East Prussia
East Prussia occupied the southeastern corner of the Baltic shore, a province of the Kingdom of Prussia that endured for close to two centuries. By the spring of 1945, a territory holding 2.49 million people in 1939 had been reduced to 193,000 survivors. Its capital was Königsberg, a city that had stood for seven hundred years without suffering severe damage in war. By 1946 it carried a different name entirely. How a crusading military order carved this territory from Baltic wilderness is one thread. How the province survived plague, partition, and two world wars is another. How its entire German-speaking population then vanished within a single year is a third. All three run through one of the most turbulent provincial histories in modern Europe.
Duke Konrad I of Masovia invited the Teutonic Knights into the Baltic region in the 13th century. He needed military force to subdue the pagan Prussians along his northern frontier. The Knights built a monastic state from the conquered lands of the Old Prussians. The native population was gradually converted to Christianity. Through the medieval Ostsiedlung, the eastward German settlement movement, Germans became the dominant ethnic group in the territory. Poles and Lithuanians remained as sizeable minorities.
The Order's seizure of Polish Pomerania with Gdansk, and its campaigns into western Lithuania, drew it into prolonged conflict with the Kingdom of Poland. Those wars culminated at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, where the united armies of Poland and Lithuania defeated the Order decisively. The loss broke the Knights' capacity to expand, without immediately ending their rule.
In 1440, the anti-Teutonic Prussian Confederation formed among local nobles and cities. King Casimir IV of Poland signed the act of incorporation of the entire region into the Kingdom of Poland in 1454. The Second Peace of Thorn in 1466 ended the Thirteen Years' War. Warmia was confirmed as part of Poland, and the remaining Teutonic territory became a Polish fief.
Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach ended that arrangement in 1525. He converted to Lutheranism and secularized the Prussian branch of the Teutonic Knights. Albert established himself as the first duke of the Duchy of Prussia. He held that title as a vassal of the Polish crown, in the ceremony known as the Prussian Homage. The Hohenzollern princes of Brandenburg became co-regents of the duchy in 1569, drawing the territory into a political orbit far beyond the Baltic coast.
Elector Frederick William took advantage of Sweden's invasion of Poland in 1655. Through the treaties of Wehlau, Labiau, and Oliva, he pressed Poland to renounce sovereignty over the Duchy of Prussia. The duchy gained full independence in 1660. Opposition in Königsberg was fierce. A confederation formed in the city to maintain Poland's claim, and the Elector's army entered Königsberg by force. The opposition leader, Hieronymus Roth, was abducted and imprisoned. The city's burghers swore allegiance to Frederick William in 1663, though they still pledged loyalty to Poland in the same ceremony.
Approximately one-third of East Prussia's population died in the plague outbreak of 1709-1711. The epidemic killed 250,000 people, including the last speakers of Old Prussian. Crown Prince Frederick William I led the effort to rebuild, founding numerous towns across the devastated province. In 1724, he prohibited Poles, Samogitians, and Jews from settling in Lithuania Minor. Thousands of Protestants expelled from the Archbishopric of Salzburg were allowed to resettle in the depleted region.
Russia occupied East Prussia for four years during the Seven Years' War before withdrawing in 1762. In 1772, King Frederick the Great annexed neighbouring Royal Prussia in the First Partition of Poland. This connected his Prussian lands with Farther Pomerania and cut the remainder of Poland off from the Baltic coast. An administrative decree of the 31st of January 1772 formally designated the territory East Prussia. The Polish Partition Sejm ratified the cession on the 30th of September 1772, after which Frederick styled himself King of Prussia. East and West Prussia were subsequently merged into a single Province of Prussia in 1829, an arrangement the state reversed by separating the provinces again in 1878.
The province's population reached 1,996,626 people in 1900. Protestants numbered 1,698,465 of them, Roman Catholics 269,196, and Jews 13,877. German speakers predominated throughout, but Lithuanian speakers concentrated in the northeast, in the region known as Lithuania Minor. The Kursenieki, a Latvian-related group, inhabited areas around the Curonian Lagoon.
Between 1885 and 1890, East Prussia lost population despite a high birth rate. Workers moved west to seek employment in the industrial centres of the Ruhr Area and Berlin, a movement known in German as Ostflucht. Brandenburg and the Rhineland gained population in those same years. East Prussia's count declined by a fraction, a persistent stagnancy that shaped political attitudes in the province for decades.
Russia invaded East Prussia at the start of World War I, finding the province lightly defended. The bulk of the German Army had been sent west under the Schlieffen Plan. Early Russian forces captured Rastenburg and Gumbinnen. At Tannenberg in 1914, the Russian Army suffered decisive defeat. A similar outcome followed at the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes in 1915. During the Russian occupation, 74 civilians were killed in the Abschwangen massacre on the 29th of August 1914.
The Treaty of Versailles gave West Prussia to the new Polish Republic, cutting East Prussia off from mainland Germany by land. The province became a detached exclave. The Seedienst Ostpreußen, or Sea Service East Prussia, was established as an independent transport link to the isolated territory. On the 11th of July 1920, a plebiscite was held under Allied supervision in southern East Prussia. The result was 96.7 percent in favour of remaining within Germany. The Klaipeda Territory, a League of Nations mandate since 1920, was occupied and annexed by Lithuania in 1923 without giving its inhabitants a vote.
Erich Koch had headed the East Prussian Nazi party since 1928. By 1932, he led the province as Gauleiter. On the night of the 31st of July 1932, the local SA bombed the headquarters of the Social Democrats in Königsberg, the Otto-Braun-House. The Communist politician Gustav Sauf was killed. The Social Democratic newspaper's executive editor, Otto Wyrgatsch, was severely injured, as was the German People's Party politician Max von Bahrfeldt. Kurt Kotzan, the Reichsbanner chairman in Lötzen, was murdered on the 6th of August 1932.
In the last contested pre-war German election, held in March 1933, the population of East Prussia voted overwhelmingly for the Nazi Party. On the 16th of August 1933, Koch reported to Hitler that unemployment had been entirely abolished in East Prussia. The claim was false. Walther Funk and the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had organized the announcement as a staged event. East Prussia was chosen partly because its agrarian economy already had lower unemployment than the industrial regions of Germany.
Koch's industrialization ambitions put him at odds with Richard Walther Darré, the Reich Peasant Leader and Minister of Agriculture. Darré held a neopagan rural-romantic vision for East Prussia and expected the province to remain agricultural. When his land representatives challenged Koch's plans, Koch arrested them.
In 1938, Koch ordered more than 1,500 East Prussian place names changed by the 16th of July of that year. Polish, Lithuanian, and Old Prussian toponyms were eliminated or Germanized under a decree initiated by Adolf Hitler. The Klaipeda region, reacquired from Lithuania in 1939 after a German ultimatum, was incorporated into East Prussia.
Hitler's top-secret Eastern Front headquarters, the Wolf's Lair, was located in the village of Gierłoż during World War II. The Jews remaining in East Prussia in 1942 were deported to concentration camps including Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia and Kaiserwald in occupied Latvia. Deportations began on the 24th of June 1942 and continued throughout the war. Most of those deported were killed.
As the Eastern Front approached East Prussia's borders in 1944, Koch continued to delay the civilian evacuation. The population had been systematically misinformed about the war's progress by Nazi Endsieg propaganda. By the time the danger became undeniable, it was too late for many to flee.
On the night of the 26th and the 27th of August 1944, Royal Air Force bombers launched the first of two devastating raids on Königsberg. A second raid followed three nights later, overnight on the 29th and the 30th of August. Winston Churchill had erroneously believed the city to be "a modernized heavily defended fortress," as he later recorded in The Second World War. He ordered its destruction. The raids left Königsberg almost completely in ruins.
Reports of Soviet atrocities during the Nemmersdorf massacre of October 1944 spread fear and desperation among the civilian population. Thousands of civilians fleeing west were overtaken by retreating Wehrmacht units and the rapidly advancing Red Army. Soviet submarines sank the evacuation ships Wilhelm Gustloff, the Goya, and the General von Steuben, killing thousands of refugees. Königsberg itself surrendered on the 9th of April 1945, following a four-day battle.
An estimated 300,000 people died in the province's final phase. The causes included wartime bombing, the battles to defend the province, mistreatment by the Red Army, and hunger, cold, and disease. A population that had numbered 2.2 million in 1940 had been reduced to a fraction of that by May 1945.
East Prussia was partitioned between Poland and the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Southern East Prussia came under Polish administration. Northern East Prussia was divided between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, as the Kaliningrad Oblast, and the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. In July 1946, the city of Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad to honour Mikhail Kalinin.
An estimated 800,000 Germans remained in East Prussia during the summer of 1945. Most were subsequently expelled under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement. The largest internment camp was established at Deutsch Eylau, holding approximately 48,000 inmates. Orphaned children left behind in the Soviet zone were referred to as Wolf children. Curonians, who had inhabited the shores of the Curonian Lagoon, were expelled by Soviet authorities. By 1955, only 219 remained along the Curonian Spit.
In 1967, Leonid Brezhnev ordered the demolition of the remnants of Königsberg Castle. The site was cleared for a planned House of the Soviets that was never finished. Since Poland and Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004, the territory of former East Prussia has been freely accessible to German visitors. Most of the Curonians who had been expelled emigrated to West Germany, where the majority now live.
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Common questions
What was East Prussia and where was it located?
East Prussia was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia located along the southeastern Baltic coast. Its capital was Königsberg, now known as Kaliningrad. The province existed in its final administrative form from 1878 until it was partitioned between Poland and the Soviet Union in 1945.
Who were the Old Prussians of East Prussia and what happened to them?
The Old Prussians were the indigenous Baltic people of the region before the Teutonic Knights conquered it in the 13th century. They were gradually converted to Christianity and their language was extinguished over the following centuries. The last speakers of Old Prussian died in the plague of 1709-1711, which killed approximately 250,000 people in the province.
What was the Battle of Grunwald and how did it affect East Prussia?
The Battle of Grunwald in 1410 was the decisive defeat of the Teutonic Knights by the united armies of Poland and Lithuania. It broke the Order's power to expand and began a long political decline. That decline ended in 1525, when Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach secularized the Order's Prussian territory and became the first duke of the Duchy of Prussia.
Why did East Prussia become an exclave after World War I?
The Treaty of Versailles granted West Prussia to the new Polish Republic, creating a corridor of Polish territory that severed East Prussia's land connection to Germany. The province was left isolated, reachable from the rest of Germany only by sea. The Seedienst Ostpreußen, or Sea Service East Prussia, was established to provide independent transport to the detached province.
What happened to the German population of East Prussia after World War II?
The German population of East Prussia was almost entirely expelled after World War II under the Potsdam Agreement. An estimated 800,000 Germans remained in the region during the summer of 1945, but most were subsequently removed by Soviet and Polish authorities. An estimated 300,000 had already died in the final phase of the war from bombing, battle, Red Army mistreatment, hunger, cold, and disease.
When was East Prussia's capital Königsberg renamed Kaliningrad?
Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in July 1946. The city was renamed to honour Mikhail Kalinin after the northern portion of East Prussia was incorporated into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as the Kaliningrad Oblast.
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