The name which was seared into German consciousness was Nemmersdorf, a village in the district of Gumbinnen in north-eastern East Prussia. Nemmersdorf was occupied by Soviet forces on 20 October as they marched into the districts of Gumbinnen and Goldap; when Wehrmacht units re-occdupied the area a few days later, they found that numerous German civilians had been killed.
The Nazi propaganda machine made the most of the scene, giving it prominent and graphic coverage: the ‘gruesome Bolshevik crimes in East Prussia’, including pictures of mutilated corpses of German victims, were featured prominently in German news propaganda so as to arouse the greatest possible fear.
The propaganda worked. The atrocities in Nemmersdorf became almost legendary, with descriptions of how the Russians left behind a scene (according to later testimony of a member of a Volksturm unit charged with clearing up Nemmersdorf in the wake of the short-lived Soviet occupation in 1944) of mutilated dead bodies, of naked women nailed to doors, of infants whose heads had been smashed, of dozens of corpses of women and children ‘almost without exception murdered in a bestial manner’.
The immediate effect was panic.
Author’s Note:
The events at Nemmersdorf also have been the subject of television investigation in Germany, e.g. the ZDF television programme, ‘Die Wahrheit über Nemersdorf’, broadcast on 25.11.2001: http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/0,1872,2004695,00.html
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Fleeing for Their Lives.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 71. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Marlis Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans. Public Mood and Attitude during the Second World War (Athens, Ohio, 1977), p. 287.
Generally, see Berhard Fisch, Nemmersdorf, Oktober 1944. Was in Ostpreußen tatsächlich geschah (Berlin, 1997).
Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa. Band 1/1, pp. 7-8. ‘Erlebnisbericht des Volkssturmmannes K.P. aus Königsberg i. Ostpr. Original, 14, Januar 1953’.
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