Battles for Fischhausen Fischhausen (now the village of Primorsk) owes its name to the fishermen who lived for many centuries on the shores of Frisches Huff Bay. The history of the city is connected with the Teutonic Order, Catholic bishops, Prussian dukes and Brandenburg electors, German kaisers and professors of the famous Albertina (University of Königsberg), for whose maintenance a special tax was levied on the townspeople. Not only the Prussian Guard was born here, but also Prussian Protestantism. In the administrative center of Samland there were sawmills, brick and gas factories, mills, electric and seed stations, a slaughterhouse, banks, schools, an orphanage, a nursing home, a hospital and a hospital. The settlements of the Fischhausen Peninsula were connected by roads and railways, as well as a navigable bay. Map of Fischhausen with explanations. In the spring of 1945, the district authorities reopened savings banks and began issuing loans for sowing work, which had been curtailed by the beginning of April due to constant Soviet air raids. Burgomasters and elders were again appointed to collect food for people and feed for abandoned livestock. The district’s own population had long fled, and the houses and estates they left behind were occupied by refugees from other regions of East Prussia and Königsberg, and plundered by retreating Wehrmacht soldiers.
On the afternoon of April 16, when the post and telegraph were still operating in the city, the battle for Fischhausen began with renewed vigor. The heights adjacent to the city, a continuous labyrinth of trenches and bunkers, were stormed five times by guardsmen of the 32nd Infantry Division. Military happiness smiled on the Hero of the Soviet Union Guard Captain M.A. Andreev, who burst into a German trench with a machine-gun crew. The enemy’s resistance was broken, and the 2nd Guards Army reached a narrow isthmus of land, more like a volcanic crater. “Imperial Highway No. 131” was subjected to especially heavy bombing and shelling, clogged with German military equipment: tanks, a line of cars mixed with armored vehicles, tractors, carts and guns, so that it was not only possible to drive through it, but also to walk along it. Everything lost its stability here: the air, the earth, and the water, from which gray-green fountains rose every now and then.
German positions in the Fischhausen area, destroyed by attacks from our attack aircraft. April 1945. “… before lunch, about 500 bombers flew in waves every half hour. And after the first wave, the city was burning in all corners and ends. Later, the Russians dropped bombs on our positions, and our company suffered heavy losses, ” recalled a German soldier. “ Here, east of Fischhausen, I experienced great excitement. A Soviet pilot descending by parachute fired at us from his machine gun. They returned fire on him, and he fell to the ground, already dead. Between the departure of some bombers and the arrival of other bombers, we decided to move a considerable distance from Fischhausen, since it was impossible to hold our positions .” Broken German equipment and dead horses, the outskirts of Fischhausen. April 1945.
The ancient Fischhausen, dug with trenches and blocked by barricades, whose population in the pre-war years did not exceed four thousand people, turned into a pile of rubble and ash. The persistent dust and smoke, the glow of the fires that engulfed the city, made the afternoon of a cloudy day look like evening. Using flare bombs, Soviet pilots destroyed up to eight to ten tanks and armored personnel carriers, destroyed the railway, sending a train carrying factory equipment downhill. Between air raids, Katyushas streaked the night sky with their crimson dotted line. Under their cover, fighters of the 17th Guards Rifle Division of the 39th Army reached the northwestern outskirts of the town. The headquarters of one of the rifle regiments took refuge under the arches of the order’s church, decorated with frescoes of the 14th century and an ancient altar depicting the figure of Christ holding the globe in his hand. The high tower of the church served as a landmark for German artillery. Its shells turned a small cobblestone square inside out and smashed the terracotta statues of St. Adalbert and the first evangelical bishop Georg von Polenz that stood at the entrance to the temple, injuring signal soldiers with shrapnel. When the wounded were carried into the church basement, the soldiers standing nearby heard one of them, with great difficulty, begin to sing: “This is our last and decisive battle.” A minute later the song died down, the fighter fell silent forever.
A street in the city of Fischhausen after the fighting. April 1945. On the southeastern side, the city of Fischhausen was covered by a swampy forest, from where the enemy least expected an attack. Here the soldiers of the 126th Gorlovka Rifle Division (as part of the 43rd Army) were knocking with axes, knocking down drag shields for field artillery, which they were pulling on their hands almost waist-deep in water, dripping with sweat. Soldiers and officers struggled through the viscous quagmire, holding weapons and ammunition above their heads. Each step required much more effort than the kilometers they traveled on ordinary roads. The fate of this division was typical of the Red Army formations that participated in the Great Patriotic War. Difficult June 1941, the bitterness of the retreat from the borders of East Prussia on the Neman, four encirclements. The 126th Rifle Division of the first formation (1939) ended its combat journey near Moscow with less than 1,000 men and was disbanded. In 1942, another division was formed, from the first it received only a number. After difficult battles, the division was not taken to rest, but was again thrown into the most difficult sectors of the front near Stalingrad, in the Donbass, and in Sevastopol. Its fighters liberated Belarus and Lithuania and took Tilsit and Koenigsberg. For mass heroism and military skill, the unit was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner and the Order of Suvorov. German self-propelled 15cm howitzers “Hummel” destroyed in Fischhausen. April 1945.
The Soviet soldiers had a worthy opponent – the 1st East Prussian Infantry Division, one of the best in the Wehrmacht. Its soldiers marched through the squares of many European capitals, blowing up palaces and parks in the suburbs of Leningrad. She was returned from the Eastern Front to defend Konigsberg. The division included battalions of the Marine Corps and the Hitler Youth and the “union of eastern peoples.” The losses of this division at Fischhausen exceeded the losses of all the battles in which it had previously participated. From the remnants of its units, which later made their way to Pillau, only a small combat group was formed.
From the report of the commander of the 126th Infantry Division:
“By the end of the day on April 16, 1945, the enemy, putting up desperate resistance on the approaches to the city of Fischhausen, defending at commanding heights, controlling the entire surrounding area with fire, tried to hold back the advance with massive artillery mortar fire and machine gun fire our units.
Having established crossings, at 18.00 on April 16, 1945, the 550th and 366th rifle regiments went on the offensive and, subjected to strong enemy flank fire, at 21.00 on April 16, 1645 they broke into the eastern outskirts of Fischhausen and started street battles. As a result of the active actions of the assault groups in cooperation with artillery, grenades and incendiary bottles in hand-to-hand combat and in a fierce battle for individual neighborhoods and individual fortified buildings, at 24.00 on 16.04 they crossed the mouth of the river in the harbor area, parts of the division by 4.00 on 17.04. completely cleared the southern part of the city of Fischhausen . “
Damaged and abandoned German equipment on the streets of Fischhausen. April 1945. A group of machine gunners secretly approached the bridge, which had exactly one minute left before it exploded. While Corporal A.A. Malyutin neutralized a landmine, his comrades, fighting off the advancing enemy, waited for the approach of the tankers, who, having crossed the river on the move, burst into the city blocks. In a street battle, the fighters did not have enough ammunition, and they fired in short bursts. Lieutenant S.D. Cherednichenko, who delivered nine boxes of cartridge belts and five boxes of hand grenades to the infantry chain, was later awarded the Order of the Red Star. Armor-piercer V. Khomichuk set fire to a car from the basement of a residential building. With the second shot, he hit the driver of the truck, and it hit the wall of a burning three-story mansion at high speed, covering the intersection where the Germans had rolled out an anti-tank gun with thick, billowing smoke. Private A. Shokhin made his way through the window of a neighboring house to the rear of the crew, and when the German non-commissioned officer leaned into the sight, he opened machine-gun fire. Until the end of the battle, this gun stood with a shell in the barrel. StuG III assault gun , abandoned at Fischhausen. Machines of this type with an additionally concreted cabin of an outdated type, the so-called. Only 173 Frankensteins were assembled. April 1945.
When one of the soldiers came under fire from a German machine gunner, senior sergeant V.M. Krinitsky, being wounded himself, saved the life of his comrade. And the soldiers of junior sergeant N.F. Dogatkin with a swift throw knocked the Germans out of the trench near the bay, on the shore of which they blew up a German ammunition warehouse. Private G.S. Fedyaev, with a grenade in his hand, burst into the shelter and captured thirteen soldiers. Sergeant Major A.P. Avdeev, replacing the wounded telephone operator, corrected about forty breaks in the communication line with the regiment command post under fire. On this day, the musicians of the division also distinguished themselves under the command of bandmaster M.N. Pivnik, removing a pile of twisted metal from the road leading to Fischhausen, in the battle for which the divisional artillery fired more 122 mm shells than during the assault on Konigsberg. The commanders of batteries and fire platoons are senior lieutenants A.M. Tyurin, P.P. Yankovsky, lieutenants K.V. Lubovich, N.N. Khusnupin, L.I. Kulakov, D.D. Sherstyuk, junior lieutenant A.F. Plaskin – they fired directly at German pillboxes and snipers holed up in the attics of buildings, in the premises of the station and water towers.
Broken German self-propelled guns. In the background of the first photo is a panorama of the destroyed Fischhausen. To the right you can see the water tower on Schlicht Strasse, modern. Yantarnaya street.
The vast expanse of water in front of the city is the river Germauer-Mühlen-Flies , modern. Primorskaya, heavily overflowed due to the spring flood and flooded the fields. The photo was taken from Reichstrasse 131. April 1945. Occupation of Fischhausen On the afternoon of April 17, when bombs and grenades continued to explode on the city streets, General I.I. Lyudnikov, making his way through piles of rubble and debris, bypassing the cemetery of corpses, broken guns, cars and carts, came to the shore of the bay, where he signed a report that was of particular importance. In the column where losses were entered day after day, this time it was written: “During the day, the army troops put themselves in order, washed themselves in the bathhouse, and delivered live ammunition, grenades and missiles to military supply depots . ” The fact that these words meant the end of the war on yet another shore of Frishes Huff Bay was clear to Guard Sergeant Major Nikolai Trofimov: “We’ve arrived, Comrade General. There is nowhere else to go . – And then he became curious: – Or maybe to Berlin? ” – “ Thank you, Guard Sergeant Major, for reaching from the Volga to the Baltic Sea. And where next, I myself don’t know. Wherever they order. We are military people ,” Lyudnikov answered him.
The Soviet troops received large trophies: fourteen tanks, twenty-two self-propelled guns, seventy-two armored personnel carriers, more than two hundred cars and thousands of motorcycles, warehouses with fine wines and cognac, evacuated here from Konigsberg. If eyewitnesses are to be believed, part of the wine reserves was lost in the fires; the Germans hid the other in the vicinity of Villa Porr. The reports of the trophy teams are silent about the further fate of the “precious cargo”. On the Fischhausen station tracks there was a train with industrial alcohol. The doctors could do nothing to help the soldiers who drank it.
Broken trains on the station tracks, Fischhausen. April 1945. From the once well-groomed and cozy Fischhausen, only seventy-five buildings miraculously survived, in which military sailors and German residents settled. In a large cadet estate on the outskirts of the city, dozens of wounded German soldiers remained, and in the basement of the manor house they found a Soviet pilot shot down over Fischhausen. He was saved from the gendarmerie by Russian female slaves. They passed off the wounded officer as their sick girlfriend. One of the German soldiers warned the women to be careful and said that the Russians were about to come here. German equipment abandoned on the street of Fischhausen, half-track armored personnel carriers, RSO tractor, 8.8 cm Pak 43 anti-tank gun, . April 1945. In the hay barn, the infantrymen found a wounded pilot, Senior Lieutenant M. Abramishvili. While covering ground troops, he managed to jump out of a burning car with a parachute and was captured. The German officer examined him and, smearing the burnt areas on his body with ointment, showed Abramishvili a voluminous leather folder: “ There are secret documents here. I want to give them to the Russians. For this, save our lives .” He pointed a finger at himself and the young woman typist. Important papers were transferred to the headquarters of the 39th Army, and the pilot was nominated for an award and returned to his unit. In the first post-war year, Fischhausen was renamed Primorsk. In the center of it there was a figure of a warrior with a machine gun in his hands under an unfurled banner. On both sides of the monument lie the remains of 1,807 Soviet soldiers and officers who fell here in the April days of 1945. When the last commander of the German Semland group, Dietrich von Saucken, preferred Russian captivity, he asked General A.P. Beloborodova: “ And Fischhausen? Is this city intact? ” – ” Not good. There were fierce battles there .” – ” My God! “- the German exclaimed and began to cry. ” What’s the matter? “- Beloborodov was surprised. “ You won’t understand me. Fischhausen is my homeland. My grandfathers and great-grandfathers lived there. Family estate, park, cascade of ponds. Life and customs that have developed over centuries. Everything was there and nothing was there. I am a native Prussian. I’m a nobleman. Can you understand this? ” “ No, ” Beloborodov answered him, “
I don’t understand why, having invaded us, you incinerated entire cities without blinking an eye, and now, when the war has come to your home, you cry? Where is the logic? “
“ He was very upset, this sentimental baron, talking about the old house, about the walls covered with ivy, and winter evenings by the fireplace. And I listened and mentally imagined what would have happened to me if I had fallen into his hands in ’41,” General Beloborodov recalled this conversation . “I had several business questions for him, but I decided to postpone this conversation and invited Sauken to the table. However, even a glass of vodka did not shake the Prussian baron. He became even more limp, and there was nothing to talk to him about .”