Exploring History Through Genealogy

WWII and the Russian Invasion Into Germany

WARNING!
This post has information that is not for the faint of heart and is definitely not for those under the age of 18. I am making it public as it is a part of history that is rarely talked about and is important to understanding the German people and attitudes they still bear today.


On the 12th of January 1945, the Russians began their offensive against the German front lines in southern Poland. Their momentum carried and they started a spree of terror that rivaled that of the one that Germans perpetrated against them when they invaded Russia in 1941. As they pushed through Poland toward Germany, they committed unfathomable acts in the name of revenge. According to historians, they did the same to Germans as the German military did to them. They shot any German in a uniform point blank. They looted houses of valuables and food. German women were raped up to 30 times a day by multiple men. It didn’t matter what they looked like or how old they were. Reports have been made of girls as young as 8 being violated and women as old as 83 as well. Most of the women ended up with venereal diseases and many pregnant, that is, if they survived.

As they continued westward, Germans fled in droves. They fled taking what goods they could into one of the coldest winters on record. So many died either from the snow, starvation, or the Russians. The Russians didn't just kill them with pistols, they used tanks, bombs and flew over ahead of the refugees with machine guns. Some refugees tried to take their cattle with them, but they were too slow and so they slaughtered them so that the Russians wouldn't be able to get to them.

It was especially brutal in northern Poland. The Refugees tried to escape over the ice that had formed on Koenigsberg Bay on the Baltic Sea. Their wagons would break through where the ice wasn't thick enough to support them. Women were the leaders of the treck as the men either were old and feeble or wounded from war. They went ahead of their families looking for the safest places to cross. Women were seen throwing their children into the sea (most likely because they were already dead), others hung themselves. Those starving would cut open dead horses and roast the flesh over fires and women would give birth in the back of the wagons. All in all, about 1 million people died in this huge migration of refugees.

By March 1945, there were millions of refugees on the roads between the Oder River, just east of Berlin and the Elbe, just East of Hamburg. I am sure the Brauers, my great-great-grandparents, had many such refugees traipsing through their farm on their way west. As they fled west, the tale of the horrors the Russians were unleashing spread far and wide. It is unknown when the family fled the oncoming army, but what is known is that they were scared. Helene and Heinrich, pack up Trude and Christel and start the journey west to Schleswig-Holstein. Now a days, the drive on modern roads and driving at reasonable speeds, the journey would take about 4 hours.

Helene must have been heavily pregnant. I estimate between eight and nine months along. We don’t know how far they got before she went into labor, but judging by what followed, I don’t think it was too far. They must have still been in east Germany on the east side of the Elbe river. We do know that Heinrich dropped her off at a hospital and continued with the girls. There, Helene gave birth to a little girl. My grandmother, Annegrete, says her name was Annemarie, but her sisters, Trude and Christel, say it was Rosemarie. Due to her inability to breastfeed, the baby died of starvation. The story goes that she is buried on the side of the road somewhere, most likely in a very shallow grave as Oma Brauer wouldn’t have had a means of digging a grave.

The story has been lost what happened next, but we do know that Helene decided to turn around and go back to the farm in Dahmen. I believe that this all occurred in the beginning of April or even earlier in March. If the Russians were already swarming the countryside, I don’t think the hospital would have accepted her or that she would have turned back to run right into them. What we do know from family lore is that Helene was hidden from the Russians by the Polish workers they had left behind on the farm. The Russians advanced on Berlin on the 20th of April and then continued westward shorty after. A contingent of Russians swept northward from Warren and headed to Rostock, which passed by Dahmen, and surely just passed their farm. They would have definitely ransacked the place continuing what they began in Poland.

The war officially ended on the 7th of May 1945, but the Russian reign had only just begun.