If one were to stand in front of a map of Europe and connect the Ural Mountains in the northeast corner with Gibraltar in the southwest corner, Scotland in the northwest corner with the Caucasus Mountains on the southeastern edge, or Norway in the north and Greece in the south, these intersections would intersect near the Baltic sea coast.
What we are going to say about "Kaliningrad" is located near the geographical center of this continent of Europa.
The red dot is "Kaliningrad". Source/Google Maps
"Prussia" with only the name left
Today's Kaliningrad is a region of the Russian Federation and an "enclave" sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. Less than 100 kilometers from the city of Kaliningrad, in present-day Poland, lies the famous "Wolf's Den" during World War II. Adolf Hitler stayed in this command for 850 days before withdrawing to the bunkers in Berlin at the end of the war. Both today's "Kaliningrad" and "Wolf's Den" belonged to "East Prussia" until 1945. As the name implies, the "Prussians" were the earliest masters of Kaliningrad.
Hitler's "Wolf's Lair". Source/Screenshot from the documentary Wolf's Lair: Hitler's Eastern Command
The ancient Prussians probably lived and bred for generations on the coastal lands between the Vistula and Neman rivers as early as four thousand years ago. Lithuanians and Latvians are the "relatives" of the Prussians who have survived to this day. Their language is also considered one of the oldest Indo-European languages. The French Chinese-speaking Antoine Meillet (1866-1936) once said, "If you want to know how our (Indo-European) ancestors spoke, come and listen to Lithuanian" – this is because The Ancient Prussian language was extinct at that time.
By the 12th century, the "Christians" of Western Europe had broken the Baltic peoples' "quiet years." Under the guise of religion, the invaders coveted the rich lands along the Baltic sea coast. The terrain is flat and easy to defend, as someone has commented, "If Switzerland is famous for its peaks, Italy for its works of art, and Finland for its lakes, its land is too unsafe for Lithuania". In fact, the same applies to the Prussians.
On April 13, 1147, Pope Eugenius III issued a sacrament calling on the Catholic countries in the northern part of the Continent to march on the "pagans" around them, setting off a "Northern Crusade". Prussian society at that time had almost no institutions similar to the feudal system, so the Prussians could not unite to defend their land.
At the end of the 12th century, the Polish feudal nobility built Danzig Castle (present-day Gdansk) at the mouth of the Vistula River and began to use it as a base to compete with the Lithuanians for control of Prussia. Unlike their Prussian neighbors, the Lithuanians had an efficient fighting machine: its landowners, later known as "Boyars," recruited his relatives and robust peasants to join his military subordination. This kind of military subordinate organization is somewhat similar to that of the Samurai of Japan. In front of them, the Poles could not bargain. Troubled by this, the Polish feudal lords sent an invitation in 1226 to the Teutonic Order, who were still in the "holy city" of Jerusalem at the time, to come and "help" in the conquest of Prussia.
The Teutonic Knights "gladly obliged" to come, but had no intention of making a dowry for the Poles: they received edicts from the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope, and were allowed to take Prussia for themselves in the name of a religious domain. After more than half a century of brutal warfare, by 1283 much of Prussia had been conquered by the Teutonic Knights. In 1255, the Teutonic Knights built a castle at the mouth of the Prigolia River and named it "Königsberg" after King Przemysl Ottoka II of Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), who joined the Order in the Crusades.
Through mass immigration and forced labor, Prussia gradually became "Germanized" in a very violent way. In the process, a rare scene in history occurred: the conquerors adopted the name of the conquered. Not only did the teutonic knights establish the state later known as "Prussia", but the Germanic immigrants who came to settle with the knights gradually merged with the remaining Prussian natives, and then called themselves "Prussians". The end result was that the ancient Prussians who lived on the south shore of the Baltic Sea perished along with their language, leaving only the geographical term "Prussia" to those who came after them.
From Poland to Germany
The expansion of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia had a strong impact on the Baltic region. In 1381, for its own security and interests, Lithuania decided to form an alliance with the Catholic state of Poland. The "pagan" Lithuania eventually threw itself into the embrace of Christianity and became the last European country to convert to God.
This was not good news for the Conquerors of Prussia. Lithuania's conversion to Catholicism wiped out the basis for the Crusaders in the North to wage a "holy war" and even shook the Knights' raison d'être in Prussia. Not to mention, the Teutonic Knights, who used to stir up a rivalry between Poland and Lithuania, now face the alliance of these two enemies.
In 1410, the combined Lithuanian-Polish army fought the Teutonic Knights at Tannenberg. It was one of the bloodiest battles in medieval Europe. The Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights and all but one of their commanders were killed. In the following year's agreement, the Teutonic Knights were forced to make peace and went downhill ever since. Due to the defeat of the "Thirteen Years' War (1454-1466)" with Poland, in the Treaty of Toruń signed in 1466, the Teutonic Knights were forced to cede "West Prussia", including Danzig, to Poland, retaining only East Prussia as the "Tsai" of the Polish king's fiefdom. Today's Poland sometimes spreads the "discord" of "coveting" Kaliningrad, which stems from this history.
Teutonic Knights' war with Poland. Source/Screenshot from the movie Crusader Knight
Then again, this vassal-vassal relationship between the Teutonic Knights and the Polish kings is not the same thing as "sovereignty" in the modern sense. In medieval Europe, a person could be both a vassal and a vassal at the same time, with several vassals and many more vassals at the same time. For example, after the "Norman Conquest (1066)", the English royal family became a vassal of the French king under the name of "Duke of Normandy", but everyone knew that London was not at the mercy of the French king. The same was true of Prussia's relations with Poland, whether it was the Teutonic Knights or the secularized Duchy of Prussia (established in 1525), which had only nominal vassalage to Poland and Lithuania.
Another feature of medieval European politics was that territory could change hands with marriage. The most famous in this regard is, of course, the Motto of the Habsburgs: "Let the others go to war, and you, happy Austrians, get married!" In fact, when the time is ripe, other families will not give up the opportunity to expand their territory through marriage. Johann Sigismund, Elector of the Holy Roman Empire (Germany) of the Hohenzollern family, became Duke of Prussia through a political marriage to Anna, the beloved daughter of the Duke of Prussia, and also merged Brandenburg with (eastern) Prussia, establishing the Duchy of Brandenburg-Prussia in 1618.
The habsburg family icon double-headed eagle. Source/Screenshot from the documentary Habsburgs
In 1701, the principality was further elevated to the Kingdom of Prussia (thus freed from its affiliation with Poland). From this time on, "Prussia" changed from a name of a region and tribe to a national name. Interestingly, at the same time, the original regional names continue to exist in parallel. When the "lost land" was recaptured from Poland, East and West Prussia became the names of the two northeasternmost provinces of the kingdom. Together, they constitute "Prussia" in the narrow sense. It was also in the same year (1724) that the philosopher Kant was born here, the capital of East Prussia, Königsberg, was established, and its size and population once exceeded that of The capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, Berlin.
The Prussian state successfully expanded over the 170 years since its founding. The Junker military aristocracy, who began in Prussia, played a remarkable role in this process – it was Bismarck who defeated Denmark, Austria and France with "iron and blood" to establish the German Empire. In this sense, although the empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles on the outskirts of Paris (18 January 1871), prussia was its "land of dragons".
Goodbye Königsberg
As the statesman and writer Winston Churchill put it, "the heart of Germany is Prussia." This Germany, with Prussia at its core, waged two world wars, and as Churchill said, "that is the root cause of the recurrence of the plague." Thus, the elimination of Prussia from the political map of Europe also has a symbolic necessity. On February 25, 1947, after the end of World War II, representatives of the Allied occupation authorities in Berlin signed a law officially declaring that "the Prussian state, the central government and all its affiliates shall be abolished with immediate effect", and since then, Prussia has completely disappeared from the map.
In fact, before that, the capital of East Prussia, "Königsberg", no longer existed.
The "end" began around the summer of 1944, when RAF bombers flew over half of Europe, blowing Königsberg to smithereens. The British, mimicking the rhetoric of the wartime prime minister, concluded: "Never before has there been so little aircraft, so much destruction in such a short period of time to a place so far away." ”
British aircraft on a bombing mission to Germany. Source/Screenshot from the documentary Apocalypse: World War II
The following year, the Red Army approached the city from the east. In order to capture Königsberg, which was densely packed with fortresses and underground bunkers, the Soviets began to draw up operational plans from March 1945. It is said that the Soviet command deliberately made a 1:3000 sand table model. Using the German fortifications in the occupied areas, special penetration drills were carried out. On 6 April, the 3rd Belorussian Front launched a general offensive after a two-hour long artillery bombardment, attacking the German lines in Königsberg from eight different directions. The once invincible German army was now defeated and reluctantly resisted until after April 10, when it announced its surrender. In total, 42,000 Germans were killed (more than ten times the Soviet losses) and another 92,000 captured. A quarter of Königsberg citizens, or 25,000, were also killed in the fighting.
A month after the fall of Königsberg, World War II came to an end in Europe. The real problem before the Leaders of the Allied Powers became how to demarcate the borders of postwar Europe. As early as the Tehran Conference in 1943, Stalin announced that if the Soviet Union received part of East Prussia, including Königsberg, after the war, he was ready to accept the "Curzon Line "The Ceasefire Line proposed by the British Foreign Secretary Marquis Curzon in 1920 for the Polish-Soviet War)" as the border between the Soviet Union and Poland.
He got his wish (in any case, the Soviets had already occupied the land stalin demanded). Eventually, East Prussia was divided in two, with two-thirds of the southern part going to Poland and 15,800 square kilometers of land in the north, including Königsberg, to the Soviet Union. This was an unprecedented expansion that allowed the Soviet Union's western borders to stretch to places it had never reached before.
In fact, historically, Königsberg had little contact with the Soviet Union. Although Soviet historians later argued that Königsberg was originally the "land of the ancient Slavs", it was only during the "Seven Years' War (1754-1763)" that the Russian army briefly occupied East Prussia and sent a governor to Königsberg. What really attracted Joseph Stalin was the strategic position of Königsberg.
Königsberg Cathedral. Photography / Belikart Source / Figureworm Creative
"What Russia needs is waters" was once the famous saying of Peter the Great. But the Soviet Union, which was geographically located to the north, was very short of freeze-free ports. Königsberg' latitude is higher than China's Mohe River (54°N), but the winter climate is as mild as Odessa on the Black Sea, making it the only Baltic port in Soviet territory that is "ice-free" all year round. Since the 1950s, the Baltic Fleet base of the USSR (Russia) has been located here. During the Cold War, the fleet was tasked with conducting amphibious attacks on the danish and West German coasts, in coordination with the navies of Poland and East German allies.
At the same time, Königsberg, located in the "center of Europe", also gave the Soviet Union a rare offensive base. If you draw a circle with the radius of the distance from Moscow (about 1100 kilometers), the capitals of more than a dozen European countries, including Berlin (Germany), Oslo (Norway), Stockholm (Sweden), Amsterdam (Netherlands), etc., will be included. Using missiles to strike these places from Königsberg can be said to be a breeze. Now facing the pressure of NATO's eastward expansion, Russia has threatened to deploy missiles/nuclear weapons here several times, which is also the superior geographical location here.
Excellent location in Kaliningrad. Source/Google Maps
Therefore, the Soviet Union attached great importance to Königsberg and did not incorporate it into Lithuania nearby, but into the Russian Federation (April 7, 1946). The change of land was accompanied by another population swap. Nearly 100,000 Germans who still lived here after World War II were "resettled" to the Soviet-occupied parts of Germany (later the GDR), while migrants from all over the Soviet Union, mainly in Russia, became the new owners. Königsberg thus became the "West Pole" of the Geographical Distribution of the Russian Language.
Finally, there is a question of the name of the city. As mentioned earlier, "Königsberg" is used in honor of King Ottoka II of Bohemia. He was also a Slav, so at first it was intended to "Russianize" the German place name "Königsberg". However, Ottoka II plundered Lithuania after all, and finally aborted the proposal. When discussions began about renaming Königsberg to Baltiisk because of its coastal location, the nominal head of state of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Kalinin, died on June 3, 1946. In his honor, Königsberg was finally named "Kaliningrad".
This new place name escaped the frenzy of name change during the collapse of the Soviet Union and has survived to this day.