'Aussie Rick'’s Comments (group member since Jun 12, 2009)

'Aussie Rick'’s comments from the THE WORLD WAR TWO GROUP group.

"Opening the Gates of Hell: Operation Barbarossa, June–July 1941" - The German invasion has begun, and this incident took place near Deutsche Przemysl:

"And on the very end of the German line, a small group of pioneers moved across the San unnoticed on three inflatable sacks to begin scouting the outposts of the Molotov Line on the western edge of the city. They found the 1,150ft-high Tartar's Hill, which dominated the valley, unoccupied, and seized three prisoners, including an artillery officer. 'Why didn't you shoot?' his interrogator asked. 'We didn't receive any orders to do so,' he said with a laugh, threw himself on the grass and asked for a cigarette."

Opening the Gates of Hell: Operation Barbarossa, June–July 1941 by Richard Hargreaves

Sounds like a book to keep an eye-out for! Thanks for providing those details Jerome.

About to head over for my morning coffee and I am going to start reading this new book on my Kindle; "Opening the Gates of Hell: Operation Barbarossa, June–July 1941" by Richard Hargreaves.

Opening the Gates of Hell: Operation Barbarossa, June–July 1941 by Richard Hargreaves

I'm just looking forward to the day that I can start unpacking my books and checking to make sure they survived the journey in good condition :)

Much smaller Liam, downsized from a 4-bedroom house with garage office/den to a 2 bedroom with a media (library) room apartment.

My furniture was finally delivered yesterday so I might be a bit quiet for a few days to a week as we slowly unpack. My books will have to stay boxed up until I can get some bookshelves built but I have started the process with getting a few spaces measured up and I'm just waiting for the quote to arrive.

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - On the fate of the civilian population under Russian occupation:

" ... the Yalta Conference considered the issue of reparations for losses suffered by the Soviet Union during the war. The conference participants agreed to “reparations in kind” on the last day of the conference and Stalin interpreted this agreement as giving him carte blanche to deport as many surviving Germans as he wished to forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. As noted above, Stalin did not wait for a final go-ahead from the United Kingdom and the United States at the Potsdam Conference to start the deportations. Estimates vary as to the number of German slave workers sent to the Soviet Union. At least fourty-four thousand were deported from East Prussia alone between January and April 1945, while estimates of the total number of German civilians transported to Soviet work camps from all the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse range from 200,000 to 400,000."

The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province by Peter B. Clark

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province":

"Of the roughly sixty thousand Jewish and other inmates in concentration camps in East Prussia at the beginning of 1945, only fifteen hundred survived, according to documents at the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem: the handful of survivors at Palmnicken; the five hundred in Camp Praust near Danzig, who were freed by the Red Army on March 23; and about one thousand, whom Rudolf Strücker, a German naval officer, transported in late April to freedom in Neustadt on the north coast of Germany (see below). All the others died in attempts to flee, in the massacre in Palmnicken, on the Cap Arcona and other ships, and on the forced marches to the west."

Beata wrote: "Hi! I'm new to the group. I love WWII fiction and nonfiction. The topics I want to read more about include the Eastern Front, operation Tempest, the Battle of Britain, American bombers in Europe, a..."

Hi Beata, and welcome to the group.

Check out this thread on books covering the Eastern Front:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - From the chapter on the Massacre at Palmnicken:

Once the Volkssturm unit had departed from Palmnicken on January 30, the fate of the survivors of the march was again in the hands of the SS and their collaborators. One was the mayor, Kurt Friedrichs, who ordered twelve armed members of the Hitler Youth (Martin Bergau among them) to his office in the town hall. There he gave them a considerable amount of brandy to drink and then introduced them to two low-level SS men with an ice-cold demeanor whom they were to assist. Friedrichs told them to maintain absolute secrecy when they had finished the task that the SS would explain. It was already dark when they left the town hall and made their way out of town to the run-down buildings that were part of the long-abandoned Anna Grube amber mine. Martin Bergau describes what happened next:

"I noticed a group of forty to fifty women and girls. They were Jews who had been apprehended. A diffuse light source barely illuminated the ghostly scene. The women had to stand in two rows, and we were ordered by the SS men to escort them…. When the formation was ready, two women were led by two SS men to the back of the building. Shortly after, the reports of two pistol shots were heard. This was the sign for two more SS executioners to lead the next two victims in the twilight around the building, and shortly thereafter pistol shots again blasted the air. I had to position myself near the end of the long row…. A woman turned to me and in good German begged me to let her advance two places in the line. She wanted to go the last walk together with her daughter. In a voice made nearly inaudible by tears, I granted the wish of this brave woman…. Then I led a mother whom I will never forget to her daughter."

The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province by Peter B. Clark

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - The author provided a chapter on an incident known as the Massacre at Palmnicken:

https://www.liberationroute.com/pois/...

https://jewsineastprussia.de/massacre...

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - More on Operation Hannibal:

"Shortly after noon on February 9, the Steuben departed from Pillau and steered toward Hela to meet its escort vessels, the torpedo boat T-36 (which had rescued hundreds of survivors from the Gustloff ) and the torpedo recovery boat TF-1. Around midnight the one-time luxury liner and its escorts reached the vicinity of the sinking of the Gustloff ten days earlier. Undetected by the escort vessels, none other than Commander Marinesko in the S-13 lay in waiting. At 12.52 a.m. on February 10 he gave the order to fire two torpedoes from the stern tubes of the S-13. The two torpedoes hit their target, one near the bow and the other amidships, and the Steuben immediately began to sink bow first. It took only thirty-three minutes for the ship to slip beneath the waves, with loss of life of 3,608 and 659 survivors. Pastor Jänicke’s church friends all drowned, and when he later learned of their fate, he felt ashamed of feeling bitter when they parted company in Pillau as they headed for the presumed safety of the west. Notwithstanding these losses, Operation Hannibal was a huge success. By one estimate some 2.5 million people were evacuated in the last months of the war, mostly German civilians who were escaping the advancing Red Army. Historian Philip Karl Lundberg has described this evacuation effort as the most successful rescue by sea in modern history. This rescue operation exceeded by far the better-known rescue of more than 300,000 British troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in May and June of 1940."

The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province by Peter B. Clark

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - Operation Hannibal was the evacuation of German soldiers and civilians from the Baltic region:

"The Gustloff was one of many ships carrying German refugees that were sunk with considerable loss of life in the waning months of World War II. Some twenty-five other vessels met the same fate, with casualties totaling roughly forty thousand (refugees, soldiers, and sailors), in the huge evacuation operation in the Baltic from January to May 1945 called Operation Hannibal. The loss of those on board the Gustloff comprised almost one-quarter of the total. The sinking of the freighter Goya, which was hit by torpedoes at 11:58 p.m. on April 16, 1945, shortly after taking on thousands of refugees at the port of Hela, resulted in the second-highest number of deaths. Two torpedoes hit the ship—one amidships and one astern—and caused such gaping holes in the ship’s hull that it broke in half and sank within four minutes, with a loss of life of around seven thousand and only 147 survivors."

Operation Hannibal:
https://the-past.com/feature/germanys...

Jerome wrote: "A November release:

by Patrick G. Eriksson
Description:
The title of this book, 'Eagle Day..."

Should be a good one to keep an eye-out for!

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - On the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff:

"The most up-to-date estimates indicate that 1,252 of the 10,595 passengers and crew on the Gustloff were rescued after she was torpedoed: 564 by the T-36, 472 by the Löwe, and 216 by seven other ships that came to the scene of the catastrophe. The last survivor to be rescued was an eighteen-month-old boy, who was found shortly after 5:00 a.m. by the crew of the old, rusty patrol boat VP-1703. He had been wrapped in a blanket and was the only one still alive in a lifeboat containing the frozen bodies of four passengers (a man, a woman, and two older children) who had succumbed to the effects of exposure to the bitter cold (0°F, –18°C). The little boy was adopted by his rescuer, Petty Officer Werner Fisch, whose wife was incapable of having children."

The Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff:
https://the-past.com/feature/the-wors...

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - On the seaborne evacuations from East Prussia:

" ... the refugees crammed the German ports on the Baltic hoping that a ship would arrive soon to transport them to the relative safety of the coast of Schleswig-Holstein in north-central Germany. Most in fact made the trip successfully to western Germany or Denmark via this sea route, but thousands met a watery grave. Almost one-quarter of the forty thousand Germans who lost their lives in the Baltic were on the Wilhelm Gustloff when it was torpedoed at 9:15 p.m. on January 30, 1945, some fifty miles (80 kilometers) off the coast of Pomerania. It was by far the worst catastrophe involving a single ship in maritime history: 9,343 people died, more than eight thousand of them refugees, over half of whom were children."

The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province by Peter B. Clark

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - On the Russians and how they treated civilians on their advance into Germany:

"A Hungarian woman, a victim of the brutality of both the Germans and the Russians, compared them as follows: The Germans returned, then the Russians came again. I was always more afraid of the Germans. When they said there would be an execution, then you could be certain they would execute someone. The fear began with the Gestapo, and it was regressive. The persecution of the Jews intensified it. With the Russians, you could never know anything, never figure out anything. It was amazing that something actually developed from this lack of organization. When they left, they never said good-bye; they simply vanished. When they returned, they greeted us with tremendous joy, took us into their laps, tossed us into the air, as if they were meeting their dearest relatives. They were warmhearted but unusually impulsive. Another time—I no longer know what happened—they injured me and then carried me to the Russian doctor in their arms. He bandaged me, petted me, and took me to the military dining hall for dinner…. That is what the Russians were like. They hit me with one hand, petted me with the other. Sometimes they came to grips over me: one wanted to spare me, the other to rape me, one to beat me, the other to heal me. One to take something from me, the other to give me something."

The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province by Peter B. Clark

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - On the Russians entry into East Prussia:

"Soviet soldiers could not understand why the Germans, who had so much, would want to invade their country and take and destroy what little they had. Vasily Grossman wrote: It was in Germany…that our soldiers really started to ask themselves why did the Germans attack us so suddenly? Why did the Germans need this terrible and unfair war? Millions of our men have now seen the rich farms in East Prussia, the highly organized agriculture, the concrete sheds for livestock, spacious rooms, carpets, wardrobes full of clothes. Millions of our soldiers have seen the well-built roads running from one village to another and German autobahns…. Our soldiers have seen the two-storey suburban houses with electricity, gas, bathrooms, and beautifully tended gardens. Our people have seen the villas of the rich bourgeoisie in Berlin, the unbelievable luxury of castles, estates, and mansions. And thousands of soldiers repeat these angry questions when they look around them in Germany: “But why did they come to us? What did they want?”

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - Fleeing the advancing Russian juggernaut:

"Refugees were still trying to escape the advancing Red Army and those able to reach Schiewenhorst (in the middle of the last remaining German bridgehead on the Baltic on both sides of the Vistula) were taken by boats of all kinds across the Bay of Danzig to Hela. There, military personnel worked feverishly to house and feed thousands of refugees and troops awaiting evacuation to the west by ship. The scale of this desperate effort to escape the Russians can be seen in the fact that on April 15 alone, eighteen thousand wounded soldiers, thirty-three thousand refugees, and eight thousand members of the Volkssturm arrived at Hela. By midnight on May 8, 1945, when Germany capitulated to the Allies, nearly all the remaining refugees had been evacuated. But thousands of German troops remained in Hela after the last German ships had departed and soon became Russian prisoners of war. It has been estimated that roughly 2.5 million German civilians and soldiers were evacuated by ship from East Prussia, Danzig, and West Prussia between the second half of January and May 8, 1945. Through this incredible effort, over a million East Prussians were able to flee from the Soviet invasion and occupation that was to follow."

The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province by Peter B. Clark

"The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province" - An interesting incident involving a fleeing Nazi party member:

"Another party functionary who escaped in similar fashion, Gauleiter Albert Forster, had been in charge of the Danzig - West Prussia region. On March 27, two torpedo boats, the T23 and the T28, were protecting the warship Lützow in the waters near Danzig when their crews noticed a ferry overcrowded with refugees lying dead in the water, having been hit by an attacking Soviet fighter plane. At the same time, a luxury steamer was approaching at high speed and was clearly paying no heed to the ferry’s desperate situation. Enraged, Captain Weilig of the T23 contacted the steamer by radio and ordered it to take the ferry in tow to the relative safety of Hela. From the steamer came an immediate and authoritarian reply: “Here on board is Gauleiter Forster. You have no business giving us orders!” In response, both torpedo boats rapidly approached the steamer and trained their guns on it. In the meantime, the two commanders had received authorization from Vice Admiral Thiele to use force if necessary to compel the steamer to take the ferry in tow. Before Captain Weilig could convey this message, Gauleiter Forster himself appeared on the steamer’s deck and shouted “Here speaks Gauleiter Forster of Danzig! I will call you to account for this!” Captain Weilig retorted, “And here speaks Lieutenant Captain Weilig. This is an order: Arrange promptly for your steamer to take the ferry in tow. Otherwise you will be shot at!” The order was obeyed and the steamer took the ferry in tow. After the war, Forster escaped detection for over a year near Oldenburg, in northern Germany, until he was arrested by the British authorities in Hamburg and handed over to the Polish authorities on August 12, 1946. He was sentenced to death on April 29, 1948, and was executed in Warsaw on February 28, 1952."