Thank you for remembering this tragedy,that took place from january 1945, showing a part of the WW2 not well known by most.
That was only one episode of the larger tragedy suffered by millions of germans and german origin civilian refugees, mostly women with children and old people escaping from Eastern Prussia, Memel, Poland the red army.
Those refugees were the survivors of the systematic rapes, brutality and killings by the red army, especially made by the asiatic soldiers coming in the second wave. They moved towards south west in long deadly marches in the ice and the snow at minus 40 degrees leaving behind thousands of dead children, women, old people who couldn't resist such a terrible effort and weather conditions.
Some of them tried to reach Germany by boat: the kriegsmarine put all their boats available to carry as many people as they could to Kiel, Hambourg, even to Danemark.
This tragedy was another of Hitler's crimes against humanity, showing his total indifference to the life of his own people...The gauleiters and the other nazi party officials lied to the people in their usual fanaticism and denial of reality saying that the front was stable and strong, refusing to evacuate civilians for fear of spreading defeatism; and then abandoning them to the systematic slaughter of the soviets, excited by having seen Russia devastated and mounted by a regime propaganda that pushed them to revenge and murder....
Naturally, those same gauleiters who forced their people to fight to the last man and the last bullet, fled at the last moment with a Fieseler Storch or by sea saving themselves.)
