Library of Congress photographs (LOT 2280): https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q= ... st=gallery
The Testimony of Karl August Knorr:
- Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 39-40. viewtopic.php?p=93611#p93611I was at the time an orderly officer in the 561st Civilian Grenadier Division charged with the task of restoring order in Metgethen after it had been recaptured by our side. In one street I discovered the bodies of two young women, both about 20, who had apparently been tied by the legs, one limb each between two cars, and then torn apart when the vehicles were driven in opposite directions. It was an absolutely disgusting sight. In that same street I came upon a large villa. I can’t remember the name of the street. The house contained around 60 women, all of whom we evacuated from the area. Half of them had to be taken immediately to a psychiatric hospital … on average they had been raped 60 to 70 times a day.
Horst A., at the time a driver for the Intelligence Reserve Detachment I, Königsberg, reported:
(From the same source as above)When we reached Metgethen, we were confronted with a gruesome sight: We found several hundred dead German soldiers, many of whom had been disfigured beyond recognition. There were murdered civilians in just about every home, likewise disfigured in a most bestial manner. For example, some women had their breasts cut off, and in backyard gardens we found scarcely clad women who had been hanged upside down. In one house we came across a 63-year-old woman still alive. Crying, she told us that she had been raped by 12 to 15 Russians. She lay on the floor covered in blood. This old woman’s daughter had escaped into the forest nearby, but her one-year-old child was abducted by the Russians. In the streets of Metgethen, and also at the railroad station, we found approximately 15 baby carriages, some overturned, all empty. We concluded that this meant the Russians had also abducted these babies.
Captain Hermann Sommer, former staff officer of the fortress commander of Königsberg, Otto Lasch, stated:
- Silke Spieler (ed.): Vertreibung und Vertreibungsverbrechen, 1945-1948: Bericht des Bundesarchivs vom 28. Mai 1974 (1989), p. 147I made my own observations on February 27th, 1945, when I came to Metgethen on official business. When I drove my motorcycle just before the railway-crossing into a gravel-pit, in order to inspect the building there for its usability, I found behind it the corpses of twelve women and six children. All were completely undressed and huddled up in a pile. Most of the children had had their skulls broken with a blunt object or their tiny bodies perforated with innumerable bayonet stabs. The women, mostly older ones between forty and sixty years, had also been killed with knives or bayonets. On all of them black-and-blue marks of beating were clearly visible.
German military historian Joachim Hoffmann wrote:
- Joachim Hoffmann, “Stalin’s War of Extermination 1941-1945”, Publishers for Military Science, Munich 1995, page 252Refugee columns were run down by tanks or shot down. Men – but also many women after being raped -, shot, bashed, or stabbed to death by tank drivers jumping down and by foot soldiers. Everywhere civilians were murdered, in houses and on roadways, sometimes they were also burnt alive in buildings, forest houses, barns or sheds. Men, who wanted to protect their women or daughters from being raped, were equally killed alongside the women, who defended themselves against violent deeds...
At times, as the examples of Nemmersdorf 1944 and Metgethen 1945 proved, the whole population of whole villages, men, women, and children were simply only for the reason massacred because they were Germans. For the rampant carrying-ons of the stirred up Soviet soldiers there was no established rule.
