Metgethen massacre

The Metgethen massacre was a massacre of German civilians by the Red Army in the Königsberg, East Prussia, suburb Metgethen, which is now Imeni Alexandra Kosmodemyanskogo in Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, circa January–February 1945.

Timeline

During the Battle of Königsberg in 1945, Soviet forces attacking from the north of the Samland peninsula, reached the Vistula Lagoon to the west of Königsberg on January 30, taking Metgethen in the process, a village with a railway station. After dark, they further advanced westward to Groß-Heydekrug. German forces recaptured Metgethen on 19 February in a successful bid to reopen the vital road and railway line between Königsberg and the Baltic Sea harbour of Pillau. According to German reports, mutilated corpses of civilians were discovered.

German findings

There are several contemporary reports by German military personnel stating that, among other things, women had been raped, mutilated, and killed, and that 32 civilians had been rounded up on the local tennis court and killed by an explosion. In one of the eyewitness reports, Captain Hermann Sommer, former staff officer of the fortress commander of Königsberg Otto Lasch, stated:
The Library of Congress possesses an album of 26 mounted photographs, with the cover title Bildbericht über von den Bolschewisten ermordete und geschändete Deutsche in Metgethen. According to an ink stamp on its cover, this album had once been filed in the office of the commander of the Sicherheitspolizei at Königsberg.