By the end of 1944, as World War II had irreparably turned against Nazi Germany, civilians were forbidden from evacuating the eastern territory of East Prussia even as the inevitable invasion of the Red Army came closer.
[2] The Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, gave orders that fleeing was illegal and punishable ("strenges Fluchtverbot" – flight strictly forbidden), but as the Red Army approached Königsberg many Germans prepared to evacuate anyway.
[3] The Red Army's East Prussian Offensive prompted millions of German men, women, and children to flee; however, many adults were killed or wounded during bombing raids or during harsh winters without any food or shelter.
Thousands of orphaned children were left behind and fled into the surrounding forest, forced to fend for themselves and facing harsh reprisals if caught by Soviet soldiers.
In 1947, the Soviet Union sent trainloads of orphans to the Occupation Zone; these train rides took four to seven days, partly without food or toilet facilities and some children did not survive.
[8] On 15 February 1948, the Ministerial Council of the USSR decided to resettle all Germans in the former East Prussia, declaring them illegal residents in their own homeland.
Of those, only 99,481 arrived, though sources of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) attributed this to "perhaps a Soviet calculation error."
[9] At that time, some of the young orphans had no knowledge of their identity, information in search files was vague, and the occupational development difficult.
Some historical records given by children from East Prussia survived, describing how their families were overtaken by advancing Soviet forces as they tried to flee.
[11] Another five orphans, born in the years 1930-1939, told Leiserowitz how they managed to survive and were transferred to a children's home in East Germany.
[14] Another outstanding story is that of Liesabeth Otto, born in 1937, who, after her mother had died from starvation, went with her brothers and sisters to her homeplace Wehlau, where she managed to survive until 1953 by working and begging.
After an odyssey through many detention camps, later on looking for work in the Soviet Union, she located her father and brother in West Germany in the 1970s.
[15] Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described his experiences in Prussia as a Soviet soldier, in his poem Prussian Nights.
From January 1, 2008, on, compensation is granted by Lithuanian law for those persons who suffered on account of World War II and the Soviet occupation.
The German Red Cross helps to identify and locate family members who lost contact with one another, such as the Wolf children, during the turmoil in East Prussia.
The goal of the memorial is to publicize the fate of all human beings who were killed or died from starvation in East Prussia in the years 1944-1947, and to remember the orphan children left behind.