Air attack on Swinemünde

March 12th, 1945, little before the end 2nd World war, the town of Swinemünde in Poméranie was destroyed mainly by a attacks air 8th American fleet .

The Red Army which was in front of the island of Wolin, had asked for their support for the allies, owing to the fact that the progression towards the west proved to be difficult. Carried out by 671 bombers and 412 hunters which accompanied them, the attack which should not have destroyed that the infrastructure of the city took place about midday and lasted about an hour. There was practically no response. The bombers released 1609 tons of bombs, especially explosion and cluster bombs.

According to various estimates, between 8.000 and 23.000 people lost there the life in this very encumbered city of refugees and inhabitants. An estimate specifies would be difficult in practice, since the majority of deaths were not recorded people, of the runaways, and the administration of the city was overflowed by this mass of refugees who saw the last relatively sure passage there to escape from the furnace that had become the Poméranie and the Western Prussia. The port of Swinemünde was also the terminus for the transport of the refugees within the framework of the Opération Hannibal. Moreover, much of dead could not be identified. They had been literally chopped of pieces. Eyewitnesses even told that pieces of corpses burning hung with the trees. Especially in the district of the station there was really a great number of deaths, since trains of refugees and coach-ambulances piled up there. Most of the city was the prey of the flames. The sector of the park of cure, where thousands of refugees had sought a protection under the trees, was papered cluster bombs of the type “Baumkrepierer” which burst in contact with the branches. It is there that the majority of deaths was found.

At the time of the attack, were also run by the aviators who passed in hedgehopping a series of ships which were used for the transport of refugees coming from Samland and Eastern Prussia. They were the vessels Jasmund , Hilde , Ravensburg , Heilighafen , Tolina , Cordillera , Winfried von Kniprode and Andros . Only on the Andros 570 people (women and children for the majority) disappeared in the port from Swinemünde. The majority of deaths found her last rest in collective burials on close Golm close to Kamminke. Golm is, with its 59 meters, the highest hill of the island of Usedom. Swinemünde is at an altitude so low that the installation of collective burials was not possible because of the elevated level of the subterranean water tablecloth. The 8th American Fleet cynically qualified in his report/ratio this raid devastator of “attack on a series of stations”. March 12th of each year on Golm, where a monument of the memory was set up, of the manifestations of the memory the victims of this barbarian attack recall. The historian Jorg Friedrich qualifies this attack of “massacre of Swinemünde”.

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