Provisional Redemption and the Fate of Kaliningrad's Germans

After the end of World War II, the Soviet Union annexed the northern third of the Baltic German province of East Prussia, along with its capital city, Königsberg, as the result of a series of wartime geopolitical negotiations between Stalin and the Western Allies. Königsberg and the surrounding territory were incorporated in 1946 into the RSFSR and were renamed Kaliningrad. The Soviet Union's newest territory, however, was populated almost exclusively by Germans—by ethnicity, by elective affinity, and by citizenship—over 150,000 of them at war's end, and they remained the majority until late 1946. These Germans' experience of Sovietization differed significantly from that of populations elsewhere in East Central Europe or the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Berlin, in part due to early bureaucratic confusion about the region's status within the Soviet Union but also because of the region's unprecedented situation: a civilian population, once understood collectively as the enemy, was now living on Soviet soil with no clear plan on the part of Soviet authorities for its long-term fate.

The results of this preliminary confusion were tragic. As was the case elsewhere in Soviet-occupied Europe, Kaliningrad's Germans were forced to work to rebuild, but they received lower food rations, succumbed to malnourishment and epidemic disease at higher rates, and suffered treatment from their Soviet overseers that resembled (far longer than for Germans elsewhere) the wartime dynamic between victors and vanquished.¹ While émigré Communists were returning to East Central European countries to rebuild, Kaliningrad's Germans remained second-class subjects, with no representation in the new Soviet government, and increasingly marginalized as new Soviet settlers arrived to take their homes. Yet even as Germans elsewhere in Eastern Europe were being expelled—at first by Polish, Czechoslovak, or Hungarian governments in 1945, and then in accordance with the Potsdam Conference's call for "orderly and humane" transfer through 1946—Moscow made no plans to expel the Germans from Kaliningrad yet forbade them to leave the territory. Their status within the Soviet Union remained indeterminate for two and a half years, until October 1947, when Moscow announced plans to resettle the Germans to the Soviet Zone of Occupation. By the time the final mass transports were completed a year later, over one-third of the Germans had died from execution, starvation, or epidemic disease.²

Historians on both sides of the Iron Curtain have shared the basic assumption that the impetus to expel Kaliningrad's Germans came from Moscow as part of the center's inhumane geopolitical calculus. German historians during the Cold War, and some even later, have cast it as a project of totalitarian forced labor, in which Soviet overseers coerced the German civilians into rebuilding and then expelled them when their labor was no longer needed.³ More recent German historians present it as a case of malignant neglect, in which the Germans starved as an unintentional consequence of bureaucratic ineptitude, until Moscow found it expedient to expel them.⁴ Soviet-era official histories, meanwhile, obscured the Germans' long postwar presence, instead focusing on the reconstruction efforts of the new Soviet settlers who arrived after 1945.⁵ In contrast to the dominant Soviet narrative, historians in Kaliningrad since perestroika have argued that a real possibility for successful German integration in Kaliningrad was interrupted by Moscow, the result of a nefarious center/periphery dynamic in which the metropole stifled local initiatives in the name of Stalinist homogeneity.⁶

These arguments and explanations, however, overlook the coexistence of two extraordinary features of the Soviet treatment of Germans in Kaliningrad: first, the fact that amid the hardship, retribution, and perpetual budget shortages the local Soviet government in Kaliningrad actually made concerted efforts to integrate the Germans into the Soviet system through both social welfare and reeducation; and second, that although the formal expulsion order came from Moscow in October 1947, the drive to expel them first began in Kaliningrad, even amid projects aimed toward integration.

This article shows how these simultaneous and often contradictory efforts at inclusion and exclusion arose and how...