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Salt To Sea

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Read 25k reviews from the world's largest community for readers. While the Titanic and Lusitania are both well-documented disasters, the single greatest tr...

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Salt to Sea

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From the author of Between Shades of Grey comes another gripping, heart-breaking novel, inspired by the worst disaster in maritime history. Told from four intertwining perspectives, this is a book that is sure to delight all historical fiction fans and people who enjoyed Sepetys's first novel.

Joana, Florian, Emilia and Alfred are four young people from four different European nations ravaged by the second world war. The book follows each character's journey toward the Wilhelm Gustloff, an overcrowded ship that seems to be their only hope of escaping the Red Army. As each character fights for their survival and their stories converge, we discover how their lives have been shaped by tragedy and betrayal and how they are all still haunted by their pasts.

Sepetys is clearly an ambitious writer; this is a relatively short novel yet told from four different perspectives. Although these four narrative voices have the potential to become indistinguishable or possibly confusing, Sepetys is successful in delineating each character and this is an original and compelling way of telling the story. Readers are able to gain an insight into four different stories, four different ways of seeing the world and it's absolutely fascinating. A Lithuanian nurse, a German soldier, a pregnant Polish girl, and a Prussian thief: all of these are fictional characters and yet they bring the historical setting alive. The secondary characters are also well drawn; we may not gain much insight into their pasts but they are certainly vivid and believable. The only drawback of this unique way of telling the story is that there is less backstory to each character than there would have been with one or two perspectives. Although readers will come to know all the characters, the amount of words allocated to each character isn't that much more than in a short story and many important plot points are only briefly narrated. This meant that the story didn't drag, but it bothered me in the final chapters where a little more information about what happened to the characters would have given the conclusion more of an epilogue feel.

One only has to read the author's note at the end to realise that Sepetys has written about an often-overlooked historical disaster so that the memory of those who lost their lives in this tragedy are never forgotten. "When the survivors are gone, we must not let the truth disappear with them" she writes, "Please, give them a voice." The hard-hitting conclusion is testament to this, when the characters are forced to forget their own personal struggles in a horrific struggle for survival. While the four main characters are all fictional, the events in this novel are all real and, needless to say, the historical accuracy is exemplary. Without cramming the novel with too much historical information or dull explanations, Sepetys is able to transport her readers to another time.

In this time of endless YA romances, it is very refreshing to see a novel where the romance doesn't dominate. This is not to say it's not a beautifully written and important part of the novel but the romance doesn't define either of the characters or detract attention away from the central tragedy.

After her beautiful debut, Between Shades of Grey, Sepetys has written a more complex book, which is just as heart-breaking. This compelling read deserves a place on your bookshelf beside Elizabeth Wein and Monica Hesse.
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Salt To The Sea by Ruta Sepetys - review

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From the author of Between Shades of Grey comes another gripping, heart-breaking novel, inspired by the worst disaster in maritime history. Told from four intertwining perspectives, this is a book that is sure to delight all historical fiction fans and people who enjoyed Sepetys's first novel.

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Videos, links, resources

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In 1945, World War II is drawing to a close in East Prussia and thousands of refugees are on a desperate trek toward freedom, almost all of them with something to hide. Among them are Joana, Emilia, and Florian, whose paths converge en route to the ship that promises salvation, the Wilhelm Gustloff. Forced by circumstance to unite, the three find their strength, courage, and trust in each other tested with each step closer toward safety. Just when it seems freedom is within their grasp, tragedy strikes. Not country, nor culture, nor status matter as all ten thousand people aboard must fight for the same thing: survival.

A tribute to the people of Lithuania, Poland, and East Prussia, Ruta Sepetys unearths a shockingly little-known casualty of a gruesome war, and proves that humanity can prevail, even in the darkest of hours.

Winner of the Carnegie Medal
#1 New York Times Bestseller
International Bestseller
Educational Resources for Salt to the Sea

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In 1945, World War II is drawing to a close in East Prussia and thousands of refugees are on a desperate trek toward freedom, almost all of them with something to hide. Among them are Joana, Emilia, and Florian, whose paths converge en route to the ship that promises salvation, the Wilhelm Gustloff.

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To learn more about global forced displacement, a good place to start is the website of the UN Refugee Agency ( UNHCR). This includes plenty of information and resources; including a basic explanation of the Refugee Convention and an annual report on patterns of forced displacement. The website also looks at individual stories, trying to match the statistical data with more personal accounts of displacement.

To further investigate the challenges faced by those who seek to begin a journey from war to safety, the missing migrants project looks broadly at those-both migrants and refugees-who have died along migratory routes (both at land and at sea). For more detailed information, you can read this report by the International Organization for Migration.

In this TED Talk, Melissa Fleming (UNHCR) tells the story of two refugees and their harrowing journey towards safety. In another important TED Talk (and written article) journalist Anders Fjellberg and photographer Tomm Christiansen remind us of the personal nature of these stories, writing that "everybody has a name, everybody has a story and everybody is someone." In this interview with Antonio Guterres, the former High Commissioner of UNHCR, Guterres calls for a multilateral turn toward acceptance and respect.

It is important to realize that arriving at the destination and obtaining refugee status does not mean the end of problems. Refugees and IDPs in camps often face difficult conditions, including limited infrastructure, overcrowding, temporary shelter with inadequate insulation/protection from the weather, lack of economic opportunities and/or education. Psychologically, life in a camp can be highly alienating and take a heavy toll.

Refugees living outside of camps also face hurdles including gaining access to health, education and other social services, and finding adequate shelter. Refugees are frequently in need of assistance for rent, and financial considerations can prevent them from finding adequate housing, forcing them to live in substandard accommodations such as abandoned or unfinished buildings or in informal dwellings. These run the risk of lacking adequate access to water, sanitation, waste management, or electricity and are unfit for the winter season.

Finding a job is often one of the most complex and difficult tasks, even though refugees may have had access to a good education in their home countries or had jobs that require a high level of education. And even for those refugees that obtain asylum in a country where more socio-economic assistance may be available, the trauma of having to rebuild a life and integrate in a very different context is a major challenge.

At the same time, we should keep in mind that refugees are courageous and strong human beings with their own unique skills and talents and with the ability to make plenty of positive contributions to their host countries. They have a lot to offer to their host societies and their full potential should be embraced. Here you can find a few ways through which you can help and empower refugees in your city or country.

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What does it mean to be a refugee? - Benedetta Berti and Evelien Borgman

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About 60 million people around the globe have been forced to leave their homes to escape war, violence and persecution. The majority have become Internally Displaced Persons, meaning they fled their homes but are still in their own countries. Others, referred to as refugees, sought shelter outside their own country.

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Profiting quickly from its understanding with Germany, the U.S.S.R. on October 10, 1939, constrained Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to admit Soviet garrisons onto their territories. Approached with similar demands, Finland refused to comply, even though the U.S.S.R. offered territorial compensation elsewhere for the cessions that it was requiring for its own strategic reasons. Finland's armed forces amounted to about 200,000 troops in 10 divisions. The Soviets eventually brought about 70 divisions (about 1,000,000 men) to bear in their attack on Finland, along with about 1,000 tanks. Soviet troops attacked Finland on November 30, 1939.

Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library

The invaders succeeded in isolating the little Arctic port of Petsamo in the far north but were ignominiously repulsed on all of the fronts chosen for their advance. On the Karelian Isthmus, the massive reinforced-concrete fortifications of Finland's Mannerheim Line blocked the Soviet forces' direct land route from Leningrad into Finland. The Soviet planners had grossly underestimated the Finns' national will to resist and the natural obstacles constituted by the terrain's numerous lakes and forests.

The western powers exulted overtly over the humiliation of the Soviet Union. One important effect of Finland's early successes was to reinforce the tendency of both Hitler and the western democracies to underestimate the Soviet military capabilities. But in the meantime, the Soviet strategists digested their hard-learned military lessons.

On February 1, 1940, the Red Army launched 14 divisions into a major assault on the Mannerheim Line. The offensive's weight was concentrated along a 10-mile sector of the line near Summa, which was pounded by a tremendous artillery bombardment. As the fortifications were pulverized, tanks and sledge-carried infantry advanced to occupy the ground while the Soviet Air Force broke up attempted Finnish counterattacks. After little more than a fortnight of this methodical process, a breach was made through the whole depth of the Mannerheim Line. Once the Soviets had forced a passage on the Karelian Isthmus, Finland's eventual collapse was certain. On March 6 Finland sued for peace, and a week later the Soviet terms were accepted: the Finns had to cede the entire Karelian Isthmus, Viipuri, and their part of the Rybachy Peninsula to the Soviets. The Finns had suffered about 70,000 casualties in the campaign, the Soviets more than 200,000.

The war in the west, September 1939-June 1940

During their campaign in Poland, the Germans kept only 23 divisions in the west to guard their frontier against the French, who had nearly five times as many divisions mobilized. The French commander in chief, General Maurice-Gustave Gamelin, proposed an advance against Germany through neutral Belgium and the Netherlands in order to have room to exercise his ponderous military machine. He was overruled, however, and French assaults on the 100-mile stretch of available front along the Franco-German frontier had barely dented the German defenses when the collapse of Poland prompted the recall of Gamelin's advanced divisions to defensive positions in the Maginot Line. From October 1939 to March 1940, successive plans were developed for counteraction in the event of a German offensive through Belgium-all of them based on the assumption that the Germans would come across the plain north of Namur, not across the hilly and wooded Ardennes. The Germans would indeed have taken the route foreseen by the French if Hitler's desire for an offensive in November 1939 had not been frustrated, on the one hand, by bad weather and, on the other, by the hesitations of his generals; but in March 1940 the bold suggestion of General Erich von Manstein that an offensive through the Ardennes should, in fact, be practicable for tank forces was adopted by Hitler, despite orthodox military opinion.

Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library

Meanwhile, Hitler's immediate outlook had been changed by considerations about Scandinavia. Originally he had intended to respect Norway's neutrality. Then rumours leaked out, prematurely, of British designs on Norway-as, in fact, Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, was arguing that mines should be laid in Norwegian waters to stop the export of Swedish iron ore from Gällivare to Germany through Norway's rail terminus and port of Narvik. The British Cabinet, in response to Churchill, authorized at least the preparation of a plan for a landing at Narvik; and in mid-December 1939 a Norwegian politician, Vidkun Quisling, leader of a pro- Nazi party, was introduced to Hitler. On January 27, 1940, Hitler ordered plans for an invasion of Norway, for use if he could no longer respect Norway's neutrality.

After France's failure to interrupt the German conquest of Poland, the western powers and the Germans were so inactive with regard to land operations that journalists began to speak derisively, over the next six months, of the " phony war." At sea, however, the period was somewhat more eventful. German U-boats sank the British aircraft carrier Courageous (September 17) and the battleship Royal Oak (October 14). The U-boats' main warfare, however, was against merchant shipping: they sank more than 110 vessels in the first four months of the war. Both the Germans and the British, meanwhile, were engaged in extensive mine laying.

In surface warfare at sea, the British were on the whole more fortunate than the Germans. A German pocket battleship in the Atlantic, the Admiral Graf Spee sank nine ships before coming to a tragic end: having sustained and inflicted damage in an engagement with three British cruisers off the Río de la Plata on Dec. 13, 1939, she made off to Montevideo and obtained leave to spend four days there for repairs; the British mustered reinforcements for the two cruisers still capable of action after the engagement, namely the Ajax and the Achilles, and brought the Cumberland to the scene in time; but, on December 17, when the Graf Spee put to sea again, her crew scuttled her a little way out of the harbour before the fight could be resumed.

The invasion of Norway

British plans for landings on the Norwegian coast in the third week of March 1940 were temporarily postponed. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, however, was by that time convinced that some aggressive action ought to be taken; and Paul Reynaud, who succeeded Édouard Daladier as France's premier on March 21, was of the same opinion. (Reynaud had come into office on the surge of the French public's demand for a more aggressive military policy and quicker offensive action against Germany.) It was agreed that mines should be laid in Norwegian waters and that the mining should be followed by the landing of troops at four Norwegian ports, Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, and Stavanger.

Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library

Because of Anglo-French arguments, the date of the mining was postponed from April 5 to April 8. The postponement was catastrophic. Hitler had on April 1 ordered the German invasion of Norway to begin on April 9; so, when on April 8 the Norwegian government was preoccupied with earnest protest about the British mine laying, the German expeditions were well on their way.

On April 9, 1940, the major Norwegian ports from Oslo northward to Narvik (1,200 miles away from Germany's naval bases) were occupied by advance detachments of German troops. At the same time, a single parachute battalion (the first ever employed in warfare) took the Oslo and Stavanger airfields, and 800 operational aircraft overawed the Norwegian population. Norwegian resistance at Narvik, at Trondheim (the strategic key to Norway), at Bergen, at Stavanger, and at Kristiansand had been overcome very quickly; and Oslo's effective resistance to the seaborne forces was nullified when German troops from the airfield entered the city.

Simultaneously, along with their Norwegian enterprise, the Germans on April 9 occupied Denmark, sending troopships, covered by aircraft, into Copenhagen harbour and marching over the land frontier into Jutland. This occupation was obviously necessary for the safety of their communications with Norway.

Allied troops began to land at Narvik on April 14. Shortly afterward, British troops were landed also at Namsos and at Åndalsnes, to attack Trondheim from the north and from the south, respectively. The Germans, however, landed fresh troops in the rear of the British at Namsos and advanced up the Gudbrandsdal from Oslo against the force at Åndalsnes. By this time the Germans had about 25,000 troops in Norway. By May 2, both Namsos and Åndalsnes were evacuated by the British. The Germans at Narvik held out against five times as many British and French troops until May 27. By that time the German offensive in France had progressed to such an extent that the British could no longer afford any commitment in Norway, and the 25,000 Allied troops were evacuated from Narvik 10 days after their victory. The Norwegian king Haakon VII and his government left Norway for Britain at the same time. Hitler garrisoned Norway with about 300,000 troops for the rest of the war. By occupying Norway, Hitler had ensured the protection of Germany's supply of iron ore from Sweden and had obtained naval and air bases with which to strike at Britain if necessary.

What was to happen in Norway became a less important question for the western powers when, on May 10, 1940, they were surprised by Hitler's long-debated stroke against them through the Low Countries.

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World War II - The Baltic states and the Russo-Finnish War, 1939-40

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World War II - The Baltic states and the Russo-Finnish War, 1939-40: Profiting quickly from its understanding with Germany, the U.S.S.R. on October 10, 1939, constrained Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to admit Soviet garrisons onto their territories. Approached with similar demands, Finland refused to comply, even though the U.S.S.R.

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In 1915 during WW1 it was all different. Russian POW in Tilsit with two burly German guards
In the first four months of 1945, 2.5 million East Prussians tried to escape by these routes and it is probable that a million of them died, in the cold, on the ice, in the sea or at the hands of the Russians.

A pretty German girl in East Prussia in the 1930s. One shudders to think what happened to her in 1945....

At 10.00 a.m. on 21 January the church bells of Wehlauwere rung, signalling that all the inhabitants were to leave.Only officials were to remain behind. A couple of trains came through the station on the way to Königsberg but for most there was no room.

The town began to resemble an ant's nest.The streets were completely blocked and the bridges were impassable. There was no time to say goodbye properly to a place which had been East Prussian for 700 years. All they could do was pack a few things and try to get out. Some were lucky and got a lift with the Army but most had to load their belongings on to carts or sledges and struggle through the crowded roads to get to Königsberg or to Samland, where they hoped to find a boat to take them west along the Baltic coast.

The route was so crowded that for many it took twenty hours to go the fifteen kilometres to the safety of the next town, Allenburg. Some tried other routes out of the town to avoid Reichstrasse 1 but on these the refugees were caught by Russian artillery fire and many were killed. Those trying to get to Königsberg were attacked from the air and dead people, animals and broken carts littered the icy roads. Many committed suicide when they ran out of energy.

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On 21 January Hans von Lehndorff crossed the large square in front of the Hauptbahnhof and found it overflowing with refugees. There were rows and rows of laden carts and there was a constant flow of newcomers, mainly women. Trains were returning to the station as it was no longer possible to get through to the west and most of the passengers were now determined to escape via Pillau. One woman took him aside to say that she was not worried.'The Führer won't let us fall into Russian hands,' she said and Lehndorff privately wondered why she still had so much trust.
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A Soviet officer in Tilsit

Yet even in the first days of January many people in Königsberg still seemed unaware of the true state of the war. No one was allowed to listen to any foreign news and the only information received was what Goebbels was prepared to tell them. His propaganda machine was very efficient and to doubt him was dangerous. Those who remember the last days before the onslaught on East Prussia recall that there were still many who believed the message from Berlin that there was nothing to fear. The propaganda given out day after day was that the German Army was holding the attackers back and that the Russians had been stopped. A few weeks later it became clear that all civilians should have been evacuated to the west when the trains were still running but the authorities did nothing; people went about their day-to-day business in their damaged city and tried to put their fears out of their minds.

August 1944. The Red Army reached the east Prussian border. The sign board says, "That's it, damn Germany."
People began to pack up and leave in haste; women, children and the elderly - the few men who had avoided call-up because of their age or state of health were now mostly fighting with the Volkssturm - all strove to get away from the Russian advance. It was the coldest winter on record and in temperatures of -20 Celsius columns of refugees made their way towards Königsberg and the coast through snowy day sand freezing nights. The refugees, mingling with groups of Allied prisoners of war and freed slave labourers, trudged on foot or rode on farm carts through the bitter weather. Fathers sometimes shot all their families or gave them poison rather than face any more horror.
At the end of January 1945 Königsberg was packed with 300,000 refugees who had fled to the city hoping it would be the first stop on their flight to freedom. Unable to get any farther, they parked their prams, sledges and carts along the roadsides, crowded into the bombed and damaged buildings and released the horses which had drawn their carts since they left their villages. Many of these animals died of starvation and others were shot; Werner Terpitz recalls how the once beautiful streets were strewn with the carcasses of dead horses from which all edible meat had been taken. The streets in the town centre were full of rubble made into amateurish road blocks and broken-down trams were abandoned where they had come to a stop. All the city's schools were shut on 23 January and the University closed its doors on 28 January. By 26 January the whole of East Prussia was in Russian hands apart from a strip of land sixty kilometres in length and varying in width, which extended from the southern shores of the Frisches Haff to Königsberg. With Elbing already captured, the encirclement of East Prussia was complete. German people fleeing from Pillau. January 26, 1945
Pregnant women had priority on the departing ships, then children and the elderly. Fit and healthy civilian men, though there were few of them, had little chance of being taken for they were to stay to participate in the final defence of the province. Wounded soldiers were also eligible for embarkation - all except the most severely injured whose chances of survival were doubtful or those who were severely mutilated. For them everything was over.

Even by the harbour side the bombardments never ceased and there was almost constant panic among the waiting crowds. These crowds stretched as far as the eye could see trapped on the quayside in front of a large port building which was also crammed with people. Guy Sajer remembers the sound of their thudding feet, like a dull roll of muffled guns, as people stamped to keep themselves warm, and he recalls the solitary children who had lost their mothers whose tears instantly froze as they ran down their cheeks.

Around 450,000 people left Pillau between January and April 1945 in the hope of finding freedom, even though the road route to the port from Königsberg was blocked by the Russians between 26 January and 20 February when the German Army managed to reopen it.
Red Army soldiers bring in the 280 mm Br 5 heavy gun to east Prussia
With Königsberg isolated, Russian planes flew low and unchallenged over the city. If the gunners saw someone move they fired on them, and if they saw a vehicle they bombed it. People began to fear clear mornings because bright blue skies meant the fighters would be lurking. Life in Königsberg became extremely unpleasant. The weather continued to be exceptionally cold, with night-time temperatures as low as-28 degrees Celsius and fuel in short supply. The city was under constant artillery fire. Families had to find what shelter they could underground.
January 1945. Soviet tanks move into Prussia
For the next ten weeks the Russians encircled the city. The outer forts around the city, which had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, remained in German hands,but beyond this ring the Soviet Army entrenched, waiting to pounce. It was a strange time; Germany effectively ended at the rubble wall so hastily built by the volunteers; around it telegraph wires blew about in the wind and from behind came the constant rattle of artillery fire and Russian loudspeakers blaring out propaganda.

There was still water and electricity, and some food supplies for the civilians, refugees and the soldiers bombed out of their units who were trapped in the city. The SS were out looking for men capable of fighting. Many soldiers, who had taken refuge in Königsberg after fleeing from the front,imagined that the Russians would soon break in and had donned civilian clothes and tried to hide from the SS. Terpitz recalls how some were dragged out of their hiding places and were hanged as a deterrent to others: In front of the North Station the corpses lay in the snow day after day with staring eyes. They wore badges which read 'We were cowards and died as a result.

Destroyed German warplanes in East Prussia. January 16, 1945.

Königsberg was one of several towns in the east designated a fortress -Festung- and now Hitler ordered that it must not surrender. Lasch set up his headquarters in an air-raid shelter in the Paradeplatz and from there he attempted to organise the defence of the city. He was short of troops, having at his disposal only four burnt-out divisions including one made up of under-trained Volksgrenadiers. He marshalled soldiers who had taken refuge in Königsberg and incorporated the Hitler Youth into the army.
March 1945. Old men from the Volksstrum defend Koenigsberg
Now we were looking literally at children. Marching beside feeble old men. The oldest boys were about sixteen but there were others who could not have been more than thirteen. They had been hastily dressed in worn uniforms cut for men, and they were carrying guns, which were often as big as they were.They looked both comic and horrifying and their eyes were filled with unease, like the eyes of children at the reopening of school. Not one of them could have imagined the impossible ordeal that lay ahead.

War ravaged Koenigsburg in April 1945 after the encircled Germans finally surrendered after months of brutal fighting.

In Königsberg the lull in the fighting allowed a semblance of normality to return. The bombing and artillery fire stopped and people came out of hiding; social life was resumed. The freezing weather abated in the middle of February and a warm spring breeze blew in from the sea. More and more people came in from the surrounding countryside and the city filled up with both civilians and retreating soldiers. Water, gas and electricity were restored and restaurants and cinemas reopened. Cattle were driven in from the country to provide milk and horses were killed to provide meat. The zoo even began to sell annual season tickets.

A weary cynicism had set in amongst the people who remained in the town. People avoided the word 'military' and spoke less and less about 'army life'. Werner Terpitz recalls how they would simply say the single word ' Barras` (army) making it sound hard and contemptuous. If someone said 'comrade' someone else would say, 'There are no comrades; they all fell at Stalingrad.' When they heard the Germans who had come to live in Königsberg from the Baltic States say, 'We want to make our home in the Reich' (' Heim ins Reich') the response was 'Wir wollen heim, uns reichts' - 'Wewant to go home; we've had enough.'
Bitter fighting in Koenigsburg
The young still managed to live from day to day with some optimism but the older people were deeply pessimistic, expecting exile to Siberia or death.Many took refuge in alcohol and took such comfort as they could in their friends as they tried to ignore the deterioration in the city, the rubble, the rubbish, the dead horses, the abandoned trams.
Russian artillery fires on the streets of Koenigsburg
Before the storm broke.... A German soldier stands guard over a bridge in the centre of Koenigsburg
By the middle of March the Soviet Army was preparing for the final assault on Königsberg. The siege was expected to be one of the largest and most difficult urban assaults undertaken by the Soviet Army. Aerial inspections had shown how effective the preparations made in the last few months had been; the powerful forts, innumerable pillboxes and foxholes and well-constructed fortified buildings presented an enormous challenge. The city had three lines of defences;there were fifteen forts on the outer defences, a second line around the suburbs and another defensive line protected the inner city.

The Red Army now turned its attention again to Königsberg and towards the end of the month low-flying Russian aircraft began blaring out messages to the people of Königsberg: 'Men of the Volkssturm go home! We won't hurt you, you old granddads. Throw your rifles away.' Whenever the weather was clear their planes strafed the city and artillery fire increased steadily.The preliminary bombardment began at the very beginning of April but the weather was poor, and fog and rain impeded pilots and gunners. April 1 was quiet but the next day the Russians began to use heavy artillery against the outer forts and pillboxes. On 4 April many listened to the news on the radio for the last time - then the electricity went off as the artillery bombardment grew in intensity.

Thursday 5 April 1945 was a beautiful warm spring day and the Russians used the clear blue skies and the sunshine to fly low above the city, dropping bombs as they went. Wave after wave of aircraft came over. Hans von Lehndorff observed that there was no response from the German armed services. 'We felt as if we were sailing on an ocean in a sinking ship,' he wrote."

The Soviet planes flew over undisturbed and attacked wherever took their fancy. A black pall of smoke hung over the inner city and floated up into the translucent sky. More than a hundred planes were in the sky at a time,most only 500 metres above the ground, so that they could deliberately aim at people in the streets. That day Werner Terpitz and his battalion were sent to defend the western edge of the city but it was already too late.

Fortress Königsberg was indefensible.The assault on Königsberg began the next day, at 7.30 a.m.on 6 April 1945. It began with the relentless shelling of the city by thousands of guns, mortars and rocket launchers,followed by yet more aerial bombardment. An eyewitness recorded: The city fell in ruins and burned. The German positions were smashed, the trenches ploughed up,embrasures were levelled with the ground, companies were buried, the signal systems torn apart and the ammunition stores destroyed. Clouds of smoke layover the remnants of the houses of the inner city. On the streets were strewn fragments of masonry, shot-up vehicles and the bodies of horses and human beings.

As the Russians smashed through vital sections of the perimeter of the city, Lasch became convinced that the end was inevitable. Wave upon wave of air attacks passed over the city, which sank into burning ruins; not one German fighter plane was available to help resist the aerial bombardment.The German positions were crushed and the defenders' foxholes were overrun. Entire companies were buried and ammunition dumps were blown up.
The landmark of Koenigsberg, the Green Bridge in 1945
Both the Army and the Volkssturm were desperately short of equipment. They lacked weapons, ammunition and trained personnel to tell them what to do. On the streets the lack of anti-aircraft defence meant that there was a constant danger of being killed by the dive-bombers. Clouds of smoke hung over the city; the streets were littered with rubble and corpses; and terrified civilians fled from their bombed and burning houses, attempting to save whatever possessions they could.

A survivor remembers with horror that:[The] Russian barrage on Königsberg was incredible. Even the old stagers had never seen anything like it. The youngest kids who were with us in the trenches screamed 'Help' and 'Mum' and the infantrymen were howling and bawling 'Get those kids out of the trenches.' It was a shambles.
A destroyed German Stug 3
The death struggle for Festung Königsberg was now at its height. The city was attacked by thousands of artillery weapons and squadrons of bombers circled endlessly,destroying everything they hit in, as Michael Wieck puts it,'that wretched city'. Clouds of smoke hung over the town as chunks of buildings were sent flying through the air and cars were riddled with bullets. The Volkssturm was breaking apart and the wounded and the dead were piling up all over.

Frightened civilians fled from the Russian infantry and tank corps; by the evening of 6 April 1945, Russian soldiers were already well into the city. Assault units had pushed their way in, blowing up several forts, cutting the Königsberg-Pillau railway line and piercing the defensive system. 'When I went outside,' wrote Hans von Lehndorff, 'the town was crawling with Russian soldiers with strange wild faces and the town was on fire.' The attack continued throughout the night.

By the morning of 7 April, with the sound of battle at its height, Königsberg was covered in a thick pall of smoke, but this did not prevent more aircraft sweeping in to bomb yet more of the city. Some 246 bombers carried out three waves of attacks whilst ground troops made their way forward, street by street. They used 'Stalin organs', rocket launchers mounted on the backs of trucks, which could fire off rapid concentrated barrages.

The number of German dead and wounded began to mount and the medical services could not cope. People began to hang white sheets out of their windows in the hope of bringing the conflict to an end before more lives were lost.On 8 April the Russians crossed the Pregel by boat, cutting off central Königsberg completely. Deputy Gauleiter Grossherr and the remaining Party personnel agreed that Königsberg was doomed and called on the military to organise a mass escape to Samland. Now, when it was all too late, enormous efforts were made to get people away with military help. General Lasch remembers how:]Local knowledge ceased to be of any help in the inferno, which had once been the city of Königsberg.
The Soviet 11th Guards Army soldiers fire mortars near Pillau
Ghostly lunar landscapes had come into being in place of the great avenues which used to lead through the city. Paths could be reconnoitred and just an hour later they were impassable; the remaining façades of the buildings collapsed into the streets and the ground was torn up by mighty bomb craters. About ninety per cent of the city was now destroyed.

The confusion was compounded when, at just after midnight on 9 April, the Party authorities, without reference to Lasch, passed the word for the civilian population to assemble on the old Pillau road. The people set off at 2.00 a.m. in a huge swarm. The Russians noticed and swamped the area with fire. The result was a bloodbath and heart-breaking scenes were played out as survivors tried to drag themselves back to their homes.

Daylight showed a city in ruins, enveloped in a cloud of smoke. Thousands were injured and the first-aid stations were overrun with people needing emergency treatment.The Russians were everywhere and treating the wounded became more and more difficult, as the attackers ransacked every building they came to, searching for valuables like watches and other treasures.
A dejected German soldier in east Prussia in 1945. An image that described well how the Wehrmacht was feeling in 1945.
On the morning of 9 April, Hansvon Lehndorff, still working in the first-aid station where he was a doctor, was woken by the sound of Russian troops demanding that everyone should hand over their watches.The one German word they knew was watch -Uhr' - and they trampled over the wounded shouting 'Ur, Ur, Ur'. When they found none, one of the soldiers stuck three fingers in the air and swore that if no one would give him a watch three people would be shot.
The surviving weary and desperate 4000 soldiers of the Gross Deutschland Division arrive in Pillau from Balga. They defended Pillau till April 25, 1945 when they were overrun by the overwhelming Red Army
The Russians had a saying: 'The first wave gets the wrist watches, the second wave gets the girls and women, the third wave gets what is left,' and these young soldiers were in the first wave.

That day General Lasch accepted that the situation was hopeless and contacted the Russian high command, who guaranteed good treatment. The surrender finally came on the evening of 9 April 1945 at 9.30. Hitler declared Lasch a traitor, sentenced him to death and ordered the arrest of his family. At the time of the surrender there were in the city between 30,000 and 35,000 soldiers, 15,000 foreign workers and more than 100,000 civilians

Russian soldiers swept the ruins looking for Nazis and surviving German soldiers were marched off to captivity in the labour camps whilst the Red Army troops plundered the city, burned, robbed, drank and raped. The intention was clearly to terrorise the remaining civilians; women's voices could be heard crying out 'Shoot me, shoot me' as they begged for mercy, and many shot or poisoned themselves to avoid the rage of the Russian soldiers. Many members of the Volkssturm who had survived the fall of their city were murdered.

The German ship 'Wilhelm Gustloff' in 1939. The Wilhelm Gustloff′s final voyage was during Operation Hannibal in January 1945, when it was sunk while participating in the evacuation of civilians, military personnel, and Nazi officials who were surrounded by the Red Army in East Prussia. The Gustloff was hit by three torpedoes from the S-13 in the Baltic Sea under the command of Alexander Marinesko on the night of 30 January 1945 and sank in less than 45 minutes. An estimated 9,400 people were killed in the sinking, possibly the largest known loss of life occurring during a single ship sinking in recorded maritime history
THE TRAGEDY OF WILHELM GUSTLOFF

On 26 January thousands of refugees waiting on the quayside at Pillau were killed when the ammunition depot was blown up. Then, just a few days later, on 30 January 1945,the largest passenger shipping disaster in history - far worse than the Titanic - occurred outside the port of Gotenhafen.Gotenhafen was a collection point for both civilians and wounded soldiers and thousands were awaiting transport on the quayside. One of the ships available to transport them was the Wilhelm Gustloff.

The Nazis had built the Wilhelm Gustloff in the 1930s as a cruise liner, but when war broke out it was used as a hospital ship, ferrying casualties across the Baltic. On that night 60,000 people were waiting to escape from Gotenhafen and, as soon as the gangplanks were put in place, the desperate escapees tried to push their way on board. In the event 1,100 crew, 730 wounded soldiers, 373 young women who belonged to the Women's Naval Auxiliary and more than 6,000 civilian refugees, mostly women and young children, were packed into the ship - a total of over 9,000 people.
More than 30,000 of the people were trying to escape back to Germany by sea in four liners. Bound for a port near Hamburg, the convoy was just rounding the Hela Peninsula and leaving the Gulf of Danzig for the Baltic Sea. The biggest of these ships, the 25,000-ton Wilhelm Gustlofl, had never before carried so many passengers-1500 young submarine trainees and some 8000 civilians-eight times the number on the Lusitania. No one knew exactly how many frantic refugees had boarded at Danzig. Though everyone was supposed to have a ticket and evacuation papers, hundreds had smuggled themselves aboard. Some men hid themselves in boxes or disguised themselves in dresses. Refugees had been known to go to even more shameful extremes to escape the Russians.
Only 950 were saved by the rescue ships. Over 8000 perished in the greatest of all sea disasters-more than five times the number lost on the Titanic.

Recently at Pillau, where only adults with a child were allowed to board a refugee ship, some mothers tossed their babies from the decks to relatives on the dock. The same baby might be used as a ticket half a dozen times. In the frenzy some babies fell into the water, others were snatched away by strangers. As the Wilhelm Gustloff headed west into the choppy Baltic, a middle aged refugee, Paul Uschdraweit, came on deck. He was one of the doughty district officials of East Prussia who had defied Gauleiter Koch and let his people evacuate their towns. He himself had barely escaped the Red Army advance with his chauffeur, Richard Fabian.
The ship sank just fifty minutes after being hit and the water was so cold that no one could survive for more than a few minutes. Of the 9,000 people on board only 996 survived. Germans surrender in Koenigsburg
Every last centimetre of space was taken. The temperature outside was -10 Celsius, it was snowing and the deck was covered with layers of ice. The ship was unescorted and, because the visibility was poor, the captain decided to sail out into the open sea rather than keep to coastal waters. At 9.10 p.m. a Russian submarine, which was off course because the captain had disobeyed orders, spotted the Gustloff. Four torpedoes were fired and three direct hits were made below the waterline.
German civilians in Koenigsburg
The thousands on board began to panic, with everyone pushing to get up on deck. They clawed their way upwards; children slipped from their mothers' arms and were crushed. The ship was sinking fast and many of the lifeboats were under water before they could be launched.Others were covered with such a thick layer of ice that they were too heavy to launch. It soon became obvious that the majority on board were doomed.
German soldiers in Koenigsberg surrender after the Soviet army stormed it on April 9, 1945
After Königsberg had fallen, the Soviet Army turned its attention to Pillau, which was fanatically defended by the Germans following orders which went out to hold the port at all costs in order to permit every available German ship to take off refugees and soldiers. Some 20,000 German troops fought furiously for six days, inflicting enormous damage on the Russians but with huge casualties on their own side. The Germans finally surrendered Pillau on 26 April 1945. As the war came to an end, the evacuation by ship of Army Group North stranded in Kurland also began. In an operation reminiscent of Dunkirk every available vessel, from mine-sweepers to trawlers, ran a shuttle service from tiny ports strung along the Kurland coast and took the soldiers to bigger harbours for evacuation to the likes of Kiel and Eckernförde
The contrast. German holiday crowds in Koenigsberg in 1935.
Koch had abandoned East Prussia and Königsberg and those who remained now faced the wrath of the Russians.The German armed forces had slaughtered indiscriminately in Russia and Eastern Europe and now it was the turn of the Red Army to exact its own revenge. Drunk on the alcohol they found in the town, Russian soldiers killed old men, raped women and set on fire what remained of the city. They ransacked cellars where people were hiding and destroyed the houses above their heads. They herded groups of people together and shot them; they stormed the hospitals and threw the sick and wounded out of the windows. People remember cemeteries being destroyed, gravestones ripped up, and coffins flung open. Anyone suspected of being a Nazi was rounded up and sent to a labour camp.

Not much is known about the eventual fate of the Königsbergers who were forced to stay in the city. Many committed suicide and those who hung on through the next few months, hoping for a return to normality which was never to come, were pre-occupied with finding enough food to live on. With no proper government in place a poorly disciplined army was left in charge of the city. The Russians made no attempt to supply the German survivors with provisions. In an echo of what the people of Leningrad had had to endure when the Germans besieged their city, the people of Königsberg lived on the verge of starvation, amidst unburied corpses, non-existent sanitation, polluted water, disease and terrible infestations of flies. Stray dogs roamed the streets and anything that could be caught - cats, dogs, rats - ended up in the stew pot. On the brink of starvation and without fuel, survivors remember searching the gardens and fields for sorrel, dandelions and stinging nettles to boil into soup over fires made of sticks, seemingly unaware that the Germans had subjected the people of Leningrad to far worse. There was no electricity and even the polluted water supplies often failed.

A SAD END TO A ONCE THRIVING GERMAN KOENIGSBERG

The Russianisation of Königsberg began even before the final surrender on 8 May 1945. Loudspeakers were installed on every corner which blared out Russian music. Within a few days of the fall of the city, direction signs and place names in German were torn down and replaced by new ones in Russian script.

As Russians arrived in the town, those Germans who still had somewhere to live were turned out of their homes and forced to find shelter in bombed-out cellars without heating, lighting or water.In the winter of 1945-6 there were rumours of cannibalism and in the summer of 1946 there were outbreaks of typhus,malaria and typhoid, caused by drinking water from artificial lakes (built by the Nazis to double the water supply) being filled with decaying corpses and garbage. There were terrible infestations of lice and rats. The only proper food available,apart from a small allowance of bread given to those Germans who were given jobs by the Russians, was rye grain from fields in the surrounding countryside that had not been harvested in the summer of 1945 and had regrown a season later.

Of those who stayed behind, it is thought that half died in the course of the first three months after the surrender and another twenty-five per cent in the next three years. Michael Wieck believes that the Russians '... intentionally destroyed every resource needed for survival and thwarted every attempt people made to look after themselves, as if they wanted to accelerate the rate at which Königsbergers died.'And this was because, 'In their hearts they carried the pain of millions and millions of fallen comrades, starving civilians and murdered relatives and friends.'

In July 1946 northern East Prussia and Königsberg, an area about half the size of Belgium, officially became part of the Soviet Union after the signing of an agreement at the inter-Allied Potsdam Conference, which met in July and August 1945. The rest of East Prussia would go to Poland; Memel and the surrounding countryside became part of Lithuania.Königsberg and its environs were collectively renamed the Kaliningrad Oblast (region) in July 1946 (after Mikhail Kalinin, one of Stalin's cronies who had just died) and it was declared a military zone.
Koenigsberg in April, 1945. A city devastated. General Otto Lysh, the German officer in defence of Konigsberg after he signs the surrender on April 9, 1945. He observed, German people watch helplessly as a Red Army tank trundles on a street in Konigsberg in 1945 Port town of Pillau. The Germans evacuated on April 25, 1945 Nightmare in East Prussia. German refugees fleeing their land in Grantsa District in April 1945. The Allies had determined that Germany was to lose East Prussia and the Germans there were to be expelled westwards. The rag-tag Red Army soldiers celebrate the German surrender. East Prussia. May 1945. " I never thought that a first-rate fortress like Konigsberg would fall so soon under the blows of the Soviet army."
A barbed-wire fence was erected along its entire border with Poland, dividing families and communities. The first Soviet settlers arrived that summer from many parts of Russia, and East Prussia started to become Russian. Banners displaying the faces of Stalin,Lenin, Marx and Kalinin appeared all over the remains of the city and loudspeakers played Russian music. The port of Pillau was renamed Baltiysk and became home to the Soviet Baltic Fleet. It is still closed to foreigners and is the only Russian Baltic port which is ice-free for most of the winter.During the Cold War there were at times up to half a million troops stationed in the Kaliningrad region although there have been fewer since the end of the Cold War.

Koenigsberg broken. April 9, 1945. After the Germans surrendered. Russian officers with the Steindammer wall in the background.

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Hell On Earth: East Prussia And Koenigsberg In 1945

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In 1915 during WW1 it was all different. Russian POW in Tilsit with two burly German guards In the first four months of 1945, 2.5 million East Prussians tried to escape by these routes and it is probable that a million of them died, in the cold, on the ice, in the sea or at the hands of the Russians.

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THE STORY OF BALTIC DISPLACED PERSONS, 1944 – 1952

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THE STORY OF BALTIC DISPLACED PERSONS, 1944 - 1952

Displaced person: a person expelled, deported, or impelled to flee from his country of nationality or habitual residence by the forces or consequences of war or oppression

Webster's Third International Dictionary of the English Language, 2002

Seventy years ago, Baltic people by the hundreds of thousands left their homes to avoid war and the threat of Soviet oppression. They fled to the West by any means they could find. They traveled in fear and with hope of survival. But most overwhelmingly, they fled without knowing where they were going, what would happen, or when they might return. "No Home To Go To" features the words, images, and artifacts of Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian families and individuals who lived through this wrenching flight from home, years of living in displaced persons camps, and, finally, the journey to a new life in an unknown part of the world.

In his book, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War, Ben Shephard characterizes the displaced person crisis in Europe:

This story has been largely ignored by historians, mainly because it sits uncomfortably among such historical behemoths as the Second World War, the Cold War, the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Palestinian question. In addition, the years in camps in Germany were for many of the refugees themselves a time of limbo, an interlude between stages in their lives-and therefore best forgotten.

This story must no longer be ignored. Many who were adults during the war or post-war period are dead or in their senior years. Their children- now well into adulthood-have recollections of those years too, offering the impressions of youngsters but often blended with stories they heard from parents. Their perspectives and memories are central to defining what happened, to whom, and to how many. On the basis of these recollections, future historians can build a multi-dimensional and inclusive record of the post-war experiences. This exhibition and its related programs seek to contribute to this future, truthful story of the DP past.

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THE STORY OF BALTIC DISPLACED PERSONS, 1944 - 1952 Displaced person: a person expelled, deported, or impelled to flee from his country of nationality or habitual residence by the forces or consequences of war or oppression Webster's Third International Dictionary of the English Language, 2002 Seventy years ago, Baltic people by the hundreds of thousands left their homes to avoid war and the threat of Soviet oppression.

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The Willhelm Gustloff