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Gatchina Palace

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Wippich:
(part 4 of 5) Hello again : sdrastwuj :)
They told, sometimes came a "Dicke Bertha" aeroplane, later more often, unto daily, this flew so deep (maybe to avoid radar?) that each knew, that theit skin was linnen, not aluminium or steel - they threw mortars, bombs, or sent shooting rounds when crossing the Krankensammelstelle, day or night, ignoring the red crosses on the roofs. When they just were doing an operation, the doctors and nurses took the sleepimg patient and went all together with him unter the "bed" (OP-Pritsche) made their hand-lamps on and continued the operation. In thee first time a "newbie" cried hysterically for fear, if such happened, then one of the others beat her in the face and told, to be silent. Some wekks and nobody cried or shocked about a "Dicke Bertha", because it became a normal thing that happens. Surely, the one or other of them died by these attacks and raids while healing others. But where to complain? Nearly all the world suffered similarly. But therefore they loved the flying service nearby, those pilots who hunted those "Dicke Berthas" as acrobats as they.

I saw in the lists of flight Aces, that the Russians were in 2'000 unto 4'000 m height but also in 200 unto 50, even 5 to 10 m heigth. The most problematic seem to have been the mortar-shells of "Stalin Orgel" - shooting serias of exploding materia. Once a man stood just at the dotors tent, he told me, that he had been a "Krad-Melder" (motorxycle-messenders) and a piece of a mortar shell hit and cut open his main blood adder to the head - this meant "dead in 1 minute". The next doctor, always some sterile packs with OP-needles with him in the mantle, tore it off with his teeth while grabbing with one fist to the man's neck, holding the air out of that otherwise deadly wound, and sewed it alltogether until the blood stood still. Since that time the man had no pulse in his right arm, but after that first recreation time no other problem - I met him 30 years later and asked because this mysterious pulse-disapperaring.

They "repaired" in Gatchina - thorougly or "quick and dirty" - a lot of soldiers and civil personnel, many pilots came in, later the wounded became more dirty, more hungry and younger and younger, unto 16-17 years old boys, some of them weeping and crying for their Mama until still and dead - coming from heavy fighting in the swamps near that front north-eeastern fom them. Leningrad was not far away, while starving, but they had not the time to thnk about another place - they began to work here in a wintertime - the railway brought them from at home, and nobody wihed to speak about the situation, if they met for a short time this "civilisation's refugium in white" at Red Cross home in Gatchina or rhe other placess.

But some of them told to me, that they even began to forget to long for a holiday ("Front-Urlaub" nachhause) p.e.to see Frankfurt or their former life's family and friends - there was sorrow of bombs - ruins - friends destroyed in all the world's war-places, political terror in eaxh situatuion, never allowed to "greet" with the hand-up (Esthoniansbegan to make a hand-up and to say "Ei "utle" (= I din't say)) and they at the front had not all these feeling of pressure because the daily life was in risk and the job knew no hours. They say in Hessian language "Dumm muss mer sei, stark muss mer sei und de Ouhr nech kene" (U should be silly, should be strong - and never look at the clock) and tried to make their lonely little joys. Once they had a seed of Rittersporn-flowers in Gatschina - its a flower in German Gardens, which grows about 60 cm high - in Gatchina it was quickly unto 160 cm, wonderful flowers.

- Even some of the SS was not the same here, they said "Ab Tauroggen wird der Landser hoeflich" (when passinfg the border of Latvia (Tauroggen) the soldiers become politely) - the same was said in Narwa. The systems of Stalin and Hitler had been as similar, that nobody could know much around his place of working. A lot of SS-lower-grade-soldiers had only the job to transport the wounded through the lines, a hard an deadly painful job. One elderly "Waffen-SS"-man told me, he came to those troop because his mother, a widow was poor, and he used to sew his shoes himself of his elderly rotten clothes, and then the SS-recruitment promised to him a pair of leathern shoes.
Another one, a former "Hitlerjunge, then a soldier, told, that his mother cleant the Synagoge, he functioned as the "Shabbes Goy" - he managed to sta their Shabbes Goy until the 9th of November and iit was burnt, the Jews ordered away - and his mother without job.

(continues)

Wippich:
(part 6 of 5) Hello again :)
- When my mother reached the place of Gatschina, ehe knew, where to go to find my father, it was a morning, they had gone through the night in a bus, all the dancing girls of Narva - but she surely couldn't tell to somebody, whom she was looking for - they would call her a "spy" and kill her, she knew by instinct, looking at the total village of barracks - Stalin was a "teacher" of such things - she stood in a middle way (Gasse) and was really astonished. She dared not to ask anything. Then - by the wonder of love-instinct - my father came just out of the next door wishing just now to smoke a cigarette - having made operations all the night - and was astonished, too, to see her. In those times she was a beautiful lady, a mix between Greta Garbo legs and Zarah-Leander-face, but with full dark hair. - Even Mrs.Maria Krebs, the chief of the Red Cross troop Nr.6, she laughed and said: we did see her through the windows and some of my girls sighed and said "No chance left to get this doctor!"

He said to my mother, she shouldn't dance for other men and wrote an attest, that she cannot dance. And then - "our tradition became truth" - he went with her in the Pavillion of Venus for a private lunch or supper he let bring there. The "Herzchen" had even a foto of him looking "totally in love". n these three days they "founded" me, I'll say - even my birth was a lot of wartime later.

Because many things were not allowed to make fotios of, the "Herzchen"

I assume, each thing has 3 sides - a right, a wrong and - my.

Greetinx,
I hope it is useful for Ur forum and for some questions :)

Dr.Wippich II

Margot:
Dear Dr Wippich

May I be the first of many to thank you very very much for taking the time to share the extraordinarily moving story of your parents and their and your connection to Gatchina! I was utterly spellbound by this! It is stories such as the one you have just shared here that bring an incredible immediacy to us all of the events that took passed between 1917 and 1945!

I am almost at a loss as to what to say! I think I had better read your posts again!

Thank you again for sharing this wonderful, sad yet profoundly heartwarming piece of your history with us here! I found some of the little personal details you have related such as the behaviour of the SS officers once they crossed the frontier most interesting! It is these sort of personal anecdotes which really put a human face to the epic struggle that was World War Two!


Thank you!

Wippich:
Hello Margot :)
thanx for Ur nice word
 
Only here I think U missed the point: What for the changing "behaviour .... once they crossed the frontier"
- I say it more precisely - the Red Cross wifes wondered about their bad behaviour at home in Germany unto Latvia, "barking" around, with word, lances and starring weapons - or soft and the more dangerous making each the spy and treator of his neighbour - zack-zack! - like a powerful godless elegant devil's community likes to behave for to spread horror - maybe similar to the Tscheka-people - and sometimes their wifes at home (in p.e.Frankfurt) the worse! - in the moment the mass of German soldiers had passed Tauroggen, eastwards - they felt more free and more themselves than at home in thore system - similar to the front-helper-women they began to enjoy politeness and friendlyness, as much, that the women-"comrades" joked about and said "Must be - they are shickered by champaign in the air". It was a phenomen! -

I'll tell U a last little story in connection to Gatchina (or Riga Kurland-Kessel, I cannot imagine to have happened there) - in one thread here in the forum is told, that the population of Gatchina had been evacuated from Krasnogwardeisk and Gatchina and so on - I assume, at first by the Sowjet order, "to give the enemy no chance to find any useful help or helper"

- then the wintertime arrived, and women, children, ill or old ones couldn't stand the frost and snow like snow-hens, and then a lot of them came back to the places the Germans now living in, to beg for food or little jobs, and the "Tauroggen-effect" was, that the German "Feldkueche" (soldier's own kitchen) gave them some soups, it is witnessed, not very much, but warm and a little chance to live

- we had a similar thankful memory,
1 Ukrainian Feldkueche in Koenigsberg, in the summer of 1945, feeding my mother daily when they saw she is getting a child in her womb (me). She could come daily to get 1 milkpot full of Kasha or "Borshtsh"-soup, and shared this with 19 other wives and her little son, the had a "magical cook" between, who managed to mis this little pot full of so called Kasha with collected edible herbs, leaves, grass, some detected supplies under burnt-out or bombed housess... - maybe this lady was a learnt Vegetarian-Society-member in better times. This soup was the soldier' own ration. Whether the NS nor the SU had allowed to do so, we "prisoners" or so called "freed" population in the enemies land had no "ration cards", never before 1947 a piece of bread. If any, then a "little" card for only a handful of bread, which needes administration - 4 stamps in 4 ttally distant places, sometimes one had to come 4 times again or more, and then one might have the luck to get this at the bread fabric, if not some hungry robbers killed the people coming from the last-stamp's station and took the card, plus killing and eating this unhappy person, too. It truely happens.
- The maximum I heard from, a man doing the very hard job to bury the daily found deads of the city - they won a "right" for 400 gramm bread a day, and that he once needed the total of November to get his promised bread (9 of 10 people in our city died in 2 years, the same in the city of Elbing - they told us, it is the revenge for Leningrad and we ddn't know what they meant - only later I got the knowledge about this huge war-criminality to give a city not a single chance for capitulation while blocking their nutritions - nobody spoke of this in radios or newsletters in NS-Germany, because the bad men knew the difference between war and criminality very well.... )

- Well, I wish to remember this, too - but it is a fact that my fathers hospital - Krankensammelstelle - gave a free treatment for ill people of the inborn population, and they did this friendly. - Some years later, I was born, lying in my "cradle" and we had found a place to live again (our house was burnt after the conquering of our city while raping badly my grandmother, until this nice Ukrainian cokk felt pity with her and cried "This is my wife!" and she learnt to add "yes! (=he is my husband)") - maybe an old "right of wars allowed raping for one or 2 weeks, but this went on, all 1945, and 1946, and 1947 until we left, driven away.

- My mother was one of the 3 last living women of the city who had stayed "unhurt" as far as we know. Se moved extremely cautious, she told. U must imagine, in those times such a fact results in a form of unhappy jealousy between the wifes and maidens, being such forgotten and delivered. We lived in a lonely house built for about 12 families with 200 wifes and childs in it, now. When the next drunken sowjet-soldiers knocked in the doors some of the others cried of desperation and fury, "Go to that room, the seweress, she hasn't yet....!" - and the 2 (they had a routine, they used to be 2, one with the Kalashnikow, U know, and then the oher helding the weapon at each other in the near). - Oh, I know the date - after 10th of september, 1946, because in that time we had put an oil-painting of my father in his Wehrmacht-doctors-uniform at the wall, dated 10.Sept.1946, and I was lying lame with poliomyelitis in my "cradle" near to my sewing mother, under this picture. It was a very similar painting, so great as alive, his face and shoulders, made from a postcard-foto of him, only looking stern and friendly.

- The soldiers went in and my mother felt very bad - no possibility to flee, nobody in to fetch help or to cry - in this moment, the one of the both asked, more to himself: "Who is this man? I know him!" - my mother understood this, because she spoke Russian language from Narva. She quicly told: "My husband, this child's father, a doctor." - and the soldier enjoyed and told his compagnon: "This German was a nice one, he healed my wounds and gave me a cigarette! - Lets go and do no harm to his wife." - and then said a friendly "dajdajdaj" to me, the babe, and went out - and my mother was rescued again.

So the one good deed helps to let a bad dead - sometimes.

my greetinx,
Dr Wippich

richard_1990:
Does anyone have any pre-revolutionary pictures of Gatchina?

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