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Displaced persons on their way to the west cross the Elbe near Tangermünde on a bridge destroyed by the Germans in May 1945
Photo: Fred Ramage / Getty Images
The first refugees came to Allenstein in autumn 1944.
They had been evacuated from the northeastern regions of East Prussia because the Red Army was approaching.
The people were very afraid of the Russians.
Our house was full of refugees.
We were not asked at all, we had to hand over some rooms that were used to accommodate families.
On January 12, 1945 the schools were closed.
A week later we fled.
That was a drama.
It's so difficult to part with your house and everything you own.
About 75 percent of the population stayed in Olsztyn in the hope that the Germans could still stop the Russians.
Then you never got out of town;
many were abducted or killed by the Russians.
Shortly after her arrival in Hamburg, Annemarie Günther wrote a report about her escape from East Prussia: she first wrote it down by hand with a blue pencil on paper that she found on the way in the ditch, and later she typed it cleanly on the typewriter. It reflects the worldview of the then 21-year-olds:
“When we celebrated Christmas in 1944, we had no idea that the next month would drive us out of our beloved house, our Allenstein, forever.
It looked serious enough;
but who doubted the good outcome of the war?
Our soldiers hold the East Prussian border, that was our firm conviction, everyone's hope.
Despite all the hopelessness, you cling to your homeland until the very last moment, about which nothing is possible. "
The terrible rumor
We had made it through for a whole week.
Then we came to Vehlow north of Berlin, where we were taken in by relatives on an estate.
On May 1, 1945, I fled from Vehlow with my sister and our mother to Hamburg.
In her notes from 1945 it goes on: “Suddenly on the morning of May 1st the terrible rumor that the Russians broke through to the east of us, are in Bork and are bombarding Blumenthal. And really we saw plumes of smoke on the horizon. Just keep calm, even if the worst was to be feared in the shortest possible time. They waited for the Russians and still hoped. There was a great emptiness in me, I thought nothing at all anymore. There was no point in brooding now. We had decided to hold out, everything that was to come was no longer in our hands.
At around 1 a.m. we were woken up by the noise.
Did it start now?
This waiting was almost unbearable.
Outside we still found the SS charged with blowing up the bridges and then building them up.
Oh, you could go with that!
To have the Russians in front of your eyes was demonized.
When the soldiers saw us, they were horrified and said we should leave as soon as possible.
Then I got the trigger that I had been waiting for.
Go on now!
Take fate in hand!
We stormed off.
The direction of the route was clear to me, to the west, towards Hamburger Chaussee.
In all likelihood it was the only free path.
"The Führer dead!"
One had the impression that all Germans were streaming north, only away from the Russians.
Soldiers, civilians, labor service workers, prisoners of war, men, women, children and many treks moved north.
We lined up in this mournful train.
How long would we last?
Will the Russians catch up with us?
Left and right in the ditches were piles of discarded weapons, uniforms, files, even typewriters!
Here on this trip we received the news that Hitler had died in Berlin.
The leader dead!
Unthinkable!
Now it was all over anyway.
I will never forget the moment when we saw the first white flags hanging in Grabow.
White flags, surrender, surrender!
We had reached the Americans, drove into their arms.
Now the first Americans drove past us slowly, we could see them face to face.
Standing casually in their car, cigarette between their lips or chewing gum in their mouth, mostly smiling, they watched our long columns.
Now these were our conquerors.
Whether on horseback, in the car, on the bike or on foot, from the first moment it was clear to me that they are an adventurous people, sporty and enterprising.
The American news was far from encouraging.
Atrocities were reported from the concentration camps, which proved the alleged inhumanity and cruelty of the National Socialist government.
Incredible and unheard of for us!
No Germans could have acted like this!
That must be foreign propaganda (...). "
Our escape ended at the end of May 1945.
My mother, my sister and I got to Hamburg on foot.
A sister of my mother lived in Othmarschen, that was our goal.
We arrived at her completely torn, in ski pants and a thick sweater, and it was already wonderful summer weather here.
We only had what we were wearing, otherwise we had nothing.
We had fled hastily at night, we hadn't been able to take any luggage with us, nothing.
"Wait a minute, dad can still come"
Hamburg was a single field of rubble.
But Othmarschen was pretty well preserved.
We were glad that my mother's sister was alive and that we were back.
She and her husband welcomed us with joy.
They had three sons, all three of whom were killed in the war.
For a long time we had been full of hope that my father was still alive, that he had got out of Allenstein in time and that we would see him again soon.
He had kept all the important documents, bank documents, my high school diploma, my exam certificate, with him.
I'll get out safely, he told us, I'll take the important things with me.
We later learned that he had been found dead near our home in Olsztyn.
He is said to have been slain by the Russians.
After the war I tried to find out something about his fate.
I've been looking for his grave.
All unsuccessful.
He is probably in a mass grave in Allenstein.
Despite everything, we had courage and hope this summer.
Because we were young.
We boys had the strength to move into new life.
It was much harder for my mother: she had lost her husband, four of her children and her home.
For years she didn't have my father pronounced dead.
She always said: "I'm still waiting, Daddy can still come."
In Othmarschen, from July onwards, I worked as a therapeutic and physiotherapist in a school that served as a hospital.
I lived there too.
The auditorium had a small stage, on which a room was partitioned off for me to sleep with a curtain;
there was my bed.
Next to it was my study with two bunks on which I did movement exercises with the soldiers and massaged them.
Twelve hours a day, I really worked.
Hunger and Schumann's "dreaming"
There was hardly anything to eat.
In the hospital we got a piece of bread with a tiny piece of butter in the morning and in the evening, at noon we got potatoes and turnips, without meat.
Whether doctors, nurses or soldiers - everyone was given the same ration;
that was really damn little.
I was always terribly hungry.
I was very thin, the work was exhausting.
The soldiers then stole raw turnip slices from the kitchen.
I tucked it into my smock apron, and whenever my stomach didn't want to go anymore, I nibbled a slice.
The soldiers, of course, liked me as a young girl.
They soon found out my birthday.
A soldier, he only had one leg, asked me at some point which music I like.
I told him that I really love Schumann's "daydreaming".
There was a piano on the stage in the auditorium.
The following year, on my birthday morning, when I was still asleep, the soldier sat down at the piano and played "Reverie" for me.
When he finished he came hobbling on one leg with a huge platter of crocuses in his hands.
He said: I have to confess, they were stolen from a front yard in Othmarschen.
My God, I was so touched.
How should you deal with that?
Many soldiers in the hospital were badly injured.
Some were missing a leg, some were missing both hands, others were blind.
Nevertheless, there was a great atmosphere.
We felt like a community of fate.
We were like a big family.
Everyone was glad that the war was finally over;
there was an incredible spirit of optimism.
Then slowly the news reached us about what Hitler, what Germany had done.
We learned about Auschwitz, about the extermination of the Jews, about all the atrocities.
That was horrific.
It was a collapse of our whole world that we had previously lived in.
It was so horrible that we just wanted to hide away.
How it could have been kept secret for so long!
Of course, that seems implausible to people today, including myself.
At the end of 1945 an English truck drove up to the hospital.
All people who had ever been with the SS were picked up.
You could recognize her by the scar on her arm, where her SS number was previously tattooed.
I don't know what happened to them.
All doctors and nurses had to indicate whether they were in the party.
I wrote in all honesty that I was a high-ranking young girl leader.
Shortly afterwards I received a letter that I was denazified.
I had to pay two marks and fifty and was released immediately.
Many years later I was asked by a psychologist: How did you actually deal with all of this?
I never asked myself that question.
These are such newfangled questions.
How should you deal with that?
The experiences are always alive in me.
And then there is the guilty conscience that in our time so great injustice has been committed that so many people have been murdered.
You cannot understand this time today.
Perhaps one can never really relate a time backwards.
Even I have difficulty today understanding how all of this was possible.
