Bloody tragedy in Demmin. Why the myths of Goebbels are back in vogue in the West
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels at a meeting at the Fuhrer's Berghof residence. 1943
The case of the German Demmin with hundreds of corpses in early May 1945, who allegedly became victims of the "bloodthirsty Russians", perfectly illustrates the full power of Goebbels' propaganda.
"We won't forget anything"
In the fall of 1944, the Red Army entered the territory of Nazi Germany. The Red Army soldiers marched across the charred, scorched land, where the villages were burned along with the inhabitants. The wells are filled with corpses. Dead people hung from city lamps. Around the towns and cities, freshly dug up earth sagged, showing the places of mass graves. Almost every fighter's relatives died, went missing or were taken prisoner. Every soldier and officer who fought from Stalingrad and Moscow to the border knew about the unthinkable, terrible suffering and grief that the war and the Nazi occupation brought.
It was unbearable, scary even for a military man. It was not just a war, but a war to exterminate the entire Soviet (Russian) people.
“We had one captain die a day, the first day we set foot on German soil,” recalled nurse Tamara Kuraeva. “All his family members are dead. He was a brave man, he was waiting for this... This day... When he sees their land, their misfortune, their grief. How they cry. Their ruins… He died just like that, not injured, nothing. Came, looked - and died ... "
During the war years, the words "enemies" and "Germans" became synonymous. The Germans were arsonists, murderers, rapists, executioners and cannibals. Germany became a cursed country where mass production of "Killer Fritz" was organized.
Hatred was not born immediately. At the beginning of the war, the Red Army treated the Germans with respect. They were brought up in Russian cultural traditions, proletarian internationalism was instilled in them. But such illusions quickly sank into oblivion. Already in the first months of the war, it became clear that the enemy was waging a war of extermination. The Nazis abandoned all laws and traditions, including the military. They did not spare not only commanders and political workers, but the civilian population, the elderly, women and children. And then hatred came, the singer of which was the writer Ilya Ehrenburg.
“We will not forget anything,” Ehrenburg wrote. - We are going through Pomerania, and before our eyes is a devastated, bloodied Belarus. We will bring to Berlin the persistent smell of burning, which our greatcoats in Smolensk and Orel have been soaked with. In front of Königsberg, in front of Breslau, in front of Schneidemulle, we see the ruins of Voronezh and Stalingrad ... Berlin will still answer ... - for everything. He will answer for the German who flogged pregnant women in Budenovka. He will answer for the German who threw up the children and shot at them, hemming: "A new sport ...". He will answer for the German who burned Russian women in the Leningrad region and boasted: "These Russians are burning, as if they were not made of meat, but of straw." He will answer for the German who buried the old Jews alive, so that their heads stick out of the ground, and wrote: "These are very beautiful flower beds," Berlin will answer for everything.
With such thoughts, the Red Army soldiers walked through the German cities and villages. Everything was alien, hateful, beautiful and whole. And behind our army was the devastated native land, where ashes and ruins were more common than entire houses. The lands from the border to Leningrad, Moscow, the Volga and the Caucasus mountains were destroyed. Unable to restrain themselves, the soldiers used to destroy and burn houses and furniture.
lair of the beast
The population of the Reich was cut off for a long time from true information about the war in the East. About what the soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the SS were doing on Soviet soil for three years. However, bits of information leaked out. The Germans understood that it was impossible to lose the war, otherwise they would have to be responsible for what their soldiers did in Poland and the USSR.
The Goebbels Propaganda Ministry did everything to inspire the people that it was impossible to surrender. City posters depicted bestial Russian peasants tearing German babies to pieces. The whole country was littered with books, pamphlets, which described the atrocities of the Eastern subhumans. All Germans, young and old, knew that when the Russians came, they would rape, burn and cut into pieces.
Propaganda clichés of the last century were used. The Goebbels department told tales that Germany was threatened by wild and bloodthirsty Cossacks. Historical theories according to which the Cossacks were descendants of the Goths-Goths and almost true Aryans (for the recruitment of Cossacks and Russians in the SS, Wehrmacht) were forgotten. Now the Russian Cossacks were portrayed as some kind of monsters, fiends.
Also, Nazi propaganda assured that there were almost no Russians in the Red Army. To the West go, as in the time of Attila or Batu, solid hordes of Kalmyks, Buryats, Mongols and Chinese, who will flood the whole of Europe with blood. It is worth noting that the current Western and Ukrainian Nazi propaganda uses the same clichés.
In essence, Hitler's propagandists attributed to the Russian soldiers and command the way of thinking that was characteristic of the soldiers and command of the Wehrmacht and the SS. It seemed logical that the enraged Russians would do the same to the Germans that they so stubbornly wanted to do to them - they would destroy to the last man.
This position was very clearly formulated in Hitler's last address to the German nation:
Soldiers on the Eastern Front! called the Fuhrer. - For the last time, the mortal enemy in the person of the Bolsheviks and the Jews goes on the offensive. He is trying to defeat Germany and destroy our people. You, soldiers on the Eastern Front, for the most part already know for yourself what fate is prepared for, first of all, German women, girls and children. While old people and children will be killed, women and girls will be reduced to barracks prostitutes. The rest will go to Siberia.”
In essence, the Fuhrer became the author of the Western black myth about the millions of German women raped by Russian soldiers.
And the German soldiers knew what they were doing in the East. They killed children and the elderly, drove women into brothels and raped women, ripped open the stomachs of raped girls, burned entire villages with their inhabitants. That is why the words of Hitler and the propaganda of Goebbels sounded so convincing.
This caused a wave of panic in the Third Reich. Many thousands of Germans, when the Russians did cross the border, fled to the western regions of the country. When the Red Army entered the next town or village, it seemed extinct. Those who could not or did not have time to escape hid and waited for inevitable terrible death. German burghers were waiting for the invasion of Russian barbarians, Cossacks and Mongols, who would flood everything with blood.
Forced laborers thank Soviet tankers for their release from captivity in Berlin
Tragedy in Demmin
Terrible tragedies occurred in a number of places.
In the Pomeranian Demmin (former Slavic city) at the end of the war there were 15-16 thousand inhabitants. Refugees from Prussia and East Pomerania also settled here. On April 28, 1945, all the Nazis, officials, military and police fled from the city. Only militias (Volkssturm) and members of the Hitler Youth became in the city. Soviet parliamentarians offered to surrender the city without a fight. They opened fire on them.
Panic began in the city: “We will all be destroyed!” Many residents of the city and refugees, in fear of inhuman torment, committed suicide, it happened that entire families. Who had a gunshot weapon - they shot, others hung themselves, drowned themselves in the Pene and Tollense rivers, used razors, knives and poisons. Some women have previously killed their children.
The victims were buried in several mass graves at the Demmin cemetery. In total, according to various sources, from 700 to 1 people died. After the collapse of the USSR and the unification of the GDR and the FRG, it became fashionable in the West to brand the Union, the Red Army and the Russians in general in all sorts of crimes and horrors. Naturally, the bloody tragedy in Demmin was also blamed on the Russians. They say that the massacre occurred due to the fact that Russian soldiers began to rob and burn the city, rape women. According to the traditional scheme, one or two examples of rapes, cases of looting were given, and then it was concluded that this was a mass and widespread phenomenon (up to “millions of raped”). That's all! No documents, certificates and records.
That is, a case of mass panic, which was largely caused by German propaganda and rumors (in the style of “a grandmother told in the market”), when the burghers had not yet seen the Russians in the eyes, but began to kill themselves, they wrote down in the alleged “atrocities of the Red Army”.
In general, this is recognized by those Westerners who still remember what common sense is. In 2018, German director Martin Farkas made a documentary about the tragedy of the civilians of Demmin. In an interview with Deutsche Welle, he said:
“People were subjected to terrible propaganda. The National Socialists fanned the fear of "monsters from the East". However, all the survivors with whom I spoke said that the Russians helped them. In 1945 these people were children. They said that Soviet soldiers saved their lives by pulling them out of the river or bandaging their hands when their mothers wanted to kill them. Modern Germans know very little about Demmin's history. Some people were very surprised by the film and what the older Demmin people were saying there.”
Yes, and Deutsche Welle itself, commenting on Farkas's tape, confirms that the majority of the city's residents did not observe the crimes of the Red Army.
"Honor of the Soviet Union"
In the West, the history of the Second World War has already been quite successfully rewritten. In it, Russian barbarians destroyed, incinerated German cities (and not the Anglo-American aviation), raped German women by the millions, deliberately exterminated prisoners of war. And then they drove the survivors to the Stalinist concentration camp.
However, despite the propaganda of the Western revisionists, we must remember the undeniable fact: the German people did not experience even a hundredth part of the hell that the Nazis created on Russian soil. It is clear that some excesses occurred. This is war, not kindergarten. And the command severely suppressed such cases so that they did not multiply. In general, the Red Army treated the German population quite loyally. A Soviet soldier with a rescued German girl in Treptow Park is not propaganda, but the truth embodied in stone.
Having gone through the hell of urban battles in a number of German cities, including Berlin, our fighters recalled how, even at the cost of their lives, they tried to save German children, women and the elderly. The Soviet, Russian people could not calmly look at the death of children.
The hate hasn't gone away. The Red Army would have torn to shreds Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, the Gestapo executioners and savage SS. But they could not take revenge on ordinary people. Russian and Soviet culture are based on humanity, the highest qualities of man. Truth and life in conscience are the basis-code of Russian civilization and the Russian superethnos.
The defeated Germans no longer aroused hatred, but pity. Russian soldiers could not take revenge on the elderly, women and children. They were treated with indifference, as if they were strangers, or even helped, fed the hungry. And there were almost no men in the liberated regions. Everyone, including young men, was sent to be slaughtered during total mobilizations.
The Soviet leadership formulated its position on the Germans as early as February 1942. In a festive speech dedicated to the next anniversary of the Red Army, Stalin said:
“Sometimes they talk in the foreign press that the Red Army aims to exterminate the German people and destroy the German state. This, of course, is stupid nonsense and stupid slander against the Red Army. The Red Army does not and cannot have such idiotic goals ... The experience of history says that the Nazis come and go, but the German people, and the German state remain.
As soon as the Red Army entered enemy territory, an order was issued for severe punishment for crimes against civilians. Kalinin in 1944 warned members of Komsomol organizations in the army:
“It is necessary to behave in such a way in order to preserve, preserve the honor of the Soviet Union - the first state of workers and peasants. Behave civilly, politely with the population. Really show that we are not invaders.”
The command carried out this installation clearly and strictly. Any manifestations of violation of discipline, violence and looting were resolutely fought. These requirements were met by the troops. At the same time, educational work was carried out. The soldiers were explained why it was impossible to behave like fascists. It worked.
The same Ehrenburg now called for noble mercy: "There are people, and there are cannibals."
"Warrior-Liberator" - a monument to the Soviet soldiers who fell in the battles for Berlin at the war memorial in Treptow Park in Berlin. Sculptor E. V. Vuchetich, architect Ya. B. Belopolsky. Opened May 8, 1949. Height - 13 meters. Weight - 70 tons. The Warrior-Liberator monument is a symbol of the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War and World War II and the liberation of the peoples of Europe from Nazism.
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