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Tanel
HV Guru
liitunud: 01.10.2001
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03.08.2026 19:18:42
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This photograph shows General der Panzertruppe Dietrich Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Kasimir von Saucken, born on 16 May 1892 in Fischhausen, East Prussia, and one of the most remarkable figures of the war's final months. The man in this portrait was by the time of his last command simultaneously the recipient of Germany's highest military decoration, the last officer ever to receive it, and a prisoner of the Soviet state who would spend the next ten years in conditions of deliberate brutality. Between those two facts runs one of the more striking personal stories of the entire conflict.
Von Saucken's military biography before East Prussia was that of a career cavalry officer who had proved himself one of the German Army's most capable armored commanders under the most extreme conditions. He had commanded the 4th Panzer Division, then the Panzerkorps Großdeutschland, on the Eastern Front through the grinding defensive battles of 1943 and 1944, earning the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords in the process. He had been wounded seven times across two world wars. By 1945 he was one of the most decorated and combat-experienced general officers remaining in the Wehrmacht.
The manner in which he received his final command is worth recording in detail because it is nearly without precedent. On 12 March 1945, von Saucken was summoned to the Führerbunker to receive orders to take command of the German 2nd Army in Prussia. He arrived in the underground conference room wearing his cavalry saber at his side, monocle in his eye, and gave the assembled company a slight bow rather than the raised-arm salute that had been compulsory in the German armed forces since 20 July 1944. He had committed three simultaneous violations of protocol before he had spoken a word. He then refused to lay down his saber on entering, a mandatory requirement for anyone approaching the German leadership. When he was told he would be subordinated to Albert Forster, the Gauleiter and N*zi Party governor of Danzig, he placed his hand flat on the map table, looked directly at the German High Command, and said: "I have no intention of placing myself under the orders of a Gauleiter." He used no honorific. The room went silent. An exception was made. Von Saucken departed for Danzig without subordination to the civilian authority.
The strategic situation he flew into was catastrophic. Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front had already cut the land connection between East Prussia and the rest of Germany in January, reaching the Baltic coast near Elbing on 26 January and isolating the entire German garrison. The Soviet East Prussian Offensive committed 1,669,100 men, 3,000 tanks, 25,000 guns and mortars, and 3,000 aircraft against German forces of approximately 580,000 regular troops, 200,000 Volkssturm, 700 tanks, and 8,200 guns. By March, the trapped pocket had been subdivided by successive Soviet advances into a series of shrinking bridgeheads along the Baltic coast, with Königsberg, the Samland Peninsula, Heiligenbeil, Danzig, and Gotenhafen each fighting their own separate battles for survival. Von Saucken's 2nd Army held the western portion of this disintegrating perimeter, defending the approaches to Danzig and Gotenhafen while simultaneously trying to keep the Baltic sea lanes open.
The reason those sea lanes mattered went beyond military calculation. Operation Hannibal, the German naval evacuation operation ordered by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz on 23 January 1945, was the largest seaborne evacuation in history. Between January and May 1945, at least 800,000 German civilians and 350,000 soldiers were transported from East Prussian ports to Germany by approximately 1,000 vessels of all types. Some sources place the total as high as two million people. This was more than three times the number of people evacuated in the nine-day operation at Dunkirk. The port complexes at Pillau, Gotenhafen, and Danzig were the arteries through which that evacuation flowed, and von Saucken's army was the formation keeping Soviet forces from closing those arteries permanently.
Despite overwhelming odds he maintained discipline, organized the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers across the Baltic, and held the Hel Peninsula until unconditional surrender. Danzig fell on 30 March 1945 after some of the most vicious urban fighting of the entire East Prussian campaign, fought through the city's medieval streets and dockyards while evacuation ships continued loading at the quays under artillery fire. Gotenhafen fell the same day. Von Saucken's surviving forces fell back onto the Hel Peninsula, the narrow sand spit projecting into the Bay of Gdansk, and held there as the last German-controlled ground in the region while the evacuation continued until the final capitulation.
On 8 May 1945, von Saucken received notice that he had been awarded the Diamonds to his Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, making him the last of 27 officers to receive this highest grade of Germany's premier military decoration. Grand Admiral Dönitz sent a seaplane to extract him so he could surrender to the Americans. He refused with the words: "Mein Platz ist bei meinen Soldaten" — my place is with my soldiers. He surrendered with his men to the Red Army on 9 May 1945 on the Hel Peninsula.
What followed was ten years of Soviet captivity. He was held in the Lubyanka, then the Oryol Prison, then transferred to a Siberian labor camp at Tayshet in 1949. He refused repeatedly to sign false confessions under interrogation. The refusal cost him permanent physical damage; he was confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. He was released in 1955 and settled in Pullach near Munich, where he took up amateur painting and died on 27 September 1980, aged 88.
He died quietly, in obscurity, in a West German suburb. The man who had refused to salute the German High Command, who had stared down the most powerful authority in the Reich to protect his soldiers, who had held a collapsing perimeter against a million Soviet troops to keep the ships running long enough to save hundreds of thousands of civilians, and who had refused evacuation to stay with the men he could no longer protect, was buried with his wife and son in Munich. The Diamonds to his Knight's Cross was the last the German state ever awarded. It was, by any reckoning, earned. |
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MatchMaker
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liitunud: 23.06.2007
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Etz
HV Guru
liitunud: 27.01.2005
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09.08.2026 00:15:00
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Mis seal vahet, mitmendalt korruselt kukkudes surma saad?
Enamus klaaspakette tehakse tänapäeval seestpoolt laminaat, väljastpoolt karastatud.
Sel ajal, kui see hoone ehitati, ei tea kas mõni neist tehnoloogiatest üldse kasutusel oli. Vbla väljamaal oli.... |
Paneelika aknast näiteks kogemata alla ei kuku. Aken on selleks liiga kõrgel. |
Sõltuvalt riigist...võib ka akendeta, maa aluse punkri aknast, alla kukkuda... 
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...life is random...so am I...
So, there is a fan. Time to grab your sh*t, gentlemen! |
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sa ei või postitada uusi teemasid siia foorumisse
sa ei või vastata selle foorumi teemadele
sa ei või muuta oma postitusi selles foorumis
sa ei või kustutada oma postitusi selles foorumis
sa ei või vastata küsitlustele selles foorumis
sa ei saa lisada manuseid selles foorumis
sa võid manuseid alla laadida selles foorumis
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Hinnavaatlus ei vastuta foorumis tehtud postituste eest.
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