Flight from the Red Army

The fall of the Third Reich in 1945 was defined by the Red Army's brutal invasion of Germany. Mike Burgess tells how the Hoppe family trekked from Finowfurt near Berlin to Preetz in Schleswig-Holstein to escape the brutality.

- 

After the Second World War (1939-1945), Anna Elisabeth Emmy Hoppe (née Roth) settled in the town of Preetz in what was to become West Germany.

Her husband, Johannes Georg Hoppe, was missing and presumed dead, and by the 1960s her youngest daughters Sigrun (my mother) and Gerland emigrated to South Africa.

Sigrun married my father, Billy Burgess, who farmed in the Eastern Cape district of Indwe. For as long as I can remember Anna Elisabeth (Anneliese for short), known to us simply as Tannie, would spend summers with us in Africa.

We all knew that when the first migratory white stalks from Europe began appearing in my father's lucerne lands, that Tannie would soon be jetting in on a Lufthansa Boeing to dish out hugs and gifts.

She refused to talk about the war, bottling up her trauma as she kept busy cooking, cleaning, reading, writing, and smoking long menthol cigarettes.

However, in later years, I was able to glean some information about the Hoppe family's traumatic trek of nearly 400km from Finowfurt to Preetz over about a two-week period. One such occasion was in 1997 when I travelled to Germany to find Anneliese frail and cared for by her son (and my uncle) Eckart. The chairs arranged around her bedroom were decorated with springbok and black-backed jackal skins, and the photos on the walls were of family braais and South African farming scenes.

Anneliese (19) and Johannes (26) met at a Nazi youth rally and were married in the town of Langenbielau in Lower Silesia (now in Poland) on 7 February 1931. Soon after tying the knot, they emigrated to Brazil where Johannes, a Lutheran minister, oversaw an isolated congregation. Five of their eight children (a baby girl, Friedrun, passed away in Germany) were born in Brazil, where they lived a hard, pioneering life.

However, because of Johannes's Nazi views, the Hoppes were deported from Brazil and returned to Germany on board the MV