The capture of Königsberg

On the evening of 9 April 1945, at around 9.30 p.m., the commandant of Fortress Königsberg (Festung Königsberg), General der Infanterie Otto Lasch, accepted the Soviet terms of surrender. After a four-day assault, preceded by several days of shelling and air raids, the troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front under Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky had taken the capital of East Prussia – a city that had been cut off from the Reich since the end of January and had held out under encirclement for more than two months. That same night Moscow celebrated the victory with a salute of 24 salvoes from 324 guns.

Königsberg (today Kaliningrad) was a city of great symbolic weight: the seat of the grand masters of the Teutonic Order and later of the dukes of Prussia, the place where the first King in Prussia was crowned in 1701, and the city of the Albertina university and of Immanuel Kant. Its fall brought seven centuries of German Königsberg to a close. The captured city, wrecked first by British bombers and then by Soviet artillery and aircraft, was annexed to the USSR after the war, and its German inhabitants – those who survived the hunger and epidemics of 1945–1947 – were expelled.

The surrender of Königsberg was a military act: it was signed by the fortress commandant on behalf of the garrison, and the civilians were not party to it – they remained in the ruined city and came under the rule of the Soviet military administration. Nor did the surrender end the fighting in East Prussia: on the Samland Peninsula and at Pillau the Germans held out until 25 April, and on the Vistula Spit until May.

A fortress city

Before the war Königsberg had some 370,000 inhabitants and was the largest city in East Prussia, its administrative, port and industrial centre. Until the summer of 1944 the war had passed it by almost entirely – a handful of Soviet raids in 1941–1943 did little damage. That changed in August 1944, when the Red Army reached the borders of East Prussia. On the night of 26/27 August, 174 Avro Lancaster bombers of No. 5 Group, RAF Bomber Command, flying at the limit of their range, attacked the eastern part of the city. Three nights later, on 29/30 August, 189 Lancasters dropped high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the city centre itself. The fires consumed the historic districts – the Old Town, Löbenicht and the island of Kneiphof – together with the Gothic cathedral, of which only the walls survived, the castle, churches and the buildings of the university. Kant’s tomb beside the cathedral survived. Estimates of the dead in the two raids range from about 3,500 to more than 4,000, and tens of thousands were left homeless.

In the autumn of 1944, after the first Soviet offensive into East Prussia had been repulsed, the city was declared a fortress that was to fight on even if surrounded – like Poznań or Breslau. Its defence rested on a ring of forts built in the 1870s and 1880s. The outer ring, a few kilometres from the centre, consisted of a dozen or so forts linked by an anti-tank ditch, minefields and wire entanglements; a second ring ran along the edge of the built-up area, among fortified tenement blocks and barricades; the third enclosed the city centre with its old bastions and ravelins. The thick-walled, moated forts stood up well to lighter artillery, but they were obsolete and too few to defend a large city.

The siege from January to March

The East Prussian offensive, launched on 13 January 1945, cut the province off from the Reich within two weeks. At the end of January the troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front, then commanded by General of the Army Ivan Chernyakhovsky, approached Königsberg from the east and south, and over the following days severed its land links with Samland and Pillau; after fighting for the suburbs, the city was completely cut off from them on 9 February. It was crowded with refugees from the eastern districts; the party authorities of Gauleiter Erich Koch, who for months had forbidden evacuation, now called on the population to leave, which caused panic. Thousands set off on foot across the frozen lagoon and through Samland towards Pillau, from where ships carried them west – one episode of the flight of the population of East Prussia. Koch himself never returned to the besieged city; he moved to Pillau and, in the last weeks of the war, escaped west by sea.

From the end of January the fortress commandant was Otto Lasch, an infantry officer born in 1893 in Pszczyna (Pless), a veteran of the First World War and of the fighting on the Eastern Front, who in 1944 had commanded a division and then a corps. He managed to master the chaos, formed emergency units out of stragglers and the remnants of divisions, and stabilised the defence. On 19–20 February German forces struck simultaneously from the city and from Samland to the west and reopened a corridor to Pillau through Metgethen. Over the following weeks tens of thousands of civilians and wounded were evacuated from the city along it, while supplies were brought into the fortress. In recaptured Metgethen the Germans found the bodies of murdered residents and refugees; Goebbels’s propaganda publicised the crime, and the casualty figures later given for it are uncertain.

On 18 February Chernyakhovsky was killed near Pieniężno (Mehlsack). Vasilevsky took command of the 3rd Belorussian Front, and the troops of the former 1st Baltic Front, reorganised as the Samland Group of Forces under General of the Army Ivan Bagramyan, were placed under his front. Vasilevsky decided first to destroy the strongest German grouping – the remnants of the 4th Army in the pocket on the Vistula Lagoon south-west of Königsberg. The fighting lasted from 13 to 29 March. By then the main front lay hundreds of kilometres further west, on the Oder, and Königsberg had become an island in the Red Army’s rear. The Soviet command decided not to prolong the siege but to take the city by storm, so as to free the front’s troops for other tasks.

The forces before the assault

According to figures cited in the literature, the Königsberg garrison numbered about 130,000 men – including artillery, police, sailors fighting as infantry and Volkssturm battalions. The core of the defence consisted of four weakened infantry and Volksgrenadier divisions (the 61st, 69th and 367th Infantry Divisions and the 548th and 561st Volksgrenadier Divisions). Tanks, artillery ammunition and fuel were in short supply; the Luftwaffe was practically non-existent over the city, and anti-aircraft guns were used against ground targets. West of the city, in Samland, stood the troops of the Samland group, which were to strike to relieve the fortress if necessary. Between about 100,000 and 126,000 civilians, depending on the estimate, remained in the city, mostly women, children and the elderly, crammed into cellars and shelters. During the siege the bread ration was cut to about 180 grams a day.

Vasilevsky committed four armies to the assault: from the south the 11th Guards Army of General Kuzma Galitsky; from the north-west the 39th Army of General Ivan Lyudnikov and the 43rd Army of General Afanasy Beloborodov; and from the north-east the 50th Army of General Fyodor Ozerov. Estimates of Soviet strength vary widely – from about 106,000 to over 180,000 men, depending on whether only the assault units or all the troops in the Königsberg sector are counted. The superiority in equipment was beyond dispute: some 5,000 guns and mortars, including the heaviest siege guns and armoured-train artillery, more than 500 tanks and self-propelled guns, and about 2,400 aircraft of the 1st and 3rd Air Armies, the Baltic Fleet’s air arm and the long-range bombers of the 18th Air Army. In some sectors there were more than 200 barrels per kilometre of front. Propagandists were also sent to work on the defenders, along with small groups of German prisoners from the National Committee for a Free Germany, who slipped across to the German side in German uniforms to urge surrender.

The assault was preceded by several days of artillery bombardment that began in early April; bad weather, however, limited air operations and the correction of fire.

The assault: 6–9 April

On the morning of 6 April, after an artillery preparation lasting several hours, the Soviet armies attacked from the north and the south. Assault units – infantry with sappers, flamethrowers, accompanying guns and tanks – broke through the first line of defence and by evening had forced their way into the suburbs. The strongest forts, which could not be taken at a rush, were surrounded and left to the second echelons. The first day, however, brought no decision, and during the night the defenders threw their last reserves into counter-attacks.

On 7 April the weather improved and the air force entered the battle in full. According to Soviet figures, in a single raid that day more than 500 bombers dropped hundreds of tons of bombs on the city, while Il-2 ground-attack aircraft strafed the streets and artillery positions. In the south Galitsky’s guardsmen captured the main railway station, where the Germans fought from carriages and platforms, and reached the Pregel. In the north Soviet troops took further forts – some of them stormed after their walls had been blown in with explosive charges, with fighting inside at bayonet point and with grenades – and broke into the residential districts. In the burning city, under incessant fire, communications between German headquarters and their units were breaking down. According to accounts cited in the literature, that day Lasch asked for permission either to break out of the city or to cease fighting, and was ordered to defend it to the end.

On the night of 7/8 April the 11th Guards Army forced the Pregel, and on 8 April its units linked up with the 43rd Army west of the city. Königsberg was now completely cut off from Samland. That day Vasilevsky called on the garrison to lay down its arms; the call was rejected. On the evening and night of 8/9 April part of the garrison tried to break out westwards, while the Samland group attacked from Samland to relieve it. Both attacks collapsed under artillery and air attack; the columns of soldiers and of civilians who had joined the attempt to get out of the city suffered heavy losses.

The surrender

On 9 April the defence broke up into isolated pockets of resistance in the city centre. Lasch was directing operations from a bunker in the centre of the city, near the university building, with no communication left with most of his units. Judging further resistance pointless and wishing to spare the remaining soldiers and the civilian population, he decided – on his own responsibility and against Hitler’s orders – to open negotiations. In the evening his envoys crossed to the Soviet side, and Soviet officers arrived at the bunker. At around 9.30 p.m. the commandant accepted the terms of surrender and ordered a ceasefire. The order did not reach every unit; individual groups held out through the night and the following day before surrendering or being killed.

According to Soviet figures, some 42,000 German soldiers were killed in the fighting for the city and about 92,000 were taken prisoner (other tallies give nearly 94,000, including about 1,800 officers). These figures also include Volkssturm members, policemen and some men from the civilian population, and cannot be verified from German sources. Soviet losses were never officially published; Russian historians give estimates for the four days of the assault ranging from about 3,700 to more than 9,000 killed and several tens of thousands wounded. Whatever the discrepancies, the Soviet command regarded the capture of Königsberg as a model assault on a major fortress – carried out quickly and at a lower cost than had been feared.

Hitler received the news with fury. Lasch was sentenced to death by hanging in absentia for cowardice, and his family was arrested under the practice of collective liability (Sippenhaft); they were released only after Germany’s surrender. Lasch spent ten years in Soviet captivity; sentenced in the USSR as a war criminal to 25 years in the Gulag, he returned to West Germany in 1955. In 1958 he published his memoirs, So fiel Königsberg (“Thus Fell Königsberg”). He died in Bonn in 1971.

On 9 June 1945 the Medal “For the Capture of Königsberg” was instituted – the only Soviet medal for the capture of a city that was not a national capital (the others were for Budapest, Vienna and Berlin); according to figures from 1987, some 760,000 people received it.

The civilian population

For the civilians the end of the fighting did not mean the end of their suffering. During the assault many thousands of them were killed – perhaps as many as a quarter of those who had stayed in the city, according to estimates cited in the literature that are hard to verify; they died in collapsed cellars, from shells and in fires, and during the failed attempt to break out to the west. After the surrender the captured city was subjected to looting, arson and violence by Soviet soldiers: witnesses described the rape of women, killings and the plundering of homes. Residents were rounded up in squares and driven in columns to transit camps and filtration points in the surrounding area; some of the men – and women – were deported deep into the USSR for forced labour, and those who returned after a few days found their homes stripped bare.

The heaviest toll, however, came in the months that followed. In the ruined city, without running water, sewerage or electricity, the surviving Germans were forced to work for the Soviet military administration, and the food rations – issued irregularly and only to those who worked – were not enough to live on. Typhus and dysentery spread. According to Soviet registers, about 73,000 Germans were living in Königsberg at the end of June 1945, and about 45,000 in May 1946. The German historian Andreas Kossert estimates that of the 100,000–126,000 civilians found in the city in April 1945, only about 24,000 lived to be expelled in 1947–1948; about three-quarters of the dead were killed by hunger, about 15 per cent by violence and the rest by disease. A harrowing record of those years is the diary of the surgeon Hans von Lehndorff (PL), who worked in Königsberg’s hospitals during and after the assault.

From Königsberg to Kaliningrad

The city’s fate had been decided even before it was taken. As early as the Tehran Conference in 1943, Joseph Stalin had demanded the northern part of East Prussia with Königsberg for the USSR, and the Western Allies had accepted the demand. The Potsdam Conference in August 1945 placed Königsberg and the adjacent area under Soviet administration pending a final settlement in a peace treaty. In October 1945 the USSR formally incorporated the area into its territory, and on 7 April 1946 the Königsberg Oblast was created within the Russian SFSR. On 4 July 1946 the city was renamed Kaliningrad – in honour of Mikhail Kalinin, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, who had died a month earlier and who had no connection whatsoever with the city – and the oblast became the Kaliningrad Oblast.

In the autumn of 1947 Stalin ordered the expulsion of the remaining Germans. In 1947–1948 they were taken by train to the Soviet occupation zone of Germany; according to Soviet documents, more than 102,000 people had been deported from the whole oblast by 1951. Settlers from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were brought in to replace them. The ruins of the castle where the first King in Prussia had been crowned were blown up in the 1960s, and the historic centre was rebuilt from scratch. Only a few buildings of the old city survived – the cathedral, rebuilt after 1990, with Kant’s tomb, the forts and the city gates. The border with Poland, drawn in 1945, cut the city off from its former hinterland; after the collapse of the USSR the oblast became a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania.

Significance

The capture of Königsberg ended the real struggle for East Prussia – the fortress that German propaganda had presented as the Reich’s bastion in the east. Four days later Vasilevsky’s troops began the final phase of the operation, the advance on the Samland Peninsula; Pillau fell on 25 April, and the remnants of the German Army East Prussia held out on the Vistula Spit and the Hel Peninsula until Germany’s surrender. The troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front freed by the capture of Königsberg could now be sent by the Stavka to other tasks; Vasilevsky himself soon began preparing the coming campaign against Japan in Manchuria.

The fall of Königsberg was also further proof that Hitler cared nothing for either the soldiers or the civilians shut up in his “fortresses”. As earlier in Poznań and Budapest, and at the same time in Breslau, defence to the last man could no longer change the course of the war; it could only add to the death toll and the destruction. Even as Lasch was signing the surrender, the Red Army on the Oder was preparing for its last offensive – against Berlin – while in the west the Allies were destroying the German armies encircled in the Ruhr. For the Germans Königsberg became a symbol of the lost east; for the Russians, one of the most celebrated victories of the last months of the war.