Nemmersdorf massacre

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Newspaper clipping with the headline "Beasts raged in East Prussia"
Headline in the Braunschweiger daily newspaper on October 27, 1944

The Nemmersdorf massacre refers to the events around October 21, 1944 in the then German village of Nemmersdorf (today Mayakovskoye, Russia ), in which, according to current knowledge, between 19 and 30 people were killed after the Red Army occupied the East Prussian town. At the core of these events is the shooting of 13 local civilians who had fled to a bunker before the fighting between the Wehrmacht and the Soviet troops. In addition, there are six other people from Nemmersdorf and possibly also a few non-residents who perished while taking Nemmersdorf. The background to the death of the civilians there has not yet been fully clarified.

After the Red Army had withdrawn from Nemmersdorf, the German Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda tried to interpret the events in the village in the spirit of the National Socialist regime. The aim was to mobilize the reserves of the German population against the advancing Soviet troops by portraying them as cruel invaders. For this purpose, recordings of people shot dead of unknown origin were subsequently made and propagandistic reports were distributed that spoke of methodical torture, rape and murder. The goal of motivating the German population and the world community to fight against the Red Army, however, failed this propaganda.

In the Federal Republic of Germany , Nemmersdorf became a symbol for the experiences of the East German population towards the end of the Second World War . The accounts and deaths from Nazi propaganda were increased again. Reference was made to alleged eyewitness reports that neither correspond to the presentation of Nazi propaganda nor to the sources that can be reconstructed today. In the GDR and the Soviet Union , the Nemmersdorf massacre was taboo or presented as a mere propaganda campaign by the Nazi regime. In Russia , responsibility of Soviet troops for the shootings is denied to this day. In Germany, Nemmersdorf is still a symbol of crimes committed by the Red Army against the German population. It was not until several decades after the events that the German author Bernhard Fisch contributed to a decisive revision of the reports on the Nemmersdorf massacre that had been handed down over decades. The reception of the Nemmersdorf events is considered symptomatic of the one-sided public reappraisal of the complex of war and displacement in the respective countries.

Course of events

War situation

By the end of October 1944, the Red Army had been able to recapture large parts of the Soviet territory occupied by the Wehrmacht . In Operation Bagration , it had driven the German troops out of Belarus and was able to advance to the East Prussian border, the Vistula and Riga by August . With this, the Red Army had practically revised the results of the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, but had not crossed the borders of the German Reich in 1937 . The main reasons for the end of the Soviet summer offensive were the high losses that had to be compensated, as well as the overstretched supply routes. Some divisions of the Red Army, with 2,000 to 3,000 soldiers, were far below their nominal strength of around 10,000 men. The remaining reserves were not sufficient to make significant territorial gains on German territory. However, the Soviet General Staff tried to report such a success to Stalin on the 27th anniversary of the October Revolution . The army command had planned for the second half of October to smash the German troops in northern East Prussia with the 1st Baltic Front and the 3rd Byelorussian Front as part of the Gumbinnen-Goldaper operation , in order to occupy all of East Prussia. The Red Army did not succeed in asserting itself against the 4th Army , among other things, because the 1st Baltic Army under Hovhannes Baghramjan stopped at the Memel and did not translate. The area gains were only around 150 km. Only the 11th Soviet Guard Army was able to penetrate East Prussian territory and reached the Gumbinnen district on October 21, 1944 , where they met the 4th Army of the Wehrmacht and fought bitter battles with them.

With the only drivable concrete bridge in a wide area over the Angerapp, Nemmersdorf played a key strategic role. The next bridge that tanks could pass was 6 km further downstream in Sabadschuhnen , south of Nemmersdorf the next bridge was 26 km upstream in Darkehmen . However, its location did not only give Nemmersdorf military importance: in response to the advance of the Red Army, Fritz Feller, peasant leader of the Gumbinnen district and district authorities, decided on October 20, 1944, to evacuate the population to the Gerdauen district to the south-west . The residents of about 20 villages east of the Angerapp were forced to cross Nemmersdorf on their treks. Except for one, all the treks in the area led via Nemmersdorf, which is why the refugee trains jammed at the bridge, and military vehicles were retreating from the approaching 25th Soviet tank brigade . It is unclear why the Wehrmacht did not blow up the bridge and cut off the approaching troops. According to eyewitness reports, the bridge was already mined when a trek from Kuttkuhnen reached Nemmersdorf on the night of October 19-20. Bernhard Fisch suspects that those responsible on site did not blow up out of consideration for waiting refugee treks. Many people waiting left their belongings, partly out of impatience and partly out of fear, and crossed the bridge to Nemmersdorf on foot.

According to Soviet records, Nemmersdorf was protected east of the bridge by two trenches , an anti-tank ditch , a barbed wire line and fortified and unpaved machine-gun nests of the Wehrmacht. The Red Army itself put ten 75 mm guns, four tractors and 150 soldiers out of action during the storming of Nemmersdorf. Early in the morning of October 21, around 6:30 a.m., the vanguard and later the tanks of the 2nd Battalion of the 25th Panzer Brigade reached the Nemmersdorf Bridge, where the refugee trains were still jammed. It was already light on site, but extremely foggy. The Soviet tanks first had to fight their way through the crowd of waiting cars. Clearing the bridge was particularly difficult because the wagons were packed together. In addition, the Polish prisoners of war , who mostly had to drive the wagons, ran over to the Soviet soldiers when they appeared. At around 7:30 a.m., the bridge was finally taken by the Red Army, and at around 8:00 a.m. they had secured the area as far as the Pennacken estate, which was north-west of Nemmersdorf.

Soviet occupation

Map of Nemmersdorf and the surrounding area
Nemmersdorf with the locations of the events of October 1944

Most of the 637 people from Nemmersdorf had already left the place when the Red Army took it. Above all, the inhabitants who did not have horses and wagons, were old or suffered from an illness, stayed behind in the village. Overall, it was probably only a lower two-digit number, plus the refugees from the villages to the east who remained at the bridge, which the Red Army soldiers had to withdraw again towards the afternoon of October 21. The incidents from October 21 to 23, 1944 are difficult to reconstruct as only a few eyewitness accounts are available. In addition, these reports were drawn up at great intervals or passed on orally by third parties. Its authors were mostly close to the NSDAP and probably agreed on the basis of personal relationships with one another. Bernhard Fisch classifies the reports of the eyewitnesses known by name as authentic, but compromises their informative value in some aspects. Fisch also rates a report by the village policeman's wife, who is not known by name and quoted for the first time by Fritz Leimbach in 1956, as serious: The woman fled the village with her two children as the noise of the battle approached. In the process, she overtook a Wehrmacht tank without stopping, although she called out to the crew to take her away. Shortly afterwards, however, a Russian officer took them with them in an armored car, dropped them off outside the village and, according to Leimbach, warned them in good German about his comrades. The master painter Johannes Schewe, who went to his house towards the morning of October 21, was also able to pass the Soviet soldiers, was later questioned by an officer in German and was finally able to leave the place unhindered. On the other hand, on the Angerappbrücke, the refugee routes were searched by Soviet soldiers, and towards the afternoon of October 21, the abandoned luggage was also looted there, according to eyewitness Gerda Meczulat. 14 civilians - residents of Nemmersdorf and evacuated relatives, including Gerda Meczulat - had withdrawn into a makeshift bunker in the south of the village at a canal breakthrough for fear of tank bullets when Nemmersdorf was taken. After it had calmed down, a few hours later her father Eduard, later Karl Kaminski, also from Nemmersdorf, went back to their houses to get coffee and blankets. While her father was searched by the Red Army soldiers and then let through, Kaminski was denied entry to his house, and he was returned to the bunker without having achieved anything. In the early afternoon, Soviet soldiers finally appeared in the bunker, talked to Meczulat's father, searched the hand luggage and played with the children present. Towards evening a senior officer had appeared, whereupon an argument broke out between this soldier and another soldier. The civilians were then ordered out of the bunker and killed with bullets in the head in front of the exit. Only Gerda Meczulat survived because she fell due to illness. She was shot in the head, but vital organs were missed. A day later, Meczulat was brought to Osterode by soldiers of the Wehrmacht and later to the hospital in Neuruppin .

According to his wife Margot, a refugee trail had started on the Schrödershof estate of the mayor of Nemmersdorf, Johannes Grimm. It was stopped shortly afterwards by Soviet soldiers, only the first car of the trek drove away under gunfire. The Red Army soldiers forced the refugees to dismount and searched them. Wristwatches were removed from the men, then their husband was led to the side and shot in the temple. She was disguised by Polish forced laborers and passed off as a Polish woman, which meant that she was spared. The community nurse was kicked and seriously injured by Soviet soldiers in Nemmersdorf. Apart from the shootings, these mixed impressions of the Nemmersdorf Red Army soldiers coincide with those from the surrounding villages: In Tutteln (Russian: Sychyovo), southwest of Nemmersdorf, Soviet troops took civilians with them to a shelter on October 22 to protect them from gunfire. At the Eszerischken estate east of the bridge, Red Army soldiers initially behaved in a friendly manner towards the residents on the same day, but later two members of the Red Army raped a young woman. On Monday, October 23, according to eyewitnesses, they apparently toyed with the idea of ​​shooting the estate residents, but abandoned this plan after the protest of Polish slave laborers. According to Erika Feller, who was not there, in addition to the occupants of the bunker and the mayor, at least two refugee women from Eszerischken were killed on the bridge when the Red Army held the place. In addition to seven Nemmersdorfer from the bunker who were shot by Red Army soldiers, the community soul list also includes the names Bernhard Brosius, Berta Aschmoneit, the widow Hilgermann and the Wagner couple.

Victims known by name or origin during the capture and occupation of Nemmersdorf by the Red Army
Surname origin Age Circumstances of death
Berta Aschmoneit Nemmersdorf 70 Killed by bullet in her home
Bernhard Brosius Nemmersdorf * 1885 unknown
Johannes Grimm Nemmersdorf 37 Shot by Soviet soldiers at Gut Schrödershof
Ms. Hilgermann Nemmersdorf approx. 60 unknown
Helene Hilbermann Nemmersdorf unknown Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Friedrich Hobeck Nemmersdorf approx 72 Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Amalie Hobeck Nemmersdorf approx. 74 Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Karl Kaminski Nemmersdorf * 1865 Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Ms. Kaminski (wife) Nemmersdorf unknown Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Ms. Kaminski (daughter-in-law) Nemmersdorf unknown Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Relative of Kaminski's Gumbinnen unknown Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Relatives of Kaminski's Gumbinnen unknown Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Grandchild of Kaminskis Nemmersdorf unknown Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Grandchild of Kaminskis Nemmersdorf unknown Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Grandchild of Kaminskis Nemmersdorf unknown Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Grandchild of Kaminskis Nemmersdorf unknown Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Amalie Klaus Nemmersdorf * 1881 Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Maria Koch Skardupchen * 1897 unknown
Eduard Meczulat Nemmersdorf 71 Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Mr. Susat Nemmersdorf approx. 70 Shot by Soviet soldiers at the canal breakthrough
Mr. wagner Nemmersdorf approx. 65 unknown
Ms. Wagner Nemmersdorf approx. 65 unknown
Grete (Gertrud) Waldowski Copy 19th Killed by headshot
Mr. M. Zahlmann Gerwischken unknown shot
Currently name unknown (worker woman) Good Eszerischken unknown unknown
Currently name unknown (worker woman) Good Eszerischken unknown unknown

In addition to the victims listed here, there were other people for whom it is not possible to determine with certainty where they were during the events in and around Nemmersdorf and how they died. This included a sister of Berta Aschmoneit and another worker woman from Eszerischken. Herta and Margitta Brandtner may have been shot dead from a trek from Schameitschen . The couple Friedrich (* 1868) and Matilde Rossian (* 1875) from Matzutkehmen and a man named Bahr from Augstupönen were reported missing from the treks . Based on trustworthy eyewitness reports, the community soul lists and questionnaire reports, the total number of deaths in Nemmersdorf is 23 to 30. The reports of the Wehrmacht officers Hans Hinrichs and Karl Fricke, which Bernhard Fisch rates as serious, come to a total of 26 deaths and around Nemmersdorf. Apart from the shootings attested by eyewitnesses, it cannot be determined which of the victims were willfully killed. Unintentional deaths among the civilian population, for example from tank shells from the Wehrmacht or the Red Army, are possible. In West German literature, however, such an interpretation was generally dropped in favor of the thesis that people were deliberately murdered by Soviet soldiers.

Recapture and inspection

On the night of October 21, 1944, the Wehrmacht had set up alarm units in the Insterburg garrison . On the night of October 22nd, the German Panzer Grenadier Replacement Battalion 413 sent about 100 men to Nemmersdorf, led by Lieutenant Louis Rubbel and Sergeant Helmut Hoffmann, who attacked the village from the west. They were able to reach the Angerapphöhe south of the village, while units of the parachute-tank division Hermann Göring attacked the village from the northwest independently of them. After several skirmishes during October 22nd, the Red Army withdrew from Nemmersdorf on October 23, 1944 at around 2:30 a.m.

The withdrawal of the Red Army was only noticed by the German troops after about six to eight hours on the morning of October 23rd. Helmut Hoffmann and the soldier Harry Thürk from Hermann Göring's division were among the first Germans to inspect the place afterwards . The district farmer leader Fritz Feller immediately went to Nemmersdorf when he heard of the withdrawal of the Soviet troops. On 23 or 24 October met with Karl Gebhardt not only an SS - Lieutenant General , but also the personal physician of Heinrich Himmler one. When the first official inspectors of the Secret Field Police arrived in Nemmersdorf on October 25th, numerous members of the SS and NSDAP were already there , including three security policemen from Gumbinnen, a delegation from the SS standard Kurt Egger and a NSDAP commission under the East Prussian Gaul propaganda leader Martins. In addition, Army Group Center and the Air Force had each assigned a war correspondent to Nemmersdorf, to whom Hans Hinrichs from the High Command of the Wehrmacht , a judge-martial Groch and Captain Karl Fricke from the High Command of the 4th Army joined on October 25 . The representatives of the Wehrmacht and SS were sent to Nemmersdorf independently of each other, which can be seen from the fact that the first SS units arrived in Nemmersdorf before the official inspectors of the Wehrmacht, apparently a direct message from the East German front to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler available.

One of the mass graves created in 1944. In today's Mayakovskoye there is no tombstone that indicates individual or mass graves.

Reports from Hoffmann, Thürk, the Secret Field Police and Hinrichs and Fricke are available from these early witnesses. Hoffmann put his observations on record about 65 years later to Bernhard Fisch; all other witnesses wrote them down. All reports from this period are very similar, both in terms of the scenery and the number of victims. Deaths were noted at the canal bunker (nine to ten), in the houses east of the village square (an old woman in her living room, in the house opposite a married couple and a young woman, Grete Waldowski) and on the bridge (two women and a baby). Off the main street, Harry Thürk reported on a dead elderly man on a dung heap with a pitchfork stuck in his chest. In addition, Thürk notes a woman who was hung from a barn wing and who was taken down shortly after he saw her. On the question of whether there were rapes in Nemmersdorf, the reports are divided: Hoffmann denies this, the Secret Field Police thought it was possible with a woman on the bridge. The bodies found in the village were first buried by the inspectors in a mass grave in the village cemetery because of the heat. The bodies were later exhumed and examined, and the Secret Field Police recorded 13 women, eight men and five children. Photos were then taken of the corpses, but it is unclear how much the corpses were manipulated for the pictures. If these first images are identical to those later distributed by the German Ministry of Propaganda , the women at least had their skirts pulled up and their underwear pulled down. This already suggests a propaganda intention, but considerations of piety would have resulted in covering the dead, according to Bernhard Fisch. It is also unclear who identified the dead, the sources provide contradicting information. It was probably Gertrud Hobeck, who worked as a nurse in Insterburg and recognized her parents and other villagers. Grete Waldowski, who comes from the Darkehmen district, was apparently identified by her identification card . The whereabouts of the corpses are unclear: In today's Mayakovskoye there is no tombstone that indicates individual or mass graves. There are also no photos of such a burial site. An anonymous burial would be extremely unusual even for the final phase of World War II. In the spring of 1945, even soldiers who died in battle were placed on the spot with grave crosses with inscriptions.

The condition of the village after the fighting is unclear: According to Thürk, it was largely unscathed, which he was astonished to see in view of the artillery bombardment by the Wehrmacht. Bernhard Fisch, who inspected the abandoned village as a young soldier on October 27, 1944, describes the western part of Nemmersdorf as completely intact. While Fritz Feller confirmed this in his questionnaire report from 1944, the descriptions of former Nemmersdorfer in later decades range from several destroyed houses to the complete destruction of the village; Fritz Feller himself later said that two thirds of the place had been destroyed. These discrepancies can in part be explained by the differently affected districts. It is also possible that soldiers passing through devastated the abandoned village after the first inspectors had withdrawn, as also happened in the area around Nemmersdorf.

Propagandist instrumentalization

Nazi officials inspect corpses laid out
Admission of a German propaganda company with bodies in Nemmersdorf. Dead women were deliberately photographed with their skirts pulled up to portray them as victims of rape.

The German Reich Propaganda Ministry under Joseph Goebbels recognized the importance of the Nemmersdorf incidents for a propagandistic evaluation , possibly even before Nemmersdorf was taken by the Red Army, preparations were made for a corresponding instrumentalization. The ministry was aware of the change in mood among the German population, who were increasingly skeptical of the Nazi and Wehrmacht leadership in view of the continued defeats of German troops on the Eastern and Western fronts in 1944. It worked intensively on countermeasures to restore the war morale of the Germans. Even before the Wehrmacht attacked the village, leading authorities assumed that civilians had been killed in Nemmersdorf.

Publicity campaign

After the first reports from Nemmersdorf had reached him, Goebbels noted in his diary that he was planning a major press release for Nemmersdorf. On the basis of reports from NSDAP, SS and Wehrmacht members on site, an article about Nemmersdorf was finally published on October 27, 1944 in the Völkischer Beobachter and other German newspapers. He did not give an exact number of victims, but added to the deaths from the early reports "several women who had been put down," all of whom had been shot in the neck and robbed. The Völkischer Beobachter also claimed that all houses in Nemmersdorf had been looted and destroyed by Red Army soldiers, that the evacuation of the town had gone according to plan and that when the Red Army moved in, it was a sudden advance that surprised some of the villagers. The next day there was a report by a PK man and a more detailed report that also dealt with fatalities from the wider region and a total of 61 deaths. The reliability of these numbers is unclear. The Völkischer Beobachter subsumed all the dead under the keyword Nemmersdorf in order to reinforce the propaganda effect. Newsreel footage showed pictures of the propaganda company, on which several women with pulled up skirts and a completely destroyed village could be seen. Two days later there were verifiably false reports in the Nazi-related newspapers Fritt Folk ( Oslo ) and Courrier de Genève ( Geneva ), which confirmed the articles in the Völkischer Beobachter or even surpassed them in drastic terms.

Investigative commission

At the same time, Goebbels set up an international commission of inquiry which, with the Estonian Hjalmar Mäe as chairman and, with the exception of a Swiss doctor, only had members of occupied or allied states. On October 31, 1944, they questioned the Volkssturmmann Emil Radünz, the judge-martial Paul Groch, Hans Hinrichs, Charlotte Müller von Gut Eszerischken, a medical officer named William, a lieutenant Saidat and a reporter None from the Air Force, who had taken the photos from Nemmersdorf. Before being questioned, the witnesses were instructed privately by Eberhard Taubert ; their statements were discussed with him beforehand. In particular, the descriptions by Radünz and Saidat sharpened the representations of the Nazi press. There was talk of deportations to Siberia , the rape of all Nemmersdorf women without exception and a dead Swiss. The Völkische Beobachter also reported on the meeting of the investigative commission . For Goebbels it was not only an attempt to shake up the German public even further, but was also aimed primarily at foreign states and the media, which were to be won over to the fight against the Soviet Union.

However, neither the domestic press campaign nor the fact-finding mission had any noteworthy success. The Nazi propaganda failed to dispel questions about the causes of the Soviet advance and its evacuation policy among the population. For example, the question arose as to why civilians in the combat area had not been brought to safety in time, whereupon the propaganda both asserted that the harvest had yet to be collected and claimed that the area had already been evacuated and that only refugees were among the victims been. The security service of the Reichsführer SS reported from Stuttgart that the explicit depictions of the Nemmersdorf massacre were perceived by the population as “shameless” and put in context with the Holocaust , about which returning soldiers knew: “The Jews are human too. We have shown the enemies what they can do with us in the event of a victory ”. In this respect, the propaganda is counterproductive. Goebbels recorded his action on November 10, 1944 as a failure in his diary and did not comment on the incidents at all until December 1944. In January 1945, the Wehrmacht leadership decided to indict various Red Army officers with war crimes in Nemmersdorf, which, however, had no consequences in view of the war situation. The indictment was not published.

Reception in the post-war period

The Nemmersdorf case gained new momentum after the end of the war against the background of the expulsion of the German population from the areas east of the Oder-Neisse line and the emerging Cold War . The reports on the events became part of the culture of remembrance in the Federal Republic of Germany and saw numerous changes in content. As early as 1946, Erich Dethleffsen reported that the Soviet soldiers nailed several people alive to barn doors in Nemmersdorf and shot around 50 French prisoners of war in addition to local civilians. In the years that followed, more and more former authors spoke up who wanted to hear about mass rape, civilians run over by tanks and castrated men through witnesses . These descriptions culminated in the alleged eyewitness report that Karl Potrek wrote under a pseudonym in 1953 : He spoke of 72 women and children murdered in Nemmersdorf, the crucifixion of naked women on barn doors and ax murders of old women. There was only one adult man among the dead, the rest were women and children. According to Potrek, the dead were not buried for five days, which is incompatible with any of the statements of previous witnesses. On the other hand, there was seldom any mention of the dead at the makeshift bunker or at Gut Schrödershof in West German reports from the post-war period . Potrek's statements were published in 1971 by Rudolf Grenz . In addition to Potrek, Grenz also referred to a number of other questionable witnesses, incidents verified by eyewitnesses are often heavily dramatized and sometimes falsified in his work. Works from later decades, including by Alfred de Zayas , often referred to Grenz and his witnesses; Karl Potrek in particular, who was probably never there, was cited most frequently. The contemporary witnesses Gerda Meczulat and Johannes Schewe published their memoirs at the end of the 1970s, but they were also ignored by later authors. Photographs by the propaganda company as well as reports and articles from official Nazi agencies were regarded as reliable sources in the German discourse. Only de Zayas endeavored to have some reports checked by their still living authors.

Eva and Hans-Henning Hahn explain the intensification of the reporting on Nemmersdorf in the Federal Republic of Germany as the suppression of a German joint responsibility for the evacuation of the German population from the eastern regions. Bernhard Fisch, on the other hand, suspects a reaction to the bloc conflict in the Cold War, in which the ideological opponent, the Soviet Union, was demonized.

Working up after the fall of the Wall

Bernhard Fisch has dealt with Nemmersdorf since his youth and when he was resettled in the German Democratic Republic , but for a long time could hardly research it because the GDR leadership suppressed the coming to terms with Soviet war crimes. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, denied any responsibility for the incidents from the start; even in more recent Russian history books, they are still portrayed as pure propaganda action by the Nazi regime. Only after German reunification was Fisch able to conduct open research on Nemmersdorf and find contemporary witnesses who were still alive until 1994. These explicitly contradicted all representations of the events that emerged after the end of the war and also relativized some of the claims of the Völkischer Beobachter . From the end of the 1990s, Fisch succeeded in reconstructing many parts of what happened in and around Nemmersdorf, but also pointed to significant gaps in the sources that made it impossible to fully trace the events. For example, it is still unclear why Red Army soldiers shot civilians in Nemmersdorf, or what were the intentions behind sending high-ranking SS and NSDAP members to the site of the massacre. In view of the changed source situation, Fisch as well as Eva and Hans Henning Hahn sharply criticized earlier West German historians, who would have portrayed the Nemmersdorf massacre in a negligent, uncritical or falsified manner.

In addition to praise for his source work, these interpretations also brought Fisch criticism. Karl-Heinz Frieser , for example, criticizes the fact that Fisch's account is based almost exclusively on oral eyewitness accounts and that the interpretation of the events is too positive towards the Red Army. Frieser criticizes a distortion, which is caused by the long time lag, the necessarily incomplete questioning of eyewitnesses and a one-sided weighting of sources that contradict Fisch's interpretation. Frieser does not present a sequence of events in Nemmersdorf that deviates from Fisch's reconstruction. He does, however, relate the events to war crimes that Soviet soldiers would have committed across East Prussia, possibly with the approval of the army command. For him, the Nemmersdorf massacre represented a brief motivational boost for the German soldiers, with which Stalin temporarily stabilized Hitler's rule and thus delayed his overthrow. Ian Kershaw describes the Nemmersdorf massacre in his monograph on the defeat of the Third Reich, primarily on the basis of contemporary military reports , Fisch's 1997 book and Theodor Schierer's report on the expulsion of Germans from the eastern regions in the 1950s, and the number of victims is similar to Fisch. He cautiously agrees with Frieser's criticism of Fisch's book that he portrayed the Soviet soldiers too positively in some places. The events in Nemmersdorf, according to Kershaw, are still unclear and difficult to reconstruct in view of the amalgamation of authentic reports with contemporary propaganda and transfiguration in post-war Germany. The resulting image of the Nemmersdorf massacre was said to have been much more effective in its consequences than a factual analysis of the events.

In historical research, the massacre is now considered a war crime by the Soviet soldiers. In Germany it is interpreted as a portent for the crimes that they committed on their further advance, namely the mass rapes of 1945.

supporting documents

Used literature

  • Frank Bajohr , Dieter Pohl : The Holocaust as an open secret: the Germans, the Nazi leadership and the Allies . Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-406-54978-6 .
  • Bernhard Fisch : Nemmersdorf, October 1944. What actually happened in East Prussia . edition ost, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-932180-26-7 .
  • Bernhard Fisch: What did the eyewitnesses really see? Experience report on the sources of the events in the East Prussian Nemmersdorf on October 21 and 22, 1944 . In: Bulletin for Fascism and World War Research . tape 12 , 1999, p. 30-65 .
  • Bernhard Fisch: Nemmersdorf 1944 - still unexplained . In: Gerd Ueberschär (Hrsg.): Places of horror: Crimes in the Second World War . Primus, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-89678-232-0 , p. 155-167 .
  • Bernhard Fisch: Nemmersdorf in October 1944 . In: Elke Schersjanoi (Ed.): Red Army soldiers write from Germany. Letters from the Front (1945) and historical analyzes . KG Sauer, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-598-11656-X , p. 287-304 .
  • Bernhard Fisch: Nemmersdorf 1944 - a so far unknown timely testimony . In: Journal for East Central Europe Research . tape 56 (1) , 2007, pp. 105-114 .
  • Karl-Heinz Frieser : The successful defensive battles of Army Group Middle in autumn 1944 . In: Karl-Heinz Frieser (Ed.): The German Reich and the Second World War . Volume 8: The Eastern Front 1943/44. The war in the east and on the secondary fronts. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-421-06235-2 , pp. 619-622 .
  • Rudolf Grenz : City and District of Gumbinnen. An East Prussian documentation . District community Gumbinnen in the Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen e. V., Marburg / Lahn 1971.
  • Hans Goldenbaum: Not a perpetrator, but a victim? Ilja Ehrenburg and the Nemmersdorf case in the collective memory of the Germans . In: Halle contributions to contemporary history . tape 17 , 2007, p. 7-38 .
  • Eva Hahn , Hans-Henning Hahn : The expulsion in German memory: Legends, myths, history . Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-77044-8 .
  • Ian Kershaw : The end. Fight until the end, Nazi Germany until 1944/45 . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-421-05807-2 , pp. 166-182 .
  • Alexander Mikaberidze (Ed.): Atrocities, Massacres, and War Crimes. To Encyclopedia . 2013, ISBN 978-1-59884-925-7 .
  • Henning Köhler : Germany on the way to itself. A story of the century . Hohenheim, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-89850-057-8 .
  • Alfred M. de Zayas : The Anglo-Americans and the expulsion of the Germans . Ullstein, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-548-33206-4 .

Web links

Commons : Nemmersdorf massacre  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fisch 1997, p. 8.
  2. ↑ Fisch 1997, p. 9.
  3. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 104-118.
  4. ↑ Fisch 1997, p. 79.
  5. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 119-120.
  6. ↑ a b Fisch 1997, p. 155.
  7. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 33-41.
  8. ↑ Fisch 1997, p. 169.
  9. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 121-123.
  10. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 121-124.
  11. ↑ Fisch 2003, pp. 156–157.
  12. ↑ Fisch 1997, p. 125.
  13. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 124-125.
  14. ↑ Fisch 2003, pp. 159-160.
  15. ↑ Fisch 2007, pp. 108-109.
  16. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 124-126.
  17. ↑ a b Fisch 2003, pp. 159–161.
  18. ↑ Fisch 1997, p. 126.
  19. ↑ Fisch 2003, pp. 158–165.
  20. ↑ Fisch 1997, p. 132.
  21. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 134-136.
  22. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 27-28.
  23. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 131-140.
  24. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 141-144.
  25. ↑ a b Fisch 2003, p. 165.
  26. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 144–152.
  27. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 155–159.
  28. ↑ Kershaw 2011, p. 175.
  29. ↑ Peter Longerich : “We didn't know anything about that!” The Germans and the persecution of the Jews 1933–1945 . Siedler, Munich 2006, p. 310.
  30. ↑ Fisch 1997, p. 150.
  31. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 162-163.
  32. ↑ Grenz 1971, p. 635.
  33. ↑ de Zayas 1996, p. 97.
  34. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 160-172.
  35. ↑ a b Hahn & Hahn 2010, p. 64.
  36. ↑ Fisch 1997, p. 172.
  37. ↑ Fisch 1997, pp. 171-172.
  38. ↑ Goldenbaum 2007, p. 35.
  39. ↑ Hahn & Hahn 2010, pp. 55–56.
  40. ↑ Frieser 2007, pp. 620–621.
  41. ↑ Kershaw 2011, pp. 168-172, 578-159.
  42. ↑ Bajohr & Pohl 2006, p. 122.
  43. ↑ Mikaberidze 2013, p. 752.
  44. ↑ Köhler 2002, p. 432.
  45. ↑ Hubertus Knabe : Day of Liberation? The end of the war in East Germany . Propylaea, Berlin 2005, p. 39 f .; Dittmar Dahlmann : The Red Army and the “Great Patriotic War” . In: Manuel Becker (ed.): The military resistance against Hitler in the light of new controversies. XXI. Königswinter Conference from 22.-24. February 2008 . LIT, Münster 2008, p. 130.
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Coordinates: 54 ° 31 '  N , 22 ° 4'  E