Mayakovskoye, Kaliningrad
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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 26 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 presented as a symbol of war crimes of the Red Army, as an example of the pattern of its behavior in East Prussia.
On the other hand, there are indications that the massacre was actually performed under the command of Joseph Goebbels, in an attempt to stir up the civil resistance before the advancing Red Army. Bernhard Fisch in his book Nemmersdorf, October 1944. What had actually happened in East Prussia managed to find new eyewitnesses and analyzed both German and Russian archives to present a more realistic picture of the events.
Reference
- Bernhard Fisch, Nemmersdorf, Oktober 1944. Was in Ostpreußen tatsächlich geschah. Berlin: 1997. ISBN 3-932180-26-7, 192 pp, price: 14,80 DM.
See also
External links
- Nemmersdorf: New aspects of a crime One of the dark chapters by Thorsten Hinz (in German) (http://www.jf-archiv.de/archiv/47aa15.htm)