The last reserve: Volkssturm men positioned on the western bank of the Oder in Frankfurt, directly opposite the former suburb of Damm (today the Polish town of Słubice).
Photo: Seelow Heights Memorial Archive

Seventy-five years later: Helga and Heinz Köhler at the same place where the assault units stood in the winter of 1945.
Photo: Dietrich Schröder/MOZ

“This is where the damned Germany begins!” Red Army soldiers erected a sign bearing these words when they reached German territory in January 1945.
Photo: Vladimir Gelfand / Archive

Frankfurt (Oder), 21 January 1945. It is a freezing Sunday in the sixth winter of the war. Heavy snow has fallen during the previous week. Anxiety is rising in Frankfurt (Oder): residents who until recently had felt relatively safe are now increasingly alarmed.

The reason is that on this Sunday the first refugees arrive from Poznań and Łódź, two Polish cities occupied by Germany since 1939 but now rapidly being overrun by the advancing Red Army. The Vistula–Oder Offensive, launched by the Red Army on 12 January along a broad front, is moving with astonishing speed. Only a few weeks earlier German forces had destroyed Warsaw, the Polish capital. Now Stalin’s forces overwhelmingly outnumber the Germans.

That day word spreads in Frankfurt that SS-Obergruppenführer Arthur Greiser, the former Gauleiter of the Warthegau whose position in occupied Poland has become untenable, has reached Frankfurt as “one of the first refugees.” It is said that he and his entourage arranged food and drink for themselves in the local administrative building, although only the day before they had been urging the people of Poznań to “hold out to the end.”

Meanwhile, sixty-two-year-old Hermine Reichert from the village of Booßen near Frankfurt faces very different worries: her only daughter, Rita Köhler, is pregnant and expecting her fourth child.

“And yet my grandmother Hermine had to leave the city with my mother and the three of us small children, because that was the order,” says Heinz Köhler. The man who would later work for many years as a photojournalist for the Märkische Oderzeitung was then a three-year-old child. He reconstructs his memories of those weeks and months from an account his grandmother typed in November 1945 and from the recollections of his older brother and sister, Franz-Dieter and Christel.

A train took them to Pulsnitz, a small town near Dresden where family friends lived. Back in Frankfurt, where grandfather Gustav Reichert remained indispensable as the district veterinarian for the Lebus district, events were becoming steadily more dramatic.

“Refugees had been arriving and leaving for a week already,” one eyewitness later recalled. People “sometimes told terrible stories. Many had been forced to walk for days through snow and ice. Many children froze to death.”

The war was moving ever closer to Germany’s civilian population, with the same ruthlessness with which German soldiers had previously invaded other countries. Adolf Hitler, however, continued to issue orders for total resistance.

On 26 January Frankfurt was declared a fortress. The city was to resist the Red Army. Assault Battalion 16/1 was sent to the Ostwall line in the Meseritz area, today Międzyrzecz. Within only a few days it was completely exhausted.

Soviet units were advancing especially rapidly north of Frankfurt. By 31 January they had established the first bridgehead on the western bank of the Oder, near Kienitz in the Oderbruch. The previous evening, 30 January, the Frankfurt Gestapo had committed one of its most terrible crimes: more than 800 prisoners of the Sonnenburg concentration camp, today Słońsk, were shot. Soviet troops liberated the camp two days later. At the same time, the month-long battle for the nearby fortress of Küstrin began. Other Soviet bridgeheads were established at Reitwein, Aurith, and Eichwald on the outskirts of Frankfurt. The Germans still held the border district east of the Oder, today Słubice.

In villages east of the river that had already been occupied, Red Army soldiers took revenge for crimes committed by Germany during the first years of the war. Houses were looted, women and girls were raped, and men suspected of links to the Nazi regime were shot on the spot.

Terrifying rumors spread with extraordinary speed and combined with years of propaganda about “Bolshevik atrocities.” In some places women resorted to collective suicide. This happened, for example, in Wildenhagen, today Lubin, about twenty kilometers east of Frankfurt. On 31 January at least fifteen women hanged themselves in the attic of a farmhouse. Ten-year-old Adelheid Nagel already had a noose around her neck but survived because she did not dare to jump. She and many others would carry the trauma of these events for the rest of their lives.

The family of Heinz Köhler in Pulsnitz would encounter similar horrors only later. On 11 February Rita Köhler gave birth to a son, Detlef, giving Heinz a younger brother. Just two days later, on the night of 13–14 February, the refugees from Frankfurt witnessed the destruction of Dresden.

“From a distance it looked like a gigantic fireworks display. The sky glowed red from the flames,” Heinz Köhler’s elder sister remembers. Those watching from afar could not imagine the true horror taking place. Twenty-five thousand people died in a single night.

But the ordeals of the Frankfurt family did not end there.

“We were loaded onto a transport and taken into the unknown. Via Prague we ended up in Bohemia,” grandmother Hermine recalled. In the school building to which they were taken, bales of straw served as bedding.

In Frankfurt, on 8 February, a “final appeal” was issued to all women who “were not indispensable and were not subject to Volkssturm service” to leave the city. Looters were already being executed under wartime law.

“At that point my mother left the city with me,” recalls Helga Köhler. She still bore her maiden name, Helga Deppe, and was seven and a half years old. “Our father was still at the front,” the Frankfurt woman explains. She had spent many days of her childhood with her grandparents in their house in the suburb of Damm. Curiously, residents of the eastern part of the district had not initially been required to leave. Mother and daughter took their beloved dachshund, Strolly, and fled. Their first train journey took them to Großenhain in Saxony.

On 15 February Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels again visited the city on the Oder. Four days later the railway bridge across the river was blown up. On 25 February the propaganda film Kolberg was shown to the fortress troops.

By the end of February, 206 soldiers had been killed in Frankfurt, 905 wounded, and 209 listed as missing. These figures appear in a chronology compiled from numerous sources by Karl-Konrad Tschäpe of the Viadrina Museum.

After taking a vast area, the Red Army paused on the Oder; the assault on Berlin was postponed until spring. The Berlin Offensive began on 16 April with the fierce battle for the Seelow Heights. Although the fortress of Frankfurt did not lie on the main axis of advance, one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War was fought only twenty-five kilometers to the north. More than 45,000 people were killed in four days.

Meanwhile the odyssey of the Frankfurt refugees continued. Hermine Reichert and her relatives returned to Brandenburg and reached the Oranienburg area, where fighting on the German-Soviet front was still under way.

“We lay on straw in a cramped washroom and waited to see what would happen next. We had only just fallen asleep from exhaustion when there was a terrible crash. The residents of the house sent us upstairs to their apartment because they themselves wanted to shelter in the safer cellar. We stumbled over sacks and bundles. We were so numb that I think we would hardly have objected if a bomb had killed us all. But we lived to see the morning!”

Helga Deppe and her mother also wandered from village to village through Saxony, “constantly driven on by fear of being raped.” Their dachshund Strolly disappeared.

“Our joy was therefore all the greater when we found her again fourteen days later. She was completely emaciated, but beside herself with happiness.”

On 22 April the remnants of the Wehrmacht and Volkssturm abandoned Frankfurt almost without a fight. Many of them soon ended up in the Halbe pocket. According to eyewitness accounts, the center of the city on the Oder was still relatively intact at that point. Many buildings, however, were soon destroyed in fires started by Soviet soldiers after they entered the city.

The Köhler family returned home in May.

“The first thing I remember clearly is a German gendarme lying in a ditch at Spitzkrug with his head smashed in. And I remember several children’s bodies,” Heinz Köhler says. What seems unbearable today had by then become almost commonplace. “We were used to war,” he adds. He is now seventy-eight.

His younger brother Detlef died of exhaustion in June 1945. “I can still see him lying dead in the bed.”

Heinz Köhler never consciously knew his father. He had gone to war in September 1939 and was killed in April 1945 in one of the final air raids, in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The family learned of his death only much later.

Helga Deppe and her mother made the whole journey from Saxony “back to Frankfurt on foot, with a handcart.” Fortunately, Strolly the dachshund also survived all the ordeals.

Helga’s grandparents, who had remained in Dammvorstadt throughout this period, were forced to leave their home on 27 May. Three days earlier the first Polish mayor of the new town of Słubice had been appointed.

“Suddenly we were told that all Germans had to leave the town within a few hours,” Helga Köhler recalls. Almost mockingly, on the very same day the Tägliche Rundschau, published by the Soviet Military Administration, wrote of Frankfurt: “Normal life is gradually returning.”

Russian soldiers moved into the Köhler family home. Little Heinz quickly learned several phrases in the foreign language and was treated favorably when food was distributed. Several times he managed to pass pieces of bread to prisoners being held in the cellar of the house.

Heinz Köhler and Helga Deppe met in 1958. They married in 1962 and have lived in Frankfurt ever since.