The Sad Story of East Prussia
"Kill!Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair!
Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty.
Kill! As you storm forward. Kill! You gallant soldiers of the Red army." Ilya Ehrenburg
Murder by Drowning
When, in the winter of 1945, East Prussia was cut off from the west, the only possibility for many to
leave was from the small port of Pillau and over the Baltic Sea toward the west.
"The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word German is for us the worst imaginable curse and
strikes us to the quick. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a
day,you have wasted that day....for us there is nothing more joyful than a heap of German corpses."
IIya Ehrenburg.
Whole families fell into the sea. Those who tried an escape on the roads witnessed more scenes of
terror. Carts of fleeing people crushed and mowed over by advancing Russian tanks and dead
humans and animals lined the overflowing roads. Stunned children and frantic mothers screaming and
crying stretched through mile after mile of human misery. Unprepared for the 60 degrees below zero
wind chill and deep snow, some turned back home in despair. Blazing farms lit up the horizon,
burned by the Red Army or set on fire by their hopeless owners who then committed suicide.
A Civilian Maritime Disaster with no Movie
Wilhelm Gustloff was a 25,000-ton passenger liner. On January 30,
1945, when it steamed out of Gotenhafen it carried a crew of 1,100
officers and men, 73 critically wounded soldiers, 373 young
women of the Women's Naval Auxiliary and more than 6,000
desperate refugees, most of them women and children who had
reached the safety of the ship after grueling personal ordeals.
The Gustloff was 13 miles off the coast of Pomerania when 3 torpedoes from a Soviet sub under the
command of Captain A.I. Marinesko, struck the ship. 90 minutes later it sank under the icy waves of
the Baltic. Barely 1,100 survived. Approximately 7,000 Germans died. A few days later, on February
10, Marinesko struck again and  sank the German hospital ship the General von Steuben carrying
3,500 wounded soldiers and another 1,000 refugees. Only 650 people survived.
Homicide by Incineration
By February of 1945, thousands upon thousands of panic stricken refugees who managed to survive
the grueling exodus from the eastern regions flooded into Dresden and other towns and cities seeking
shelter and help. On the 14th and 15th of February, Dresden was incinerated, and virtually every city
that refugees were known to have flocked to, from Kiel to Swinemünde, suffered from major
catastrophic Allied bombing attacks as part of "Operation Thunderclap" and "Operation Clarion".
Slavery and forced Relocation
Caving to Stalin's plans to uproot both Poles and Germans, Churchill said in the House of Commons
in 1944: "Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most
satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble. A clean
sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences." In November 1944, Franklin
Roosevelt agreed. After the war, the German border was redrawn and 3.5 million Germans were
expelled from their homelands along with millions of ethnic Germans from all over eastern Europe.
More than 1.9 million of the nearly 2.4 million East Prussians joined by Germans from central
Poland fled westward under bad conditions. 173,000 people could not or would not leave. Later,
researchers of the Federal Archives counted 3,300 locations in areas they had access to where at
least 120,000 German civilians were either shot or beaten to death.  
"The German 'good fellows', those who
at home give way to sentimentalities,
piggy-backs to their kiddies and feed the
German cats with morsels of their
rationed hamburgers, murder Russian
children with the same pedantry as do
the bad Germans. They murder because
they have come to believe that only
people with German blood are worthy of
living on this earth of ours."
IIya Ehrenburg.
A World Made Safe for Uncle Joe, "Our Noble Ally"
Two Allied air raids were carried out on the old city of Königsberg on
August 26/27 and August 29/30, 1944 based on misinformation from
Churchill that it was a "a modernised heavily defended fortress." In reality,
he knowingly paved the way for the Red Army. 90% of the city of Kant
was absolutely destroyed and it burned for several days. The entire historic
city center, including the cathedral, the castle, all churches of the old city,
the old and the new universities and the old shipping quarter were entirely
destroyed.
During January and February of 1945, the "evacuation" of surviving German began, including those
who had returned to reunite with their families. The remaining German population of East Prussia
was expelled at that time with many people deported as forced laborers to the Gulag, and others held
as virtual prisoners until 1949, during which time many died of disease and starvation. These last
remaining German residents were expelled in more ethnic cleansing of 1949-50. The Red Army
immediately began a course of  methodically erasing any trace of former German presence.
The German cities and towns were neglected or demolished and the place names all
changed. Königsberg, founded in 1255, was renamed Kalingrad in honor of a
murderous Soviet thug who never stepped foot in the city. In July of 1945, northern
East Prussia became part of the USSR and in the autumn the first Soviet settlers
arrived from Russian, Belarus and the Ukraine. Poles were settled in southern East
Prussia, renamed the "Warminsko-Mazurskie Voivodship."
Because of Kalingrad's use as a navy base, there may be major amounts of nuclear pollution, and the
city bore the brunt of the contamination from the Chernobyl disaster. Its once clean, beautiful streets
are crime and drug infested, filthy and stinking, and it has one of the world's highest rate of AIDS.
Street sign in today's Rostock, Germany
honoring Ehrenburg!Then there is the
quaint, well-manicured "Ehrenburg
Espresso Bar" on Karl-Marx-Allee in
Berlin gleefully named after the
"prolific and multi-facetted Russian
writer" Ilya Ehrenburg.
Kalingrad was declared a 'free economic zone' in 1992 in a futile attempt to revive the economy. It never developed into
a "Hong Kong of the Baltic" as some desired, and corruption keeps most investment away. Approximately 400,000
people live in metropolitan Kaliningrad and a total of one million are in the "oblast"  but not those people who bravely
settled the land hundreds of years ago.
U.S. Department of Defense Poster
In the late 1980's some ethnic Germans arrived, most driven out of other parts of the USSR, and by 1991, 5,000 ethnic
Germans inhabited the city and 13,000 the region. Closed off to foreigners since WWII, the Kaliningrad region, about
one half the size of Belgium and some 200 miles away from the border of Russia proper, was reopened on January 1,
1991 when the first direct train since 1945 ran from Kaliningrad to Berlin. After the fall of the USSR when neighboring
Lithuania and former Soviet republics gained their independence, Kaliningrad had been cut off from Russia. Although
railroads connect Kaliningrad to Russia though Lithuania and Belarus, high tariffs in Lithuania make importing food and
supplies from Russia prohibitively expensive.
In an article of March, 3,1945 Ehrenburg emphasized that the "historical mission of the Soviet army
consists in a modest and honorable task of reduction of the population of Germany." Ehrenburg
whipped the Red Army into such a fury with his pathological hatred that by the time they arrived in
East Prussia it was easy to rape and kill. In that light, reports of young women in East Prussia having
been crucified on barn doors, or tied up by their legs to two cars then torn apart, or of naked girls
being tied together by a rope and dragged behind wagons until their skin shed, or of small groups of
children being found with their tongues nailed to tables or of lifeless babies discovered with broken
craniums with their bodies punctured by bayonets, are all withing the realm of reason.
In August, 1944, news got out that in the East Prussian villages of Nemmersdorf and Goldap, the
Red Army had entered the town and raped, tortured and murdered all of the inhabitants, down to the
last baby. The violence spread and hopeless people panicked, their only options being hiding, flight or
fighting. This also played out in West Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, the Sudetenland and other areas of
eastern Europe. There were uncounted scenes of terror as people decided to flee as quickly as
possible, hoping to find refuge and safety. The Red Army was cajoled to behave in Germany "as
Mongolian hordes of old " by Stalin's propagandists, among whom was the grand master of hate, Ilya
Ehrenburg, who encouraged communist troops to injure, torture, rape and kill all German civilians.
Some desperate civilians in Königsberg had only one route of escape, a walk
over ice floes on half thawed lagoons to Frische Nehrung, a narrow slice of
land, and from there to Danzig. Almost a million people are said to have
attempted this deadly crossing. Most on foot never made it and slid into
holes in the ice while others, pulling carts and sleds filled with children and
the elderly, drowned in the frigid water when Soviets circling overhead
intentionally cut off large ice floes with artillery fire, sending them adrift into
a bleak abyss.
"Since the end of the war about 3,000,000 people, mostly women and children and overaged men, have been
killed in eastern Germany and south-eastern Europe; about 15,000,000 people have been deported or had to flee
from their homesteads and are on the road. About 25 per cent of these people, over 3,000,000 have died. About
4,000,000 men and women have been deported to eastern Europe and Russia as slaves. It seems that the
elimination of the German population of eastern Europe - at least 15,000,000 people - was planned in accordance
with decisions made at Yalta."  Sen. Homer Capehart in speech before U.S. Senate, Feb. 5, 1946.
IIya Ehrenburg
Hailed as a hero, Marinesko was later awarded the Combat Order
of the Red Banner for his record in sinking the most tonnage in a
single cruise. He would later be demoted for other offenses. On
May 6,1945 the German freighter Goya, also part of the rescue
fleet, was torpedoed by another Soviet submarine, and more than
6,000 refugees fleeing from East Prussia also died. Marinesko and
The "Glorious Submarine Hero Marinesko" Monument in Kalingrad today, right
Meanwhile, German war widows, farmers, children and old folks were in constant danger from marauding gangs of
communist hoodlums, thieves and trouble makers. Soon violent acts against them were rampant and thousands of
unprotected ethnic Germans were dead or missing. No less than 154 complaints on behalf of the oppressed and
victimized German minority in these lands had been submitted to the League of Nations by 1933, and all were ignored. By
1939, East Prussia had 2.49 million people, 85% of them German and all of them in dire peril. They had lived there for
centuries and built up the land with their blood and tear. By World War Two their culture was already on the verge of
extinction and by the end of war they were at the mercy of a violent enemy.
East Prussia was now separated from the Fatherland by the "Polish passage". Poland was attached to areas which had
never belonged to her. Substantial channels of distribution cut East Prussia from neighbouring markets, which greatly
harmed the economy. The majority of the road and railway connections through the redrawn Poland were closed so that
East Prussia lost her traditional distribution areas in the west, raising the price of transport and harming the competitive
power of East Prussian agriculture products. East Prussia was being "starved out" of the market.
Germany's East Prussia suffered greatly from the First World War in physical damage and civilian deaths. Thousands
were deported or forced to flee in wagons and on foot, many never to return to their devastated homes and farms. With
German defeat, East Prussia was vindictively cut away from her ethnic and cultural roots with Germany by the unjust
terms of the Treaty of Versailles and her population was left physically isolated and unprotected, an island in a sea of
embittered minority factions who now greedily eyed their possible new bounty of free land, homes and businesses. The
material damage amounted to 1,5 billion Marks. In 1920, plebiscites in eastern West Prussia and southern East Prussia
were held to determine if the areas should join Poland or remain in Prussia within Germany; 96.7% of the people voted
for staying German, but it would be a rocky road.
After the Red Army's capture of Königsberg under General Chernyakhovsky, approximately 50,000
citizens who did not escape in time were dead and 90,000 German military prisoners were taken,
almost none of whom were never heard from again. Only about 50,000 citizens out of Königsberg's
prewar population of 316,000 remained alive in the ruins of the devastated city.
Kalinin
A generation is dying or already dead.. a generation of human beings who hold in their hearts and
minds the memory of being violently torn from a cherished homeland and subjected to barbarities
and monstrous obscenities few of us can even imagine. They bore witness to a catastrophic and
untold genocide. Soon, their voices will be silent.
The story of the expulsion of Eastern European Germans, an event that ended close to 1,000 years
of German presence in areas that are now considered to be parts or Poland, the Czech Republic,
Russia and other Eastern European states, has not been fairly dealt with in English literature as the
epochal event that it was: the most horrendous ethnic cleansing pogrom in the history of the world
and one which changed the ethnic face of Europe. Alone, the expulsion of millions of Prussian
Germans between 1944 and 1947, 3 million of whom died in the process, was immensely sinister,
yet it is an event that has been either minimized or rationalized by the mainstream media.
The name "Prussia" was formally expunged from international language by order Number 46 of the Allied Control
Commission on February 23,1945 because, as it arrogantly and incorrectly stated: "Since time immemorial it has been the
pillar of militarism and reaction in Germany." Lost in this heroic rhetoric was the fact that Prussia was also the "pillar" of
historical religious tolerance lacking in its European neighbors, and a pillar of hospitality in its offering of a new, free,
undiscriminating homeland for persecuted refugees from Scotland, France, Austria and elsewhere throughout its history.
Prussia was also a "pillar" of musical genius, the arts, science, philosophy and  medicine. Prussia as a state was far less
aggressive and warlike than Britain, France or Russia, and certainly less adept at gobbling large areas of the earth and
subjugating native populations by enforcing blood thirsty colonial rule on anywhere near the scale of her neighbors.
Prussia's history did not include murderous suppression of minorities, profiteering from slave trading or using hunger
blockades and enforced famine to inhumanly starve out its enemies. Nor did Prussia ever encourage the exile, rape or
burning alive of millions of women and children non-combatants in wartime.
The policy of communist Poland after the war dictated that German names be systematically
removed, church yards and grave stones ploughed under, monuments demolished, and houses
stripped of elements reflecting German history, language and culture. This policy continued until
1990. Use of the German language was made a punishable offense. From 1946 to 1948, the city of  
Königsberg was rebuilt.  The 800 year old Königsberg castle was dynamited to make way for the
hideous 22-story "House of Soviets," however the castle had contained many underground tunnels
and the building above began to slowly collapse.