On April 20, 1945, the British sent 42 bombers to bomb the town, and the next day it fell to the Red Army’s communist Ukrainian Front. During a typical victory celebration, drunk communist soldiers kidnapped and raped a score of German women at the Soviet headquarters. In the morning on April 23, Hitler Youth from surrounding areas put up a resistance and most were killed before the Red Army took back control of the city, but their commander had been reportedly shot.
In reprisal, starting that morning an unknown number of German civilians were rounded up at gunpoint and herded to the edge of a forest. The women and female children were allowed to move on at first, and the men and boys were all shot. Then however, women were gathered together and raped, then killed as well. Eyewitnesses spoke of at least 800 people being murdered, including a large amount of refugees. Eyewitnesses who had to bury the dead kept a secret tally, but had to stop counting at 721 deaths, and current estimates of the count range up to about 1,000 deaths. Nearly every family in the town lost relatives.
The bodies were buried in a pasture, where there are six mass graves wherein lie the dead in layers, 12 bodies atop one another. For over a half of century, most of it under communist occupation, there were unspoken orders not to speak of it, and the inhabitants of Treuenbrietzen kept quiet about this massacre, but in the wake of German reunification, the massacre was brought to light.
Soviet troop newspapers and the orders of the Soviet high command were jointly responsible for the excesses of the Red Army, many of which were conveniently blamed on Germans. Propaganda proclaimed that the Red Army had entered Germany as an avenger to punish all Germans. Master of hate propaganda Ilya Ehrenburg had written on January 31, 1945:
“The Germans have been punished in Oppeln, in Königsberg and in Breslau. They have been punished, but yet not enough! Some have been punished, but not yet all of them.”Note: There is a street in Rostock Germany today named in honor Ilya Ehrenburg.