On 14 November 1945 Bürgermeister Helmers of the north-east German village of Lassahn wrote to his community:

Through an agreement between the English and Russian military government, the territory of our community will, among others, be occupied by Russian troops on the night of 27-28 November. The entire population must have made a verbal declaration by 11 o’clock today, the 14th November, whether they would like to be evacuated or not. The declaration is final and cannot be reversed… The evacuation is decided, there is nothing more to do, we will have to come to terms with it.

The villagers had an immediate decision to make: to stay in their homes with limited means and supplies under Russian occupation, or leave forever, taking everything they could to the British Zone.

Lassahn was a small village to the east of Hamburg, on the eastern shore of the Schaalsee, a moraine lake forming a long strip of water running north-south, with spurs reaching out and peninsulas reaching in. Attached to it was the island of Stintenburg, an estate with a manor house and farm belonging to Graf von Bernstorff, which had been confiscated by the Nazis in 1943. After the German surrender on 8 May, the demarcation between the Russian and British occupied zones had been drawn along the existing provincial borders of Lauenberg and Mecklenburg, as agreed at Yalta and Tehran. That left the British with a slice of land on the eastern bank of the Schaalsee which they were struggling to administer owing to the swampy terrain and poor road networks. It could only be accessed by boat or through territory occupied by thye Red Army and would depend constantly on Soviet goodwill. This watery enclave of ‘British’ villages on the far side of the Schaalsee was, as the military leadership put it: ‘economically isolated, difficult to reach and undesirable from a strategic point of view. The… area has poor road conditions and is strategically unfavourable.’

The British military leadership had suggested to the Russians an exchange of territory. At the end of their negotiations, on 13 November 1945, the representative of the Commander in Chief of the British Army of the Rhine, Major General Colin Muir Barber (who was six feet, nine inches high and known as Tiny), had met his Russian counterpart, Soviet Major General Nikolay Grigoryevich Lyaschenko, in a hostelry called the Golden Lion (Goldener Löwe) in the nearby town of Gadebusch, in the Russian-occupied zone. There they signed what became known as the Barber-Lyaschenko Agreement, or more simply the Gadebusch Agreement. Tiny was one of the British Army’s most distinguished soldiers, having commanded the 15th (Scottish) Infantry Division, which led the three great river crossings of the Seine, the Rhine and the Elbe in 1945. Lyaschenko, who had been born in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, led the division that pushed westwards through the Baltics and Poland from 1944 onwards.

The Gadebusch Agreement stipulated that the Russian occupation zone would absorb the areas of Lauenburg under British administration on the eastern shore of the lake, and, in return, some Mecklenburg communities previously under Soviet administration would now fall in the British occupation zone. The British absorbed about 2,442 hectares, the Soviets got double the area, with 4,880 hectares. The border between the two states, which had endured for more than 650 years, would be permanently redrawn.

The implementation of this land swap was instantly deeply personal, especially because of the speed with which it was carried out. An eyewitness report said: ‘Grandma was just making butter when the news of the exchange of territories came. Father had a fishing boat with which he brought most of his belongings across to Niendorf. Everything that could be transported was taken, the household belongings, two cows, straw, wood for the fire. The rest was loaded onto a truck.’

The Bürgermeister said he had been assured by the British that those who wished to leave would be given every necessary support, including with the evacuation of their belongings. The British provided amphibious vehicles and a ferry, and fishing boats were also used to transport people, machinery, livestock and household goods. The main evacuation route ran through the island of Stintenburg, past the manor house, and then across a larger adjoining island with a farm village, cultivated fields and mature oak and beech forests, at the edge of which the land sloped steeply down to a band of reeds. Then the evacuees crossed the lake to the west, because all the roads to the other side crossed through the Russian Zone and were closed.

Despite the fact that the Bürgermeister’s declaration said it was not yet possible to give clear answers to the question of how those evacuated, as well as their animals and belongings, would be accommodated, the British offer to take all the inhabitants of their zone was almost entirely accepted – 106 of the 108 residents of Stintenburg Island left, despite the uncertainty of their future. A total of 506 people left Lassahn and 120 remained in the new Soviet zone. Of the whole area, about 92 per cent left. Those who remained included primarily older people who could not face departure into the unknown. The final report to the district administrator stated: ‘A total of around 800 loaded trucks – most of them with trailers – crossed over the ferry.’ In addition, the following were transported: ‘22,000 hundredweight of grain, 17,000 hundredweight of potatoes, 1,000 hundredweight of turnips, 1,000 head of cattle, 400 head of sheep, 100 head of pigs.’ By contrast, the Russians handed over their territory to the British without informing the population; only a very few residents followed them to the east.

The island of Stintenburg and its larger neighbour were completely depopulated, but almost immediately repopulated by the Soviets with refugees fleeing westwards from East Prussia, Sudetenland and Bessarabia (Moldova), the New Settlers. The immense dislocation was compounded by the erection of the wall in 1961, which changed the life of the population of Stintenburg dramatically again. Since the Gadebusch Agreement had drawn the boundary through the water of the Schaalsee, the island and the lake became the border between East and West Germany. Watchtowers and border fortifications were built at the approach to the island, the water was patrolled with boats, inhabitants of the island who wished to leave had to pass through locked gates to go to school or work. The authorities welcomed it if people moved away, so that they could raze the houses and clear the border area, and so gradually the depopulation was almost complete. In the year 2000 there were only three inhabitants in the farm community on Stintenburg.

The large 19th-century neoclassical estate house, which had been confiscated from the landowner, Albrecht Theodor Andreas Graf von Bernstorff, in 1943 had its own story. Graf von Bernstorff had been a Rhodes Scholar and worked in the German Embassy in London during 1923-1933, until he was removed from post. By the start of the war he was connected to the German anti-Nazi resistance, and spent some of 1940 in Dachau concentration camp. His work to help German Jews brought him into contact with the ‘Kreisauer Kreis’ group of officers who devised the 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life. He was rearrested in 1943, held from February 1944 in Ravensbrück, and later imprisoned in Berlin, where he was interrogated daily by the Gestapo. He was murdered by the SS in April 1945.

So close to the border, in the woods and fields, the confiscated Stintenburg estate house became in 1952 the property of the border troops of the German Democratic Republic. From 1973 to 1988 it was used to train a secret ‘Stasi elite group’ of border guards, the ‘Einsatzkompanie Grenze’, largely hidden from the few residents who remained in the restricted area. These elite scouts, trained in Stintenburg, were sent to every unit of East German border guards; they carried sub-machine guns and pistols and had a service-issued dog and a motorcycle. They were also responsible for maintaining a network of civilians who assisted with the monitoring of the border.

Today, there are few signs that they were there at all; the Schaalsee is a nature reserve, and in 1993 the manor house and estate was handed back to the von Bernstorff family. But a walk through the woods on the island opens to cleared fields where it is easily possible to imagine the watchtowers covering the exposed land, where no movement goes unnoticed. The farm village has a tiny number of inhabitants. After a scramble down the wooded banks to the shores of the lake, the water glimpsed through the trees – facing west – still seems to hold the boundary line that Generals Barber and Lyaschenko drew on it.