Königsberg: the 700-year-old city that was taken off the map

Königsberg is the clearest example there is of how completely a place can be removed. Not conquered or annexed, which happens to cities all the time. Removed. The buildings, then the population, then the name, in that order.

You can visit the site. It is a Russian city called Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland and Lithuania with no land connection to the rest of Russia, and almost nothing in it is older than 1946.

Seven hundred years

The Teutonic Knights founded it in 1255 during the Northern Crusades, on the site of an Old Prussian settlement called Twangste, and named it for King Ottokar II of Bohemia. The Prussian name meant something like a pond made by a dam. The one the Knights gave it meant king’s mountain, and it stuck for the next seven centuries.

Duke Albert founded the university in 1544. The Albertina made Königsberg a serious intellectual city about three hundred years before anyone thought of it as a frontier town. On 18 January 1701 Elector Frederick III crowned himself Frederick I in the castle church, and from then until the end of the monarchy Königsberg was the coronation city of Prussia. The capital was Berlin. The crown was put on in Königsberg.

By the 1939 census it held 372,164 people. A Hanseatic port, a cathedral, an amber trade, trams, and the oldest German university east of the Vistula.

Immanuel Kant

Kant was born there in 1724, studied at the Albertina, taught at it, and died there in 1804. The entire Critique of Pure Reason was produced by a man walking around that specific street plan on a schedule the neighbours could set their clocks by.

It is hard to think of a European city more completely attached to one mind. Which is part of why what happened next reads the way it does.

Two nights in August 1944

RAF Bomber Command came on the night of 26 August 1944 with 174 Lancasters, and again on the night of 29 August. Between them the raids dropped around 480 tons of high explosive and incendiaries onto the centre.

Bomber Command’s own assessment was that the attacks destroyed about twenty per cent of the city’s industry and forty one per cent of all its housing. The historic core, the three old quarters of Altstadt, Löbenicht and Kneiphof, was not damaged. It was gone. The cathedral, the castle, every church in the city, both the old and the new university buildings, the entire warehouse district.

Seven centuries of a city, in two nights, by an air force that had never occupied it and never would.

Then the siege

What was left was encircled and fought over for roughly three months. General Otto Lasch surrendered the remnants of his garrison on 9 April 1945. By then something close to eighty per cent of the city had been destroyed, and the military and civilian dead in Königsberg are estimated at 42,000.

Then the people

The Germans who were still alive and still there were not expelled immediately. They were held and used as forced labour until 1946. Between October 1947 and October 1948 about 100,000 were moved to Germany. A remaining 20,000 followed in 1949 and 1950.

So the removal of the population took five years and was done in stages, by administration rather than by bombing. Historians are fairly direct about what that was, and the word most of them use is cleansing.

And then the name

Mikhail Kalinin died on 3 June 1946. On 4 July 1946, thirty one days later, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad after him.

This is the detail worth sitting with. Kalinin was the titular head of the Supreme Soviet, a signature on other men’s decisions. He had no connection to the city, had not taken it and had never lived there. He had simply died recently enough to have a name going spare.

So the replacement for a name that had stood since 1255 was chosen because somebody convenient had become available the previous month. That is not carelessness. A name with no local meaning is exactly the point, because there is no older claim underneath it to appeal to.

The erasure did not finish in 1945

The castle survived the war as a ruin. It was still standing, burnt out but recognisable, through the 1950s and into the 1960s. Soviet authorities demolished what was left in 1968, twenty three years after the fighting stopped, and put a concrete administrative block on the site that was never finished and never occupied.

The cathedral was left as a shell for even longer. The photograph above was taken in September 1988. Restoration only began after the Soviet Union ended.

That is the part people miss. The bombing was two nights. The removal took another twenty three years, and it was done deliberately, in peacetime, by people with planning permission.

One thing survived

The cathedral was gutted in August 1944 and shelled again in April 1945. Almost none of the complex came through it.

Kant’s tomb, on the outside of the north east corner, survived both. It is essentially the only part of the whole site that did, and it is still there, attached to a rebuilt cathedral, in a city whose name he never heard.

Why the order matters

Renaming a place is in the news again, after an American executive order changed Lake Ontario to Lake America. Canadian officials refused the new name. Several mapping companies adopted it within days.

Königsberg is the reason the second of those matters more than the first. A decree on its own does very little. Governments have renamed things and been ignored for as long as there have been governments and things. What made Kaliningrad stick was not the 1946 decree. It was that by 1946 the buildings were rubble, the people who called it Königsberg were being loaded onto trains, and by 1968 even the ruins were gone.

The name is always the last step. It is the receipt, not the transaction.

Also read

At the other end of the Baltic the same war moved a border and emptied a region. Read about the 400,000 Karelian evacuees who lost their homes twice.