From the series, “Corrections to the history of our Time –  “The Great Wendig”, Volume 2, page 228.   Published by Grabert Verlag, D-72006. Tübingen, PO.Box 1629, Germany

 

                                        

The Case of Nemmersdorf

 

Translated by Dagmar Brenne

 

This is the official name, which the Army-inquiry-office (WUST) had given the event, about which the American Alfred M. de Zayas (1) wrote as an example of the Allied troops infringements of international law: “On the 20/21 of October 1944 the first of the Soviet Army conquered the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf, south of Gumbinnen. A few days later German troops once again occupied the district. According to the reports of German soldiers, who arrived in Nemmersdorf, the inhabitants were for the most part heinously murdered.”

 

Nemmersdorf was the first German locality conquered by Soviet troops in WW2. The Russian soldier’s mob, stirred up by propaganda, raged in this village for the first time against the German civilian population, who were “liberated” of their lives in the most gruesome way.

 

Of the already mentioned German troops, who conquered Nemmersdorf back - being units of the Parachute-Regiment 16 (East) –, are detailed entries in the diaries of Regiment Commander Gerhart Schirmer, who later became a Bundeswehr-Major (2). Commander Schirmer writes that a regiment, being part of the tank-corps “Hermann Göring”, was given the order to conquer back the locality of Nemmersdorf. In his words: “After this we attacked. The Pak (Panzer-Abwehr-Kanonen [Tank defence canons]) were positioned, ready to shoot. We fought from house to house and reached the line Church-Angerappfluss at the bridge. We were helped by Stukas [dive fighters] (Rudel) - By evening we had Nemmersdorf in our possession. The picture which awaited our fighting troops was horrible. The women were nailed naked on the barn doors - like Jesus on the cross. They were terribly abused and mutilated, the children and men slain and shockingly mauled....I have seen it with my own eyes, shortly after the re-conquest of Nemmersdorf. It was horrific. Women and children, nailed to barn and other doors, dreadfully mutilated.”

 The Soviet Troups were really inflamed by Ehrenburg’s calls for murder.

  The Jew Ehrenburg, in the middle, with Soviet soldiers during WWII.  Ehrenburg called on all Soviet soldiers to kill Germans.

Independent from former Major Schirmer's diary is another eyewitness report from Johann Walz, Hohenfels near Stockach, whose unit retreated after heavy fighting coming from Tilsit via Nemmersdorf. In the tumult of fighting he met up with his troop behind the village, only to be sent out immediately with a reconnaissance unit. From this event, while he was lying at the front next to a comrade he wrote that he himself made some terrible observations. “From afar we witnessed how the ghastly massacre took place in Nemmersdorf. There was terrible screaming by women and children and in the light of fires we could see how the drunken Russians killed children on wagon wheels, cut off breasts of women and nailed them to the barn doors. Others had their hands chopped off. It was the most terrible thing you can imagine, this massacre in Nemmersdorf...A short time afterwards the parachutist unit of lieutenant-colonel Schirmer arrived and drove the Russians away....I myself was then shot  in the lungs by a Russian sharpshooter.”

   Murdered children of Nemmersdorf, as German soldiers found them after the re-conquering in Autumn 1944 (German Federal Archives).

 

The behaviour of the Russian soldiers should not astonish anyone, when we consider the attitude of Stalin – good Uncle Joe to President Roosevelt – toward German women.

 

After the re-conquering of Nemmersdorf indescribable atrocities by the Soviets surfaced. (German Federal Archives)

  German soldier found in East Prussia

As in Nemmersdorf the dehumanized Sowiet Soldier’s mob raged also in other places, like in Metgethen near Koenigsberg.

Victim of Soviet cruelty in Eastern Prussia

After a conversation with Djilas, Stalin defended the right for rape on part of the Russian soldiers, and said to him: “You have thought the Red Army to be idealistic. It is not idealistic and indeed cannot be, even if it did not contain a certain percentage of criminals – we have opened the gates of the jails and sent them all into the army...No, the Red Army is not idealistic. The important thing is they fight the Germans - and they fight well, all other things are irrelevant (3).”

   More German children found in Eastern Preussia

Since the German Media- and Re-education Industry loves to talk of “German guilt and shame”, but seeks to minimize crimes perpetrated on Germans, a declaration by Alfred M. Zayas (4)  may be brought to mind in the following:

   Gerda Merczulat survived as the only one, heavily wounded, the massacre of Nemmersdorf. (Photo: ZDF) “when I gained consciousness I heard the children scream and rifle shots. Then it was still again.”

 

“The events in the village of Nemmersdorf on 20./21. October deserve our special attention, because 'Nemmersdorf' played an important role in the history of the German refugee movement and is, apart from Katyn, one of the best documented examples of horrendous Russian misdeeds in World War 2. For the farmers of East Prussia it became a synonym of unspeakable fear. Nemmersdorf was by no means the only place where the members of the Red Army committed heinous deeds, but what happened there speeded up the flight, not only in East Prussia, but also in Silesia and Pommerania....”

 

The murderous happenings are altogether documented: On the 5th July 1946, the former Chief-of-Staff of the Fourth Army in East Prussia, Major General Erich Dethleffsen: “When in October 1944 Russian forces broke through the German Front in the district of Gross Waltersdorf (South East of Gumbinnen) and briefly penetrated to Nemmersdorf, a considerable part of the civilian population in villages south of Gumbinnen were shot by Russian soldiers -accompanied by tortures, like nailing to  barn gates. Prior to that many of the women were raped...Also included in the carnage were approximately 50 French prisoners of war, shot by Russian soldiers. After about 48 hours the villages came again into German hands.

 

The interviews with surviving eyewitnesses, reports by physicians of the post-mortem inspections of the bodies of the deceased, as well as photographs of the bodies have been handed to me several days later.”

 

Another eyewitness gave the sworn evidence, which was later presented in Nuremberg by the defense as evidence material: “On the sides of the roads and in the court yards of the farms were great amounts of bodies of civilians lying around, who very obviously were not killed during the fighting by stray shots, but rather were murdered according to a pre-conceived plan. Among others, I saw numerous women, who, to judge by their disarrayed  and torn clothing, had been raped and were killed afterwards by a shot in the back of the neck and next to them were their dead children.”

 

Karl Potrek, a civilian from Königsberg, who was conscripted into the “Volkssturm” [Germany's last ditch defense in WW II]  and immediately sent to assist in the area of Gumbinnen- Nemmersdorf, reported later: “Behind this open space stands the large Inn 'Roter Krug'. Adjoining this Inn alongside the road was a barn. Nailed to each barn door was a woman, naked and in crucified position, nails driven through the hands.  Beside these we found in the living quarters 72 women in total, including children and an old man, 74 years of age, all dead, almost all murdered in the most bestial manner, except for a few who were shot through the neck.”

 

We close the “case of Nemmersdorf” with the thoughts of the Soviet officer Lew Kopelew (5), which explain to a certain extent the inhuman behaviour with the order to murder on part of Ilja Ehrenburg (6) with, “Kill, kill, kill....”. At the end of the chapter “In East Prussia” Kopelew wrote : ”...and all of us – Generals and officers alike – act according to Ehrenburg's recipe. What revenge do we teach: Throw German women on their backs, carry off suitcases, clothing. The Germans flee from us (to the English and Americans). And just imagine, what will happen later to our soldiers, who by the dozen fell upon one single woman? Who raped schoolgirls, who murdered old women? ...These are hundred thousands of criminals of future crimes, with cruel and audacious claims to be heroes. ”

 

   Rests of destroyed treks. “The Russian pilots had orders to shoot at every convoy of refugees, since ‘there could be soldiers suspected’ amongst them. (Heinz Schön).   

 

On the Soviet Terror against Germans the military historian Joachim Hoffmann writes in his standard work:

“Killing as the most fatal offense happened in manifold ways and manners. Refugee columns were run down by tanks or shot down. Men - but also many women after being raped -, shot, bashed, or stabbed to death by tank drivers jumping down and by foot soldiers. Everywhere civilians were murdered, in houses and on roadways, sometimes they were also burnt alive in buildings, forest houses, barns or sheds. Men, who wanted to protect their women or daughters from being raped, were equally killed alongside the women, who defended themselves against violent deeds. Constantly we hear reports of sadistic sexual murders and at times even of rapes of already dead murder victims.  In the course of a so-called “denazification” members of the NSDAP (National Socialist Worker’s Party)  and their different branches were shot or other “Fascists”, so for example rural farmer leaders, often public servants and office holders of the civilian administration,  and naturally members of the police, generally wearers of uniforms in the public service, no matter whether employed by Train, Postal, Fire Fighting, or Forestry Departments, as well as members of the Reich’s Workers Service or Organization Todt, beyond that very often so-called “Capitalists”, like proprietors of large farming estates, farmers, owners of shops, proprietors of houses, as well as anyone, like the Hitler youth, who were viewed in any manner as potential “guerrillas”, and very often inhabitants of houses,  where German soldiers or weapons were found. Formal basis was the issued order Br 0016 of the NKWD of 16th January 1945 by the People’s Commissar for Internal Matters of the USSR, Berija. The Soviets shot or slew during the deportation of the “mobilized Germans” (mobilizovannych nemcev) all those who couldn’t keep up due to lack of strength, and in the torture dungeons of the NKWD many of the interrogated died through inhuman torture. At times, as the examples of Nemmersdorf 1944 and Metgethen 1945 proved, the whole population of whole villages, men, women, and children were simply only for the reason massacred because they were Germans. For the rampant carrying-ons of the stirred up Soviet soldiers there was no established rule.” (7)  

One has to call it the afterwit of world history that just this Soviet Union was sitting next to the prosecutor at the so-called “IMT”, the revenge tribunal at Nuremberg, instead of having been charged.

  

 That Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels blew up the “rage of the Soviet beasts” in Nemmersdorf and in the surrounding villages, is undisputable. To allege that Nemmersdorf was the work of the Reich propaganda, is a lunatic step which Guido Knopp dared none the less. In his serial “ZDF-History” on the 25th November 2001 he opined: “Statements by contemporary witnesses give rise to the notion that the NS-Propaganda not only helped to instrument those crimes, but also partly staged them.”

 

Helmut Hoffmann, allegedly one of the first soldiers on site, was asked to act as contemporary witness: “When there was written that women had been crucified or nailed (to doors) – that’s utter nonsense. Neither was there a woman raped. As they were lying there…that was done afterwards. They had lifted their clothing and also pulled them down.” 

 

Annotations

1. Alfred M. de Zayas, “The Wehrmacht-Inquisitional Unit – Unpublished records of violations of the Laws of Nations by the Allieds in World War 2” Universitas, Munich 1980, page 39.

2. The records are with the publisher.

3. Milovan Djilas, “Talks with Stalin”, S. Fischer, Frankfurt/Main 1962, page 142.

4. Alfred M. de Zayas, “The Anglo-American and the Expulsion of the Germans”, C.H. Beck, Munich 1977, pages 80 and following.

5. Lew Kopelew, “Safekeeping for all times”. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1976, page 114.

6. Ilja Ehrenburg, Soviet writer and propagandists, born 1891 in Kiev, died 1976 in New Jerusalem (near Moscow), born to a Jewish family, fled to Paris 1909,  then 1918 to the Soviet Union, was then in Paris, Berlin, participated in the Spanish Civil War, was propagandistic trailblazer of the crimes committed by the Red Army in WW2 in Moscow.

7. Joachim Hoffmann, “Stalin’s War of Extermination 1941-1945”, Publishers for Military Science, Munich 1995, page 252 f. 2002 was the video published “Nemmersdorf 1944 – the Truth about a Soviet War Crime”. Eyewitnesses in: “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)”, 3rd December 2001.

 

Nemmersdorf, 20. October 1944
 On October 20, 1944 did Soviet troops set foot on German land for the first time during WWII.   The massacre carried out by the Soviets came to knowledge of the world as German troops on November 5, 1944 recaptured.  The soldier Manfred Hoflehner was the officer that came to Nennersdorf.  Here is what he saw: (in German).


http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=PL&hl=pl&v=nRnPCEUcOqE&feature=related  

 

Comment by RJH:

1. The hangings like on the Cross of women in Nemmersdorf shows very clearly that there were Jews amongst the Soviet soldiers, for only Jews would nail Christians like on a cross.

2. Berija was a Jew.