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

Naturally, German propaganda made the most of the exposé of Soviet atrocities. The most grisly scenes may have been a fabrication. On the other hand, the atrocities were not simply a propaganda invention or later concoction. General Werner Kreipe, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, visiting the Panzerkorps ‘Hermann Göring’ near Gumbinnen and in the Nemmersdorf area within hours of the Red Army pulling out, claimed in his diary entry that bodies of women and children were nailed to barn doors, and ordered the outrages to be photographed as proof.⁶¹ If the photographs were taken, they have long since disappeared. A machine-gunner among the German troops who entered Nemmersdorf on 22 October recorded in the diary jottings he kept secreted in his uniform the discovery of ‘terrible incidents involving mangled bodies’, some mutilated, one old man pierced with a pitchfork and left hanging on a barn door, sights ‘so terrible that some of our recruits run out in panic and vomit’.⁶² The numbers killed in Nemmersdorf may have been smaller than alleged, though some of the more inflated figures probably included those also killed by Red Army soldiers in other nearby localities.⁶³ Conceivably, too, there were fewer rapes than claimed, though some certainly took place and the later behaviour of the Red Army on its passage through eastern Germany offers no grounds to presume the best of its soldiers. Colonel-General Reinhardt visited the district on 25 October. He wrote to his wife the following day that ‘the Bolsheviks had ravaged like wild beasts, including murder of children, not to mention acts of violence against women and girls, whom they had also murdered’. He was deeply shaken by what he had seen.⁶⁴ Whatever doubts are raised about the actual scale of the murders and rapes, and necessary though it is to remember the nature and purpose of propaganda exploitation, the atrocities were no mere figment of propaganda. Terrible things did happen in and around Nemmersdorf.

Moreover, whatever the truth about the precise details of the atrocities, propaganda acquired a reality of its own. In terms of the impact of Nemmersdorf, its likely effect was to underpin the determination of soldiers to fight on at all costs in the east, to struggle to the utmost to avoid being overrun by the Red Army and to encourage civilians to take flight at the earliest opportunity. The image of Nemmersdorf turned out to be more important than precise factual accuracy about its horrific reality.

IV

The propaganda machinery was soon in action. Goebbels instantly recognized the gift that had come his way. ‘These atrocities are indeed dreadful,’ he noted in his diary, after Göring had telephoned him with the details, ‘I’ll make use of them for a big press campaign.’ This would ensure that the last doubters were ‘convinced of what the German people can expect if Bolshevism really gets hold of the Reich’.⁶⁵ Head of the Reich Press Office Otto Dietrich gave out instructions for the presentation of the story by the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro (DNB; German News Agency), responsible for circulating news items within and outside Germany. ‘It is specially desirable’, the directive ran, ‘that the DNB report brings out the horrific Bolshevik crimes in East Prussia in a big and effective way and comments on them with extreme harshness. The monstrous Soviet bloodlust must be denounced in the layout and headlines.’ It was not a matter of attacks on big landowners and industrialists, it had to be stressed, but on ordinary people, targeted for annihilation by Bolshevism.⁶⁶

The headlines duly followed. ‘The Raving of the Soviet Beasts’ bellowed the Nazi main newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, on 27 October.⁶⁷ ‘Bolshevik Bloodlust Rages in East Prussian Border Area’, and ‘Bestial Murderous Terror in East Prussia’ proclaimed regional newspapers in eastern Germany.⁶⁸ Other organs of the coordinated press followed suit.⁶⁹ Maximum shock was the intention in the stories of plunder, destruction, rape and murder. Commissions of doctors, it was said, had confirmed the murder of sixty-one men, women and children and the rape of most of the women. There was reference to a crucifixion. Photographed lines of corpses conveyed graphic images of the horror.⁷⁰ A front-page photograph of murdered children in the Völkischer Beobachter had an accompanying warning of what would happen if Germans did not sustain their defences and fighting spirit.⁷¹