Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

Another hour passed. Franz Mahnart stood at the window and reported back on the situation. He saw our infantry retreating and the Russians moving closer and closer. Meanwhile, again and again, there were moments of anxious quiet. Finally voices could be heard, announcing an approach from room to room. Andreyev shouted out several times. They were the same dull, throaty sounds that I had heard for the first time three years before in the woods at Upolosy. The voices had exactly the same effect on me as they had then. Both wings of the door were opened as the first Russian entered. His machine-pistol at the ready, he stood at the doors and looked around. Meanwhile, outside, next to the house, German shells were still falling.

In Holy Week of 1945 the destruction of the old German town of Danzig was completed. It was the eve of that dreadful night, the 27 March. On that fearful night, the city of Danzig and all the Vistula area were in flames. An eyewitness report stated: ‘From as far away as Hela, a wall of flames and smoke, 3000 to 4000 metres high, could be seen over the city’. It had been caused by air-raids with high explosive and incendiary bombs. The book Unvergänglicher Schmerz , or ‘Endless Agony’ is a record of the history of Danzig’s fateful year of 1945, by Peter Poralla. The section Das Inferno (p. 378) reads as follows:

The enormous development of heat in burning Danzig prevented German units becoming established in the town. So it was only at the entrance to Danzig, between the Schichau Wharf, the Olivaer Tor, taking in the Hagelsberg and the Bischofsberg, that a weak defensive line was constructed. Our soldiers were fighting there doggedly against the superior might of the enemy. There was always the certainty that every minute’s delay to the Soviet advance meant that some women and girls were saved from being raped. There was the possibility too that children and old people could flee. In actual fact they still succeeded in getting thousands every day across the bay to Hela and from there across the Baltic into the safer West. There are daily records showing the movement of 46,000 persons.

On the evening of 27 March the Russians succeeded in breaking through the Schicherowgasse to the Hansaplatz , and from there to the main railway station. Our soldiers were at the end of their strength. They were short of ammunition and weapons. There were no more replacements for the dead and wounded. The German Army command therefore decided to retreat to the Mottlau, and finally across the Vistula towards Heubude and Plenendorf. Danzig was occupied by the Red Army.

On Good Friday, 30 March 1945, Danzig’s fate was sealed. For Danzig’s population, and the many refugees from East Prussia and Pomerania, there began a via dolorosa of indescribable horror. The Soviets, and a little later the Poles, took their revenge on the innocents, on children, on women, on old people. That was done with unimaginable atrocity and brute force. What the people in Danzig at that time had to undergo, nobody can begin to imagine. Thousands, oppressed and beaten, committed suicide. Many women and children begged and pleaded, ‘Shoot me!’ Entire families were wiped out, shot or murdered, because they wanted to protect children from being raped, or were not quick enough to hand over their jewellery. Robbery, plunder and rape were committed day after day by the Soviets, and by the Poles who turned up later. They suffered death through hunger and diseases for weeks and months on end. That was the fate of the people who did not succeed in fleeing across the sea.

One in every four inhabitants of Danzig lost their lives as a result of war and from outrages committed by the Soviets and the Poles. They were starved to death during the Polish occupation. They died in forced labour camps. They died because they were not given proper help when they fell ill. At least as high must be the number of victims among the refugees from East Prussia and Pomerania who remained in Danzig.

That the city of Danzig was an ocean of fire was also described in the Divisional history. Hauptmann Franz Hrabowsky described it there and added to his description of the misery of the refugees: ‘In addition the women, concerned for the lives of their children, begged the soldiers many times to give up the fight. So it happened that in many places the officers, even using all their authority, did not always succeed in getting their people back out of the cellars. That was supplemented by an eyewitness account in Poralla, according to which in the Halbe Allee , and also in the Grosse Allee , deserters are said to have been hanged in rows.’

During the next few hours, our rooms were entered again and again by other Russians who behaved very differently. Many threatened us with their weapons. But, in many, you could see something like pity. Young members of the Komsomol , perhaps 16 years old, were the worst. One waved his machine-pistol slowly from bed to bed and then stopped in front of Franz Manhardt, aiming at his head. I can still see Franz’s profile with the questioning expression on his face, especially the detail of the eyelid of his left eye opening and closing while the young Russian – it seemed to last minutes, but it could only have been seconds – had him in his sights. I can still see too how another held a pistol, a German 08, at Oberleutnant Nabert’s temple. I can see Nabert turning his eyes upwards in order, in the last second of his life, to look his murderer in the face. But on both occasions the Russians did not pull the trigger. From that I concluded that they obviously did not have a general order to kill wounded men, nor particularly officers.

Almost amusing, when compared with the situations mentioned above, in which you were hovering between life and death, was how our watches were taken away. They were collected up, in a procedure to which the main interest of the individual members of the Red Army seemed to be directed, as they said, Uhr ist ? Because I had left my service watch behind at my unit when I was wounded, I no longer had a watch, and had to try to express this with gestures of helplessness. That seemed to be incomprehensible to one of the busy plunderers, because, with his index finger on my forehead, he pushed my head back on to the straw filled pillow. Officers also came into our room. I can clearly remember a tall, blond young major who spoke German and was an artilleryman. When he asked how I had been wounded, I replied, to please him, ‘by artillery’, which in fact did please him.

In conversation one of us said that the war was over for us, to which the major replied that it was only just beginning. In actual fact, at that time many Russians were convinced that with the downfall of Hitler’s Germany the capitalist Western powers would then turn against Russia. I found it to be more than a friendly gesture when a captain, before the officers moved on, brought out a bottle of plundered schnapps from his overcoat and reached it over to me in bed. Of course none of us exhausted wounded men would have been capable even of taking one gulp from it. So I hid the bottle in my bunk under the straw mattress.

After some hours of continually being visited by Russians we were pleased that the last assault had passed off so lightly for us helpless men. The fact that we had not yet received any food that day was unimportant. Indeed none of us felt hungry or thirsty. After all we had escaped with our lives. We also did not see anything of the medics who had stayed behind. We understood that none of them risked coming up to us on the second storey. Similarly, little was to be seen of the two doctors. I still know their names and can remember what they looked like. One of them was the Munich surgeon Dr Stadel-Eichel. He was compact in appearance and gave the impression of being busy. The other was a senior doctor from the Greifenwald University Clinic by the name of Dr Wolf. He was tall, slim and with a relaxed manner.