table edge by their tongues. 1
Afterwards, they learned that ‘hordes’ of Slavic locals had swept through the district, seeking revenge on their German neighbours. Presumably the nailing of their victims’ tongues had to do with a symbolic retaliation against the language, as well as the bodies, of the hated former ‘master race’. Katherina and her mother were warned on no account to continue towards their planned destination.
However, it was not just old local racial scores that would be settled as the Reich crumbled. After a winter of stalemate in east and west, a great Russian offensive had begun on 12 January along a front extending several hundred kilometres between the Baltic Sea and the same Bohemian forest in which the Silesian woman and her daughter had come upon the grisly banqueting scene. The Soviet forces, totalling more than two million, outnumbered the German defenders of Wehrmacht Army Group A by around five to one, with a superiority of six to one in tanks, the same in artillery and four to one in self-propelled guns.
Shortly after Warsaw fell, the Red Army began pressing forward with tremendous speed, often advancing thirty to forty kilometres a day. The great eastern German cities of Königsberg, ancient capital of East Prussia, and Breslau, capital of Silesia, soon lay encircled and under siege.
Most Germans who could flee did so. Vast columns of refugees – women, children and the old, for most adult men were either dead or away fighting – thronged the roads leading westwards into the heart of the Reich, their pathetic collections of portable belongings crammed on to wagons and handcarts. The winter weather was cruel, reaching more than twenty below zero, and would remain so until the end of March. Cold was the first great contributor to the harvest of death that would prove so rich during the year to come.
It was not just consciousness of the vast superiority of the Soviet forces in arms, equipment and numbers that spurred Stalin’s soldiers on into German territory. These troops had seen their own land devastated. There were living witnesses of the fact that at least twenty-five million of their compatriots of all ages and both sexes had died in battle, or by massacre, and often by deliberate starvation – all in an aggressive German war of choice executed by Hitler’s forces with scant regard for even the most basic, minimally humanising rules of conflict. As a result, the Red Army was also driven by hate, perhaps to a degree comparable to no other army in modern history.
A young Wehrmacht ensign from a prominent Silesian family, undergoing his baptism of fire with a Panzer unit in a part of the Czech lands near his own home region, recalled the horrors he witnessed in a Sudeten German village they had temporarily retaken from the enemy during these last bewildering weeks of the war:
What we found there cannot easily be described in words. Houses full of dead, hanged men, violated women, wandering half crazed through the streets, children with their bellies slit open. If I am honest, I have to say: This is one of those things of which one has suppressed the memory. 2
Nonetheless, as the young soldier – himself too young to have served on the Eastern Front in Russia itself – went on to speculate, ‘What actually must we have done over there that so many Russian soldiers behaved with such bestial rage?’
The great Nazi justification for the war against the Soviet Union had been the alleged German need for more Lebensraum (‘living space’), which could be gained only at the expense of the racially inferior Slavic peoples who occupied these great fertile plains to the east. When the men of the Red Army finally crossed the border into Germany in the last months of the war and saw how well the Germans actually lived in the supposedly narrow, impoverishing country that they had so urgently needed to outgrow, it caused even more fury. As one simple soldier said to his
Afterwards, they learned that ‘hordes’ of Slavic locals had swept through the district, seeking revenge on their German neighbours. Presumably the nailing of their victims’ tongues had to do with a symbolic retaliation against the language, as well as the bodies, of the hated former ‘master race’. Katherina and her mother were warned on no account to continue towards their planned destination.
However, it was not just old local racial scores that would be settled as the Reich crumbled. After a winter of stalemate in east and west, a great Russian offensive had begun on 12 January along a front extending several hundred kilometres between the Baltic Sea and the same Bohemian forest in which the Silesian woman and her daughter had come upon the grisly banqueting scene. The Soviet forces, totalling more than two million, outnumbered the German defenders of Wehrmacht Army Group A by around five to one, with a superiority of six to one in tanks, the same in artillery and four to one in self-propelled guns.
Shortly after Warsaw fell, the Red Army began pressing forward with tremendous speed, often advancing thirty to forty kilometres a day. The great eastern German cities of Königsberg, ancient capital of East Prussia, and Breslau, capital of Silesia, soon lay encircled and under siege.
Most Germans who could flee did so. Vast columns of refugees – women, children and the old, for most adult men were either dead or away fighting – thronged the roads leading westwards into the heart of the Reich, their pathetic collections of portable belongings crammed on to wagons and handcarts. The winter weather was cruel, reaching more than twenty below zero, and would remain so until the end of March. Cold was the first great contributor to the harvest of death that would prove so rich during the year to come.
It was not just consciousness of the vast superiority of the Soviet forces in arms, equipment and numbers that spurred Stalin’s soldiers on into German territory. These troops had seen their own land devastated. There were living witnesses of the fact that at least twenty-five million of their compatriots of all ages and both sexes had died in battle, or by massacre, and often by deliberate starvation – all in an aggressive German war of choice executed by Hitler’s forces with scant regard for even the most basic, minimally humanising rules of conflict. As a result, the Red Army was also driven by hate, perhaps to a degree comparable to no other army in modern history.
A young Wehrmacht ensign from a prominent Silesian family, undergoing his baptism of fire with a Panzer unit in a part of the Czech lands near his own home region, recalled the horrors he witnessed in a Sudeten German village they had temporarily retaken from the enemy during these last bewildering weeks of the war:
What we found there cannot easily be described in words. Houses full of dead, hanged men, violated women, wandering half crazed through the streets, children with their bellies slit open. If I am honest, I have to say: This is one of those things of which one has suppressed the memory. 2
Nonetheless, as the young soldier – himself too young to have served on the Eastern Front in Russia itself – went on to speculate, ‘What actually must we have done over there that so many Russian soldiers behaved with such bestial rage?’
The great Nazi justification for the war against the Soviet Union had been the alleged German need for more Lebensraum (‘living space’), which could be gained only at the expense of the racially inferior Slavic peoples who occupied these great fertile plains to the east. When the men of the Red Army finally crossed the border into Germany in the last months of the war and saw how well the Germans actually lived in the supposedly narrow, impoverishing country that they had so urgently needed to outgrow, it caused even more fury. As one simple soldier said to his
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