Part One left our readers in the middle of our visit to the Seelow war musem.

There is a movie. The movie is around 30 minutes long and the language is based on the audience. Since my showing was 100% Amie (me), I received the English version. The movie is well doneβ€”explaining the situation and battle with lots of both Soviet and German newsreel footage. Small kid warning: They do not sugar-coat the effects of warfare, so there are depictions of lots of wounded, bodies, parts of bodies, and helpless civilians who have lost everything throughout. There is a very good terrain model as well, and several useful maps on the walls. One map showed the locations of almost two hundred war cemeteries in the small kreis (county) of Seelow.

 

There are just under 200 cemeteries in this small area with several tens of thousand dead. The number of interred goes up each fall as the newly discovered KIAs join their countrymen. German are the dark dots, Soviets the orange, and the lone Polish is purple.

 

All the cemeteries are segregated. Germans are buried here, Soviets are buried there, and the Poles get one cemetery of their own. Germans being German, they have clubs each summer during which they spend weekends recovering the deadβ€”hundreds to thousands each yearβ€”who are reburied with military honors each fall. Germans here, Russians there. Interestingly, for me at least, most German dead can still be identified by their name tags, and it is the rare Soviet soldier who can be identified.

After the film was over, an employee asked what I thought of the movie. I told her it was well done, but I thought it was interesting that there was discussion of Germany starting the war in 1939 but no mention that the USSR invaded Poland as Germany’s ally in 1939 as well. After a short embarrassed look away, I was asked if I had any other questions. I asked where there were some close-by defensive positions and she happily informed me.

 

These Soviet soldier heroic ideal statues were known generally as the β€œMemorial to the Unknown Rapist” by Germans – quietly by non-party members in the DDR and openly by West Germans.

 

I went outside to the Soviet Monument and cemetery. The statue is in the standard β€œunknown rapist” tradition with a heroic Soviet soldier standing next to the turret of a destroyed German tank. Stalin ordered the sculptors to build three identical statues to memorialize this feat of Soviet arms, one at the river crossing site, one here at the breakthrough, and the largest in central western Berlin (since removed).

In front of the statue is a small Soviet cemetery of 61 graves, with several hundred later additional interments of Soviet dead to one side. There is an unadorned 2-meter-tall orthodox cross added in the early 2000s by the Russian government farther on to the side. I passed beyond the far side and entered a kilometer-long wooded area with paths among the defensive trenches. I stopped along several points to envision what happened in front of, and around me in April 1945. I then walked some other old defensive positions farther north. With a practiced eye, you could make out further defensive efforts refashioned into farm and pasture boundaries. Always 20 or so km east were the trees along the Oder River and beyond that the eastern bluffs of the Odertal (Oder river valley). In 1945, it was all German, since Poland starts at the Oder River.

 

From the cemetery looking east from below the rapist. RS 1 is the straight road left of center, the far treeline is the Oder with the β€œFestung Kustrin” barely visible, and the far horizon is the east side of the valley.

 

The heights of the Oder River that I was sitting on are the last defensible terrain before Berlin, and both sides knew it. The German high command was intent on bleeding the Soviets here for as long as they could, and Stalin was determined to take Berlin in less than a week when he ordered the offensive. I’ll cover the battle more in a future part.

After a quick ride on the VB, I was back in Frankfurt der Oder. Most Americans know Frankfurt der Main since that western German city has the huge international airport. This Frankfurt is almost a direct opposite of that Frankfurt. FdO has a small university and was a Stalin poke in the heart for residents every time they look east. Until the end of WWII, FdO was spread on both sides of the river and Poland lay much farther east. Well, Joe wanted more buffer, so he told Truman and Churchill he intended to keep much of the land he seized from Poland in 1939. But since he was in a giving mood, he was willing to give Poland land from German Prussia. Presto! Poland moved west and now the Oder was the new border, and Frankfurt der Oder was split. The Western part was retained by Germany and the Frankfurt der Oder name, and the eastern part of the city was now Slubice, Poland. As I strolled around the city center, I saw the old socialist public art was still scattered about. I also saw a couple of the same ugly apartment blocks as well. In most respects, the city looks like most other small German cities except there are still scattered piles of WWII ruins and unrepaired buildings here and there. The Soviets made sure that the locals would not forget what happened and that they were not forgivenβ€”despite all the socialist rhetoric. The most visible FU was the cathedral. It was rebuilt, but the repairs and the replaced steeple are in a much darker-toned brick. One glance tells the observer the story Stalin wanted the Germans to remember. Yes, this was deliberate. Other repaired buildings had matching brick and stonework.

 

Slubice, Poland was part of Frankfurt Der Oder until the end of WWII. Now it is a bedroom community for FdO because housing costs less. This is causing hard feelings since Poles are being outbid by Germans for housing.

 

Because Poland was right there, I had to walk across the bridge and do some exploring. I strolled my way into a very German-feeling Polish city. Most commercial signs were in both languages and I heard at least as much German as Polish spoken, especially among the young. Slubice is now a bedroom community for the larger, and more expensive, German brother city. I returned to the train station and soon found myself back in Berlin where I walked back to my temporary residence in a light snowfall. While walking I grabbed an excellent gyro (€6.5) and stopped in a grocery for a Berlinkindl Schwarzbier (€0.80 for a half liter) for dinner. A sobering but interesting day.

 

This is the border marker. During the Cold War the DDR regulated (read largely prohibited) their citizens from crossing the river. In summer 1989 the DDR permitted citizens to cross into other Warsaw Pact countries. These East Germans would drive their overpacked Trabants to border crossings into Austria then travel to Bavaria. The moment they crossed the border and told the border guards they wanted to stay PRESTO CHANGO they were West German citizens.