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

The battle-hardened soldiers of the Red Army had fought their way westwards out of their own country, through Poland and now, for the first time, into the country of the hated enemy. As they had advanced through wastelands of death and destruction, they had witnessed the legacy of the savage brutality of German conquest and subjugation and the scorched-earth devastation of a once imperious army in headlong retreat. They saw the unmistakable signs of the terrible suffering of their own people. Soviet propaganda directly encouraged drastic retribution. ‘Take merciless revenge on the fascist child murderers and executioners, pay them back for the blood and tears of Soviet mothers and children,’ ran one typical proclamation in October 1944.⁵⁷ ‘Kill. There is nothing which the Germans aren’t guilty of’ was the exhortation of another.⁵⁸ Reaching German soil, and encountering for the first time a civilian enemy population, pent-up hatreds exploded in violent revenge. As German troops moved into villages and townships retaken by the Wehrmacht after days of Soviet occupation, they came across the corpses of murdered civilians, grim indicators of the atrocities that had taken place. The worst had taken place in Nemmersdorf itself, which came to symbolize these early atrocities of the Red Army.

Details of what exactly happened in Nemmersdorf, however, remain murky. From the outset, fact became difficult to separate from propaganda. Some testimony, given a few years afterwards, which left a lasting mark on the gruesome imagery of events, is of doubtful veracity. According to the most vivid account, provided some nine years later, a Volkssturm man whose company had been ordered to assist in the clearing up of Nemmersdorf after the attack spoke of finding several naked women nailed up through their hands to barn doors in crucifix positions, of an old woman whose head had been split in two by an axe or spade, and of seventy-two women and children bestially murdered by the Red Army. All the women had allegedly been raped. The bodies had been exhumed and the findings established, he claimed, by an international commission of doctors.⁵⁹

A report compiled by the Geheime Feldpolizei (secret military police), dispatched on 25 October, two days after the Soviet troops had left the village, to interrogate any witnesses and discover what had happened, paints, however, a somewhat different picture—though one which was grim enough. There had been plundering, the report registered, and two women had been raped. The corpses of twenty-six persons, mainly elderly men and women, though also a few children, were found. Some lay in an open grave, others in a ditch, by the roadside or in houses. Most had been killed by single shots to the head, though the skull of one had been smashed in. But there were no lurid descriptions of crucifixions. A German doctor from a regiment in the district had inspected the corpses. Himmler’s own personal doctor, Professor Gebhardt, had, remarkably, also found his way to Nemmersdorf within a day of the Soviet troops leaving, though, presumably, someone of his rank was not needed simply to establish the cause of death. Already, it seems, leading Nazi authorities had earmarked Nemmersdorf for special notoriety. Propagandists were swiftly on the scene following the recapture of the area, keen to exploit Soviet ill-deeds to bolster the German determination to fight, and not slow to exaggerate where it served their purposes.⁶⁰