I am reading some old letters of my grandmother regarding the flight of the German population from Pomerania. Due to family ties, the escape was accompanied by military who at times used their assets to get their families rides in military vehicles and give them information regarding the current front lines and advances. I would like to know, if there were any military operations with the explicit goal to allow the evacuating civilians extra time to flee. Since I have the feeling that Hitler preferred that the refugees threw themselves against the Russians, I was wondering if there were any cases of officers acting on their own without direct orders from the high command.
Follow up question: The letters also describe Ukrainian farm workers begging my family to be allowed to flee with them. I am not sure what kind of Ukrainians those were. They were allowed on the trek but later detained by the police. Why were they detained? What happened to them?
Operation Hannibal was one such example in 1945 to evacuate German military personnel and civilians from Poland and East Prussia by way of the Baltic sea. Thousands of evacuees died when the evacuation ships Goya, Wilhelm Gustloff, and General von Steuben were sunk, with 6,700 dying on the Goya when she was torpedoed, the single worst maritime loss of life in the war.