Explosions and fear of air raids sometimes caused the refugees to take cover where they could, in the fields away from the road. Women fell on their knees to pray. It was a race against time as main highways became cut off by Soviet troops. Abandoned wagons and household goods littered the roadside. The lucky ones, after an anxiety-ridden wait on the shores, finally crammed into a fleet of little boats that ferried them, though without their livestock and most of their possessions, to temporary safety over the abutting saltwater inlet, the Kurisches Haff, to improvised billets in parts of East Prussia. Some sought to swim across, and were drowned. The last most of those fleeing saw of Memel was a red glow in the night sky. An estimated third of the population fell into Soviet hands. There were stories of plunder, rape and murder by Red Army soldiers.49
The fate of Memel marked the start of more than two weeks of dread and horror for the population close to the East Prussian border. Worse was yet to come. As General Guderian later commented, ‘what happened in East Prussia was an indication to the inhabitants of the rest of Germany of their fate in the event of a Russian victory.’50
On 16 October, the Red Army began its assault on East Prussia itself amid a barrage of artillery fire over a 40-kilometre stretch of the front and intensive air raids on border towns. There was as good as no defence offered by the Luftwaffe, and the German 4th Army, severely weakened in the collapse of Army Group Centre in the summer, was forced to pull back westwards. On 18 October Soviet troops advanced across the German frontier. Within three days they had penetrated German lines and forced their way some 60 kilometres into the Reich across a front of around 150 kilometres. The border towns of Eydtkau, Ebenrode and Goldap fell into Soviet hands, while Gumbinnen and Angerapp narrowly escaped that fate, though the former was heavily damaged through air attacks and Soviet troops reached the outskirts. The Soviets reached as far as the village of Nemmersdorf in the early morning of 21 October where, despite their finding a key bridge over the river Angerapp intact, the offensive halted.
The leadership of Army Group Centre had expected that the Soviet attack, when it came, would be the prelude to a huge offensive that might break through into Germany’s heartlands. As it was, the Soviets’ pause in Nemmersdorf gave the 4th Army the opportunity to regroup, muster its strength and, with panzer reinforcements, attempt a daring and successful encirclement manoeuvre against superior forces that took the attackers completely by surprise and inflicted heavy losses. Soviet commanders, impressed by the Wehrmacht’s counter-offensive, immediately went on the defensive and pulled back their troops. By 27 October their offensive was abandoned. On 3 November German troops freed Goldap—reduced to ruins and plundered by Red Army soldiers—and two days later the ‘first battle of East Prussia’ was over, at a cost of extremely high losses on both sides. A highly damaging Soviet breakthrough to the East Prussian capital of Königsberg had been prevented. German soldiers—especially those who came from the eastern regions—despite often limited training and inadequate weaponry, had fought furiously to fend off the invaders. Even so, a border strip of East Prussia, 100 kilometres broad and up to 27 deep, stayed in Soviet occupation. The front in this area stayed stable until January.51 But East Prussians were from now on a highly endangered species.
The reason why the Soviet attack had halted after occupying a good position on reaching Nemmersdorf became plain when German troops were able to retake the village on 23 October, barely forty-eight hours after it had fallen to the Red Army. What the German soldiers found awaiting them was a scene of horror. The name of Nemmersdorf soon became familiar to most Germans. It told them what they might expect if the Red Army were to conquer the Reich.
The fate that would overtake Nemmersdorf and the inhabitants of neighbouring districts was compounded by the lamentable failure of the Nazi authorities—repeated with even graver consequences a few months later—to evacuate the population in good time.52 Evacuation in the whole imperilled area was chaotic. Koch was the paradigm example of power draining from the centre to the provincial Party chieftains, a development that would intensify generally in early 1945. Abetted by his deputy, Paul Dargel, he had complete control over evacuation measures. Supported by Hitler, Koch refused to countenance early evacuation because of the fears that it would begin a stampede out of the province, and would send defeatist signals to the rest of the Reich. The population were to remain as long as possible as a sign of unwavering morale and determination. The Wehrmacht’s own wishes to have the area cleared were ignored.53 The Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, Colonel-General Reinhardt, was himself reduced to paroxysms of futile rage at Koch’s high-handed behaviour in the region.54 When evacuation orders were finally given, they were predictably chaotic in their execution. Dargel and other Party functionaries could not be located for hours. A District Leader briefly emerged, only to disappear into a local pub and drink himself into a stupor. A lorry commandeered to help with the evacuation did not turn up; it had allegedly been sequestered by a Party office to carry off stores of food and drink. At the most critical time, Party functionaries—the only people who could give orders—had failed miserably in their duties.55
Nemmersdorf, the most westerly point of the Soviet incursion, was heavily involved in the belated, chaotic evacuation. As Soviet troops approached, inhabitants of nearby towns and villages fled in panic, and at the last minute. Horse-drawn covered wagons from all around queued to cross Nemmersdorf’s crucial bridge. People took what few possessions they could and fled for their lives. Helped by the cover of thick autumnal mists, most in fact managed to get across the bridge to safety further westwards even in the final hours before the Red Army arrived. But for some, inhabitants both of Nemmersdorf and of other nearby townships, it was too late. They woke in the early hours of 21 October to find Soviet soldiers already in their villages.56
The battle-hardened soldiers of the Red Army had fought their way westwards out of their own country, through Poland and now, for the first time, into the country of the hated enemy. As they had advanced through wastelands of death and destruction, they had witnessed the legacy of the savage brutality of German conquest and subjugation and the scorched-earth devastation of a once imperious army in headlong retreat. They saw the unmistakable signs of the terrible suffering of their own people. Soviet propaganda directly encouraged drastic retribution. ‘Take merciless revenge on the fascist child murderers and executioners, pay them back for the blood and tears of Soviet mothers and children,’ ran one typical proclamation in October 1944.57 ‘Kill. There is nothing which the Germans aren’t guilty of’ was the exhortation of another.58 Reaching German soil, and encountering for the first time a civilian enemy population, pent-up hatreds exploded in violent revenge. As German troops moved into villages and townships retaken by the Wehrmacht after days of Soviet occupation, they came across the corpses of murdered civilians, grim indicators of the atrocities that had taken place. The worst had taken place in Nemmersdorf itself, which came to symbolize these early atrocities of the Red Army.