Outside the Soviet Union, there was similarly little interest in their stories: in post-’60s West Germany, this had a lot to do with a concern among many that focusing on German suffering would promote notions of German victimhood, while in East Germany state control over historiography made it difficult to present the incoming Soviet forces as anything other than liberators. As it was put in a 2013 DW article on the subject: “loss of identity was the price of survival” in the Stalin-era Soviet Union most wolf children were fearful of revealing their heritage and contact with any remaining family was difficult or impossible.Īlvydas Šlepikas Many remained in Lithuania, now also under Soviet control, being adopted by local families, adapting to the local language and culture, and often taking Lithuanian names. Those who made it across the border, as many as 5,000 according to historians’ estimates, were named “little Germans” ( vokietukaiin Lithuanian) by local people – a term which later became superseded by “wolf children”, which is how they are generally known today. Those left behind included tens of thousands of children, either left orphans by the war or sent by their parents to nearby Lithuania in search of food. Their arrival eventually resulted in the almost total expulsion of the German population and its absorption into the Soviet Union (most of the region is now part of the Kaliningrad oblast, an exclave of the Russian Federation surrounded by Poland and Lithuania).
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East Prussia, a region alongside the Baltic Sea around the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) which had been largely German-speaking for centuries despite being surrounded by Polish- and Lithuanian-populated territories, was the first area part of the pre-war German state to be reached by the Red Army during their march to the west during the closing months of the war. The story of the East Prussian “wolf children” is both one of the most extraordinary and least known stories of displacement during the Second World War and a reminder of the radically altered map which the conflict left, especially in the eastern half of the continent.