Exactly as in Paneriai, situated just outside Vilnius, where 70,000 Jewish people were murdered, the inscription on the first memorial reads, “Soviet Citizens, Victims of Fascism”, there is, erected even here – on this beautiful beach – a memorial stone conveying the blatantly deceptive inscription “In Eternal Honour of all Heroes”, an inscription which implies that it was Russian Prisoners of War who had been mercilessly executed by the retreating German troops. Every year, up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, young people of the Komsomol organisation lay commemorative wreaths by the monument paying oratory tribute to their heroes accompanied by military music. Someone had “forgotten” – and history was rewritten.

The Soviet Communists and their sympathizers had all good reason in the world, to both forget and misrepresent the historical truths of East Prussia, as indeed, the whole of the Baltic States. As stated, at the same time as the incomprehensibly long column consisting mostly of women and children – five abreast – were driven through the snows towards death in Palmnicken the Russian Great Offensive on Koeningsberg was launched. Koeningsberg, the heart of East Prussia, already wounded and bleeding from bombing raids of the Allies, six months previously and according to German propaganda “heroically” defended by General Otto Lasch and his ever increasingly weakening army of starving and panic-stricken urchin teenagers  from the Hitlerjugend. The battle with the superior opponent was of course completely futile, but Lasch capitulated only when the enemy after bloody and infernal street ravaging, literally stood outside of his bunker in the Paradeplatz. Immanuel Kant’s old city went down burning, and smouldering, perishing in the Nazi inferno, ravaging within the communist darkness. Koenigsberg was the first German city to be taken by the Russians – after four years of warfare, twenty million deaths and an interminable march through the physical culmination of German devastation. The orgy of violence then unleashed defies, as they say, all description. Woman and children were burnt to death in air-raid shelters and cellars, people were band together by rope, and literally blown to pieces, from the hospital “Krankenhaus der Barmherzigkeit” soldiers suffering fresh amputations fled down towards the castle moat whilst being fired on by the furious Red Guard. A professor who had just performed a Caesarean Section on a woman in labour, was stripped of his medical instruments and forced to complete the operation with his bare hands, during which the woman was seized from the barrack-bed and raped several times over; the doctor committed suicide. And that just signalled the beginning of a more than forty year reign of terror.
   
If the greatest rescue operation in world history, employing a total of 970 sea craft from both the marine services and the merchant navy, succeeded in saving some two million refugees during the last four months of the war, from threatened ports and bridgeheads including Koenigsberg, Pillau, Frische Nehrung och Danzig-Gotenhafen a long the coast, it was not without casualties as an estimated total of 25,000 people lost their lives as 144 German ships were sunk at the hands of mines, air-raids and torpedoes as a result of the incredible massive Soviet attacks launched on the rapidly crumbling German Empire. One of the ships went down within just seven minutes after being hit by two torpedoes, taking with it 3,500 injured soldiers and refugees, “The Beautiful, White Steuben”, built in 1929, extending more than 200 meters long and weighing 17,500 gross tons, the luxury cruiser General von Steuben had been used since the beginning of the war as a service ship and also casualty transport ship including a special maternity ward housing all necessary and required nursing staff. Just ten days after sinking the Wilhelm Gustloff, Captain Marinesco was given cause to make yet another entry in his diary, the fateful record, that the lookout of the S-13 had spotted three silhouettes in the dark of the night, just outside Stolpe Bank, the largest of which was estimated to be a cruise liner: “01.50. In the waters surrounding Uski a cruise liner was sunk effortlessly.”
    The third Russian “lucky strike” took place on the 16th April outside Stolpemünde in the very same waters where the Steuben had gone down as the modern and exceptionally fast Norwegian ship MS Goya carrying an estimated 6,000 – 7,000 passengers was hit by two torpedoes, fired by the Russian submarine L-3 and went down in a mere four minutes, ships from the convoy in which MS Goya was included hastened at all speed but only managed to save 183 lives, according to other sources even less. Embarking on Hela peninsular was even fraught with ill-omen as an air-raid bomb damaged the ship’s fore body, whilst damage to another vessel in the convoy was later understood to be engine trouble, forcing the whole convoy to slow down especially since the problem was not even signalled properly. MS Goya, the previous year had transported more than 15,000 refugees from Memel and Libau to Gotenhafen and Swinemünde, was easy bait for the Russian submarine, which allowed the escorting vessel to pass before firing four torpedoes into the still of the dark night, one hit mid-ship right in the engine bulkhead whilst the other hit the stern.

Well, it would be considered more than offensive to all those who perished along with the three vessels in the cold, dark depths, to describe Magnus Petersson’s images as sublime, even if the artist himself undeniably refers to innate creative expression in explaining that in a time when we are constantly reminded that everything has already been discovered, the forgotten and the secret still fascinate and the dream of Atlantis seems to live on expressed in the desire for just the sublime. The images – as I said before – are produced, aided by advanced marine sonic equipment, able to read the sea bed by means of diagonal sound waves, resulting in digital interpretations of a most minutely detailed nature, depicting sea bed formations and shipwrecks, a method in which Petersson explains that the ‘sight’ projected from a photographic lens is directed onto something the naked eye cannot see and then subsequently registers a world beyond the accessible, a world enclosed in the dark, where a clandestine course of events compel the wrecks into gradual collapse and hull and deck finally implode. No human eye has ever disturbed the peace of this grave, only the inaudible sound of a side scan sonar relentlessly locating traces of inhuman cruelty and suffering, death and destruction, all digitally transformed into images of hideous beauty weighted with the melancholy of this historical tragedy, according to Günter Grass, a memory bank laying on the bed of the Baltic Sea which may paradoxically even prompt atonement and insight.
    If in Magnus Petersson’s series of photographs Tillslutet (Sealed) from 2003, he approaches the visual expression atmospherically in the images of the three wrecks by the use of a sad and melancholic medium and if in the same series he even assigns a rural manor environment a process of slow decay, depicting furniture enshrouded in sheets and boxes waiting, packed, anticipating an eternal, locked house, unrelenting decay the only guest, then his work is also concerned with an incessant return to the abandoned, empty room, yes, in which the wrecks are just as laden as the manors are empty and abandoned, crammed with all the victims who did not succeed in escaping the foundering vessels, every one of them consciously or unconsciously staging their own death or indeed in everybody in whom history has imputed the regardless guilt drawing them into unavoidable disaster. Sure, if we observe Kant, Koenigsberg’s most famous citizen, the sublime does represent the immeasurable, “the dimension, in which all means of measuring the senses, is surpassed”, that which forces us beyond a general, tangible code, the energy which opens up our consciousness towards the eternally endless and boundless, beyond time and room. Exactly and as according to Kant, the sublime is just grandeur “beyond all comparison”, as for example Auschwitz, we could add – those wrecks, hidden from the naked eye, off the  coast of Poland are just as lacking in sublime qualities as Magnus Petersson’s mournful flickering images, but it is rather however the knowledge and understanding of what actually happened which awakens the sublime dimension, that awful drama once surrendering to oblivion, the traces of which – sixty years later - a side scan sonar has been able to capture on paper. Sound transformed into visual imagery representing that which should never have given rise to the need for reconciliation, namely the ideology which lead to the evacuation of East Prussia. It is precisely that insight which saturates these images.

The Still Life

I take a drag and toss the cigarette overboard,
I light the next one, the third one I manage to smoke up. Someone shouts over to me: “How can you smoke at a time like this?”
I look up and before me stands an officer from
Organisation Todt, with two gleaming Iron Crosses on his chest, his left cheek is scarred.
“Have one yourself, we all know it is the end.”
Paul Uschdraweit, survivor

If it were not for the presence of certain elemental factors, one could – as the artist himself does - define Magnus Petersson’s images of the three sunken vessels as sublime. One could, furthermore – again according to the artist himself – in evoking the concept of the merciless process of gradual disintegration on the ocean bed, create a visual imagery representing complete and utter decay, oblivion, time and death. The images of the three huge shipwrecks lying off the coast of present - day Poland, were shot and digitally reproduced, aided by sophisticated instruments used in marine technology and do not depict just any old shipwrecks. These wrecks have come to ever more increasingly symbolize the essence of atrocious human suffering and unparalleled human cruelty, the German peoples’ collective guilt during Nazism and The Second World War and furthermore symbolize both the retribution of Stalin, during the Capitulation of 1945 and moreover the prevailing concept of Nazi Germany not just as perpetrators but also as atoners, in accepting their share of culpability and confirmed in their losses suffered during the evacuation of East Prussia in the final stages of World War II. “As a transitory, melancholic string of pearls these battleships lay at the bottom of the Southern Baltic Sea - Channel 58”, is how the artist himself describes his images of inexorable beauty.
   
The debate, including the ever increasingly explicit need for reconciliation on behalf of the German collective guilt, has accelerated not just with Martin Walsers autobiographical novel Ein springender Brunnen 1998 and Winfried G Sebalds thesis Luftkrieg und Literatur published the following year, but in particular Günter Grass´s novella Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk) 2002, in which Grass, once described as the foremost voice for the German conscience, depicts how the once grand and majestic cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff of 25,000 gross tons, was sunk by the Russian submarine S-13 captained by Aleksander Marinesco by three well-aimed torpedoes during the night between 30th and 31st of January, 1945, off the coast of the then temporary domestic port of Gotenhafen (Gdynia). It is estimated that about 9,000 refugees, mostly women, children and army casualties, were escorted down into the icy cold depths whilst only slightly more than 900 people survived the singularly worst maritime tragedy of the Baltic Sea .
However, this tragedy was to be followed by two more massive tragedies, and just within a few short months – and all three faded in comparison with the news of an even greater revelation – that Hitler’s ruthless dreams were finally being shattered at the hands of massive invasions organised on both the Western and the Eastern Fronts.
    Built between the years 1936-1937 in Hamburg for the German Workers Front Movement “Kraft durch Freude”(Strength Through Joy) and named by Hitler himself after an assassinated Swiss Nazi Commander, MS Wilhelm Gustloff had been used to carry loyal party workers on cruises, with destinations such as Stockholm, The Norwegian Fjords and The Mediterranean. She was considered to be one of the most majestic and secure sea worthy vessels in the world, boasting twelve watertight sections, several dining-halls, a swimming-pool and berthing places for more than 1,400 passengers. During the war years she was docked in Gdynia where she was used as an army hospital and floating barracks for trainee submarine squadrons. She was later used for the great evacuation operation at the end of January 1945. Late during the night of 30th January, she set sail at half speed, under extremely chaotic conditions, and escorted by just two other smaller boats, the torpedo boat, Löwe and a former Norwegian destroyer, Gyller. The temperature outside was -18°, the sea rough and the wind fierce. A few hours later the Captain Marinesco of the S-13 made an entry in his war diary unaware of the identity of the ship he had sunk: “23.08 hours – Three torpedoes fired, distance 380-500 meters. All torpedoes made target. 23.09 hours – The target is beginning to sink. “One of the torpedoes struck the swimming-pool, where several hundred members of the Women’s Naval Corps were quartered. Most of them remained oblivious, as the explosion caused immediate death. Many of the crew were locked in behind the watertight doors of the bow head, which automatically closed at the onslaught of the attack. One of the most dramatic moments of the tragedy occurred thirty minutes later, as both the crew and spared refugees began to fight for places in the last remaining life-boat, only to feel the passengers pounding and striking their fingers as they attempted to climb on board until they eventually plummeted into the sea one by one, whilst at the same time others slid down from the heavily leaning stern into the sea. Exactly as the life-boat surfaced the water a heavy anti-aircraft gun broke lose from one of its moorings on the upper deck and careered down directly into the life-boat. Not only desperate cries for help and screams of mortal dread were heard, but also the pistol shots of those who still bore arms put a stop to their families’ and their own sufferings. Hundreds of children lay face down in the water, kicking their legs about in the air, because of a misconstruction in the design of the lifebelts.
Today Wilhelm Gustloff is a melancholic mass grave, lying some fifty meters below water, vandalized by Polish scrap metal plunderers during  the1950’s, a wreck, witnessed in its penultimate minute, just before the stern went down into the dark depths, in complete illuminated glory as the sound of foghorns howled their incomprehensible lament. As if some paranormal hand had lighted all the ship’s lamps simultaneously, to the accompaniment of a resonant rumbling and whistling, a description befitting a Wagnerian Vision of Doomsday.

The next ensuing tragedy occurred the day after the Wilhelm Gustloff foundered, this time in the holiday resort of Palmnicken, in the heart of Kurische Nehrung just north of Koenigsberg, right in the middle of the sand dunes of this immensely beautiful cape with its panorama views extending for miles from present day Svetlogorsk to Klaipeda, sand dunes, which erase all traces of human presence day after day, steadily into eternal oblivion. It was in these very same sand dunes, a little south of Jantarnoje, whilst mining for the gemstone Amber in the 1960’s that human bones were unearthed, later understood to be the macabre remains of the massacre of the 31st January 1945, when 3,700 people, mainly Jewish women from Poland, Ukraine and Hungary were forced out towards the sea, past the snow-clad beach and out onto the ice, where they were brutally murdered whilst at the very same time Koenigsberg lay in besiege by The Red Army.
    In October 1944 The Red Army lay positioned along the Memel River, today’s Neman River, taking control of the area surrounding the river’s outlet into the Baltic Sea, and hence dividing the town of Memel in the North from “The Crown”. One month later Hitler was forced to move huge military units from the Eastern to the Western Front in order to realize the Ardenner Offensive, troops which never returned. More than one hundred thousand citizens, mainly the elderly and the young were consequently called up for military service in the ”Volkssturm” in East Prussia, whilst at the same time the deluge of refugees fleeing from the areas taken by the Soviet Union was creating enormous supply problems in Koenigsberg. During the Winter Offensive, launched on the 12th January 1945, The Red Army needed only two weeks in order to advance towards Frisches and Kurisches Haff and were therefore able to close in on the whole of East Prussia, which in turn rendered things even more difficult in Koenigsberg since the Russians at the same time stood at the rear, advancing on into the city.
    On initiation of the Soviet Offensive, the SS promptly ordered the dispersion of all its countless concentration and work camps in East Prussia, all of which fell under the command of the large Stutthof camp situated near Danzig, and “quartered” the prisoners, an estimated total of 13,000 in a factory near Nordbahnhof in Koenigsberg. Early in the morning of the 26th January 1945 five thousand women and children were forced to leave the city marching, accompanied by the SS and members of the Hitlerjugend and including their Ukrainian, Belgium and Lithuanian “auxiliary troops”. More than one thousand perished on the way to Palmnicken, most were shot in the snow at the slightest hint of physical weakness; many were murdered in Palmnicken itself, on the street, in the middle of the day, in full sight of its inhabitants. There are, in fact, hundreds of witnesses, but the massacre still remains “forgotten”.
    It is generally believed that it was the Chief of Police for “Gestapoleitstelle” in Koenigsberg, Sturmbannführer Gormig, who gave the order for the death march. The prisoners were to be incarcerated in the walls lining the subterranean passages of the disused Amber Mine in Palmnicken. The cooperation and aid of both the mayor and the management of the Amber factory were naturally expected. The manager Hans Feyerabend, an honourable and trusted, revered man in the area, was opposed to the plans however and they failed. During the night of the 31st January the troops from Volkssturm and the Hitlerjugend drove the prisoners out through the Amber Factory’s Northern gate and along the shortest route towards the beach under the pretext that they were to board a boat. They were then divided into different groups and forced out on to the ice under armed fire, and were systematically shot failing drowning in the ice cold water.