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Evacuation of East Prussia
Part of World War II
German POWs marching towards Königsberg
Date January-March 1945 Location East Prussia Result Evacuation of over 8 million German civilians [1]
Combatants
Germany	Soviet Union
Commanders
Gauleiter Erich Koch	Ivan Chernyakhovsky Aleksandr Vasilevsky (commanders of the Soviet invading troops)
Casualties
300,000 civilians (killed by the Soviets during East Prussian Offensive)[2]

The evacuation of East Prussia refers to the evacuation of the German population of East Prussia and Klaipėda region, at the end of the World War II, between 20 January, and March 1945.

The evacuation was initiated due to fear of the advancing Red Army, during the East Prussian Offensive. Some parts of the evacuation were planned as a military necessity, Operation Hannibal being the most important military action involved in the evacuation. However, many refugees took to the roads voluntarily because of reported Soviet atrocities committed against Germans in areas under Soviet occupation. These allegations of Soviet atrocities were disseminated not only through the official news and propaganda outlets of the Third Reich, but also by rumours that swept through the population as well.

Despite having the detailed evacuation plans, the authorities in the Third Reich, including Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia, delayed action until 20 January, when it was too late and eventually were overwhelmed by the numbers. This coupled with the panic caused by the speed of the Soviet advances, those killed in the cross-fire, and the inclement winter weather, resulted in the death of many thousands of refugees.

The Soviets took control of East Prussia in May 1945. Most of the German civilians managed to escape the Red Army, while about 300,000 were killed during the Soviet offensive. However, there were still 193,000 Germans in East Prussia after the end of the war, but they were later expelled by the Soviet authorities.

See also: Nemmersdorf massacre

Nazi propaganda photograph, bodies of two German women and three children killed by the Soviets in Metgethen, East Prussia.

The Soviet army initiated an offensive into East Prussia on October 1944, but after two weeks it was temporarily driven back. After that, the German Ministry of Propaganda reported that war crimes had taken place in East Prussian villages, in particular in Nemmersdorf, where, according to the Ministry, the entire population was raped and killed by the Soviets.^[3] Since the Nazi war effort had largely stripped the civil population of able-bodied men for service in the military, the victims of the atrocity were primarily old men, women, and children. Upon the Soviet withdrawal from the area, German authorities sent in film crews to document what had happened, and invited allegedly neutral observers as further witnesses. A documentary film from the footage obtained during this effort was put together and shown in cinemas in East Prussia, with the intention of hardening civilian and military resolve in resisting the Soviets. ^[4] Nazi propaganda about the atrocities at Nemmersdorf, as well as on other crimes committed in East Prussia, convinced the remaining civilians that they should not get caught by the advancing enemy.^[5]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag uniform, arrested for criticising the Soviets during East Prussia offensive.

Since many Soviet soldiers had lost family and friends at the hands of the Germans (circa 17 million Soviet civilians died in World War II, more than in any other country^[6]), they often felt a desire to take vengeance. Murders of prisoners of war and German civilians are known from cases at Soviet military tribunals (who were not known for prosecuting such matters). Also, when Soviet troops moved into Prussia, a significant number of enslaved Ostarbeiter ("Eastern workers") were freed, and knowledge of those workers' suffering further worsened the attitude of Soviet soldiers towards Prussians. ^[7]

Some Soviet writers disapproved of the vengeance of Soviet soldiers against Germans. Lev Kopelev, who took part in the invasion of East Prussia, sharply criticized the atrocities against the German civilian population and was arrested in 1945, then sentenced to a ten-year term in the Gulag for "fostering bourgeois humanism" and for "compassion towards the enemy".^[8] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also served in East Prussia in 1945 and was arrested for criticising Joseph Stalin and Soviet crimes in private correspondence with a friend. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp.^[9]

The evacuation plans for East Prussia were ready in second half of 1944. They consisted of both general plans and specific instructions for each individual town. The plans encompassed not only people but also industry and livestock. ^[10]

East Prussia (in red), is located 340km east of the current Polish-German border.

Initially, Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, did not agree with the evacuation of the civilians (until 20 January 1945), and ordered that every citizen trying to flee the region without permission, would be instantly shot. However, between 20 January and March 1945, almost 8.5 millions of Germans civilians left their homes in East Prussia.^[1] Most of the refugees were women and children heading to the Neisse region, of south Berlin, carrying goods on improvised means of transport, such as wooden waggons and carts, as all the mothorized vehicles and fuel were confiscated by the Wehrmacht. A part of the fleeing population trekked across the frozen Curonian Lagoon, where many wagons broke through the unstable ice covering the brackish water. As part of Germany's failing military effort, horses and caretakers from the Wehrmacht's Trakehner stud farms evacuated with the wagon trains. The evacuation was severely hampered by masses of retreating Wehrmacht units who clogged roads and bridges on the way west, as well as by Allied bomber and fighter aircraft. The remaining men received orders to leave East Prussia and were immediately incorporated into the Volkssturm. However, Volksstrum members used to hide and build-up defenses in the woods, as they were afraid of the cruelty of Soviet soldiers.^[11] Refugees trains leaving East Prussia were also extremely crowded, and due to the very low temperature, the children were often freezing to death during the journey. At the end of January, between 40,000 and 50,000 refugees from eastern Reich territories were arriving in Berlin by train every day.^[12]

Military historian Antony Beevor wrote in Berlin the Downfall, that:^[13]

Martin Bormann, the Reichsleiter of the National Socialist Party, whose Gauleiters had in most cases stopped the evacuation of women and children until it was too late, never mentions in his diary those fleeing in panic from the eastern regions. The incompetence with which they handled the refugee crisis is chilling, yet in the case of the Nazi hierarchy it is often hard to tell where irresponsibility ended and inhumanity began.

Main article: Operation Hannibal

German Admiral Hipper class cruiser - Kriegsmarine vessels were often involved in the operation.

Operation Hannibal was a military operation which started on January 21st, 1945, at the orders of Admiral Karl Dönitz, involving the withdrawal of German troops and civilians from East Prussia. The flood of refugees turned the operation into one of the largest emergency evacuations by sea in history - over a period of 15 weeks, somewhere between 494 and 1,080 merchant vessels of all types and numerous naval craft, including Germany's largest remaining naval units, would transport over two million refugees and soldiers across the Baltic Sea to Germany.^[14]

The biggest naval humanitarian disaster occurred during this operation, when cruiser Wilhelm Gustloff was hit by three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea on the night of 30 January 1945. She sank in under 45 minutes, possibly taking as many as 5,300.^[15][16] or 7,400^[17] people with her. The survivors were rescued by Kriegsmarine vessels led by cruiser Admiral Hipper.^[17] Also, on 14 February, hospital ship SS General von Steuben left Pillau with 2,680 refugees onboard; it was hit by torpedoes just afterwards the departure, killing almost all people aboard.^[18]

See also: Battle of Königsberg

Soviet assault on Königsberg from 6 to 9 April 1945.

On January 24th, 1945, the 3rd Belorussian Front led by General Chernyakhovsky, surrounded the capital city of East Prussia, Königsberg. The 3rd Panzer Army and around 200,000 civilians were trapped inside the city.^[19] In response to this, General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, commander of the Army Group Center, warned Hitler regarding the imminent Soviet threat, but the Fuhrer refused to listen him. Due to the very fast approach of the 2nd Belorussian Front, led by General Rokossovsky, Nazi authorities in Königsberg decided to send trains full of refugees to Allenstein, without knowing that the town was already captured by the Soviet 3rd Mechanised Corps.^[8]

Urban warfare during the Königsberg battle.

During the heavy Soviet assault, the Frische Nehrung spit, became the last way of escape to the west. However, civilians which tried to escape through the spit, were often intercepted and killed by Soviet tanks and patrols.^[20] 2,000 civilians left Königsberg every day and tried to reach the already crowded town of Pillau. According to a NKVD report received by Lavrentiy Beria, the German civilians who left Königsberg and reached the Reich's territories, were not treated by far well, receiving only 180 grams of bread per day.^[21] The final Soviet assault on Königsberg started on 2 April with heavy bombardment of the town. The land route to Pillau was once again severed and those civilians who were still in the city died in their thousands. Eventually, the Nazi garrison surrendered on April 9, and as Beevor wrote, "the rape of women and girls went unchecked in the ruined city"^[22]

The mass rapes made by the Soviets in Königsberg, led to a severe psihological damage to the entire German population in East Prussia. Even the Soviet women eliberated by Soviet troops from German territories were often raped by the Soviet drunk soldiers. This acts of violence were a result of the Nazi propaganda and crimes made by Germans also at the time of the invasion of Soviet Union.^[23] War reporter Vasily Grossman, said that the rear-guard units of the advancing Soviet armies were usually responsible for the large number of crimes committed by the Red Army personnel. Even if the Soviet authorities where informed regarding this atrocities, they didn't take any measure to stop this; actually, they became quite annoyed by the fact that German civilians managed to escape, as major cities and rural areas were completely abandoned, at the moment when the Soviet forces reached them.^[1] The wealthy civilians from East Prussia were often shot by the Soviet soldiers, their goods stolen and their houses putted on fire, as a result to the Soviet propaganda supporting the eradication of aristocracy.^[24]

The Red Army eliminated all pockets of resistance and took control of East Prussia in May 1945. The exact number of civilian victims has never been determined but is estimated to be at least 300,000, with most of them dying under miserable conditions. However, most of the German inhabitants, which at that point consisted mainly of children, women, and old men, did escape the Red Army as part of the largest exodus of people in human history.^[2]As Antony Beevor also said:^[25]

Most Germans who were not evacuated during the war were expelled from East Prussia and the other former German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line in the years immediately after the end of World War II as was agreed by the Allies at the Potsdam conference, because in the words of Winston Churchill "Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble".^[26]

• Evacuation of German civilians during the end of World War II
• Federation of Expellees
• Landsmannschaft Ostpreussen
• Wolf children

• Beevor, Antony. Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Penguin Books, 2002, ISBN 0-670-88695-5
• Beevor, Antony. Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Romanian translation.

• de Zayas, Alfred-Maurice. A Terrible Revenge:The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950, 1994,ISBN 0-312-12159-8
• Glantz, David M. The Soviet‐German War 1941–45: Myths and Realities: A Survey Essay
• Hitchcock, William I. The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945-2002, 2003, ISBN 0-385-49798-9
• Walter, Elizabeth B. Barefoot in the Rubble, 1997, ISBN 0-9657793-0-0