The children of the flight

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Movie
Original title The children of the flight
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2006
length 135 minutes
Rod
Director Hans-Christoph Blumenberg
script Hans-Christoph Blumenberg
production Ulrich Lenze
music Stephan Zacharias
camera Daniel Koppelkamm
cut Florentine Bruck
occupation

A love on the Oder

Wolf children

Wroclaw is on fire!

Die Kinder der Flucht is a three-part docudrama by Hans-Christoph Blumenberg from 2006 . It contains the section titles: Eine Liebe an der Oder with Anna Brüggemann and Adrian Topol in the leading roles, Wolfskinder with Amber Bongard and Lukas Schust in the leading roles and Breslau is burning! with Jasmin Schwiers , Karoline Herfurth and Peter Kremer in the leading roles.

content

1. Film: A love on the Oder

Kwidzyn (Marienwerder) Summer 1995: The German Elvira Profé is waiting with a friend for her great love, the Pole Fortek Mackiewicz, whom she has not seen for decades due to the turmoil after the war. The couple's story begins fifty years earlier. When the Red Army reached the Oder at the end of January 1945 , the war also came to the small town of Bärwalde , where the then 20-year-old Elvira lived. Her father runs a factory that produces folding rules and other tools. When the Russians wanted to liquidate Elvira's father, one of the Polish forced laborers stood up for him and reported that they had always been treated well by Profé and had received protection, many Poles had perished, but not in Bärwalde, Profé had more than all of them only saved once. The Russian commander then refrains from executing Profé. Since the resistance of the German army has not yet been broken, the Red Army settles in Bärwalde. Heavy fighting broke out on the Oder in February 1945. The main battle line runs just a few kilometers from Bärwalde. Again and again there are attacks by the Red Army on the German civilian population. Since many Soviet soldiers have lost members of the Wehrmacht in the war of aggression, they seek retaliation.

The German civilian population had to leave Bärwalde on February 9, 1945. Since the evacuation order comes as a complete surprise, there are only a few hours to prepare for the march into an uncertain future. The Ritter family also set off to the east, as did the Wredes, although Mr. Wrede still refuses to admit that the war is lost. In eastern Poland, too, people are suffering from the Soviet occupation . At the beginning of the war, the Red Army had occupied large parts of eastern Poland - in the eyes of Stalin, legitimate spoils of war. The Soviet occupiers also want to force Fortek Mackiewicz into military service, but he can stay in hiding for more than a year. Other young Poles are also not ready to take part in this war. The trek of the people from Bärwalde, among them the Profés, Ritters and Wredes, came across Soviet soldiers in the Oderbruch who ordered them to stop. They are obliged to do forced labor for the Russians. Mother Ritter, whose son is seriously ill on the way, dares to go to the Soviet forest hospital, disregarding the associated danger, and receives a pill for her son, who gets well again. Elvira Profé is sent to a labor camp in Siberia separately from her family. Under miserable living conditions, it is used there for logging. On May 1, 1945 the war is over, Hitler took his own life.

At the beginning of May 1945 the residents of Bärwalde returned to their city. The Germans have to leave Bärwalde again in mid-June. This time they are thrown out by the Poles who know no mercy. The Profés, however, have to stay out of economic considerations. Fortek Mackiewicz and his mother, who fled from the east, also land in Bärwalde. At the Potsdam conference the Oder-Neisse line was established by the victorious powers as the new German-Polish border, accompanied by the forced resettlement of all Germans from the former eastern territories.

Elvira Profé in distant Siberia has no inkling of any of this. She is sick in the labor camp. Soon after, however, she is part of a transport home, which she can only reach because a Polish fisherman helps her. Elvira's father explains to her that father and mother Profé are still in Bärwalde by saying that the Poles cannot yet do without the “capitalist Profé”, otherwise they would have no light in the village. However, one should be happy if the Poles did not let them starve to death. While fetching milk, Elvira meets Fortek Mackiewicz, a friendship slowly develops between the two of them, which turns into love. Fortek even asks Elvira if she would like to marry him. When he asked for a marriage license, however, he was denied it with the reference to the fact that the German was a class enemy. In October 1947, the Profés and the last Germans left Bärwalde. Elvira and Fortek have no future. Fortek marries later, the marriage ends when his wife emigrates to the USA, Elvira remains single. For the next sixteen years after his wife left, Fortek was left alone.

The day of the opening of the border comes . In 1991 Elvira went back to her old home for the first time. It should be another four years before they meet Fortek for the first time. When the two of them embrace, fifty years seem obliterated. They get married shortly after Elvira's eightieth birthday.

2nd film: Wolf children

“In the first years of hunger after World War II , thousands of German children were traveling between East Prussia and Lithuania. Almost all of them had lost their parents and their homes. Only through dangerous begging tours in a foreign country could many survive. Many found death. They were later given the name Wolfskinder. ”Summer 1948 Insterburg station ( East Prussia ): The siblings Waltraud and Ulrich Liedtke are picked up and questioned in the Soviet headquarters in Insterburg. For the most part, they have no answers to the questions asked. When asked where her mom is, the answer is that she is dead, simply starved to death and her papa is gone. Yes, they still have siblings Rudi, Siegi, Irmi, Hedi, they are all in Lithuania. And then little Waltraud suddenly thinks that they belong to the Max and Martha Liedtke family.

The tragedy over the lost children begins with the Battle of East Prussia in autumn 1944. Superior Soviet troops enclose the Königsberg fortress at the end of January 1945 . It falls on April 9th. Of the 130,000 trapped people, only 25,000 survive. More than 50,000 German civilians were killed in the mass exodus across the Fresh Haff . Until 1945 Waltraud and her brother lived in Wehlau (East Prussia) in a well-protected home. The children's mother was a housewife, the father owned a sawmill. The family odyssey begins in the icy winter of 1945. Millions of people flee from the Red Army, including the Liedtke family with their six children, including a two-month-old baby. The father is soon separated from the family and disappears without a trace. The baby dies after just a few weeks. For Martha Liedtke and her five surviving children, an almost two-year odyssey through various camps of the Soviet occupation begins. Thanks to her iron will, the delicate woman gets her children through and even manages the way back to Wehlau. There the family is in a Soviet internment camp in January 1947. Her obviously sick mother impresses on the children that they must never forget who they are. After the end of the war, there was a dramatic famine among the German population in East Prussia. In addition, cholera and typhus spread and tens of thousands of people disappear in the prisons of the Soviet occupying forces, many of whom are arbitrarily shot. Mass deportations are the order of the day. Many German women are deported to Siberia.

Martha Liedtke is now so sick and weakened that she dies. Before that, she begs her older children not to let the two little ones Waltraud and Ulli starve to death. The children remain stunned. Among the wolf children wandering through Lithuania after the end of the war is twelve-year-old Heinrich Kenzler. Years later, his fate is closely linked to that of the Liedtke children. In the summer of 1947, the Liedtke children were in Lithuania. The little ones whine because they are hungry. Rudi, the oldest, hopes to find work with a farmer. When the children move on, Rudi stays behind on the farm. The 12-year-old Sieglinde is now responsible for her siblings. The children have bitter experiences along the way. A farmer orders the second oldest sister Irmi to get on his wagon. It should be a farewell for many years. Waltraud is taken in by a friendly farmer couple, so that Sieglinde only has to look after Ulli, the youngest. While she is organizing food, little Ulli disappears. He finds his way back to the yard where his sister Waltraud has found a place to stay. However, it doesn't take long before the children have to move on, as the farmers have to leave their farm and can no longer keep them with them. On their tour into the unknown, the children are approached by a stranger who thinks they should join forces for mutual benefit, since one has no pity on adults on the farms and gives them nothing. Since little Waltraud is uncomfortable with the stranger, she takes the first opportunity and runs away with her brother. After the children were able to jump on a freight train, Ulli is pushed off the step by a Russian while it was driving, whereupon Waltraud also jumps off to help her injured brother.

The children gave fragments of what they experienced to the two women in the Soviet headquarters. The siblings are given biscuits and, after spending a day in a Russian children's home, are moved to a home that only houses German children who have been picked up somewhere. The odyssey of the two ends in 1948 in a children's home in Kyritz, Brandenburg . Her brother Rudi is also returning to Germany, while Sieglinde remains in Lithuania. After losing her brother Ulli, she was taken in by a local family and found work in a factory in Kaunas , Lithuania . In the summer of 1955, Sieglinde went to look for her sister Irmgard, who had been missing for nine years. When Sieglinde finds Irmgard on a farm, she does not recognize her. Irmgard's stupor, who was mercilessly exploited on the farm and had to work from morning to night for her meager place to stay and a little food, is only slowly relieved with the help of photos she brought with her. Nine years after the death of their mother, the five Liedke children get together again. At Easter 1956 Sieglinde met Heinrich Kenzler in Kyritz. Two years later they were married and had four children and later eight grandchildren.

3rd film: Wroclaw is on fire!

Wroclaw Town Hall , January 27, 1945: Danuta Orlowska, the director of the Historical Museum in Wroclaw, welcomes Eva Spielhagen, who was last in Wroclaw in January 1945. The look goes back to the day when Mayor Dr. Wolfgang Spielhagen is arrested by SS officer Richard Hildebrandt. The charge is: cowardice before the enemy and desertion . A stand trial is waiting for him . At that time Spielhagen was the second mayor of Wroclaw, the only major German city besides Dresden that was largely spared from the war in January 1945. But the front in the east is inexorably drawing closer. Eva Spielhagen has come to re-enter her husband's office, where he had received his death sentence. She recognizes the room immediately and the past is there again: Wolfgang Spielhagen has been sentenced to death by shooting in the name of the Führer. The sentence will be carried out immediately. After Spielhagen was shot, Gauleiter Hanke explains that you have to set an example. Against dutiful and dearly forgotten subjects should continue to act with severity without respecting the person. Hildebrandt agrees with him. “Whoever fears death in honor, dies it in shame,” Hanke affirmed that the Führer relied on his people to keep the fortress of Breslau, no matter what the cost. With this he pronounces the death sentence on the Silesian capital. Breslau fortress, that means hopeless defense to the last man. Under Marshal Zhukov , the Red Army crossed the German border on January 21. One million people in Wroclaw are threatened with encirclement and constant fire. Spielhagen had to die because he did not believe in perseverance propaganda.

Eva Spielhagen tells Danuta Orlowska that her husband never had a chance to defend himself. “I know,” Orlowska replies, “it was murder”. "There are not many Germans from that time that we Poles fondly remember," adds Orlowska, her husband is one of them. Mrs. Spielhagen thanks and would like to know where Orlowska was actually at that time, if she could ask that. She explains to her that she came to Breslau earlier, albeit not entirely voluntarily, as a forced laborer. At the time she was 16 years old.

January 21, 1945: Gauleiter Hanke's voice is heard over the loudspeaker: “Breslau has been declared a fortress. The evacuation of women and children from the city is ongoing and will be completed shortly. Whatever is possible will be done to look after women and children. Our job as men is to do whatever it takes to support the fighting troops. I call on the men of Wroclaw to join the defensive front of our fortress in Wroclaw. The fortress is defended to the utmost. Anyone who cannot wield a weapon has to help with all their might in the supply companies and in the supplies as well as in maintaining order. ”The appeal only applies to German women and children, but not to the city's Polish women. Danuta, who was still called Purpurowska at the time, is irritated that her father is happy about the appeal. He explains that it will not be long before the Russians come and that would be wonderful, because then they would be free people again. Father and daughter work in a cafe run by Ms. Motz, a German. There is a good relationship between them. Ms. Motz plans to leave the city in a few days.

At the same time, the Gersch family from Wroclaw is said to give up their existence in their hometown. Since the family does not want to leave, also with regard to the seriously ill grandfather, the local group leader appears personally and says that the family has already defied the order three times, if they do not finally take reason, he must use the firearm. The devil's going on at the train station. The promised hospital car for the old man doesn't exist, so the family returns to their house. Shortly afterwards, the Wroclaw Fortress is completely closed. However, the order regarding the evacuation of women and children by Gauleiter Hanke came much too late, so that chaos breaks out in the city, because the Red Army is already at the gates of Breslau. Soviet artillery shells reach targets in the center. The student Ursula Scholz and her mother are also supposed to leave Breslau. However, Ursula's mother decides to stay. On February 16, Soviet troops completely surrounded Wroclaw. The Red Army is also capturing the city airport, so Wroclaw is practically closed off from the outside world. Soviet raiding parties are already penetrating the outer parts of the city.

The former forced laborer Purpurowski and his family walled themselves up in the basement of their former workplace. Believing that the Russians were there, he made a mistake that led to the family being caught by the Germans and sentenced to death in a fast-track trial. The German officer who is supposed to carry out the sentence is aware that the war is lost and that he will never get out of town. He assured mother Purpurowska that he would spare her and her children if she made contact with his wife and children who lived in Munich after the war and would help the family, which would be ostracized after the war was lost. Father Purpurowski had previously been separated from his family and made his way to Posen .

Command center Gauleitung Breslau, February 23, 1945: Major General and Commander Hans von Ahlfen appears at Gauleiter Hanke and tells him that he is worried about the Russian breakthroughs in the south of the city. Hanke replies succinctly whether he has no confidence in his own strength. Even the doubts of his immediate superior does not apply to the arrogant hank. When the Fiihrer received an order to build an inner city after the airport had been lost, von Ahlfen was stunned, "then we would have to do exactly what the Russians are planning to do anyway, our own troops would first have to reduce Wroclaw to rubble". After the major general's departure, Hanke was connected to Berlin. A few days later he was commissioned by Hitler's headquarters with the construction of the new airfield, which in fact meant a disempowerment of Ahlfens, who was then also replaced at the beginning of March.

Seriously, Sergeant Stich helps Ursula Scholz and other girls who have been seconded to work on the airport runway to increase their chances that they will survive all of this. Danuta Purpurowska from Poland also receives a work card from the Breslau Fortress and thus avoids the risk of being killed directly. At the end of March 1945, on behalf of Hanke, the local group leader Kaschke swore a troop of boys, still half children, with the slogan "Vengeance our virtue, hate our duty" on the "inhuman enemy from the East". Nearly seventy percent of Breslau was destroyed at Easter 1945. Everyone agrees that Gauleiter Hanke is responsible for this, who is still not thinking of handing over the city. To his secretary Helga, on the other hand, he says that he is by no means thinking of dying a senseless heroic death, because the world still needs him after the end of the war.

On May 2, 1945, the capital of Berlin capitulated, but the fighting in Breslau continued. In his political will, Hitler named Karl Hanke as the successor to the disgraced Heinrich Himmler as Reichsführer SS and chief of the German police. The 12-year-old Achim Gersch is instructed by Kaschke that because of his statement that the Hitler salute is superfluous because the Führer is no longer alive, he can be put up against the wall immediately because of the disgusting defeat of military strength and should remember that the greeting " Heil Hitler “will last forever. On the night of May 5 to 6, 1945, an airplane with Gauleiter Hanke on board took off. The exact circumstances of his escape are still unclear. There is also uncertainty about Hanke's later fate. It is said that he was killed while escaping from custody in the Czech Republic. Yet another witness claims to have seen him in Argentina years later.

The Polish confectioner Eduard Purpurowski found his way back to his family on adventurous routes. In the first days after the fall of Wroclaw, atrocities were committed thousands of times against the German civilian population. Mass rape and looting by Soviet soldiers create a climate of fear. Eduard Purpurowski also has to recognize that the Russians are different from what he imagined. He has to protect his wife and daughter from falling victim to rape, because no distinction is made between German and Polish women.

Eva Spielhagen says goodbye to Danuta Orlowska, saying that she and her family were really lucky. Danuta agrees, yes, more luck than many thousands. As a farewell, she assures Eva Spielhagen that she would be very happy if she would come back.

production

Production notes

The three-part series, whose shooting lasted from February 18 to May 9, 2006 and took place in Wroclaw , among others , was produced under the working title Children of Expulsion by the production company Cinecentrum on behalf of ZDF . The project was accompanied by the ZDF editorial offices “Zeitgeschichte” (editorial management: Guido Knopp ) and “Zeitgeschehen”. Christian Buß said in Spiegel Online that the editorial management by Guido Knopp, "the top history teacher at ZDF", cannot shake the feeling that he is his director and author Hans-Christoph Blumenberg [...] "now all the blind spots" had processed "which have not yet been illuminated by the Knopp histotainment machine". “Perhaps” one wants “with the project only to cheat the ARD in the race for commemoration [...]”.

Michael Jeismann, on the other hand, wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the docu-drama genre, if it is “handled as it is here”, “makes it possible to experience” “how many threads in 'the story' would converge” - until it is opened again and hold the loose ends in your hand.

Contemporary witnesses

The film plot is repeatedly interrupted by newsreels from that time as well as by several contemporary witnesses whose fate was modeled in the film. The following people have their say:

  • Film 1: A love on the Oder : Elvira Profé, Fortek Mackiewicz and Irmgard Regenberg
  • Film 2: Wolf children : Waltraud Bolduan, Sieglinde Kenzler, Irmgard Kühn, Ulrich Liedtke and Heinrich Kenzler
  • Film 3: Wroclaw is on fire! : Ursula Waage, Danuta Orlowska, Achim Gersch, Horst Gleiss, Ruth Trinks, Manfred Bresler and Anneliese Kotte

publication

The three-part film was first broadcast on ZDF on the following dates:

  • A love on the Oder on November 28, 2006
  • Wolf children on December 5, 2006
  • Wroclaw is on fire! on December 12, 2006.

criticism

Christian Buß from Spiegel Online stated that the ZDF had devoted itself to the “fate of young victims of the war” with the three-part documentary “The Children of Flight”, but it was strange that “because of the upright emotion, the makers sometimes have delicate perspectives on the perpetrators “Had. The German-Polish love story of Elvira and Fortek, which "not by chance marks the beginning of the three-part docu-drama", is "touchingly told by the two in front of the camera and sensitively recreated in play scenes". The only thing “stupid” is “that with so much upright emotion one forgot the historical analysis and the narrative conclusiveness”. From the three-part series, the audience is “really smart”, “at least not”, since the trilogy “seems extremely unfocused” despite the very engaging introduction. “The childlike perspective that the title suggests”, “but actually only really comes into play in the middle section 'Die Wolfskinder'”. This is also the “most consistent” film in the documentary project. “Real Nazis” are “conspicuously few and far between” in “The Children of Flight”.

Kino.de wrote that "docu-dramas about important cornerstones of German history have now become something like a trademark of ZDF". For example, “the cooperation between director Hans-Christoph Blumenberg and producer Ulrich Lenze has provided some highlights”. The three-part series 'Die Kinder der Flucht' also follows “the tried and tested recipe”, in which reconstructed scenes are mixed with documentary recordings and conversations with contemporary witnesses. However, Blumenberg had "not let unknown faces slip into the role of the little man", "but cast seasoned actors (at the beginning including Maja Maranow, Karl Kranzkowski and Eva-Maria Hagen)". It is the "two main characters and their wonderful common story that make the opening film 'A Love on the Oder' so worth seeing". Often "in films of this type, game scenes and interviews stand next to each other like foreign bodies". Blumenberg, however, succeeded in “an extremely harmonious combination”. The memories of the real Elvira and the real Fortek would give the characters “a kind of inner monologue; In this way, Blumenberg does not need to have the background, history and feelings of the couple explained in a complicated commentary ”.

Michael Jeismann stated in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that “nothing better has been seen” in this genre. The three films fit “very nicely with the current disputes about the 'Center against Expulsions', about all the new and old German-Polish finger pointing”. The “more complicated and now much more bitter German-Czech past” has been “disregarded”. Jeismann went on to say that “in the past there was little reason” to “warm up to Knopp's history”. But this series of films was made by Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, and you have to "make a lot of effort if you don't want to notice the difference". Jeismann posed the question in the room whether one should “veil” “how powerful guilt, greed, anger, hatred and revenge work in what we call history in such a tidy way”. Blumenberg had "achieved something special". With him, the audience “suspected what it meant to roughen the smooth varnish of political history and to make visible how people became part of conditions of action that they could not produce on their own and according to which they arranged their lives with everyone Fatalities - and some options ”. The critic's recommendation was then: “All those who always and above all want to be right about history will not like these films; but to all those who can experience and feel something, this series is definitely recommended. "

Evelyn Finger from Zeit Online saw it differently and spoke of a "manipulative TV film". The films surpassed the “previous attempts by television to stage the Second World War in a massively effective way with their own revisionist punchline: namely that the stories of suffering of those Germans who fled the eastern regions from 1944 or were expelled after the collapse of the“ Third Reich ”are themselves with the inevitability of a natural disaster ”would have occurred. This is "the scandal of the latest epic from Guido Knopp's ZDF history workshop".

Caroline Fetscher wrote about the three-part ZDF documentary at Tagesspiegel that the films are primarily about "'Jefühl', as Berliners call it", because "the heart is powerless against certain sentences: the emotions of real people who, as real children, experienced real and bitter need ”. And the series is “on this effect”. Occasionally newsreels would flicker past. Fate has "taken its course", which has been recreated in "scenic fragments with actors from Germany and Poland at original locations".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The children of the flight see page prisma.de
  2. ↑ a b The children of the flight see page cinecentrum.de
  3. ↑ a b Christian Buß : TV documentary “Die Kinder der Flucht” Unter Wölfen In: Spiegel Online, November 28, 2006. Accessed June 2, 2019.
  4. ↑ a b Michael Jeismann : Experienced stories of flight In: Frankfurter Allgemeine, November 28, 2006. Retrieved on June 2, 2019.
  5. ↑ The children of the flight see page kino.de. Retrieved June 2, 2019.
  6. ↑ Evelyn Finger : All were victims In: Zeit Online, November 23, 2006. Retrieved June 2, 2019.
  7. ↑ Caroline Fetscher : It's about "Jefühl" In: Der Tagesspiegel, November 28, 2006. Retrieved on June 2, 2006.