Brick in the Wall A Cold War Thriller

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 The Wehrmacht had withdrawn, after having previously forced the townspeople to dig a three mile anti tank ditch along the eastern approach.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 1^st 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 65^th Army had caught up with the 1^st 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.