As news of the Red Army’s advance spread like wildfire, East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and other eastern regions were filled with panic-stricken refugees, often scarcely equipped to cope with the bitter cold, fleeing with or without their possessions by any means they could find, many of them on foot. ‘The roads are full of refugees, carts, and pedestrians,’ one eye-witness recalled. ‘Now and then cars packed with people and suitcases go by, followed by envious looks from those on foot. Again and again there are jams. People are gripped by panic as the cry goes up: “The Russians are close!” People look at each other. That can’t be possible. Then a man comes by on horseback, shouting in a loud voice: “Save yourselves, you who can. The Russians will be here in half an hour.” We’re overcome by a paralysing fear.’35
Another report, from Königsberg, where the main square was thronged with refugee-wagons, mainly driven by women, and a fearful population not daring to think of the future, described the scene on 26 January: ‘It’s night as we leave the house. On the old road to Pillau the wagon-wheels grind endlessly as they pass by. Alongside, people of every age and position pull their sledges or push fully-laden prams. No one looks back.’36 One woman remarked: ‘The Führer won’t let us fall into Russian hands. He’ll gas us instead.’37 No one took any notice of such an extraordinary remark. Others discussed how much cyanide was needed to commit suicide; it was as if they were talking about what to have for the next meal.38
A boy fleeing from the collapsing front in Poland travelled, together with his mother and sister, for two days and two nights in an overcrowded train heading for Breslau. From the window of the train, he observed the bodies of German soldiers along the wayside, hanged with notices round their neck denouncing them as cowards and deserters, and roads full of slaughtered cattle which their owners had been unable to drive off.39 A couple who managed to jump on the last train to leave from Breslau told of ‘refugees who almost trampled each other to death, of bodies thrown out of unheated goods trains during the journey, of those trekking coming to a standstill on the streets, of mothers gone mad who did not want to believe that the babies they carried in their arms were already dead.’40 Within days, Berlin was among the cities swarming with refugees from the east, bitter and angry. ‘Those who have lost everything, also lose their fear,’ as one account put it. The police, for the time being, did not intervene.41
Horror stories filtering out and exploited by propaganda about the treatment of the German population unable to leave before Soviet troops arrived intensified the panic.42 ‘The refugees arriving here from, the eastern Gaue are bringing for the most part quite shattering news of the misery of the fleeing population which, partly in panic, has sought refuge within the Reich from the Bolsheviks,’ was noted in a regional report from Lower Bavaria.43 All too often the horror stories were true as soldiers of the Red Army, frequently drunk and out of control, wreaked vengeance for what had been done to their own people on the families who fell into their hands in orgies of plundering, rape, beatings, killings, and other forms of terrifying maltreatment.44 One careful estimate suggests that as many as 1.4 million women were raped in the eastern territories — some 18 per cent of the female population of those regions. In East Prussia, the percentage may well have been much higher.45
Fear of capture by the Red Army was by no means confined to the civilian population. Reports reaching Himmler left no illusions of collapsing morale among German troops in the battle zones of the east. This was especially pronounced among the units hastily put together from ‘stragglers
