Fall of Hitler's Fortress City

The East Prussian city of Konigsberg, founded by the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century, became, seven centuries later, a key stronghold for the Third Reich. As the Russians approached it in 1945, Hitler declared that the city be held to the last man. Its governor compounded his master's folly by failing to organize any sensible evacuation plan. And so tens of thousands of refugees streamed out of the city to die of frostbite, starvation, Russian attacks, and drowning in the Baltic when they fell through its ice or when their ships sank. The remaining soldiers and civilians who didn't die in the fighting were often enslaved, either to rebuild the city or to labor in the Soviet gulag. The ruined city, renamed Kaliningrad, was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1946, and it is now one of Lithuania's more prosperous municipalities. But it still shows scars of its ghastly ordeal in 1945. Denny fills in a gap in the historiography of World War II's European eastern front.