Battle of Königsberg

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Königsberg took four days, but a siege had gripped the city since late January 1945 long before that. Soviet forces of the 3rd Belorussian Front had already pushed almost 1,500,000 troops into East Prussia by the 13th of January, backed by several thousand tanks and aircraft. Winston Churchill later described Königsberg as "a modernised heavily defended fortress," ringed by forts strong enough, in theory, to survive nineteenth-century siege guns. Why did that fortress fall in only four days of urban fighting, and what became of the tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers trapped inside its rings of defenses when it finally did?

• 2. Encircling The City

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  Soviet planners in the Stavka designed the East Prussian offensive to guard the flanks of the armies pushing toward Berlin, since East Prussia held forces that could strike at them. Joseph Stalin ordered Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky to destroy the Wehrmacht troops trapped in the region.

  On the first day of the advance, Red Army troops broke through only three defensive lines and gained just 1.5 kilometers of ground. Five days in, after heavy losses, Soviet forces had advanced only 20 kilometers and still could not break into open country.

  On the 24th of January, advance units of the 1st Baltic Front under Ivan Bagramyan reached the shores of the Vistula Lagoon. That cut the German forces in East Prussia off from direct contact with Germany, forcing them to resupply the trapped troops by sea. The next day, Hitler renamed three army groups, a quiet admission that his forces sat far behind the collapsing front line; Army Group Centre, surrounded in the Königsberg pocket, became Army Group North. Compressed by further Soviet attacks, those troops split into three pockets: one at Königsberg, one on the Sambia Peninsula, and one on the Vistula Lagoon coast at Heiligenbeil.

  By late January the 3rd Belorussian Front had surrounded Königsberg on the landward side, cutting the road down the Samland peninsula to the port of Pillau. The encirclement trapped the 3rd Panzer Army inside the city, along with roughly 200,000 civilians.

• 3. Civilians Caught Inside

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  Rations inside the encircled city were cut to 180 grams of bread a day. Civilians faced three grim choices: stay and starve, cross the front line into Soviet hands, or cross the ice of the Vistula Lagoon toward Pillau in hope of an evacuation ship.

  Hundreds chose to cross the front line. Around 2,000 women and children a day chose the ice instead, walking toward Pillau on foot. Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, was returning from a visit to Berlin around this time; rather than go back into Königsberg, he chose to stay in the relative safety of Pillau to organize the evacuation. The first evacuation steamer out of Pillau reached safety on the 28th of January, carrying 1,800 civilians and 1,200 wounded.

  Metgethen was the last remaining route out of Königsberg toward Pillau. On the 29th, the Red Army attacked the quarter and overran it completely.

• 4. Fighting For The Corridor

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  For a time in February, Soviet troops managed to sever the connection between Königsberg and Samland entirely, cutting the city off. German forces spent the month in desperate fighting to hold that narrow link open.

  On the 19th of February, the 3rd Panzer Army and the 4th Army attacked from the direction of Pillau, forcing a corridor back open. Led by a captured Soviet T-34 tank, the assault was spearheaded by the 1st Infantry Division out of Königsberg, aiming to link up with General Hans Gollnick's XXVIII Corps, which held the Samland peninsula and the port of Pillau. The unit recaptured Metgethen, clearing the way for the 5th Panzer Division to join Gollnick's forces near Gross Heydekrug the following day.

  That action held the German defense together until April, keeping the land route from Königsberg to Pillau open for supply ships and for evacuating the wounded. Soviet accounts sometimes call this month-long fight the First Siege of Königsberg.

  By March the wider front line had shifted hundreds of kilometers to the west, and capturing Königsberg had become a low priority for Soviet planners. The garrison, still intact, showed no sign of surrender, so Soviet command chose to take the city by direct assault rather than continue the siege.

• 5. A Fortress Built To Endure

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  Five German divisions, roughly 130,000 troops in all, garrisoned Königsberg: the 61st, 69th and 367th Infantry Divisions and the 548th and 561st Volksgrenadier Divisions. Their defenses dated to 1888, fifteen forts linked by tunnels with built-in quarters for troops, engineered to withstand the kind of super-guns developed after the siege of Paris in 1870-71. A narrow strip of land still connected the city to the German pocket on the Samland peninsula, and the so-called Samland Group could be expected to counter-attack to keep that link open.

  Three concentric rings encircled Königsberg: an outer ring reinforced by 12 forts, a middle ring through the outskirts, and an inner city fortified with anti-tank defenses, barricades and landmines. To break through, Soviet commanders leaned heavily on aviation and artillery, massing as many as 250 guns per kilometer in some sectors. German troops were also fed propaganda telling them their position was hopeless and that they were trapped in a "pocket" best surrendered, though it had little effect.

  After four days of preparatory bombardment, the assault opened on the 6th of April 1945. Soviet planners called the design "star-like": troops would attack from many points around the perimeter and converge on the city center, splitting the defenders into isolated groups unable to support one another. Two main fronts formed, north and south, with a reserve corps holding the line while two corps of six rifle divisions, plus armor and engineers, carried the attack.

• 6. Soldiers Fighting Their Own Country

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  The National Committee for a Free Germany, known as the NKFD, was formed mostly of German prisoners of war held in the USSR. Its Combat Groups, or Kampfgruppen, fought alongside the Red Army, carrying German weapons and wearing Wehrmacht uniforms for reconnaissance, infiltration, disarming German troops, and other combat support.

  On the 22nd of March, a company of 58 men led by Lieutenant Alfred Peter, joined by four NKFD members tasked with spreading propaganda, was sent toward Königsberg. It returned with 35 captured German soldiers, including an Oberleutnant Grünwald; one of the group was killed and two more wounded.

  General Otto Lasch described a similar operation from the 23rd of March in his memoir, So fiel Königsberg. A group of men in German uniforms approached a post of the 561st Volksgrenadier Division at the Landgraben, claiming to be deserters, and asked to be led to the command post. Lasch wrote: "When they arrived in the company commander's bunker, they suddenly pulled out their hidden submachine guns and opened fire. In the resulting confusion, they managed to overpower about 20 men of the weak company and escape with them across the Russian lines... The fight seemed to had become pointless if Germans were now fighting against Germans."

  A follow-up operation on the 5th of April, again led by Peter with 79 men, tried to breach the German 367th Division. The group overpowered one machine gun crew but had to retreat under heavy fire. On the 9th of April, the last day of the battle, two more groups from the Combat Group tried to reach German lines as parlementaires and also retreated under fire.

• 7. Four Days In April

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  At sunrise on the 6th of April, the southern assault opened with three hours of shelling before the main wave moved in. Soviet rifle divisions broke through the first defense line quickly, since days of bombing had already worn its defenders down. By noon they reached a tougher second line and had to commit reserves; three hours later that line, too, gave way in several places.

  Fort Eight held out through the day. Built at the end of the nineteenth century and later modernized, its thick walls and deep moat blocked any frontal approach, and only at dusk did Soviet troops reach the moat to begin planting explosives. In the north, the attack opened at the same hour; by noon the first line had fallen and the second was badly shaken, though the advance slowed in the afternoon as the Samland Group launched flanking counter-attacks from the west. Fort Five, considered the strongest point in the whole Königsberg position, held so firm that Soviet commanders chose to surround it and press on, leaving it for a later assault. By dusk the fighting had stalled everywhere, letting both sides regroup, but German morale had cracked enough that officers as well as soldiers began surrendering in small numbers.

  Overnight, German troops threw their last reserves into counter-attacks, most heavily against the Samland front, where roughly a dozen assaults were beaten off. Clearer skies on the 7th of April let several hundred Soviet bombers from the 1st, 3rd and 15th Air Armies, joined by Baltic Fleet aircraft, strike the downtown area and the Samland Group's bridgeheads. At Fort Eight, Soviet troops used smoke screens and flamethrowers to get several hundred men across the moat; close combat followed inside the fort before a final frontal assault forced its garrison to surrender. To the south, the 11th Guards Army pushed toward the Pregel river, though its advance slowed in the packed central city, where the main railway station became a battleground of railcars turned into firing points, cleared only by dusk with heavy Soviet losses. In the north, Soviet sappers finally blew a breach in Fort Five's walls, and close combat there ran through the night until its last defenders surrendered at dawn. That evening, General Otto Lasch radioed Hitler's headquarters to ask permission to surrender. Hitler's reply was "fight to the last soldier."

  Overnight on the 8th of April, the 11th Guards Army crossed the Pregel and, despite enemy fire, held a full bridgehead by dawn, linking with the northern troops and sealing off the Samland Group from the city. That afternoon Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky again demanded surrender; the Germans refused and tried to break out from both the city centre and the Samland bridgehead. The Samland force advanced a few kilometers before Soviet Il-2 ground attack aircraft, unopposed by German air defenses, tore into the attacking troops. By nightfall the breakout attempt was clearly hopeless, though almost 40,000 men still held the city centre under constant shelling.

  On the last day, the 9th of April, German command inside the city collapsed. Otto Lasch, judging further resistance pointless, decided on his own initiative to send emissaries to the Soviet lines. They arrived at 18:00, and a delegation was taken to Lasch's bunker; shortly before midnight, the surrender was acknowledged. The wider campaign did not end there: Army Detachment Samland fought on until Soviet forces destroyed it on the 25th of April.

• 8. Aftermath And A New Name

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  Almost 80 percent of Königsberg lay in ruins, first from Royal Air Force bombing in August 1944, then from Soviet shelling during the April assault. For the Soviet Army, the operation counted as a major success, since casualties had stayed comparatively low against a heavily fortified target.

  Moscow marked the victory with an artillery salvo of 324 cannons firing 24 shells each. A new decoration, the Medal "For the Capture of Königsberg," was created, and 98 military units took the Königsberg operation's name as their own.

  After the war, the northern half of East Prussia passed to the Russian SFSR, and Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad. Settlers moved in from elsewhere in the Soviet Union, mostly Russian, with smaller numbers of Belarusians and Ukrainians. Kaliningrad has remained a Russian exclave since the Soviet Union's collapse, bordered by Poland and Lithuania.