After Russia’s occupation of Crimea and Donetsk, we drew historical parallels between the German Königsberg, which was ceded to the USSR after World War II, and the so-called “new regions” captured by the Russian Federation.
In the “historical information” about how the Kaliningrad region turned into a “model Soviet region” through the destruction of cultural heritage, gross violations of human rights and ethnic cleansing.
The Potsdam Conference of 1945 considered the proposal of the Soviet government “pending the final resolution of territorial issues in a peaceful settlement” that the section of the western border of the USSR adjacent to the Baltic Sea would run from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig east, north of Braunsberg and Goldap, to border crossing points of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia.
Stalin: “The Russians do not have ice-free ports in the Baltic. Therefore, the Russians need the ice-free ports of Konigsberg and Memel and the corresponding part of the territory of East Prussia.”
The Conference agreed in principle to the Soviet government's proposal regarding the final transfer to the Soviet Union of the city of Königsberg and the surrounding area, as described above, subject to an expert study of the actual border.
The President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom have stated that they support the Conference proposal in a future peace settlement.
At the same time, Germany confirmed in a number of treaties that it has no territorial claims against the USSR. Such, for example, is the Moscow Treaty of 1970, in which the inviolability of borders and the renunciation of encroachments on territories already included in the USSR are recognized as a guarantee of normalization of relations with the Union; the same thing was stated in the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Formally, the renunciation of any territorial claims of Germany to Poland and the USSR (Kaliningrad was not mentioned separately, but it was meant) took place in the Treaty on the Final Settlement with respect to Germany in 1990.
Data on the transfer of Königsberg under conditions of financial compensation were provided in 2010 by Spiegel, but it is not yet known how verified they are.
The most important thing is that Germany - unlike, for example, the cases with Japan and the Kuril Islands - has not put forward territorial claims against the Kaliningrad region and does not want to make any for now.
The integration of Koenigsberg into the USSR was accompanied by human rights violations against the local population.
At the very beginning of peacetime, the Soviet administration consciously and deliberately limited the disabled German population's right to social security, which resulted in the spread of cases of starvation.
“The non-working German population (...) does not receive food benefits, as a result of which they are in an extremely depleted state,” Kaliningrad authorities reported to Moscow in 1947. – As a result of this state of affairs, the German population has recently experienced a sharp increase in crime rates. When practicing cannibalism, some Germans not only eat the meat of corpses, but also kill their children and relatives. There were 4 cases of cannibalism noted.
Not wanting to work on resolving the issue of providing for the German population and seeing in it a “potentially hostile element,” the Moscow authorities decided to carry out an operation to evict part of the German population of the new territories into the Soviet occupation zone of Germany.
On April 30, 1947, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Kaliningrad Region, Major General Trofimov, sent a memo to the USSR Minister of Internal Affairs, Colonel General Kruglov, with the words:
“The German population (...). negatively affects the development of the new Soviet region (...) I consider it appropriate to raise the question of the organized resettlement of Germans in the Soviet zone of occupation of Germany.”
In 1946, bishops from the American, British and French zones of Germany appealed to the Western world not to respond to the crimes of Nazism with a crime against the German people. They were supported by Pope Pius XII, but the call, in fact, remained unheard.
The victims of this decision were representatives of the most defenseless sections of the population of Koenigsberg - large families, children left in orphanages and older people. In total, in 1947-1948, according to Soviet data, 102,150 people of German origin were resettled, of which more than 84 thousand were women and children; a small number of such persons - both local residents and immigrants from the Soviet Baltic republics - were transported to the GDR as early as 1949.
It is important that the Soviet government had no justification for committing such actions, even for purely political reasons: the Potsdam Declaration provided for the possibility of moving the German population only of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but not of new Soviet territories (northern East Prussia).
There is an opinion according to which the United States “turned a blind eye” to the forced displacement of the Germans of Koenigsberg as a sign of gratitude for the USSR’s entry into the war against Japan.
The “management” of the USSR, and subsequently of Russia, in the Kaliningrad region led to the gradual decline of the German cultural heritage. The buildings of old Koenigsberg and other cities in the region, damaged by the bombing of the British Air Force during the war, were mostly not restored, but were destroyed, in particular with the aim of developing with buildings of a new type, ignoring the historical and cultural features of the cities.
A textbook illustration of the new government’s attitude to cultural heritage was the construction of the so-called House of Soviets near the ditches of the previously blown up Königsberg Castle, which was never completed and is now planned to be dismantled
In the middle of the twentieth century. Kaliningrad lost a large number of religious sites as a result of Khrushchev's atheist campaign.
By 2000, the general condition of the 156 remaining religious buildings in the region was as follows:
– used or restored for intended use – 29;
– used as theaters, concert and sports halls, cultural centers, schools, libraries, cinemas – 19;
– rebuilt into residential buildings, factory workshops, institutional premises – 13;
– used as warehouses mainly in rural areas – 31, of which 20 were strong buildings, 11 were obsolete;
– empty walls, without owners in rural areas – 24;
– only ruins of walls and 40 towers have survived.
Many settlements in the region have lost both their historical appearance and their status as cities. These are the current villages of Dobrovolsk (Pillkallen), Domnovo (Domnau), Druzhba (Allenburg), Zheleznodorozhny (Gerdauen), Znamensk (Velau), Korneevo (Zinten), Krylovo (Nordenburg), Slavskoye (Kreuzburg), Ushakovo (Brandenburg).
In the 1990s pp. Organizations associated with the German far right began raising money to buy land in the Kaliningrad region to enable ethnic Germans to settle there.
In particular, the Gesellschaft für Siedlungsförderung in Trakehnen (“Society for Assistance to Migrants in Trakehnen”) attempted to establish a settlement in Yasnaya Polyana (Trakehnen). A separate group associated with the later convicted radical Manfred Raeder collected donations to build housing for ethnic Germans in the village of Olkhovatka (Walterkemen) east of Kaliningrad.
In Yasnaya Polyana, another organization financed the construction of a German-language school and housing in the Amtshagen farmstead. Several dilapidated houses were purchased and restored; Tractors, trucks, construction materials and equipment were brought into the village, and the work of small enterprises began. Relatively high salaries attracted new residents, and the ethnic German population grew to approximately 400 residents. Most of the settlers were Russian Germans from the Caucasus and Kazakhstan, and not repatriates or their descendants. Some Russian Germans were unable to speak German and/or were denied resettlement in Germany due to inconclusive evidence of German ancestry.
Relations between the local Russian administration and the settlers were initially friendly, but subsequently deteriorated. The initiator of the project, Dietmar Munier, was banned from entering the Kaliningrad region. In 2006, he sold his share of the association to Alexander Mantai, who turned it into a commercial company and evicted the original settlers. The association was liquidated in 2015 for violating Russian legislation on public organizations.
Even taking into account the fact that now the German authorities do not dispute the ownership of this territory to Russia, it is worth paying attention to the fact that historically, in the course of their activities in the region, the authorities of the USSR and the Russian Federation have repeatedly violated the rights of the local population. Also, the Russian authorities violate the political rights of the opposition-minded population of the region, which advocates rapprochement between the region and the EU, the revival of local identity, accusing them of separatism and the desire to annex the region to Germany or Poland.
