BRICK IN THE WALL
A Cold War Thriller by Addison Marsh
Prologue
April 30, 1945
Demmin, a town of
15,000 in the lake district of Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania, 120 miles
north of Berlin and less than 40 miles from the Baltic Sea, woke up to a
beautiful spring morning. Light fog rose
from the Peene and the Tollense rivers that encircled the town, their
tributaries branching out like the spokes of a wheel, fed by a myriad of lakes
and marshlands covering two hundred miles to the east and the west. The high
tide in the Baltic Sea gently pushed the water of the rivers back inland.
On every other morning
there would have been a throng of boys and old men along the river banks,
catching eel, perch and pike but not today. The town lay awake in fear and
trepidation. The Russians were coming. The Red Army was sweeping north, pushing
ahead a wave of displaced Germans and liberated forced labourers from Poland. The
Poles would lose part of their nation to the Russians; the Germans were in for
a lot more punishment. General Zhukov had made it abundantly clear what they
were to expect: “Woe betides the
murderous nation upon which we’ll impart horrendous revenge.” Goebbels’ relentless
anti Soviet propaganda had only added to the fear that now seemed an inevitable
reality: the Russians would rape, kill, burn and plunder their way through East
Germany all the way up to the North Sea and Demmin was right in their path.
There was nobody left
to stop them. The Wehrmacht had withdrawn, after having previously forced the
townspeople to dig a three mile anti tank ditch along the eastern approach. It
was useless now. There were no soldiers left to mount a defence. The Wehrmacht
had abandoned Demmin, leaving behind a few old men and boys from the
Hitlerjugend, gullible enough to hope for glory in a last stance.
The town’s major, the
police force, the Nazi functionaries and everybody else who had the means to
leave had left with the soldiers, using their vehicles and confiscated fire
engines for transportation. They were not waiting for the Russians to capture
them. They would head west to capitulate to the Americans or the British. Demmin
had no defenders, no leaders and no escape. The retrieving Wehrmacht soldiers
had blown up the bridges behind them, cutting off all escape routes except the
one east, where nobody in his right mind wanted to go.
By mid morning the
square filled with townspeople and refugees who kept arriving at an ever increasing
rate with more bad news: the Russians were just hours away. With all the
bridges down there was nowhere to go for them, either. They would have to stop
in Demmin and regroup.
The Pastor climbed to
the top of the church tower and hoisted a white bed sheet. Others followed his
example, displaying white flags from the windows of their houses.
Tales of atrocities
committed by the approaching Red Army from the east and the Poles who had taken
Danzig in the north spread like wildfire. Wary of the refugees that by now
outnumbered them, the townspeople began to recognise what had driven them here:
a horror and despair so deep no words could fathom. It was beyond human fear:
the burning distress and panic of trapped animals. Only now did the people of
Demmin realise that they were different no more.
The first suicide went
almost unnoticed. Hilde Bloehmann who had lost her daughter in an attempt to
cross the Peene, decided she had suffered enough. She swam back to shore,
picked up as many stones as she could fit into her coat pockets and then swam
back out. The stones dragged her under but no matter how hard she tried, she
could not stop herself from paddling back to the surface. It took her two more
trips to finally weigh her down enough to sink. A handful of other refugees who
contemplated crossing at the same spot silently watched her last struggle, then
jumped in the water and swam right over the top of the ripples she had left.
By noon the townspeople
heard the deep growl of V12 Diesel engines and the metallic clanking of tank
tracks as the spearhead T-34s of the 1st Guards Tank Division on the
way to Rostock reached the outskirts of the town. One single shell was fired
from the 85mm cannon of the leader tank, aimed at nothing in particular and completely
wasted if it was meant to get the town’s attention.
The tanks lined up
along the ditch. As the engines were shut down, voices could be heard, shouting
in German for negotiators to come forward for a surrender that would spare the
town. One officer in German uniform and two soldiers emerged from the line of the
tanks and proceeded into the ditch towards the town. When they reached the
middle of the ditch, several shots rang out, coming from a group of Hitler
youths who had lined up behind a stone wall of an abandoned farm yard. The
three German collaborators were shot dead. There was no immediate reaction from
the Russian side but more tanks could be heard approaching from the east. Soon
the tanks of the 65th Army had caught up with the 1st
Guard. They opened fire and were in the town half an hour later, looting two
breweries on their way in.
What followed was a
drunken three day orgy of punishment and revenge devoid of any semblance of
warfare, with the full blessing of the commanding officers who had declared the
town outlawed after being fired upon. The intense hate of the Russians for
their former oppressors boiled over. Here in Demmin they had found the parents,
the wives and the children of the German soldiers who had invaded Russia, even
now in defeat living a far better life than most of the simple Russian soldiers
could ever hope for. This was revenge for the Nazi arrogance as well as for their
dead brothers and comrades and nothing they did to the inhabitants of Demmin could
be indiscriminate or brutal enough to ever balance the scale.
Boys and men considered
to be of fighting age were summarily executed, shot or stabbed and left where
they fell. Buildings were methodically doused in petrol and torched or shelled
by the tanks, street by street. Nothing was spared. Three quarters of all
buildings were totally destroyed in the three day rampage.
There was no hiding.
Women and girls who escaped their burning homes were raped over and over again,
regardless of age. Whoever objected or put up resistance was executed,
mutilated or dragged along the streets and run over by tanks. Hordes of drunken soldiers roamed the
streets, shouting: ‘women, women!’ in Russian. On that day, every woman and
girl the Russians encountered was raped. Few would ever be able to talk about
it but the ones that did, told of seeing their eight year old daughters raped
right next to them or their grandmother gasping her last breath, her belly cut
open with her entrails spilling out.
The brutality would be
suffered by all, shared by children who didn’t understand and the old who
couldn’t have imagined horrors on such scale. Yet, some of them knew or
suspected they knew of the atrocities committed against millions more in their
name. Even in their deepest despair they knew that what was happening now was
revenge that would not diminish the guilt their generation would be passing on.
At three thirty in the
afternoon, as the Russians were wreaking havoc on Demmin, a single shot rang
out in the Fuehrer bunker in Berlin. Hitler’s valet and his private secretary
Martin Bormann, the only men authorised to enter Hitler’s private quarters,
found their boss sitting hunched over on a sofa, his head resting on an
occasional table with blood dripping from his right temple. Hitler had shot
himself with a single bullet from his Walther PPK. To his left lay the slumped
body of his wife of one day, Eva Braun, showing signs of cyanide poisoning.
Hitler had left
instructions with his valet. His body was to be wrapped in a blanket and
cremated. Accordingly, the guards carried the two bodies upstairs and burned
them in a shallow pit near the emergency exit of the bunker. Some of the SS
guards on duty in the upper level brought additional cans of petrol and they
managed to burn most of both bodies. Hitler had insisted on the
destruction of his remains after learning of the indignities the Italians had
inflicted on the bodies of Mussolini, his mistress and close supporters. No
spectacle should be made of Hitler’s remains.
The following day, May
1 1945, Hitler’s death was broadcast to the nation and the world.
Nobody in Demmin was
listening to the radio that day. If they had listened they wouldn’t have cared.
One man’s suicide was insignificant to the atrocities that were unfolding in
the town. The excesses of the Russian troops continued unabated and panic
amongst the terrified population had now reached fever pitch.
Schoolmaster Gerhard
Moldenhauer grabbed a bazooka and fired it at the Russians, and then he raced
home and hanged himself next to the bodies of his wife and their three children
he had shot dead before his last act of defiance. Friends of his were adamant that
he was no Nazi. He had only joined the National Socialist Party to keep his
job. Moldenhauer was a follower – the same as most of the townspeople. His
actions were not those of a fanatic who followed the Fuhrer to his death. His
were the actions of a man who had judged himself guilty by association of no
lesser crimes.
Moldenhauer’s last
desperate act opened the floodgates of what was to become Germany’s biggest
mass suicide. Most of the victims
drowned themselves in the Peene or the Tollense. Mothers and children, entire
families tied together with ropes or washing lines, carrying backpacks filled
with stones. Some went down quietly, other screamed for their lives. Some of the
older children fought back and managed to swim ashore to watch helplessly as
the rest of their family went down.
The drownings went on
for two days. Possibly well over one thousand committed suicide, their bodies
washed downstream, mingled with their belongings, piled up high on the river
banks. Not everybody succeeded at the first attempt. Survivors crawled up the
banks and strayed through the town, looking for a knife to cut their wrists or
a rope to hang themselves.
In a small park near
the river, amongst the spring flowers and the chirping birds, half a dozen
women sat slumped over on the park benches, with lifeless eyes staring into the
warm midday sun, blood dripping from their noses. One bottle of herbicide had
been enough for all of them.
In the midst of the dying
and the dazed, the looting and burning continued but the mood of the soldiers
began to change. By late afternoon even the hardiest Russians couldn’t cope
with the mass drowning any longer. They began pulling the Germans from the
water and guarded the banks to prevent others from entering. They couldn’t stop
them all. One woman tried to enter the water with her two sons several times
until the elder son finally managed to talk her out of it. Their house was razed
to the ground but they found an empty fisherman’s cottage a bit further out of
town where they settled for the night. By morning the mother was gone.
After three days the sappers
had secured a temporary river crossing and the Russian tanks moved out of the
devastated town. Half the population of Demmin followed in their tracks,
joining the growing stream of the displaced, flowing west like stormwater after
the deluge. They had lost everything and there was nowhere else to go. The ones
that stayed began to bury the dead. It would take weeks to recover all the
bodies that kept floating forth and back with the changing tides. Nobody
counted them. Around 900 suicide bodies were buried in a single mass grave. Some
of the names or their details were recorded on the pages of an accountant’s
warehouse stock book. The mass grave was marked with a simple stone and
the inscription 1945. There was no reference to what had caused the mass
suicides.
The grave site and the marker
were soon overgrown, the field around it used to grow sugar beet as a new
regime, led by a small group of handpicked German Communist stooges under
Walter Ulbricht took over the civil administration of the Soviet Occupied Zone.
Stalin had comprehensively outwitted Churchill and Roosevelt. He was going to
keep East Germany, use his right of reparation to sap the lifeblood out of it and
deport tens of thousands of its citizens to the death camps of Siberia.
For the dead in Demmin and
thousands more suicide victims in the Soviet Occupied Zone, there would never
be a reckoning. The heroes of the Soviet Army were celebrated with monuments as
the liberators of Nazi Germany. Nobody dared to speak up. The silent torment
and the shame of the victims had by now been turned into the collective guilt
of all Germans. It was to be the justification for the birth of the German
Democratic Republic and the yoke that would keep its citizens tethered to a state
that had been meticulously planned long before the Russian tanks had rolled
trough Demmin. Walter Ulbricht, the man Beria, the head of the NKVD State
Security, once described as “the greatest idiot I have ever seen”, was to build
a Communist state and make it look democratic while keeping an iron fist on its
citizens. Never mind that his SED party only managed to secure one fifth of the
vote in Berlin’s one and only free elections; never mind that it’s citizens
clambered to get out - Ulbricht and Stalin were going to build a Soviet style
Communist Germany and wall it in, brick by brick.
