One of my wife's relatives pulled out a collection of items from the 1960s, and passed the collection over to the wife. So in the midst of this family photo collection, there's this brief letter from a German Army official to notify the family of the death of the grandfather in WW II. There are two interesting aspects to this.
First, the letter starts off with 'heil Hitler', and ends with 'heil Hitler'. It's a phrase that became mandatory when anyone wrote off a letter in this period of the Nazis. I imagine the grandmother, upon getting this note, sat for years looking at the beginning and ending.....feeling frustrated over the need to inform her and use of the phrase.
Second, the guy notes the end, 8 January 1945....in the town of Sudargas. It's not really filled with much info....other than there was an attack....a hand-grenade was thrown, and this guy didn't make it.
I sat and spent an hour looking over Sudargas, Lithuania. It's an interesting layout. This was a farming community, just a mile or two over the border from what was Konigsburg (now Kaliningrad). The make-up in the 1930s? Mostly all German heritage folks, with a fair number of Jewish families.
When the Germans arrived in the summer of 1941, they went into the ethnic cleansing game, and the Jewish families more or less disappeared while they were around.
Then in late 1944....with the Soviets gaining ground, they (the Soviets) decided that an additional ethnic cleansing was necessary, so they were going purge out all ethnic Germans from the Lithuania region. Women and children were to be deported (back to Germany), and men sent to labor camps in Siberia.
The German Army, while in retreat, decided to hold a valuable road for exit out of the country, probably to help these civilians escape back to Germany. Note, the vast majority of these ethnic Germans.....had been around there for several hundred years. So my wife's grandfather (in the German Air Force) was pressed to serve as defense on this road that leads through Sudargas (it's the main point you'd have to pass, to exit the country). Somewhere on that day (the 8th), he was killed.
What came after 1945 for Sudargas? Well, with the Jews mostly gone, and the Germans exported.....the community had existed for hundreds of years had hit maximum population numbers of roughly 3,000 residents, and by the 1960s was down to around 100 to 200 folks. I noticed the population was measured in 2010-era to be near 35. No one ever came to fill the town back up.
It's probably a quiet town today, without much on war memorials. What the Nazis didn't achieve....the Soviets came to wrap up the job.
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