Metgethen massacre

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Metgethen in the Battle of Königsberg in April 1945

The “ Metgethen Massacre ” or “ Abomination in Metgethen ” are war crimes that soldiers of the Red Army allegedly committed against German and Ukrainian civilians in February 1945 during an occupation of the Königsberg suburb of Metgethen, today the Alexander Kosmodemjanski settlement .

initial situation

At the end of January 1945, in the battle for East Prussia in Samland , the Red Army had bypassed the fortified Königsberg to the west and had advanced to the Frisch Haff near Groß-Heydekrug . This cut off the road and railway line to the Baltic Sea port in Pillau , which had previously enabled the Germans to supply and evacuate the besieged Königsberg. On the night of February 1, Metgethen was also captured during this Soviet advance. At that time there were an unknown number of civilians in the village and the neighboring forest area, which was also occupied, as well as residents, refugees and a large number of Ukrainian forced laborers.

When German troops were able to recapture the Pillau-Königsberg corridor on February 19, 1945, a large number of civilians were discovered near Metgethen, whose bodies are said to have shown signs of rape, mutilation and beatings in many cases.

Reports

One of the crime scene witnesses was Hermann Sommer, according to his own account a captain in the staff of the fortress commander General Otto Lasch and the Wehrmacht - Kommandantur Königsberg , as well as responsible for the accommodation of the troops, the “barracking of foreigners” and “Commander of the prisoner of war system”. In 1951, Sommer made an affidavit from the perspective of a non-impartial witness who was keen to bear witness to what he saw as the unquestionable "atrocities of Russian warfare". The Sommers report should therefore be treated with caution, but is of particular importance due to the information that was available to this contemporary witness. According to Sommer, after the reconquest of Metgethen, "in addition to the individual corpses scattered all over the place, two particularly large mounds of corpses" were discovered, "which contained about 3,000 bodies, mostly women, girls and children." Contrary to later representations, which the Sommers report selectively evaluate and only highlight the victims in the German civilian population, according to Sommer, "a large part of the corpses were not of German, but of Russian nationality". This meant the Ukrainians present in the village and in the adjacent forest area, of whom, according to Sommer, after the Soviet occupation of the area, "the majority of the men were immediately integrated into Russian criminal departments and the rest were shot". In his autobiography, published after his return from Soviet captivity in 1958, Sommer's superior, the fortress commander Otto Lasch, did not give a remotely comparable number of victims, but merely put a number of "32 civilians" "on a fenced tennis court" for one of the individual finds and were blown up by an electrically detonated mine. "

According to Sommer, a special commission was formed to identify the victims and clarify what happened, photographed “several hundred corpses” and recorded statements from witnesses. Some of these materials were then kept in Sommer's own office, where they served a dual purpose. On the one hand, detective officers and detectives interrogated prisoners of war from the relevant section of the front in order to further clarify the course of events: according to Sommer, "several hundred prisoners of war" gave statements about the treatment of the Ukrainians on record. On the other hand, his office served as a contact point for the civilian population to identify relatives among the victims.

In addition, the Gauleitung published posters based on such materials, a memorandum “Think of Metgethen!” And other propaganda materials, supposedly - according to Sommer - “to get the population to leave the city”. In fact, the Gauleitung had strictly forbidden evacuation of the area until mid-January 1945 and made no preparations for an escape from East Prussia , which is why the responsible Gauleiter Erich Koch and his local subordinate Alfred Fiedler were sometimes ascribed a major complicity in the civilian victims.

According to his statement, Hermann Sommers' office in Königsberg was destroyed by an artillery hit on April 2, 1945, along with all the materials located there. Nothing else seems to have been preserved of the investigative and propaganda materials, with the possible exception of an album with 26 photographs archived today in the Library of Congress , which is entitled "Photo report on Germans murdered and desecrated by the Bolsheviks in Metgethen" and one Has ownership mark "The Commander of the Security Police, Königsberg Pr." A scientific investigation into the authenticity of these photographs is not yet available.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edgar Burger, later co-founder of the CDU -Landesverband Saarland, at the time in question participant of a course in West Prussia and only known about the events in Metgethen through hearsay, overwrites the relevant chapter in his autobiography with "The Metgethen Massacre"; Christian von Oppel, Hartmut Matthieu (ed.): In the rear of the enemy: Memories of Edgar Burger 1925-1945. Book on Demand, Norderstedt 2004, ISBN 3-8334-0442-6 , pp. 85-86; also “Massacre in Metgethen” by Alfred-Maurice de Zayas , evidence of the expulsion. Sinus-Verlag, Krefeld 1983, ISBN 3-88289-206-4 , p. 56, in the introduction to his shortened excerpts from several crime scene reports.
  2. ↑ As formulated by Andreas Hillgruber , Gerhard Hümmelchen: Chronicle of the Second World War. Bernard & Graefe, Frankfurt am Main 1966, p. 145.
  3. ↑ East Prussia Map 1: 300,000 ( Memento from January 31, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) on ostpreussenkarten.de.vu
  4. ↑ Jürgen Thorwald : The great escape. It started on the Vistula. The end on the Elbe , Steingrüben, Stuttgart 1963, p. 161; According to Kurt Dieckert, Horst Grossmann: The struggle for East Prussia: An authentic documentary report , Gräfe and Unzer, Munich 1960, p. 209, Soviet troops had already penetrated Metgethen on the night of January 30, 1945. According to de Zayas, Metgethen was occupied on January 29th.
  5. ^ A b c Alfred Fiedler, the "fire brigade general" or colonel of the professional fire brigade and head of the fire brigade school, a manufacturer with excellent connections to the NSDAP Gauleiter for East Prussia Erich Koch , had converted the fire brigade school of Metgethen into a facility for Ukrainian forced laborers and moved there the later euphemistic account by Heinrich Sommer “several thousand Ukrainians evacuated with their families” (ie interned), cf. Hermann Sommer: Typewritten affidavit (February 15, 1951), in: Bundesarchiv / Silke Spieler (editor): Expulsion and Expulsion Crimes, 1945–1948: Report of the Federal Archives of May 28, 1974, archive material and selected reports from the German expellees' cultural foundation, Bonn 1989, ISBN 3-88557-067-X , pp. 146–148, here p. 147, and on Fiedler see Andreas Linhardt: Feuerwehr im Luftschutz 1926–1945: The restructuring of public fire extinguishing in Germany from the point of view of civil air protection , Book on Demand, Braunschweig 2002, ISBN 3-8311-3738-2 , p. 165; Fritz Gause : The history of the city of Königsberg in Prussia , part 3: From the First World War to the fall of Königsberg. Böhlau, Cologne 1971 (= East Central Europe in Past and Present, 10, 3), ISBN 3-412-38871-8 , p. 134, p. 169; Dieckert / Grossmann: Der Kampf um Ostpreussen , Munich 1960, p. 31, p. 43, and the novel-like depiction by Marianne Blessing: Vorbei, über ... , Book on Demand, 2002, ISBN 3-8311-1899-X , passim. According to Heinrich Sommer (p. 147), around 25,000 Ukrainian refugees ("trek members") were also camped in the forest near Metgethen.
  6. ↑ Hermann Sommer: Typewritten affidavit (February 15, 1951), in: Federal Archives: Displacement and Expulsion Crimes , Bonn 1989, p. 146, unlike the rest of the literature, dates the recapture to February 23.
  7. ^ Hermann Sommer: Typewritten affidavit (February 15, 1951), in: Federal Archives: Expulsion and Expulsion Crimes , Bonn 1989, p. 146.
  8. ^ A b c Hermann Sommer: Typewritten affidavit (February 15, 1951), in: Federal Archives: Expulsion and Expulsion Crimes , Bonn 1989, p. 148.
  9. ^ Hermann Sommer: Typewritten affidavit (February 15, 1951), in: Federal Archives: Expulsion and Expulsion Crimes. Bonn 1989, p. 146f.
  10. ↑ a b c d Hermann Sommer: Typewritten affidavit (February 15, 1951), in: Federal Archives: Expulsion and Expulsion Crimes , Bonn 1989, p. 147.
  11. ↑ Otto Lasch: This is how Königsberg fell: Battle and fall of East Prussia's capital. Gräfe and Unzer, Munich 1958, p. 74.
  12. ↑ On the effect of the propaganda see u. a. Michael Wieck : Testimony to the fall of Königsberg. A " Jew of respect " reports. 3rd, verb. Edition. Schneider, Heidelberg 1989, ISBN 3-7953-0390-7 , p. 175 f. and the representation of Edgar Burger in: Christian von Oppel, Hartmut Matthieu (ed.): In the rear of the enemy: Memories of Edgar Burger 1925–1945. Book on Demand, Norderstedt 2004, ISBN 3-8334-0442-6 , p. 85 ff.
  13. ^ Dieckert, Grossmann: The struggle for East Prussia. Munich 1960, p. 43.
  14. ^ Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs division, [1]

Coordinates: 54 ° 43 ′ 12 ″  N , 20 ° 22 ′ 12 ″  E