Wounded and refugee transports across the Baltic Sea in 1945

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After the Soviet troops surrounded East Prussia at the beginning of 1945 , many people decided to flee across the Baltic Sea and tried to reach one of the ports between Hela and Memel in order to get on board a ship. The number of people who set off for the West as the Red Army advanced is estimated at 5 million. There is different information about the number of people who fled across the Baltic Sea to the west. The number of 2.5 million that was rumored in the former “ Albatros ” memorial in Damp until 1999, for example , is now considered an inflated estimate. A plaque in the Laboe Naval Memorial speaks of "hundreds of thousands". The evacuation of the civilian refugees was organized by the Navy and carried out in parallel with the evacuation of the wounded soldiers of the Wehrmacht units deployed in East Prussia and the Baltic States.

Start of the transports

The evacuation began with the relocation of the 2nd submarine training division (2nd ULD) from Gotenhafen to Schleswig-Holstein . This action was announced on January 23 by Karl Dönitz and by the commanding admiral of the submarines, Hans-Georg von Friedeburg , with the instruction to embark personnel, cadets and material ( company Hannibal ) on the residential ship of the 2nd ULD, the Wilhelm Gustloff , initiated.

In addition to the naval personnel and their relatives, refugees were taken on board. The civil commander of the Wilhelm Gustloff was assigned the commander of the II division of the 2nd ULD, Corvette Captain Wilhelm Zahn, as military commander. Both men survived the sinking of the ship by a Soviet submarine, which killed several thousand people on January 30th. Information about the people on the Wilhelm Gustloff at this point in time vary as well as information about the number of victims.

Until the end of January, the Navy coordinated the transport of a total of 250,000 people on ships of the war and merchant navy from Danzig , Elbing , Gotenhafen , Hela , Königsberg , Libau , Memel , Pillau and Swinoujscie . The loss of a total of twelve ships as part of these transports cost the lives of 12,600 people.

Coordination by the Navy

East Prussian Refugees in the Port of Pillau (January 26, 1945)

In the second half of February, the Wehrmacht succeeded in breaking the siege of Königsberg by the Red Army. As a result, refugees again streamed from the city to the surrounding ports of Samland , primarily Pillau. The “Sea Transports” (SeeTra) department of the Kriegsmarine, under the direction of Rear Admiral Conrad Engelhardt , ensured the removal as far as possible, but could not transport more than 5,000 people a day due to a lack of ships - and not even to Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark or Mecklenburg, but only to Gotenhafen or to Danzig near the front. When this city was finally captured by the Red Army on March 23, ships were available for removal, but were not used due to a lack of fuel and had to be shut down. Existing fuel, however, was kept for the submarines and other units of the Navy.

End of the transports

At the beginning of April there were still around 400,000 civilians in the last regions held by the Wehrmacht, most of them in Pillau. On April 6, the Navy defined the transport key as follows: 80% of the capacity should be available for transporting the wounded and other military purposes and 20% for civilians. After Königsberg's surrender on April 9, the latter portion was increased to 40%. Furthermore, the transports were essentially only a shuttle service to Hela, not to the safe west. With the conquest of Samland by the Red Army on April 25, the transports from Pillau came to an end.

In view of the 250,000 people who were on Hela and in the Vistula estuary at the end of April, Karl Dönitz made his first public statement on how to deal with the refugee situation. At the beginning of May, the last Reich government and Dönitz withdrew to the Mürwik special area in Flensburg. The unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht finally took place on May 8th. The Dönitz government was not arrested until May 23, 1945.

Evaluation and Dönitz reception

Karl Dönitz repeatedly stated in numerous post-war publications and other statements that his main focus in the last months of the war was on the removal of the refugees. This claim remained unchallenged for a long time, the East Prussian Landsmannschaft awarded him their Prussian shield and the name “Savior of Millions” became established for the former Commander-in-Chief of the Navy .

Today it is certain that the focus of Dönitz's thoughts and actions in the last months of the war with regard to ship movements in the Baltic Sea was the guarantee of German maritime sovereignty and supplies for the armed forces fighting in the east. The Kriegsmarine supplied the encircled areas with soldiers, ammunition and material until May and transported a total of half a million wounded on the way back. There were also war materials and weapons in, by the trench warfare could no longer be used embossed, shrinking boilers.

Doenitz only tolerated taking civilians along - and only insofar as the military requirements permitted it. On May 1, 1945, in a radio speech after Hitler's death, he proclaimed the continuation of the fighting with the aim of “saving German people from annihilation by Bolshevism”. It was not until a few days later, on May 6, that Dönitz released the fuel reserves of the submarines that had been withheld until then for the fueling of the refugee ships.

Remembering and commemorating

The Albatross on Damp Beach (2015)

In December 1980 the German Navy Federation donated the " Albatros Memorial Site - Rescue by Sea " in the Baltic Sea resort of Damp with a budget of 250,000 DM , which was inaugurated in May 1983 by Henning Schwarz , the deputy prime minister of Schleswig-Holstein . On this occasion he quoted a text from Dönitz's memoirs, which in turn revealed that the former Commander-in-Chief of the Navy had placed particular emphasis on the transport of refugees. On board the former refugee ship Albatros , photos and memorabilia, videos and eyewitness reports were presented.

In the following years, former refugees met several times in Damp for memorial events. The memorial was closed in 2000. After that, the Albatros housed a natural history exhibition for a few years and now serves as a viewing platform for the German Life Saving Society .

Web links

literature

  • Fritz Brustat-Naval: Rescue company. Gustav Lübbe Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach 1970, ISBN 3-404-65040-9 .
  • Heinrich Schwendemann : “Send ships!” In: Die Zeit , No. 3/2005 of January 13, 2005, p. 38 ( also online ; subtitle: When the Red Army overran East Prussia in January 1945, hundreds of thousands flee towards the coast. But many Refugees wait in vain for the great evacuation by sea - instead, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz is fighting for the “final victory.” And the Holocaust continues. )

Remarks

  1. ↑ Of the 5,384 ( Jürgen Rohwer , Allied Submarine Attacks of World War Two , Naval Institute Press Annapolis, 1997, p 97) to 10,582 ( Heinz Schön , The tragedy of the refugee ships: Sunk in the Baltic 1944-45 , Motorbuch 2004 S 244) People on board are said to have survived between 645 (Rohwer, 1997) and 1,236 (Schön, 2004).
  2. ↑ The Albatros is the sister ship of the Alexandra , a steamship that is used as a ferry on the Flensburg Fjord .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Military History Research Office (ed.): The German Reich and the Second World War. Vol. 10: The collapse of the German Empire in 1945. Half- vol . 1: The military overthrow of the Wehrmacht. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Munich 2008, p. 269 (footnote).
  2. ↑ Chronicle of the year 1945
  3. ↑ Schwendemann, p. 4.
  4. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legend and reality. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-77027-1 , p. 133.
  5. ^ Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legend and reality. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-77027-1 , pp. 135-136.
  6. ^ Information from the Federal Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe