The Nemmersdorf Massacre
This article comes from: "Directional Positions on Contemporary History, the Great Angle" Volume 2, Page 228 Published 2007 by Grabert Verlag, Tübingen 72 006, PO Box 1629 German Reich (taken with permission from www.kehrusker.net and translated by Duncan Edmister).
The Case of Nemmersdorf
This is the name
that Alfred M. de Zayas (1) of the Wehrmacht Investigation Bureau (WUST) placed
on the actions of the Soviet Red Army on the 20th and 21st of October,
1944. The Americans used it as an example of Allied international
law violations. "peaks conquered by the Soviet army south of the
East Prussian village Nemmersdorf Gumbinnen. A few days later, German troops
occupied the town again. After describing the first German soldiers who arrived
in Nemmersdorf then, area residents had been killed in an extremely cruel
manner".
Nemmersdorf was
the first German city conquered by Soviet troops during World War II. The
ferocity of the propaganda supplied to Russian soldiers against German
civilians in this village raged viciously.
German troops who retook Nemmersdorf were of units of the Parachute Regiment, 16-East. The diary entries of the regimental commander, later army colonel Gerhart Schirmer(2) follow. Commander Schirmer reported that a regiment with tank corps was commissioned to reclaim the space around Nemmersdorf.
"Then we
attacked. The Pak were pushed to fire. We fought from house to house and
reached the line of Angerapp church river at the bridge. Then we helped
Stukas. By evening we had retaken Nemmersdorf. The picture that presented
itself to the fighting force was terrible. The naked women were nailed to the
barn door - as Christ on the cross. Children and men were terribly killed and
mutilated. Their skin had been horribly taken from them .... I saw this
shortly after taking Nemmersdorf. It was horrible. At the barns and other
buildings women and children were maimed horribly. "
The Jew psychopath Ilya Ehrenburg.
Soviet troops were really
whipped up by his specific calls for rape and murder. A report was made by John
Walz, earlier High Field Officer at Stockach. His troops had come under
heavy behind-the-front fire from Tilsit by Nemmensdorf. In the confusion
of the fight he did not arrive until after the village had been freed by their
troops. He took a patrol to inquire into the situation. That
experience led him to write briefly of terrible observations. "From the
distance we had to watch as the terrible carnage in Nemmersdorf was going
on. We heard a terrible screaming of women and children. In the
firelight we could see the drunken Russians running over the children with
wagons. The women's breasts were cut off and nailed to doors.
Others had their hands chopped off. This slaughter of Nemmersdorf
is the most terrible thing you can think of... Shortly afterwards the
paratroopers of Colonel Schirmer came and expelled the Russians ... I
myself was then wounded by a Russian sniper and was shot through lungs. "
Murdered children of Nemmersdorf, as seen by German soldiers in
the fall of 1944 (Federal Archives)
Indescribable atrocities of the Soviets came to light after the recapture Nemmensdorf. (Federal Archive)
Soviet soldiers raged on in other venues as they had in
Nemmersdorf. Town-folk such as those in Metgethen near
German soldier found in
A victim of Soviet atrocities in
Stalin had a conversation with the Jew Djilas regarding the law of the Russian soldiers' rape party. He said to him:
"The Red Army are presented with an ideal. We have opened the doors
of our prisons and sent them forth with this ideal in the army. .... It
is important that they fought the Germans - and they fight well, everything
else is irrelevant (3) ".
Children from
The
behavior of Russian soldiers should not surprise us when thinking of
Stalin. He unleashed the Jew Ilya Ehrenburg and Jewish Red Army
Commissars to incite terrible violence against German civilians. They
deliberately set out to rape and murder German women and children. On
December 7, 1944 the Jew Ehrenburg wrote "German women arouse only
feelings of abhorrence in us.... We despise them because they are thieves and
temptresses. We need none of these flaxen-haired hyenas. We are
coming to
The German re-education and media industry is too fond of talking of
German guilt and shame. The international press would like to downplay
atrocities against Germans. This is referred to again in a statement of
Alfred M. de Zayas (5): "I heard the children screaming and gun
shots awaken me. Then everything was quiet. The events in the
village Nemmersdorf on the 20th and 21st of October, 1944 earn Nemmersdorf
special importance for the history of the German war against Communism.
This played an important role in addition to Katyn as being probably one of the
best documented examples of Russian atrocities in the Second World War.
It was the epitome of unspeakable fear for East Prussian farmers.
Nemmersdorf was not the only place the Red Army soldiers committed atrocities,
but what is going on there accelerated the flight of
Gerda Merczulat survived
severe injuries during the massacre of Nemmensdorf. (Photo: YouTube).
The painful events are documented plainly for
all. On July 5, 1946 the former chief of staff of the Fourth Army
in
re-take Nemmersdorf and secure a larger number of villages such
as Gumbinnen. The German civilian population had been nailed to barn
doors as torture. Then they were shot dead by Russian soldiers. A large
number of women had been previously gang-raped ... also about 50 French prisoners
of war were shot by Russian soldiers. Those places were in German hands
48 hours later. Medical reports on the autopsies of the corpses and
photographs of the bodies were submitted to me a few days later. "
Another witness put under oath gave the following statement,
which was later presented in
"Bodies of civilians were at the roadside and in the courtyards of the
houses en masse. They were apparently not killed in the course of combat
operations by stray bullets, but were killed as planned. Among other things, I
saw many women who judging by the situation of the displaced and torn clothes
were raped and then killed by a shot in the neck. Some children were also
laying dead beside the women."
Karl Potrek, a civilian from
We close the "case Nemmersdorf" with the idea of
the Soviet officer Lew Kopelev (5), the commander in charge of the murderer
Ilya Ehrenburg (7) "Kill kill, kill ..." This will give us
some explanation of the inhumanity. At the end of the chapter "In East
Prussia", Kopelev writes: "... and all of us - officers and
generals - are to behave according to Ehrenburg's recipe. What we teach
is revenge: German women are to be put across trunks and suitcases. Carry
off their clothes. The Germans flee from us (to the British and Americans). And
imagine what will become of our soldiers, who attacked dozens of women?
The school girls raped and old women are murdered? ... .. The hundreds of
thousands of criminals of future crimes, cruel and brazen with the claims of
being heroes."
Remnants of destroyed treks. "The Russian pilots had orders
to shoot any refugee column, since that is supposedly where soldiers were. "(Heinz
Schön)
The German military
historian Joachim Hoffmann writes of the Soviet terror in his classic work:
Murder, the most serious crime, was committed in every
conceivable way, in endless variations on a theme. Lines of fleeing
refugees were crushed by tanks or blasted to bits; men and women were shot,
beaten to death, or stabbed by infantry troops and tank crews leaping down from
their tanks, the women often after being raped. Civilians were murdered
everywhere: in private homes, on the street, in public buildings,
forester's houses, barns, and sheds, and were sometimesw burned alive.
Men attempting to protect their wives and daughters from rape were usually
killed, as were women who attempted to defend themselves against rape.
There are endless reports of sadistic sexual attacks and murders and sometimes
even of the rape of persons already murdered. During the so-called
"de-Nazification," members of the NSDAP and their membership organizations
were shot, along with other "fascists", such as local farming village
leaders and, of course, members of the police and all persons wearing the
uniforms of the postal employees, members of the fire department, or forestry
officials, in addition to members of the Reich Labor Service and the
Organization Todt. Often kiled were the so-called
"capitalists", such as landowners, farmers, shop-owners, and
homeowners. Also killed were all those who could in any way be considered
potential "partisans", such as members of the Hitler Youth, and, very
often, the residents of houses in which German soldiers or weapons had been
found. The formal basis for all of this was Order No. 0016 of the NKVD of
January 16, 1945, issued by the People's Deputy of "mobilized Germans"
(mobilizovannych nemcev), all those who were unable to keep pace due to
exhaustion were beaten to death or shot by the Soviets, while many others died
under interrogation from inhuman tortures in NKVD torture chambers. The
residents of entire localities- men, women, and children- were sometimes
massacred simply because they were German, as ilustrated by the examples of
Nemmersdorf in 1944 and Metgethen in 1945. There were no established
guidelines for the unrestrained activities of the inflamed Soviet "soldateska"
(soldiers).(8)
One must
call an irony of history that the very Soviet Union was on the so-called
"IMT", the Revenge of International Military Tribunal, on the side of
the accuser, rather than being themselves under indictment.
That Reich
Propaganda Minister Goebbels incited the "fury of the Soviet beasts"
in Nemmersdorf and in surrounding villages is ridiculous. To say that
Nemmersdorf was the work of the Imperial propaganda is an insane step that
Guido Knopp has not yet ventured. In his series "ZDF - History of
November 25, 2001 he said: "suspect witnesses made statements that the
Nazi propaganda exploited not only the crimes, but in part also has
staged".
The
massacre at Nemmersdorf stands as the ultimate example of what Jewish-induced
atrocities can achieve. Ilya
Ehrenburg and other Jews in positions of military Commissars incited the
Asiatic Slavs, Poles, and Czechs to model this treatment on the whole civilian
German population of eastern and central
SOURCES
1 Alfred M. de Zayas, The Wehrmacht War Office -
Unpublished records of Allied violations of international law in the Second
World War, "Universitas, Munich 1980, page 39
2 The records are of the author.
3 Milovan Djilas, "Conversations with Stalin",
S. Fischer,
4 Ilya Ehrenburg "Soviet War News July 12, 1944"
5 M Alfred de Zayas, "The Anglo-Americans and the
expulsion of the Germans," CH Beck,
6 Lew Kopelev, "Preserving for all time," Hoffmann and
7 Ilya Ehrenburg, Soviet writer and propagandist, 1891 in
8 Joachim Hoffmann, "Stalin's War of Extermination
1941 - 1945 ", publisher of Defence Studies,
Randulf Johan Hansen