Question

what was the morning evacuation in nazism germany?

Answer 1

Almost a half-million people managed to flee across the Vistula Lagoon and reach the other side. Hundreds of thousands were already there. It was a scene of terrible chaos. Men carried frozen relatives, women threw their children into departing boats in the hope they would be saved. Many families were split up forever. Injured people patched up with paper bandages lined up by the gangplanks. One hundred thousand refugees were already waiting on the Hel peninsula for the next rescue ship.

Nazi Party officials sometimes commandeered boats for their exclusive use. East Prussian Gauleiter Erich Koch even wanted refugees to be thrown overboard. Often enough, if an air raid occurred, ship's crews quickly cast off, leaving refugees being brought out on rowboats to their fate in the icy sea.

A ramshackle flotilla of refitted torpedo boats, icebreakers, freighters and cruise ships desperately shuttled refugees to Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg in northern Germany and to Denmark. The boats, most of them completely overloaded, were moving targets, shot at by fighter bombers and fired on by Russian submarines.