Commemorating the devastation of Königsberg

By C.G. | BERLIN AND KALININGRAD

THE FATE OF Dresden during the second world war is well-known. A devastating allied campaign of air raids left the Baroque city centre in ruins; an estimated 25,000 people died, most of them women and children. Such attacks on German cities and towns were designed to ruin the country’s morale and affect their ability to wage war, but they were also carried out as revenge for the bombing of Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and Coventry by the Luftwaffe. According to an analysis by the Centre for the Study of War, State and Society at the University of Exeter, approximately 410,000 German civilians were killed by allied air raids and 50% of inner-city buildings obliterated.

Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, Germany’s easternmost region, was an oasis of peace for much of the second world war. Its destruction has been widely forgotten. From August 26th-27th 1944, the Royal Air Force conducted a bombardment; an even more ruinous raid of carpetbombing followed two days later. In “The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany 1939-1945” (1961), Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland observed that incendiary bombs destroyed or seriously damaged 41% of all buildings in the city and 20% of industrial buildings. More than 100,000 people were displaced by the strikes.

Michael Wieck, a German-Jewish violinist born in 1928, reflected on the events in his memoir, “Witness to the fall of Königsberg” (1989). “Although I was longing for Hitler’s defeat...we lamented Königsberg’s fate from the bottom of our hearts,” he wrote. “At that moment began the ending of the 690-year history of Königsberg, began the dying of a city that lost all that was characteristic of it for all time.” The Altstadt (Old Town), Löbenicht and Kneiphof districts all lay in ruins including the castle, the university where Immanuel Kant had taught and the medieval cathedral (miraculously, Kant’s tomb at the cathedral survived unscathed). “The people of Königsberg shall never expunge these nights of terror from their memory,” Wieck said.

After the war, in 1946, Königsberg fell under Soviet rule and was renamed Kaliningrad; by 1948 all remaining German citizens had been expelled, and the region became a restricted military area. No foreigners were allowed to visit until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Few relics of the Prussian era had survived and they were in poor condition. Ugly Soviet buildings stood on the wastelands left by the war.

Erna Moskal returns to Kaliningrad every year and is always struck by how much it has changed, particularly since the 1990s. She was 12 years old when the bombings happened and she is still haunted by her recollections of it. Her family survived the first attack in an air-raid shelter, though their house burnt down; she was sent to Rauschen, a spa town on the Baltic Sea coast, the next day. Her parents also survived the second raid, in which 4,500 people died, and the family left Königsberg for Hanover in January 1945. (Many also fled for fear of the approaching Red Army.) Since 2009 Ms Moskal has been living in Potsdam, near Berlin.

Now she is a member of the Friends of Kant and Königsberg, an international association founded by Gerfried Horst, a former lawyer, devotee of Kant and committed bridge-builder between Russia and Germany. Since 2008 the group has hosted a ceremony in the Gothic cathedral to celebrate Kant’s birthday. The Königsberg cathedral, as it is officially called, has been restored with Russian and German money and it is the best-known music venue in the city, hosting regular recitals.

It is where citizens of Kaliningrad, together with some 150 German guests including Mr Horst and Ms Moskal, will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Königsberg. On August 30th Igor Ronge, provost of the Protestant-Lutheran church of Kaliningrad, will hold a prayer in front of the cathedral followed by a piano recital by George Harliono. The young British pianist hopes that “through music we can bring people with different views together to ensure that such terrible things never happen again”.