RITA STREICH - A VOICE FROM SIBERIA

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The Assassination of Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanov Family

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WORLD WAR I BLOODLINE : PRISONER OF THE CZAR

Unique photograph of Wilhelm as a Murmansk prisoner. He is holding the horse's leg.

We left young Wilhelm Salzmann of the 18th Prussian Infantry as he was being carried off the Tannenberg battlefield by the Russians with a machine-gun bullet through his thigh bone. Presumably, he was cared for well enough to be taken to a POW camp after a few weeks. In stark contrast to Hitler's 1941-45 war against Russia, both sides made an effort to adhere to the Geneva Conventions in World War I. However, his destination, inside the Arctic Circle, guaranteed levels of deprivation and suffering that made these Conventions seem irrelevant. The Czar had decided to connect his only ice-free northern port, Murmansk, to the capital at St Petersburg in order to facilitate the movement of vital war supplies from his allies. He was having a railway built up there and was running out of manpower. He therefore permitted the use of German and Austrian prisoners for this task. It would become an Arctic precursor of the Japanese Burma Railway, as well as a prototype for the Soviet GULAGs. Wilhelm settled into his log barracks as winter, with temperatures of minus-30 degrees, gradually approached. He would have arrived in his Prussian summer uniform, but, as time passed, extra clothing could always be taken from the dead.

With the first snowfall, Willi tried to escape. Whether he hoped to reach Finland or stow away on a ship in Murmansk, he hadn't a hope in hell. A Cossack horseman followed his footprints for a few hundred yards and whipped him all the way back to the camp. In the morning he was laying tracks again. They say there is a prisoner's corpse under every sleeper. Freezing temperatures alternated with swarms of mosquitoes and malaria in the hot months. The huts crawled with lice, which is often a recipe for typhus. The rations of thin soup and black bread did not contain enough calories for the strenuous labour. The men wasted away. They were kept hard at it, under the whip, because the rail link was urgently needed. Although planned in 1905, the Japanese war had intervened. After that disaster, the Czar did not expect another major conflict to follow so soon.
Occasionally, prisoners resorted to drinking paraffin from the barracks' lamps, which must have made them more ill than drunk. My grandfather told me that he managed to get himself transferred to the camp orchestra, which, he said, saved his life. He could stand there playing merry tunes while the others broke their backs. Somehow, he acquired a violin. This made a great difference, relieving the boredom and raising the spirits of his comrades, especially since he could play their favourite tunes on request without sheet music. Singing together became an important survival strategy for the weary, homesick men. Once, almost unbelievably, he was rewarded for his efforts with that most exotic of delicacies, a banana. On which ship it had reached the remote, icy outpost is anyone's guess.
While Willy made himself as comfortable as he could in a hostile environment, he must have imagined all sorts of worst-case scenarios. At this stage, Russia still hurled gigantic armies at Germany and Austria. It would be years before the Germans played their luckiest card and launched the deadly human missile, Lenin, at St Petersburg in a sealed train. Willi went to sleep in his verminous blankets while the Czar alternated between playing soldiers and resting in the luxurious surroundings of his palatial retreats. It would never have crossed my grandfather's mind that he would live to a ripe old age, while Czar Nicholas II would soon be rotting at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft near Ekaterinburg, riddled with bullets, surrounded by the corpses of his massacred family. However, Nicholas completed at least one project before he abdicated. The Murmansk railway became operational in 1917, just when he had no further need for it. After his abdication, Nicholas too became a prisoner, with a Red sword of Damocles hanging over his head. Now, the vast country began to tear itself apart in an orgy of bloodletting from Poland to the Pacific Ocean.

An Austrian prisoners' hut on the Murmansk line. Picture by the pioneer of colour photography, Produkin-Gorski

THE VIENNESE NIGHTINGALE

The vivacious lady I knew as Aunty Rita from Vienna was the daughter of my grandfather's best friend, Bruno Streich, his fellow prisoner in POW camps at Murmansk and, after 1917, at Barnaul in the Siberian Altai Region. She was born there in 1920. I last saw her after she sang a Lieder concert in London's Wigmore Hall during the late 1970s. While she gave me a warm hug backstage, I noticed the actor Edward Fox standing behind me with a bunch of roses. I felt I was upstaging 'The Jackal'!

FIRST WORLD WAR CENTENNIAL BLOODLINE

I am reminded of The Great War every time I look in the mirror because, of all the members of my family, I physically resemble my German grandfather, Wilhelm Salzmann, most closely. The story of his youth, as filtered down to me before he died in 1972, begins in the heartland of Germany's heavy industry at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Willi looks about 12-years-old in this photograph. His father Peter was a pit foreman in one of the many coal mines in Bochum, Westphalia. Old Peter Salzmann had, for a fee, married a teenage bride called Bertha, whom he found in an orphanage. He was, apparently, a strict disciplinarian with a foul temper. He later died of apoplexy after loosing all his savings in Germany's postwar hyper-inflation. Bertha, by contrast, was sweet and kind. I remember my great-grandmother's last years, in the 1960s, with fondness. As you can see, the boy had a mop of strong, very dark hair. Due to this, he was known as 'Der Schwatte', 'The Black One' in the Ruhr valley dialect. Willi possessed the rare talent of being able to reproduce any tune by ear on a variety of musical instruments. The violin suited him best. His father had no time for such frivolity and insisted that he take a job in the nearby Krupp steelworks. Things were coming to a head between father and son in 1914. By then, Willi was just old enough, at 16, to answer the Kaiser's call for volunteers.  He ran off to join the army, mainly to escape from the atmosphere at home.

                                  The Salzmann family at the outbreak of war; Wilhelm stands behind his mother Bertha, father Peter,  brother Paul and sisters Amalia and Clara.

From the number on the cover of his spiked helmet, I can deduce that he joined a Prussian outfit, the Ist Posen Infantry, Regiment Nr 18, named Von Grolman after Bluecher's Quartermaster-General during the 1815 Waterloo campaign. Westphalia had been incorporated into the Prussian state after Napoleon's defeat. Willi remembered the Prussian cavalry commander August von Mackensen, a hero of the Franco-Prussian War, recruiting volunteers in the Ruhr valley as the German Empire mobilised for the coming conflict.

The Russians mobilised much faster than the Germans thought possible. They launched a massive, two-pronged invasion into East Prussia. It looked overwhelming. Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the subsequent events in his book August 1914.
The Germans had to divide their outnumbered forces, sending two-thirds of their men south, into the Masurian Lake district, to fight General Samsonov's 15th Corps of the Second Russian Army in the misty swamps and forests that led to the Polish border. At the time, Poland was part of the Russian Empire.
My grandfather Willi's 18th Von Grolman Infantry Regiment steamed down to the front near Tannenberg by train, as part of the 72nd Brigade of the 20th German Corps under Artillery General Friederich von Scholtz, another Franco-Prussian War veteran. General Paul von Hindenburg had overall command of the sector. During the ensuing march, an NCO screamed,"Du hast wohl Angst, du Schwein!" and kicked Willi into a flooded ditch.  "So! You're scared, you pig!" The raw recruit, unable to swim, had hesitated at the water's edge.Colonel Ewald Mecke's 18th Von Grolman Infantry Regiment was part of the 72nd Osterode Infantry Brigade under Major General Schaer, which in turn belonged to Lieutenant General Leo Sontag's 41st Deutsch-Eylau Division. One of the main reasons for the comprehensive Russian defeat at the hands of smaller German forces was their incredibly careless habit of transmitting battle orders on open, uncoded radio frequencies. The Germans could listen in, predict their movements and meet them with adequate force at every crucial point. It was as if blind men fought sighted ones. The wet, tangled and wild terrain invited tremendous confusion, but the Germans also had the advantage of operating on home ground. Many of the German top brass were aristocrats familiar with this part of East Prussia, even if the lower ranks often came, like my grandfather, from the border with Holland in the West.

At 08.30 on the morning of the 27th of August an intercepted Russian signal ordered part of Samsonov's army to advance South of the Muehlensee lake. At 11.00 AM, Hindenburg reacted by ordering a movement East of the lake, blocking the Russian move. General von Scholtz proposed to drive a wedge between General Martos' advancing 15th Corps and General Konratovitsch's 22nd Corps at Neidenburg with a single division, the 41st Deutsch-Eylau under General Leo Sontag. My grandfather Willi Salzmann's regiment, the 18th, would form part of the division's rearguard. General Sontag's instructions were to push forward Northeast of the lake and capture the small town of Waplitz. However, he stopped his advance along a line from the lake's southern shore to Janushkau at 12.15. It seems that Martos' Russians were swarming along this front in considerable numbers. So, I have to imagine my grandfather spending the warm summer night in a swampy East Prussian forest. It was, perhaps, at this time that the regimental cooks began to run out of sufficient soup and had to dilute it  with a hose pipe from a water tank.
A huge Russian army lurked in the trees all around, threatening to engulf the small German force. Untried volunteers like Willi, coming from urban industrial environments, would have been completely disoriented on this wild Eastern frontier, even in peacetime. I can't imagine he got much sleep, especially after being kicked and soaked earlier that day and hearing the increasing noise of the battle up ahead.

Russian cavalry charging the German lines

The situation was chaotic enough at the time, so it is impossible to say with certainty exactly when and where young Willi was wounded and left on the field. I will make an educated guess  by combining his reminiscences with the recorded movements of  the 41'st Division. He was probably hit during the morning of August the 28th. Looking at the map below, the number 41 follows a blue arrow skirting Waplitz. Clearly, the advancing 41st was sandwiched between two large Russian Army Corps. No wonder Major General Sontag did not go forward on the previous day, despite Hindenburg's order, as he would have been keenly aware of the threat to his right flank. His entire command risked encirclement and annihilation.

The 41st German Infantry Division advance between Muehlen and Waplitz

The order to attack Waplitz came through by radio at 04.00 - the crack of dawn. Hindenburg's Chief of Staff, Oberst (Colonel) Emil Hell, noticed that the entire area was covered in a thick fog rising from the lakes. By 05.30, Sontag had still not moved. At 06.00 Hindenburg reiterated the order from his battlefield HQ in a dairy farm at Froegenau. Soon he heard heavy gunfire coming from the East. Half-an-hour later, the fog lifted. By now the 41st Division's vanguard had run into strong Russian opposition outside Waplitz. Worse, the rear columns were under fire from their own artillery by the Muehlensee Lake. This makes sense, because the 41st Division was now behind Martos' Russian 15th Corps. If the shells exploded beyond the Russians, they would hit the force attacking Waplitz. By 07.30 Sontag had had enough. He sounded the retreat. The 41st had to rush back through a 2.5km gap between the advancing Russian lines, taking 30% casualties on the way. Oberleutnant (First Lieutenant) Schmidt wrote of "screaming men, unable to walk" left on the ground. I'm pretty sure my grandfather was among those "screaming men". The war was over for him, probably before he had fired a single shot.

                                                                                                                                                                                                

Russian Machine-Gunners

A machine-gun bullet smashed through his thighbone after being deflected downwards by his metal belt buckle. Looking at the map, I can see a wooded area to the east of Waplitz. I remember my grandfather mentioning a forest near where he was shot. For once, the "Gott Mit Uns" (God With Us) inscription on the buckle plate seems appropriate. The chances are that neither my mother or I, let alone succeeding generations, would have existed, at least in our present form, if that buckle had not been there. A belly-shot was much more serious than a broken bone. As it was, a Russian field-surgeon removed the bullet easily because its point stuck out of the back of Willi's thigh. Then, it was a question of a splint and a bandage, followed by a ride in a cartful of wounded men to the nearest railhead in Poland. I used to carry the twisted and slightly flattened projectile, with its sharp steel point, as a lucky charm at school. It got lost somewhere on my travels, but it was so distinctive that I can almost feel it in my hand to this day.

Wilhelm Salzmann was lucky in more ways than one. As one of the 14,000 Germans taken prisoner during the Waplitz debacle on the morning of the 28th, he was evacuated through the Russian rear. By nightfall on the 29th, that would have been impossible. Virtually all of Samsonov's huge army was encircled and captured by the Germans, among scenes of mass panic and confusion. Samsonov himself wandered off into the woods and was never seen alive again. Later his rotting corpse was identified by an amulet. It appears that he could not bear the shame of such a catastrophic defeat and shot himself.

The Russians flee in panic

The boy who ran away from his tyrannical father was swept away into the heart of Siberia. He would not see Germany again for five years. By then, the world would be utterly transformed and he would be a very different person, but that's another story.

Memorial to the fallen officers, NCOs and men of the Royal Prussian Infantry Regiment Von Grolman, Ist Posen,
Number 18, in a Polish Forest

My Owen Gray & Santic Record Sleeves (1978)

Jah Woosh - Chalice Blaze