not be left behind to bear witness to Nazi excess or as possible manpower for the enemy, but must be taken back into the Reich to keep its sputtering industries going.

But the possibility of defeat was inadmissible to Nazi thought and, by extension, to the officials who would be responsible for the massive evacuations. The evidence that the war was lost was, however, inescapable. The hapless settlers from Hegewald and other such colonies in Russia had long since been retreating back to Poland. Throughout the spring of 1944, residents of East Prussia had watched, and given aid to, colorful processions of ethnic Germans from Belorussia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine who were moving west, mostly in horse-drawn carts loaded with blankets and little children. This had inspired many to prepare their own contingency plans. But it was necessary to be discreet. One landowner who had secretly ordered her workers to prepare wagons for their future, but inevitable, flight was denounced and warned by a Party official that if she “continued in defeatist preparations for flight [she] could expect harsh punishment.”
⁷¹
The official did not know it, but at that very moment Himmler himself was frantically ordering arrangements to be made in Austria and Bavaria for the reception of 240,000 ethnic Germans from Romania and other areas in southeastern Europe, many of whom were already en route by trek and train. Their withdrawal had been necessitated by Romania’s change of allegiance: its troops were now fighting on the side of the Soviets. SS underlings indicated that room would soon be needed for at least 200,000 more refugees and ordered, even at this late date, that the usual “filtering” agencies be set up at the reception points lest certain “non-Germans” try to get into the Reich.
⁷²

The Balkan refugees were far away from the Germans in occupied Poland and East Prussia, but the real situation in those areas became clear in July 1944, when the German commandant of Warsaw ordered all German women, children, and low-level service personnel working for the occupation authorities to leave immediately, and news came that the Red Army had taken Lublin. Another wave of 600,000 refugees was generated in October as the Russians moved into the Baltic states. These people were sent to East Prussia and, as there was not enough space for them there, on to central Germany. During the subsequent lull in the Soviet advance, little more of a practical nature was done. Local officials tried to organize, but even when the Red Army began to move again in January 1945, most of the Nazi officials were not authorized to evacuate their populations until the enemy was within hours of overrunning them.

The numbers needing to move were a staggering 4.5 million. Trains were, as always, at a premium and, unbelievably, priority on many of them was given to the concentration camp inmates and slave laborers who were being removed for further exploitation in the Reich. And the trains were often a mixed blessing. Once on them one was a virtual prisoner, frozen and often with no hope of food. A Swiss journalist observed, “The only people beyond the reach of help are those mothers whose children have died on the long journey in unheated coaches or in compartments with broken windows.” For people who waited too long to take a train, the evacuations would be on foot or in peasant carts drawn by oxen, horses, and even cows. With only a few hours’ notice in most cases, the treks, largely made up of women, children, and the elderly, took to roads covered with deep snow and ice, into the coldest winter weather in memory. In many villages there was no official evacuation notice or any transportation. The luckiest people attached themselves to retreating Army units if they could. The roads became so completely jammed that there was often no movement at all. Some people simply went back home, but most, terrified of the Russians, went on and on, for weeks and months, stopping when they could in barns, abandoned farms, or any kind of shelter, where, from time to time, the authorities did manage to provide some hot food. The Swiss journalist found a column that was fourteen miles long:

Crossroads where lines of refugees had to merge were chaotic. At these intersections there were rules: priority was given in the traffic jams to the treks of prisoners on their “death marches” from the concentration camps. There had been plenty of planning for them. At Auschwitz, exterminations of the “useless” had been stepped up in the few weeks before the camp was evacuated. Fifteen thousand Polish, Russian, and Czech prisoners had been shipped out to slave labor camps in the Reich to prevent any pro-Soviet uprisings. Thousands of others, like Anne Frank, were sent west too. Tons of packed-up clothes taken from the dead went with the prisoners,
along with several dismantled barracks that were to be reassembled in the Reich. Before they left, inmates in several camps had been kept busy attempting to obliterate mass graves and get rid of the tons of ashes from the crematoria. Between January 17 and 21, the final evacuation of 56,000 prisoners would leave Auschwitz and its subcamps. The columns moved out on foot with the aim of reaching railheads to the west from which trains would take them to camps in the Reich such as Buchenwald and Belsen. Those who could not keep up were shot. It is thought that between 9,000 and 15,000 prisoners from Auschwitz alone perished during these treks, which left thousands of bodies lying along the roads. Many more would die in the open freight cars in which they continued their journey.
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Fey von Hassell, a political prisoner, was lucky to be in one of the few covered, though unheated, cars on the train moving the inmates of the Stutthof concentration camp from Poland back to the Reich. Drifts of snow constantly stopped forward progress. From her window she could watch

But he was not allowed on the train, which went on with its load of slaves, who when they died of cold were thrown out beside the tracks.

Meanwhile, hundreds of German refugees had been encircled in the area between Königsberg and Danzig by the Red Army. For them, the only escape was on foot across a frozen inlet of the Baltic to one of the ships sent to rescue wounded troops and anyone else who could get aboard. Crossing the ice was a nightmare. Lore Ehrich and her two exhausted little boys, who had been traveling for days and were suffering from the dysentery known as “the highway illness,” had managed to get on a farm cart for the trip:

Once across the ice, the refugees had to get to the ships. This last piece of road was sometimes the breaking point: “On the way we witnessed shocking scenes. Demented mothers threw their children into the sea, people hanged themselves; others fell upon dead horses, cut flesh out of them and fried the pieces over open fires; women gave birth to children in carts.”
⁷⁷

Lore Ehrich made it to a ship that took her to Denmark. Not all were so lucky. Among the vessels was, ironically, the
Graf Steuben
, which had, five years before, brought so many thousands of Baltic Germans to their new “homeland.” This time Stalin was not as cooperative. The
Steuben
, loaded with refugees, would be sunk by a Russian submarine only days after the huge liner
Wilhelm Gustloff
had suffered the same fate, with the loss of more than 5,000 lives, and in the end some 18,000 people would die on this route. One man, traveling with his daughter and two grandchildren, was thrown into the icy Baltic when his ship was hit. He was rescued by a German minesweeper and was amazed to find his two-and-a-half-year-old grandson on board. Sailors told him that they had found the child “sitting astride a short beam holding on with his two little hands and crying bitterly.” The boy’s mother, who had perhaps managed to put him on the beam before she died, and his other grandchild had drowned along with some 850 others.
⁷⁸
Despite these horrific events, many thousands were rescued by a huge variety of vessels from this German Dunkirk before it was taken by the Soviets.

The treks, willing and unwilling, of some eleven million Germans back to the shattered Reich, during which an estimated one million people died, would continue from all the areas conquered by the Germans long after the official end of the war in Europe on May 8. Now it was up to the Allies to deal with the gigantic masses of humanity so brutally rearranged by the Nazis, a task fraught with complexities not covered by the joyous words “liberation” and “peace.”

(photo credit p5.1)

By the time the frozen millions from the East had begun trekking toward the supposed safety of the Nazi homeland, the armies of the Western Allies were fast approaching its frontiers. Behind them lay enormous tracts of liberated territory, each with humanitarian needs of the most challenging nature, most particularly when it came to children. The Allies had recognized early on that the problem of caring for the civilian populations in war zones would be extremely difficult. In August 1940, during the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill had promised relief to the people of occupied Europe, come the day of Nazi defeat:

This highly optimistic promise was not mere rhetoric. In 1941, a number of agencies were duly established to plan for postwar needs, and by the fall of that year one of them, the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration, had organized a string of camps in North Africa and the Middle East for Polish and Greek refugees who had fled or been evacuated to that region. In 1942, President Roosevelt created his own agency, the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations (OFRRO), under Herbert Lehman, the former governor of New York. UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which would later absorb the others, finally got around to producing its charter, approved with the ostensible support of forty-four nations, in November 1943.