German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Koenigsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad

Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost bastion of Hitler's Third Reich and the launching point for the Nazis' genocidal war in the East. She then describes how, after being destroyed by bombing and siege warfare in 1945, Koenigsberg became Kaliningrad, the westernmost city of Stalin's Soviet Union. Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own-in both wartime occupation and as an integral territory of the two regimes.