Winter 1945:Hundreds of thousands flee across the Baltic Sea

After the Red Army offensive in January 1945, East Prussia was cut off. People can only flee across the Baltic Sea. A one-time rescue operation begins.

by Dirk Hempel

In January 1945, the Soviet army crossed the German borders in the east on a broad front. The weary German troops, among them young people and old men, have nothing to oppose the onslaught. Fearing retaliation for the Wehrmacht's war of annihilation, hundreds of thousands of people in East Prussia, but also in Pomerania and Silesia, flee. Some leave immediately with the scheduled express train, others wait until the last moment, also because the Nazi authorities initially forbade escape.

The escape route is cut off after a few days

The people now have to leave their farms and manor houses in a hurry. They usually travel in treks with highly loaded covered wagons and sledges or walk. Because in East Prussia there is a lot of snow in these January days. The thermometer drops to 25 degrees below zero. Many die of exhaustion along the way. Small children in particular freeze to death in the freezing temperatures.

After just ten days, Soviet tanks, which unexpectedly advanced from southern East Prussia, reached the coast near Elbing - a few kilometers from Danzig. This cuts off the escape route to the west.

The port of Pillau becomes the last resort

The only way out now is to go further north towards the Baltic Sea, to Königsberg, the provincial capital, and on to Pillau (today Baltjisk). The small town has numerous harbor basins and is located 50 kilometers to the west at the entrance to the Vistula Lagoon.

There, in the last days of January, the most extensive rescue operation of people at sea of ​​all times begins. The Navy has been given the task of transporting the soldiers from the submarine school to the west on ships. They also take the first civilians with them, women with small children and pregnant women. More and more people are now fleeing to Pillau. The small town with its 12,000 inhabitants is soon overcrowded. Not all of the sometimes up to 75,000 starving and freezing refugees can be housed in gymnasiums, barracks, churches or private apartments. Many have to sleep outdoors. In front of the few bakeries, people fight for bread early in the morning. In the cemetery, the dead are piled up in the open air around the mortuary.

From January 25, ships arrive to take in refugees, minesweepers, torpedo boats, cruisers, tugboats, icebreakers, trawlers, coal ships and cruise ships. After the first transports are still proceeding in an orderly manner, refugees are being recorded in lists and ship tickets are being issued, thousands of people are soon standing at the port waiting for ships, often for days. Others take ferries across to the Vistula Spit, a narrow strip of land between the Baltic Sea and the Lagoon that has not yet been taken by the Soviets and leads west towards Gdańsk and Pomerania.

Run on the few ships

The soldiers of the Red Army are not far away, occupying the road to Königsberg for a few days, where many residents have not yet recognized the seriousness of the situation and children are building snowmen in the garden. At the same time, the people of Pillau are trying desperately to storm the few incoming ships. In the crowd, many fall to the ground, while others trample over them. Children are separated from their mothers.

Soldiers try to stop the rush. Soviet planes are circling over the city and bombing the port. Vehicles of all kinds stay behind there:cars, carriages, wagons, empty prams, but also horses and dogs. Large suitcases and bags float in the water. By mid-February, more than 200,000 people will be deported via Pillauer Hafen, and 50,000 refugees will cross over to the Vistula Spit. Frequently, however, the hold of the ship is reserved for the removal of soldiers, weapons and military vehicles.

People are crowded on deck

The ships often leave Pillau in a convoy. Warships are to protect them against attacks by Soviet submarines and planes. On the freighters, the holds are covered with straw. They are just as crowded with refugees and wounded soldiers as the cabins of the passenger ships. And there are often hundreds of people crowded on deck because there is no space to sit down. Sometimes there is a thin pea soup, often the snow on deck has to serve as drinking water. But the refugees are glad to have escaped. They don't know that submarine alarms are repeatedly given on the bridge.

The sinking of the "Wilhelm Gustloff"

The destination is mostly Swinemünde on Usedom. From there you continue by train, also by sea to Flensburg, Lübeck or Kiel. Frequently, however, the ships only land their freight in Gdansk or Gdingen (Gotenhafen), which will soon be surrounded by the Soviets, where tens of thousands of people also crowd and wait for another ship to bring them west.

On January 30, the passenger steamer "Wilhelm Gustloff" sets sail here. The number of refugees on board is still disputed to this day. Maybe there were 6,000 people, other sources say 10,000. A few hours after its departure, the former cruise ship of the Nazi organization "Strength through Joy" was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine off the coast of Pomerania. The ship will sink within an hour. Only about 1,200 people can be saved.

Refugee ships repeatedly run into mines and are sunk by Soviet submarines or planes. In mid-April, the torpedoed freighter "Goya" sinks after a few minutes, and only a few of the estimated 7,000 people on board are saved. Almost at the same time, the SS transported more than 3,000 prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig to Neustadt in Holstein on barges and barges.

Some ships head for Copenhagen

The evacuation of East Prussia, Danzig and Pomerania by sea continued unabated until the end of the war. Gdynia falls into Soviet hands at the end of March, and Königsberg only capitulates on April 9th. Around 75,000 people are still living in the ruins of the city at this time. But ships continue to come to Pillau, which from here now also head for ports on the other side of the Baltic Sea, in neutral Sweden, but above all Copenhagen, which is still occupied by the Wehrmacht. There seems to be peace here. Well-dressed people go to work, in the shops you can buy everything. And the refugees have often saved nothing but their lives.

The last ships leave Pillau around April 23rd. It is not known how many refugees remain. A few days later, Soviet soldiers occupied the city after heavy fighting. Between January and April 1945, around 450,000 refugees were transported by ship from here. The Hela peninsula in front of Danzig, from which tens of thousands of refugees were still being rescued even after the Hanseatic city was taken in March, remains in German hands until the capitulation.

Schleswig-Holstein becomes a refugee country

Several hundred ships were involved in the rescue operation across the Baltic Sea. It is still unclear how many people were rescued by sea. The numbers vary between 800,000 and 2.5 million. More than 20,000 people died in shipwrecks. In East Prussia, Danzig and Pomerania, however, at least three million people remain under Soviet rule. Most of them are expelled from their homes by the end of the 1940s.

A large part of the East Germans stayed in Schleswig-Holstein, which later became the Federal Republic of Germany, with one million people admitted, becoming the state with the most refugees. In some towns and villages, the number of inhabitants doubles. In 1948, 40 percent of Lübeck's population were refugees. They often live in emergency shelters and assembly camps, of which there were still more than 700 across the country in the early 1950s. Only over the years do the governing politicians succeed in integrating, not infrequently against resistance from the locals, who fear foreign infiltration and displacement for a long time to come.