Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor Read Free Book Online

awareness. When I came to my senses, I heard children screaming and shots. Then everything went quiet.’ 12
    Gerda Meczulat’s would-be killer’s aim was faulty. That was why she survived and up to couple of dozen others did not.
    Within days of the massacre, fuelled by Goebbels’ press campaign, stories spread of women nailed naked to barn doors, of mass rapes and killings. Nemmersdorf became a symbol of ‘Bolshevik’ barbarism (never, of course, connected back to the routinely appalling behaviour of the worst of the German forces in occupied Russia).
    In fact, it seems that there is an element of truth in all these tales, but that – apparently like the photographs shown in the Nazi press – they were in fact collected from various atrocity sites and collated to suit the Nemmersdorf story upon which the regime had decided to concentrate. Five days later, a probably more reliable report by a Wehrmacht staff major, who led an official army investigation into all the atrocities committed on the Gumbinnen highway that day, noted that twenty-six corpses (thirteen women, eight men, five children) had been found at Nemmersdorf. Cause of death was mostly shots to the head and chest. Some of the small children had had their heads stove in with rifle butts. One woman’s breasts, it said, had been cut off after death (a detail mentioned nowhere else). There is no mention of rape in the report. However, in his description of thirteen more bodies (three men, four women, six children) found two kilometres further along the highway, where a small group of unlucky refugees had clearly been overtaken by Soviet troops, the major notes that ‘the nether parts of all the female corpses were exposed. In the case of three women, rape must be assumed.’ 13
    Whatever the full truth about Nemmersdorf – and even respectable sources continue to print wild exaggerations 14 – there can be no doubt that it was an inexcusable war crime, the first of many to be perpetrated by Soviet troops on German soil as the war ‘came home to the Reich’. It was certainly very different from the occupation of Roetgen the previous month.
    The martyrdom of Germany’s eastern provinces had begun.
     
    By the end of October 1944, harried by successful German counter-attacks, the Soviets had pulled back out of East Prussia. While Goebbels’ highlighting of the Nemmersdorf massacre had undoubtedly helped recruitment for the Volkssturm , it had unleashed something close to panic among civilians in the province itself. Even during the ensuing two months’ uneasy stalemate, and despite official discouragement, a steady stream of refugees began to head west, away from the Russians.
    Hitler himself headed west. On 21 November 1944, he left his long-time headquarters in East Prussia, the Wolfsschanze , from which he had directed much of the war against Russia, never to return. With the front line less than 100 kilometres away, the Wolfsschanze had become just too risky.
    All the same, the rapid collapse of the Eastern Front in the summer of 1944 had given way, at least temporarily, to a more stable situation. As the final winter of the war closed in, Russian advances became more piecemeal. The Red Army faced the task of consolidating its lines of reinforcement, supply and communication before the next big push.
    A similar standoff had been reached in the west. After the breakout from the beachhead in July 1944, the Anglo-American forces appeared to carry all before them. The initial crossing of the German border occurred a little over three months after D-Day. Paris and then Brussels fell. After 15 August, a second landing, Operation Dragoon, on the French Mediterranean coast, rapidly pushed the Germans out of southern and south-eastern France. The Germans lost many thousands of experienced troops killed, wounded and captured. They began to fall back in a state of some disorder. There was much talk of the war being over before the end of 1944, of the