This was made more difficult when, at the end of August, the Royal Air Force bombed the city to rubble. And I do mean rubble. All of the bridges were destroyed. All of the public buildings lay in ruins. So it was a while before I was able to verify the reports of atrocities. And I was left in no doubt as to the truth of these when our troops retook the German village of Nemmersdorf, about a hundred kilometers east of Königsberg.

I’d seen some terrible things in the Ukraine, of course. And this was as bad as anything we’d done to them. Women raped and mutilated. Children clubbed to death. The whole village murdered. All seven hundred of them. You’ve got to see it to believe it, and now I believed it and I could have wished I didn’t. I made my report. The next thing, the Ministry of Propaganda had it and was even broadcasting parts of it on the radio. Well, that was the last time they were honest about our situation. The only part of my report they didn’t use was the conclusion: that we should evacuate the city by sea as soon as possible. We could have done it, too. But Hitler was against it. Our wonder weapons were going to turn the tide and win the war. We had nothing to worry about. Plenty of people believed that, too.

That was October 1944. But by January the following year, it was painfully clear to everyone that there were no wonder weapons. At least none that could help us. The city was encircled, just like at Stalingrad. The only difference was that as well as fifty thousand German soldiers there were three hundred thousand civilians. We started to get people out. But in the process, thousands died. Nine thousand died in just fifty minutes when a Russian submarine sank the Wilhelm Gustloff outside the port of Gotenhafen. And we kept on fighting, not because we obeyed Hitler, but because for every day that we fought, a few more civilians managed to escape. Did I say it was the coldest winter in living memory? Well, that hardly helped the situation.

For a short while, the artillery and the bombing stopped as the Ivans prepared their final assault. When it came, in the third week of March, we were thirty-five thousand men and fifty tanks against perhaps one hundred fifty thousand troops, five hundred tanks, and more than two thousand aircraft. Me, I was in the trenches during the Great War and I thought I knew what it was to be under a bombardment. I didn’t. Hour after hour the shells fell. Sometimes, there were as many as two hundred fifty bombers in the sky at any one time.