From Prussian Might to Soviet Ruin: Kaliningrad and Königsberg

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Prussian Might to Soviet Ruin: Kaliningrad and Königsberg and why history might end up repeating itself?

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[jackwestin]

Every piece of land Russia conquers decays over time sadly and not just this. When Vyborg for instance belonged to Finland it was a cultural treasure but it got the same fate as Königsberg. Russia is not known for their high standards.

[captainmcawesome]

My grandfather, who is from Labiau in east prussia, once visited the region some time after the iron curtain fell.

According to him, the polish part was well-maintained (give or take) and to some degree reminded him of his childhood.
The russian part, however, was demolished, he could not recognize anything. Especially the rural areas were run-down which is very uncommon in germany where cities tend to be a little dirty but the countryside well-maintained by the folks.
He was born in 1928 so he's well over 90. Before the russian attack on Ukraine we asked him if we should organize for him to visit the region once again because he may not be able to later.
He only said "no, this would only depress me."

[oliverstianhugaas]

Reality hits you hard when you understand that there literally are just 8 houses, 1 canal lighthouse and 1 cathedral in the whole mass of Kaliningrad that are worth looking at even today. It's 10 structures.

[neelektronik]

Kalinin was the guy behind the Katyn massacre. Stalin did a little trolling, naming a town on the border with Poland after him

[justasrandom]

Native Prussians were one of the baltic tribes, so not slavic but baltic.

[SithStayer]

Königsberg was a very important cultural hub of the Teutonic Knights but not a capital, what you are referencing is probably the duchy of Prussia

[sergeygalayda]

I was in USSR navy service in 1976 in Kaliningrad. I was impressed by Goth architecture what was still remaining after war.

[oleksandrs]

Friend of mine tell me a story, when on some buildings in Konigsberg, the old soviet paint deteriorated and original German signs and texts started to be visible again.

[anatolfrombelarus]

I was in Kaliningrad in 1989, back in the USSR.
The local architecture left over from Prussia was impressive, as was the cathedral with the organ, as well as Kant's tomb.
One could feel the "breath" of Germany.

[nouta]

Post WW1 period wasn't the first time East Prussia was an enclave. It was also one before the 1st partition of Poland - Lithuania.

[aaronjones]

It's quite important to note that the Soviets invaded Poland alongside the Nazis. They contributed to the outbreak of war.

[Gokaes]

königsberg is truly one of the most interesting cities in the Europe
of course, paris and London have always been more important and so is Berlin, but Königsberg has lots of interesting history to it, and later on Kaliningrad

[es]

Sorry, but there are just so many inaccuracies in this video, that I just had to write a comment:

1. The cities' name is Königsberg and not Kunigsberg.
2. The center of the Teutonic Order was not Königsberg but Marienburg. Königsberg only became the capital after the Polish annexed then Royal Prussia in 1457.
3. The image chosen at 3:37 is particularly ironic when talking about the Order's power, since it depicts the final submission of the last ruler of the order under the Polish king in 1525.
4. German was the dominant language spoken in the city from the very beginning, since they literally founded and settled it in the first place. This video implies at several points, that Königsberg was some sort of multi-ethnic melting pot, which is however historically inaccurate. While Polish and Lithuanian minorities existed within the city, they were never so numerous to even get close to challenge the German character of the city.
5. Königsberg never "passed into Russian hands" after the fall of the Teutonic Order. The city was briefly occupied by Russian forces in the Seven Years' War, but was never part of Russian territory. Even the statement of the city "passing into Polish hands" is questionable, as Ducal Prussia, which contained Königsberg was never part of Poland (unlike Royal Prussia) but only a dependent, but autonomously governed fief of the Polish king.
6. No, Polish and Lithuanian weren't the dominant languages outside of city limits. Lithuanian wasn't even the native Baltic dialect of the region before German colonization, Old Prussian was. The Western part of the province, where Königsberg is located in, was always inhabited by German colonists, while the Eastern periphery, formerly known as the "Great Wilderness", was inhabited by Lithuanians, who settled in the region in the early 16th century, prior to which the region was almost uninhabited. With the Great Plague of 1709/10 however, most of the population was killed (the region was then resettled by German colonists) so that by the time of Kant, the Lithuanian settlement area had shrunk to what was then known as the Memelland. And even there, the local population had by 1910 assimilated to the point, that the Memelland was by then majority German. It should also be noted, that German was still the predominant language of the cities, even in these frontier regions, which is consistent with the pattern in most of Central Europe, such as in West Prussia, Upper Silesia, Bohemia, Hungary and Transylvania. The Polish element on the other hand only existed in the South of the Province, in a region known as Masuria, which was also a language (Masurian), that began to decline once industrialization started.
7. The borders at 5:56 are wrong, Northern Schleswig belonged to Germany at that time.
8. The statement that it was necessarily the existence of the German nation, which brought Britain, France and Russia closer together "to contain the German might" is a huge simplification and glosses over so many historical events and the influence of other powers (like Austria-Hungary for instance), that I just had to mention it.
9. Again, the borders are wrong. Most of Upper Silesia still belonged to Germany.
10. How was it the first time, that East Prussia was an enclave surrounded by foreign powers? That was literally the situation from 1525 to the First Partition in 1772.
11. No, the communists didn't gain support in East Prussia. East Prussia was a deeply conservative, protestant and agrarian society, which had absolutely no interest in communism whatsoever, which is, why the support for the communists always hovered around 10 %, while the conservative DNVP (conservative, anti-democratic monarchists) regularly got 30-40 % of the vote, with most of the vote for them then later going over to the NSDAP, which gained almost 50 % of the vote in 1932.
12. Again a huge oversimplification of the matter at 7:30, which completely ignores the very difficult economic situation East Prussia in particular faced after its seperation from Germany, the constant conflict with Poland over the transit between the mainland through the Polish corridor as well as the fact, that Poland and Lithuania were literally trying to expand their states into East Prussia, and Lithuania literally did illegally annex a part of East Prussia (the Memelland) against the will of its population and Germany couldn't do anything but sit there and watch. The problems and fears the people of East Prussia had were real, they weren't just paranoid and egged on by Nazi propaganda. Under the conditions set forth by the Treaty of Versailles, the people of East Prussia were probably the biggest losers and Hitler vowed to abandon that treaty, so it only made sense for the people to vote for him.
13. The renaming of Lithuanian and Masurian place names in East Prussia already started in the Weimar Republic and was not just a Nazi policy. The image at 8:17 is NOT from East Prussia by the way, but from Czechoslovakia after the German takeover, as you can clearly see by the Czech writing at the top and the name of the town "Mährisch Schönberg" (MORAVIAN Schönberg).
14. The sentence at 8:44 is again completely historically inaccurate, implying, that the Nazis somehow forced the poor native Polish and Lithuanian population to speak German, which was not the case. As mentioned before, the Lithuanian and Masurian languages had been on the decline since the beginning of the 19th century, with most of the people voluntarily switching over to German in the period from 1800 to 1933, meaning that by the time of the election of the NSDAP, the non-German population of East Prussia was already atleast bilingual, meaning that the ban on the Mazurian language by the Nazis by official institutions was little more than a formality. The statement, that East Prussia in the 1930s was "one of the most ethnically diverse regions of Germany" is therefore absolutely nonsensical. And again, the policy of assimilation was already pushed under the German Empire. And also, the implication that the Masurians were somehow "forced to be Germans" is again a complete inversion of the truth. The Masurians already felt German (and Prussian in particular), way before the Nazis ever came to power. In the time of the Empire, the region was the most vocal supporter of the Prussian Conservative Party, which was basically a Prussian nationalist and absolute monarchist party. In the plebescite of 1920, 98 % of the Masurians voted to stay with Germany over joining Poland. The region was also maybe the most Nazi-friendly region in all of Germany with the NSDAP gaining upwards of 70 % of the vote in some districts.
15. 12:25: This is not what "scorched earth" means. The Germans didn't deliberately destroy Königsberg and then retreated to a more defensible position, they hoped, that they would win in a war of attrition by wearing the Soviet Army down with all ressources left. It was Soviet artillery, that destroyed what was left of Königsberg, but even this is not really accurate, since the British air raids already reduced the historic center and most parts of the rest of the city to rubble dehousing 200.000 people and destroying 80 % of the city total, meaning that the Soviet impact was only marginal.
16. The remaining population of Königsberg after the Battle was more like 100.000 and not 150.000 to 200.000.
17. The section at 13:00 mentions bloody revenge, but the connects it in the next sentence with high military casualties, which makes no sense. What should've been mentioned were civilian massacres, torture and mass rapes of primarily German women and children.
18. I would generally like to see a source for the entire section between 16:00 and 20:00.
19. Here is another quote, which is completely misses the point at 23:35. East Prussia is not a region, which served any function to Germany, it was a vital historic region of the German nation with a culture going back 700 years. They don't have to legitimize themselves by serving some sort of geopolitical function, their existence is legitimacy enough. To compare this to the rootless purely pragmatic Soviet settler colony and equate it as one and the same is completely absurd. That would be like saying that Kent serves an important function for England by projecting power in the English Channel, which is why it is indespensible to its government.
20. And of course you can't finish off such a video without some good old victim blaming. No, fascism didn't destroy the city, democracy/liberalism and communism did. It was the British, who completely annihilated every landmark, every church, and every historic building in the old city center as well as 80 % of the city in total, as they did in all of Germany, and it was Britain, the US and the USSR, who planned and executed the ethnic cleansing of the 12-14 million Germans from their historic homelands. None of that needed to happen and all it is only making apparent, that morals and human rights are null and void, when it comes to the expression of geopolitical power. Germany wanted "Lebensraum" and wanted to ethnically cleanse and resettle Eastern Europe -> bad, the Soviets wanted "Lebensraum" and wanted to ethnically cleanse Central Europe -> good, or atleast morally acceptable, so much so, that every atrocity, that was committed by the aformentioned powers is then shifted back to Germany, because they supposedly did it first.

[a_nyolcadik_vezer]

Who else misses Königsberg and Prussia?

[JohnnyVS]

I'm from Russia and i think we need to return name Königsberg instead Kaliningrad. And make a restoration of old Königsberg like Poland did it with its cities after WWII.

[glike]

The narration was pleasantly poetic about the sad history of this once beautiful city

[zk]

10:59 although authors talk about German civil population losses they remain unfortunatelly silent about the fate of forced labour workers and concentration camps prisoners, POWs that Germans brought to the city and nearby suburbs. No, Koenisgberg ( Królewiec in Polish) was not place of idillic life during the second world war. It was - as most of German occupied or possessed territory land of death and suffering for non-G erman people. If East Prussia had the biggest level of support for Hitler imagine how German Herren volk (the master race) treated Poles and other victims of German idea of organizing other nations life.
It is sad that authors choosed to give false, one sided narrative about poor Germans suffering in that respect.

[Vilgern]

Greetings from Rēzekne, your videos are just as awesome as they could be, thank you for well done work

[lucachung]

The biggest shame is, that neither soviets nor russia have respect for the historical and cultural value for not only the germans who were forcefully displaced, but also germany as nation. No German is angry that Klaipeda or Olsztyn is in others hand, becuase Poland and Lithuania respect the heritage....

[jay-be]

I live in St. Petersburg and last month I went to Kaliningrad for 4 days. I experienced strange sensations in this city, but I was pleased that work is underway in this city to restore the sights, German houses, new transport and new embankments. It's still interesting that most of the new buildings for people there are built in the German style, although this is Russia, I think the Germans would hardly build Russian architecture, but it shows that no matter what we love Germany. But despite the fact that the city is a bit run down there is a lot of fun, a lot of clubs, restaurants, bars and so on. And there are very cool cities on the coast such as Zelenogradsk, Svetlogorsk and there the cities are very well licked both for tourists and for rich people from all over Russia on the coast