This site is about the tragic fate of the City of Königsberg, the capital of the former German province of East Prussia. As a result of WWII, neither Königsberg nor East Prussia exists anymore and today the city is known as Kaliningrad, the Russian city and administrative region surrounded by two European Union and NATO members: Poland to the south and Lithuania to the north and east.
In early 1945 Königsberg was overrun by the Soviet Red Army, after being nearly incinerated by the RAF in August of 1944. At the end of WWII the Allied Forces allowed the Soviet Union to annex the city as well as most of the province of East Prussia because the dictator Stalin wanted a year-round ice-free harbour on the Baltic coast. The city was subsequently renamed to Kaliningrad, after one of Stalin’s political puppets, Mikhail Kalinin.
Prior to 1945 Königsberg was the cultural and economic centre in the German province of East Prussia, a region that was then cut off from the main part of Germany by a narrow strip of Polish territory and the city state of Danzig (now the Polish port of Gdansk). It was the dispute over this narrow piece of Polish land that gave Hitler the excuse to invade Poland in 1939, setting off WWII.
Out of Königsberg’s prewar population of approximately 350,000 Germans an estimated 42,000 died during the war while many had fled elsewhere to escape the fighting. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but perhaps as many as 100,000 survived the aerial onslaught of 1944, only to be held as virtual prisoners within their own city by the Red Army while enduring tremendous suffering. They were eventually expelled 500 km westward across Poland to Germany between 1949 and 1950 as part of Stalin’s ethnic cleansing project. This resulted in the removal of every ethnic German from former Nazi territory that was now part of the Soviet communist empire. After the expulsion Königsberg’s bombed-out remains were repopulated with people from all over the Soviet Union.
The City of Königsberg is part of history now, its fate largely forgotten if not outright ignored. But even today – and every year since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 – many German expellees or their descendants originally from that ill-fated city and surrounding area undertake a trek back to their former homelands to look for that which was forever taken from them: their place of birth, the history of their families, their culture and communities they grew up in.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF KÖNIGSBERG
The castle of Königsberg was founded in 1255 by the knights of the Teutonic Order in the course of their expansion in the Baltic region. From 1457 onwards it was the residence of the Grand Master of the Order, and the last Grand Master was Prince Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490–1568) who – after converting to Lutheranism – created the world’s first Protestant state in 1525, the Duchy of Prussia, with Königsberg as its capital. During the 1286-1327 period the three settlements which had formed round the castle of Königsberg (Altstadt, Löbenicht and Kneiphof) were granted the status of towns. In 1724, they officially merged into the city of Königsberg..
For centuries, Königsberg was the metropolis of eastern Germany. The city played an important role in Europe’s international relations and became a meeting point of diverse historical and cultural traditions, as well as the home for people of various nationalities and religious beliefs. Thus, the Huguenot settlers (French Protestants) set up many enterprises and whole industries there. Poles, Lithuanians, English and Dutch; merchants from every European country; artisans and learned men of every nationality not only coexisted peacefully: they also respected each other and together they built up their city. Founded in 1544 as a purely Lutheran place of learning, the Albertina University of Königsberg became the center of attraction for men of science and culture from Poland and Lithuania. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the great philosopher, lived and worked here his entire life. It was in that city that the first-ever books were printed in Lithuanian.
On several occasions Königsberg found itself in the epicenter of major European conflicts: the Seven-Year War (1756-1763), the Napoleonic wars (1805-1807 and 1812-1814), the First World War (1914-1918) and the Second World War (1939-1945).
The historical center of the city with an architecture characteristic of the period was formed in the late Middle Ages. The more noteworthy and interesting sites were closely linked to the Order of Teutonic Knights, especially the castle – or Schloss – begun in 1255 and added to later, with a Gothic tower 277 ft. high and a chapel built in 1592, in which Frederick I. in 1701 and William I. in 1861 crowned themselves kings of Prussia. On Kneiphof island the Dom cathedral, a Gothic building of reddish brick, with a tower 164 ft. high begun in 1333 and restored in 1856, and the burial place of all Teutonic Order generations; it adjoined the tomb of Immanuel Kant, next to the city library, the former University building in which Kant held his lectures. Altogether, there are some 730 historical and cultural monuments in the city which up to 1939 had a population of around 350,000.
Königsberg was a vibrant, prosperous city. It was a world trade center for optical lenses, and a vital shipping port for the trade in cereals, legumes, timber and flax in Northern and Eastern Europe. Large freighters were able to access its deep sea port by means of an 8 meter deep channel that started at Pillau on the Baltic. Königsberg extensive warehousing district contained some of the largest grain silos on the mainland. As a result arts and commerce flourished here. Grand merchant houses, banking offices, palaces and opera houses were erected in the city center.