The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

There was enormous fear in Demmin in the days before the Russians entered. The feeling of terror mounted as the frightening noise of Soviet tanks rolling into the town could be heard. German soldiers fled that morning, blowing up the bridges over the two local rivers as they went. White bedsheets were hung out of windows to offer surrender, though a group of Hitler Youth fired at the Soviets. One man shot his wife and three children before blasting off a Panzerfaust, then hanging himself. Families barricaded themselves into their homes, blocking the doors with furniture. Then they heard loud, foreign voices, banging and kicking at the doors, before Red Army soldiers, many looking very young, broke in, demanding watches and jewellery. The other ominous demand was ‘Frau, komm!’ Plundering, marauding troops, often under the influence of drink, roamed the streets. The town’s representatives were peremptorily shot. The houses of suspected Nazi Party members were set on fire, and the flames spread, engulfing neighbouring properties until much of the town centre was burning.

In the horror, women were paralysed with the all too justified fear of being raped. They tried to hide, or dressed in men’s clothes, but were all too often found. Many were raped numerous times. In this scene of Sodom and Gomorrah (as it appeared to one witness), terrified individuals decided on the instant to kill themselves, and sometimes their families, with whatever method was to hand—poison, shooting, hanging, or drowning in the local rivers, the Peene or the Tollense. In one case, the death of thirteen family members is recorded. In another, a mother pushed her two tiny children in a pram while her six-year-old followed on his bike. Under a large oak tree on the edge of town, she poisoned her children, then tried to hang herself but was cut down by Soviet soldiers. She said she had seen propaganda posters claiming that the Russians killed children by putting an axe through their skull. There was something approaching mass hysteria among the townsfolk. Entire families headed for the river, tied themselves together, and plunged into the cold water. Many elderly people were among those who took their lives that way. For weeks afterwards, swollen corpses were found floating in the rivers. In some instances, panic-stricken women took their children by the hand and jumped into the water. One girl, eleven years old at the time, fleeing from her burning home, was dragged back by her grandmother as her mother suddenly grabbed her and made for the riverbank. ‘We all thought we were going to burn to death,’ she recalled, many years later. ‘We had no hope left for life, and I myself, I had the feeling that this was the end of the world, this was the end of my life. And everyone in Demmin felt like that.’⁵⁰

The rampaging of the Red Army and the gross maltreatment of the conquered German population were only gradually brought under control by the Soviet authorities once the war was over. But in the first days of May 1945, the war still continued. And so did the suffering.

III

Dönitz’s cabinet, fully formed on 5 May, bore only partial resemblance to the one nominated by Hitler. All that Dönitz had learnt from Bormann, arising from Hitler’s Testament, was the names of three intended ministers: Bormann, Goebbels and, to replace Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister, Arthur Seyß-Inquart, the Reich Commissar in the Netherlands.⁵¹ In establishing his administration, set up in the northernmost extremity of the Reich in somewhat primitive accommodation in the Naval Academy at Flensburg-Mürwik after a hasty departure from Plön as British troops approached, Dönitz had to presume that Bormann and Goebbels were dead or captured, while Seyß-Inquart was involved in negotiations with the Allies about a partial capitulation and also therefore unavailable to take up his nominated position. In any case, Dönitz was determined to form his own cabinet, not simply take over one prescribed for him.⁵²