The Evacuation of East Prussia reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004
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Evacuation of East Prussia

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The Ethnic cleansing of East Prussia refers to the genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign of the Red Army on the German population of East Prussia and other Prussian lands in 1944 and 1945. Essentially, the entire population was sent off to western Germany in the dead of the Baltic winter or murdered.

When the Soviet army invaded the German province of East Prussia, a war crime is reported to happen in August 1944 in two East Prussian villages called Nemmersdorf (now Mayakovskoye, Kaliningrad) and Goldap.

This genocidal pattern would in the following months repeat itself across entire East Prussia, and then spread to West Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Silesia — in other words the lands east of the Oder-Neisse Line that were to be taken away from Germany in light of Potsdam conference agreements. Fleeing from the genocide, the German refugees trudged in great columns through the snow at -25°C, while Soviet aircraft performed shellfire raids on them. Many were killed and sick had to be left dying on the road, while the survivors attempted to rescue what they could, carrying their possessions with them. German forces fought heroically to hold the roads westward open so their fellow countrymen could escape. Many women had to give birth in the open, leaving their newborns to die.

The Russians and Poles who were now sent to the German lands by Stalin were lied to, and told that all the nazis had originally come from East Prussia, which justified in their eyes the ethnic cleansing of the area and the subsequent annexation to Russia as the Kaliningrad Oblast. Ironically in truth nazism began in southern Germany, in Austria and Bavaria, which were hardly touched at all by the post-WW2 ethnic cleansings. Another cruel irony of history is that German populace was subjected to basically the same atrocities that Nazis earlier inflicted on Polish and Russian populace, again under orders of another tyrant, Stalin.

The name of Nemmersdorf is considered to be a symbol of the war crimes of the Red Army.

See also: