Air raids on Tilsit

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The city of Tilsit in East Prussia experienced fourteen Soviet air raids from June 1941 to October 1944 during the German-Soviet War . The most severe took place in April 1943 and in July and August 1944. Over half of the city's buildings were destroyed and another third damaged. There were about 600 dead. Between July and October 1944, Tilsit was gradually evacuated by the German civilian population. From October it was a front-line town and was under Soviet artillery fire . After defensive battles by the Wehrmacht and Volkssturm , Tilsit was occupied by the Red Army from January 18-20, 1945 .

Tilsit 1934

The city of Tilsit

Tilsit was the capital of the Tilsit-Ragnit district and in 1939 had 59,000 inhabitants. It is to the left of the navigable Memel, over which the Queen Luise Bridge and a railway bridge led. There was significant transit trade with the Soviet Union and Lithuania until the war. The city had wood, pulp, paper and agricultural processing industries. There were no armaments plants worth mentioning. Tilsit was a garrison town. It had higher educational institutions.

The individual air strikes

The main sources for this description were: Hans Dzieran "Bombenflieger über der Stadt" and Hans Dzieran "Die Schreckensnacht vom 20 April 1943"

Tilsit on the Memel (around 1910)
  • June 23, 1941: Soviet planes repeatedly overflights, several bombs damaged residential buildings. There were two dead and eight wounded in the civilian population.

Increased air protection measures were taken from now on: Training and expansion of air raid shelters in public buildings and residential buildings. From 1942 onwards, the city and district took in large numbers of "bomb evacuated" families from West Germany and Berlin . Tilsit was a hospital town, schools and other public buildings increasingly became auxiliary hospitals.

  • 16./17. April 1943: light Soviet air raid at night
Soviet long-range bomber Ilyushin DB-3 (booty)
Soviet multi-combat aircraft Petlyakov Pe-2
  • 20./21. April 1943: heavy, nocturnal (10 pm to 2 am) Soviet "surprise attack" on Tilsit on the evening of the "Führer birthday". 800 km Airport at high altitude over German occupied territory a squadron of 30 twin-engine reached for shutting go at 500 meters, at the full moon and the sky is clear, long-range bombers of the type Ilyushin DB-3 (three seasons of 10 bombers) to the city. They were not hindered by flak or German fighters and had no losses. The bombs of the first wave fell on the suburb of Birjohlen, as the air crews had mistaken the Schlossmühlenteich for the Memel . On the actual city area then 400 combined were explosive - incendiary bombs (50 kg) cast from this shot when serving ten electron incendiary devices out before the explosives detonated. The inner city burned to a diameter of over 2 km, only residential areas were affected. Over 80 buildings were destroyed, 30 of them in total. According to other information, 173 houses were no longer habitable, out of 933 counted bombs. The Bürgerhalle burned out. The destroyed buildings were in the following streets: Luisenallee, Sommerstrasse, Stiftstrasse, Grosse Gerberstrasse, Grabenstrasse, Scheunenstrasse. There was serious damage in Kallkapper Strasse, SA-Strasse, Seilerstrasse, Steinmetzstrasse, Metzstrasse, Lindenstrasse, Hochmeisterstrasse, Hohe Strasse, Sudermannstrasse. The property damage was classified as significant, with military objects not being affected. Therefore the attack was classified as a pure "terror attack", also by the propaganda. The fire brigades , air raid protection and the population fought the fires until they were exhausted and rescued buried and wounded people. The number of recovered dead was initially given as 97, then 120. But the following were also named: 207 dead, 137 of them Tilsit, the other members of the military, prisoners of war and guards. On Easter Sunday the bomb victims were solemnly buried in a newly created common resting place in the forest cemetery with great sympathy from the population, also with military ceremonies, Beethoven sounds and typical speeches by representatives of the state and party.

After this incident, the city briefly received anti-aircraft protection, but this was soon withdrawn - to Marienburg in West Prussia . The passive air protection measures were strengthened, the air warning network expanded and the air raid shelters made safer, for example by expanding the splinter protection in front of the windows of the air raid shelter.

Thanks to special operations by construction crews and construction companies from all over the province of East Prussia, many damaged houses could be made habitable again in a short time.

  • 28/29 April 1943: light Soviet air raid at night

In the summer of 1944 the Eastern Front had moved closer to East Prussia. Tilsit was the rear front area, from a distance you could hear the rumbling of the heavy artillery, the approach range for enemy aircraft was only 100 km. This meant that lighter Soviet bombers and attack aircraft could also be used, and the advance warning times were very short.

  • July 24, 25 and 26, 1944: On three consecutive nights, shortly before midnight, Soviet bomber pods attacked the city and hit it hard. 154 buildings were destroyed, 194 damaged.

From now on, the Tilsit civilian population was gradually evacuated , initially older residents and women with children: to the surrounding area and to southern and western East Prussia. Many of the remaining Tilsiters left the city every evening. The splinter trenches as the first protection against surprise attacks were given concrete frames and a cover.

  • 23/24 August 1944: according to the police report, nocturnal "moderate terrorist attack" lasting 1½ hours. Many large fires had to be fought. The human losses were "bearable".
  • 26./27. August 1944: that night Tilsit had to withstand the heaviest bomb attack. At 11.45 p.m. the sirens wailed, then the first enemy planes arrived. 400 to 500 Soviet bombing and attack aircraft dropped around 4000 incendiary and “medium to heavy” high explosive bombs over the city area. It quickly developed into a conflagration that affected 296 homes. 196 major fires and 16 block fires had to be fought. According to the police report, there were " firestorms " (probably not in the narrower sense of the word) in Hohen Strasse and Deutsche Strasse . “The whole city was on fire”. The sky over Tilsit was described as "blood red". The water and gas supplies collapsed. There were fires in the municipal hospital, the gas station, the slaughterhouse, the secondary school, the Cecilia school and the pulp factory . 815 buildings were destroyed in this "night of horror". A train carrying tracer ammunition exploded in the station area and could not be driven out quickly enough after an alarm. Numerous small flares flew far into the area for hours, delaying the all-clear.
Tilsit in January 1945

The loss of people that night "was limited" because many Tilsiters had been evacuated or fled into the area.

The evacuation of the rest of the civilian population has been intensified. Around 12,000 people remained who, with the exception of people who were necessary for their jobs ( Reichsbahn , police, fire brigade, medical staff), later left the city when the artillery bombardment began.

  • 10/11 October 1944: The station area was deliberately bombed.
  • October 13, 1944: In a moderate attack on day 75, Soviet attack aircraft dropped around 100 bombs on the German defensive positions on the left bank of the Memel and on the city. They did not succeed in destroying the Memelbrücken. Five major fires were triggered, the human losses were low.
  • October 18, 1944: the artillery bombardment began from the far bank of the Memel, people no longer dared to venture into the streets of the ruined city. There were again dead and wounded.
  • October 19, 1944: “The city looks empty”. The combat commander gave up the "Tilsit bridgehead" on the other side of the Memel. The Red Army occupied the area opposite the city of Tilsit.
  • October 22, 1944: Wehrmacht pioneers blew up Queen Luise and the railway bridge over the Memel at night.
  • January 20, 1945: in the early morning hours Tilsit was completely occupied by the Red Army after fighting with the defensive Wehrmacht and Volkssturm .

damage

The Chronicle of Tilsit says: “What aerial bombs had not yet hit, the Russian artillery completed. When Tilsit was captured by the Russians on January 20, 1945, it was a dead city with ghostly ruins staring up at the sky. it was 60–80% destroyed ”.

The former Lord Mayor of Tilsit, Fritz Nieskau, writes: “The destruction of the city of Tilsit by the enemy air raids will be roughly as follows (% of the building stock):

City center 55%, residential area "Überm Teich" 40%, residential area west of the railway 25%, industrial area at the port 50%, Tilsit Prussia 30%, suburban settlements 12%. Through artillery fire up to the Soviet occupation, a total of 5% will then be attributable to the individual information. "

A report from Tilsit City Council employees states:

Totally destroyed 44%, heavily damaged 11%, moderately damaged 22%, slightly damaged 12%. "There are no undamaged buildings or plants in Tilsit". Total debris: 1,500,000 m³

A Soviet local historian writes about the state of the city after the war: "All the buildings that had so impressively shaped the cityscape, the religious order church, the town hall, the district office, the Lithuanian church and the ensemble of Hohen Strasse: everything was still in its substance present, even though grenade impacts and bombs had left heavy marks. It looked particularly bad on Deutsche Strasse, which had been under fire from Russian artillery for many weeks. "

Sacrifice and burial place

The total number of fatalities in the air strikes is estimated by Fritz Nieckau, the former Lord Mayor of Tilsit, at 600.

The bomb dead were buried in the Tilsiter forest cemetery. A war cemetery was redesigned there by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge and inaugurated in 2006. Wehrmacht soldiers who died in the fighting or wounded in the hospital town of Tilsit, as well as bomb victims, rest here. These are not mentioned as such on the information boards. A small memorial stone from a school community reminds of them indirectly (for the historian): "In memory of the dead in the city of Tilsit in 1943 and 1944"

The cemetery is also the resting place of around 1,000 German and Russian soldiers who died in the First World War and, above all, most of the civilian dead from Tilsit.

The cemetery was leveled after 1945 and at times became a military training area, with the crematorium also being destroyed. In 2004/2005 symbol crosses, memorial steles with the names of the 954 exhumed dead and a memorial place with a high cross were created - against the background of the ruinous foundation walls of the former crematorium. In the entrance area to the cemetery you can read on a commemorative plaque: “The redesign of the forest cemetery was an idea by Horst Mertineit from the Tilsit municipality in Kiel . It was carried out and supported by: (names of personalities from Germany, Sowetsk and Riga follow ) "

War cemetery Waldfriedhof Tilsit :

  • Memorial plaque Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge

  • Steles with the names of the war dead, including bomb victims

  • Memorial place of the Volksbund in the forest cemetery

  • Part of the cemetery in the forest cemetery, including bomb victims

reconstruction

German prisoners of war and German civilians who had come to the city from northern East Prussia after the Soviet occupation were used to clear the rubble. The last of them were expelled in 1948. The replacement of the previous population with immigrants from the Soviet Union had already begun in 1945.

Many of the damaged and destroyed houses and fire ruins were demolished and replaced by new buildings, others rebuilt. As a result, parts of the city could be recognisably reproduced their earlier appearance. On the other hand, many valuable buildings were only lost after the war, such as the Teutonic Order Church, the Lithuanian Church and the Kreuzkirche.

literature

  • Walther Castner: Tilsit on April 20, 1943 . (Diary entries). 39. Tilsiter circular. 2009/2010. P. 64
  • Hans Dzieran: The last battle for Tilsit . 23rd Tilsiter Rundbrief (1994). Pp. 16-23
  • Hans Dzieran: Bomb pilot over the city . 24. Tilsit circular letter. 1994/1995. Pp. 65-69
  • Hans Dzieran: The night of horrors of April 20, 1943 . “Land an der Memel” No. 99 (2016), pp. 172–183
  • Olaf Groehler : bombing war against Germany . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1990. ISBN 3-05-000612-9
  • Walter Hubatsch : A Chronicle of the City of Tilsit (until 1945). http://www.tilsit-stadt.de/tilsit-stadt/fileadmin/fotos/Tilsit_frueher/Chronik_von_Tilsit.pdf
  • Peter Joost and Ingolf Koehler (compilation and design): old and new from Tilsit. Development and fate of a German city in 236 pictures . Ed. Stadtgemeinschaft Tilsit eV, Kiel 1983. In it numerous pictures of the destruction, the partial reconstruction and the new buildings
  • Norbert Matern : East Prussia, when the bombs fell: Königsberg, Allenstein, Braunsberg, Gumbinnen, Insterburg, Memel, Tilsit . Droste-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1986. ISBN 3-7700-0674-7 (Tilsit: pp. 102–117)
  • Fritz Nieckau: The air raids on the city of Tilsit during the last world war . Report by the former mayor of Tilsit up to 1945. Typewritten transcript, around 1953. Documents from the school community Realgymnasium Tilsit. Archive of the Tilsit City Community.
  • Isaak Rutman (and Hans Dzieran): How Tilsit became Sovietsk. A contribution to the history of the city in the years 1945-1948. 24. Tilsiter Rundbrief (1994/95 edition)
  • City administration Tilsit: Bomb damage in Tilsit (statistics, sender reader Fritz Mickat). 34. Tilsit circular letter. 2004/2005. P. 91 f
  • Roderich Walther: Tilsit before and during the eviction . Typed report of the former district administrator of the Gumbinnen district and deputy chief of police and air raid protection chief of Tilsit, Marburg 1953. Documents of the school community Realgymnasium Tilsit. Archive of the Tilsit City Community.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Dzieran: bombers over the city . 24. Tilsiter Rundbrief, 1994/95, pp. 65-69
  2. ↑ Hans Dzieran: The terrible night of 20 April 1943 . "Land an der Memel" No. 99 (2016), pp. 172-183
  3. ↑ Olaf Groehler, 1990, p. 167
  4. ↑ Walther Castner, 39th Tilsiter Heimatbrief, 2009/2010, p. 64
  5. ↑ Walther Castner, 39th Tilsiter Rundbrief, 2009/2010, p. 64
  6. ↑ Olaf Groehler, 1990, p. 167
  7. ^ Walter Hubatsch: A Chronicle of the City of Tilsit
  8. ↑ Fritz Nieskau: The air attacks on the city Tilsit during the Second World War
  9. ^ Tilsit city administration: Bomb damage in Tilsit
  10. ↑ Isaak Rutman: How Tilsit became Sovietsk . 1994/95
  11. ↑ Fritz Nieckau: The air attacks on the city Tilsit
  12. ↑ Dzieran, 2016

Web links

Commons : Air strikes on Tilsit  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files