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Difino
| • | Mayakovskoye (Russian Маяковское, German Nemmersdorf) is a village in Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. It is located to the south east of the town of Gusev, at the banks of the Agrappa river. It is notable for its World War II history.
Until 1945 the village was a part of German East Prussia. It was one of the first German settlements to fall to the advancing Red Army on October 22, 1944. It was recaptured by the Germans soon afterwards and the German authorities reported that the Red Army killed civilians there. Nazi propaganda widely disseminated the description of the event with horrible details, supposedly to boost the motivation of German soldiers. Today the name "Nemmersdorf" is a symbol of war crimes of the Red Army, as an example of the pattern of its behavior in East Prussia.
When the Germans returned to Nemmersdorf they found that many civilians, and about 50 French POWs, had been summarily shot. Others had been killed by blows with shovels or gun butts. An eyewitness report filed by one Karl Potrek of Königsberg states, in part:"... down the road stood a cart, to which four naked women were nailed through their heads in a cruciform position. ... parallel to the road stood a barn, and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands in a crucified posture. In the dwellings we found a total of 72 women ... children and one old man ... all dead. ... some babies had their heads bashed in."
The Germans organized a neutral medical commission, which subsequently reported that all the dead females, who ranged in age from 8 to 84, had been raped. However, an attempt by the Nazi regime to make an international incident of the Nemmersdorf massacre failed, due to wartime psychology and the opprobrium the Nazis had brought upon Germany by mass atrocities in Poland and the east. Accounts of the massacre were dismissed as propaganda, photos as fakes.
Even the German civilian population at first was skeptical. Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, who lived in the village of Quittainen (Kwitany) in western East Prussia, near Preussisch Holland (Pasłęk), wrote:
"In those years one was so accustomed to everything that was
Source: [wikipedia: mayakovskoye, kaliningrad]
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