`Achtung! Achtung!" roared a loudspeaker as the green police-van screeched to a halt. "There has been a breach in the dyke near Hohenwutzen. Please clear your houses and leave the area by the agreed escape routes."
The announcement heralded the end of the fight for survival in Alt-Reetz, a village of 500 souls in the heart of the Oderbruch, an area of reclaimed land near the River Oder. Most of the villagers had already left by the time the police issued their final warning, but about 100 had stayed behind to help soldiers and emergency workers reinforce the crumbling dykes.
"It was all for nothing - all that effort," said one woman, almost in despair. "What are we going to do now?"
The villagers of Alt-Reetz had no option but to follow the example of thousands of others throughout central Europe and flee the floods that have devastated the region for almost a month. More than 100 people have died in Poland and the Czech Republic as a result of flooding and the bill for repairing roads, railways and communications is expected to reach billions of pounds.
The flooding has been caused by an extraordinary level of rainfall in central Europe - almost two feet within five days - which ran down the hills into smaller rivers before swelling the Oder and pushing water levels higher than they have been for a century.
Some Poles and Czechs are angry that Bonn appeared to ignore the disaster until the flooding reached Germany, and that Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government was too preoccupied with internal political problems to take note of the catastrophe on its doorstep. In fact, the international media only became interested in the story of the floods when Germans were affected - perhaps because Western television audiences identify more readily with the suffering of relatively prosperous people like themselves.
A massive rescue operation supported by the Bundeswehr's biggest ever peace-time operation ensured no lives have been lost in Germany. But, in the battle between man and nature, the river has won every round.
Some 7,500 hectares of land south of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder have been under water for more than a week after a number of villages were abandoned to the flood. Hans-Hermann Bentrup, a senior official at the Agriculture Ministry of the local state of Brandenburg, insisted all livestock has been safely evacuated but admitted the damage to farmers is nonetheless enormous. "The harvest is destroyed. Silting up will cause further damage," he said.
Sixty-six-year-old Lieselotte Brettner wept as she left the 130-year-old farmhouse where she has lived with her husband Guenter since 1952. The house is directly behind a dam which broke under pressure from the rising water.
The couple left at the last minute, packing a few necessities into the back of their old Trabant before the ground floor of the house was submerged.
"Valuables, documents, the photo album and the best things we have, like my husband's suit and clothes for a couple of days. If they don't last, we'll just have to wash them," she said.
Frau Brettner managed to place her 22 geese with a farmer on a hill for safekeeping but she was worried that she may not have left enough food for the hens she left on the roof of the house. There was no time to move the furniture to an upper floor so the Brettners expect to return to a dismal sight whenever the floods abate.
Frau Brettner has lived all her life by the Oder, crossing it on a ferry to go to school as a child. She has seen big floods before, but she claims this experience has changed her view of the river for ever.
"It was never as bad as this. The water is flowing so quickly. I find the river frightening, threatening," she said.
Following the abandonment of the villages south of Frankfurtan-der-Oder attention turned to the Oderbruch, an area of 68,000 hectares reclaimed by a Prussian king, Frederick the Great, 250 years ago. Many of the dykes along the river date back to Frederick's time and they began to crumble last week under the relentless pressure of water.
Army helicopters dropped tons of sand from the air while soldiers reinforced the land side of the dykes with sandbags. But as the week wore on, the fortifications were steadily worn away until they became thin, sodden walls.
The villagers who chose to stay in Alt-Reetz organised themselves into teams to help in the battle against the rising river. They took turns working 14-hour shifts piling sandbags, all day and through the night.
"Then we come home and an argument with the wife is pre-programmed," said Volker Schuenemann, a carpenter from the village. "They want to leave because they hear on radio and television that the dyke is about to break."
It could be months before those evacuated from the disaster area can return to their homes, many of which will be almost destroyed by the flooding. In the meantime, most people are staying with friends and relations rather than in the emergency accommodation set up in schools and gym halls.
Insurance companies have promised to pay claims promptly and the government has offered swift, unbureaucratic help to those who need it. For many, the financial loss is less traumatic than the destruction of years of effort building a home.
But the disaster has not been without its positive side, pulling communities together, as western Germans help their eastern neighbours by contributing to special appeals and local people help one another. For Andreas Hammel, one of the volunteers at AltReetz, the experience has revealed a whole new side of human nature.
"I feel as if I'm in the wrong film. I've never experienced such solidarity before and, although I hope the flooding ends soon, I know I'll miss that feeling when it's over," he said.