Nemmersdorf massacre

Nemmersdorf massacre
Map of East Prussia, with Nemmersdf to the South West of Gumbinnen (now Mayakovskoye, Kaliningrad Oblast)
Location	Nemmersdorf, Ostpreussen
Persecution	Mass killings, rape
Unit	2nd Guards Tank Corps
Victims	72 German women, 50 French and Belgian POWs

The Nemmersdorf massacre was a civilian massacre committed by Red Army soldiers in the late stages of World War II. Nemmersdorf (present-day Mayakovskoye, Kaliningrad Oblast), was one of the first pre-war ethnic German villages to fall to the advancing Red Army in World War II. On 21 October 1944, Soviet soldiers reportedly killed many German civilians as well as French and Belgian noncombatants.

Incident

The 2nd Battalion, 25th Guards Tank Brigade, belonging to the 2nd Guards Tank Corps of the 11th Guards Army, crossed the Angerapp bridge and established a bridgehead on the western bank of the river on 21 October 1944. German forces tried to retake the bridge, but several attacks were repelled by the Soviet tanks and the supporting infantry. During an air attack, a number of Soviet soldiers took shelter in an improvised bunker already occupied by 14 local men and women. According to the testimony of a seriously injured woman, Gerda Meczulat, when a Soviet officer arrived and ordered everybody out, the Russians shot and killed the German civilians at close range. During the night, the Soviet 25th Tank Brigade was ordered to retreat back across the river and take defensive positions along the Rominte. The Wehrmacht regained control of Nemmersdorf and discovered the massacre.

Evidence

Murdered Germans in Nemmersdorf, October 1944, German Federal Archive

Nazi German authorities organized an international commission to investigate, headed by Estonian Hjalmar Mäe and other representatives of neutral countries, such as Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The commission heard the report from a medical commission. It reported that all the dead females had been raped (they ranged in age from 8 to 84). The Nazi Propaganda Ministry (separately) used the Völkischer Beobachter and the cinema news series Wochenschau to accuse the Soviet Army of having killed dozens of civilians at Nemmersdorf and having summarily executed about 50 French and Belgian noncombatant POWs, who had been ordered to take care of thoroughbred horses but had been blocked by the bridge. The civilians were allegedly killed by blows with shovels or gun butts.

The former chief of staff of the German Fourth Army, Major General Erich Dethleffsen, testified on 5 July 1946 before an American tribunal in Neu-Ulm. He said:

When in October, 1944, Russian units temporarily entered Nemmersdorf, they tortured the civilians, specifically they nailed them to barn doors, and then shot them. A large number of women were raped and then shot. During this massacre, the Russian soldiers also shot some fifty French prisoners of war. Within forty-eight hours the Germans re-occupied the area.

Karl Potrek of Königsberg, leader of a Volkssturm company present when the German Army took back the village, testified in a 1953 report:

In the farmyard stood a cart, to which more naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position ... Near a large inn, the 'Roter Krug', stood a barn and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands, in a crucified posture....In the dwellings we found a total of 72 women, including children, and one old man, 74, all dead. ... Some babies had their heads bashed in.

At the time, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry disseminated a graphic description of the events in order to inspire the German soldiers. On the home front, civilians reacted immediately, with an increase in the number of volunteers joining the Volkssturm. A larger number of civilians responded with panic, and started to leave the area en masse.

To many Germans, "Nemmersdorf" became a symbol of war crimes committed by the Red Army, and an example of the worst behavior in Eastern Germany. Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, the post-war co-publisher of the weekly Die Zeit, at the time of the reports lived in the village of Quittainen (Kwitany) in western East Prussia, near Preussisch Holland (Pasłęk). She wrote in 1962 that:

In those years one was so accustomed to everything that was officially published or reported being lies that at first I took the pictures from Nemmersdorf to be falsified. Later, however, it turned out that that was not the case.

Re-investigation

After 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union, new sources became available and the dominant view among scholars became that the massacre was embellished, and actually exploited, by Goebbels in an attempt to stir up civilian resistance to the advancing Soviet Army. Bernhard Fisch, in his book, Nemmersdorf, October 1944. What actually happened in East Prussia (the first book to also include the Russian view of the event) was the first to present this picture of the events.

Fisch, a native of East Prussia who had served as a Wehrmacht soldier during the war, had been in Nemmersdorf a few days after it was re-taken and remembered a totally different scene from the one depicted by the Wochenschau series shown in cinemas. He resolved to research the matter and separate fact from fiction. He interviewed many witnesses still alive on both sides (e.g., Soviet General Kuzma Galitsky, former commander of 11th Guards Army) and crossing out faulty memories against each other, he found out some disturbing details: the German army itself was responsible for destroying the strong German defensive position in front of Nemmersdorf, and after the event no attempt had been made to identify the photographed victims by name.

He was able to conclude that liberties were taken with at least some of the photographs, that some victims on the photographs were from other East Prussian villages, and that the notorious crucifixion barn doors were not even in Nemmersdorf. There also was the tight time schedule of witness Joachim Reisch, reducing the Soviet presence at Nemmersdorf to less than four hours of heavy fighting in front of the bridge. .

Another writer, Joachim Reisch, claimed to have personally been at the scene of the bridge when the event was supposed to have occurred. He has said that the Soviet Brigade was on the bridge for less than four hours.

Sir Ian Kershaw is among those historians who generally believe that the Soviet forces committed a massacre at Nemmersdorf, although details and numbers are disputed. The German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) contain many contemporary reports and photographs by officials of Nazi Germany of the victims of the Nemmersdorf massacre. It holds evidence of other Soviet massacres in East Prussia, notably Metgethen. In the late 20th century, Alfred de Zayas interviewed numerous German soldiers and officers who had been in the Nemmersdorf area in October 1944, to learn what they saw. He also interviewed Belgian and French POWs who had been in the area and fled with German civilians before the Russian advance. De Zayas incorporated these sources into two of his own books, Nemesis at Potsdam and A Terrible Revenge.

See also

• Metgethen massacre
• Red Army atrocities
• The Crucified Soldier (World War I)

Further reading

• Brandenburg, Christel Weiss and Dan Laing. Ruined by the Reich: Memoir of an East Prussian Family, 1916-1945. McFarland & Company; ISBN 0-7864-1615-7
• Hinz, Thorsten. Eines der düsteren Kapitel - Nemmersdorf: Neue Aspekte eines Verbrechens, in www.jungefreiheit.de 47/97 14. November 1997 (German)
• Reisch, Joachim. `Perkallen Versunkenes Paradies in Ostpreußen´ Landgut und Pferdegestüt zwischen Rominten und Trakehnen - Dokumentation (1999)
• Archived website mirroring various reports about Nemmersdorf (German)
• German TV channel ZDF: Die Wahrheit über Nemmersdorf (German)