244. The Soviets arrive in Germany
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Today, we're covering the horrific story of the Soviet offensive into East Prussia, which began on the 13th of January 1945 and did not end until late April, though some German units refused to surrender until well into May. And we should just add that there's a health warning to this episode. There are quite graphic descriptions of sexual violence.

Now, the centerpiece of the campaign was the Battle of Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, known today as Leningrad, and still part of the Russian Federation, I seem to remember, Roger. We'll come on to that. But first, to set the scene, tell us why the Russians felt the need to capture East Prussia in the first place. It was, of course, the most easterly pre-war German province instead of driving straight for Berlin.

Yeah, as you say, I mean, it was the easternmost German province. It was the first bit of, if you like, Germany proper that the Red Army reached in, actually in late in 44, they first reached East Prussia. And, you know, there's a sort of tremendous symbolic significance to that, not least for the Red Army soldiers themselves.

And there was a large force in Courland, which is what the Germans call Courland, which is what we would now call sort of broadly Latvia and parts of Lithuania, which in a sense needed to be cut off because they were being sort of invested and surrounded. And had the Red Army sort of juggernaut had pushed on to Berlin alone, then there was a risk of being attacked in the flank there.

potentially by some of those forces that were left. So they needed to sort of secure that whole front in a way, which meant occupying, destroying German forces in East Prussia, which they did very effectively. Now, they first arrived in October of the previous year,

into East Prussia. And there's a rather infamous massacre known as, called the Nemersdorf Massacre, which is quite a sort of salient moment. I mean, there are a lot of massacres. The Red Army was quite sort of liberal in its policy towards particularly German civilians, but actually, you know, civilians of all stripes, but particularly the Germans, because of course there was that sense that they wanted to avenge themselves for their own suffering and the suffering of the Soviet people on the Germans. The first time they actually...

come into contact with German civilians. They are, as you'd imagine, not terribly accommodating. Nemersdorf is basically that moment. It's a small village in East Prussia. The Red Army arrives there on the 21st of October 1944 and it's briefly fought over. The Germans sort of retake it after a while and then they realise that a rather horrific massacre has taken place. We're still not sure because you've got to sort of try and

pass the sort of propaganda that the Germans put out at the time as to precisely what happened. But it's reckoned that, you know, by some estimates, as many as 70 women were raped and murdered, as well as something like 50, I think, Belgian and French POWs who were being used as, you know, agricultural labor there. But it's a substantial massacre. And the Germans tried to sort of, you know, use this as propaganda in a way that

They didn't shy away from telling the story. They did the opposite, which was to sort of big it up and say, look, this is what will happen to you if the Russians get here. And the clear intention is to try and sort of galvanize resistance, both military resistance, because the soldiers, of course, are protecting to a large extent their own wives and children, whether they're East Prussians or not. The sense is this is what will happen to everybody, right?

But also to sort of galvanize those civilians that are, you know, due to join up into the Volkssturm, which they've set up at the same time, the Autumner 44, which is like a sort of a home guard of, you know, anyone up to the age of 60 could be called up in the Volkssturm. So anyone from really from 15 year olds up to effectively pensioners was being called up into these Volkssturm battalions.

you know, and given aged rifles and sent to the front. So the intention was to use Nemesdorf to sort of galvanize resistance. It actually has exactly the opposite effect, which is that ordinary civilians across East Prussia, across that winter from October through to January, are saying essentially,

sod this, we're off because this Soviet juggernaut is coming. It's not going to stop. It's not going to be accommodating towards us. We need to get out of here. And that civilian flight from East Prussia is one of the most significant elements of this whole story because while the Germans are trying desperately to

to sort of hold the Soviet line against a huge material and manpower disadvantage. The roads are clogged with civilians with their hand carts and with their horses and carts and so on, all trying to get out, all trying to desperately find a route out. So that's the sort of the background noise to all of this that we're talking about.

Yes, it's astonishing when you think about it, the scale of it, Roger, isn't it? Something like 2 million East Prussian, mainly ethnic Germans, of course, on the move.

um during the winter of 1944 and 1945 plenty of them don't get out but just to come on to the specifics of some of the atrocities because it is worth reminding ourselves of some of the things that happened and i was actually happened to be reading katherine meredith evans war the other day and she's got a lot of this sort of detail in there and i just want to read out one extract because i think it'll tell listeners everything they need to know

The objects of the hate, whose corpses would soon litter the roads that led to the West, were German women and girls. That's obviously the hate of the Russians. Among the Soviet troops who overtook the tide of Prussian refugees as it poured out of Insterberg and Goldap was a young officer called Leonid Rabachev. Decades later, this man would find the strength to write about the atrocity he witnessed.

And this is a quote from Rabachev. Women, mothers and their children lie to the right and left along the route, he wrote. And in front of each of them stands a raucous armada of men, that is Russian soldiers, of course, with their trousers down.

He might have added that the baying crowd included adolescent boys for whom this gruesome ritual amounted to their first sexual experience of their lives. The women who are bleeding or losing consciousness get shoved to one side, Rabachev continued, and our men shoot the ones who try to save their children. Meanwhile, a group of grinning officers stood nearby, one of whom was directing. No, he was regulating it all.

This was to make sure that every soldier, without exception, would take part. And, you know, obviously this is just one example here, Roger, but it reminds me very much of the sort of behaviour of the mutineers in the Indian Mutiny, the Great Rebellion of 1857, in which they would insist that everyone took part in the atrocity so that the whole group

were then associated with the act. There would be no backsliding. Is it fair to say that that sort of behaviour was pretty prevalent in East Pressure? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we have to say there's nothing specifically Russian about that. Rape is an unfortunate sort of accompanying horror to warfare and has been since time immemorial. But in the circumstances of the end of the war, when, as I said, the Red Army sort of comes across

German civilians for the first time

there's a sort of an added ingredient to that sort of aggression, which is, I mean, it's partly pure revenge, as I've said, but it's also that element of sort of the assumed racial superiority of the Germans that had sort of coloured so many of the Germans' own actions in the Soviet Union, their own atrocities against Soviet civilian populations. In a way, you are saying, you know, you're not so big now, are you, by the act of rape? It's that sort of mentality.

And you can see it in Berlin. I mean, that's been very well documented. Anthony Beaver's done that. I did it in my book as well, Berlin at War. So examples like that are quite well documented. And it was widespread. It is an epidemic of rape. And the Red Army really, you know, it essentially allowed its troops to avenge themselves.

And it gave them, you know, certainly in Berlin, it gave them, in some cases, like three days grace to sort of essentially do what they wanted before some form of military discipline would be re-established. But I think they saw it, and this is where it comes back to your point about, you know, in a sense, establishing complicity. They saw it, in a sense, an essential part of the defeat of the enemy. You know, this was an essential part that they all had to take part in. So absolutely rife. I mean, to be fair, you know, they...

sounds cruel, but the Soviet Red Army kind of raped everybody. It raped not just Germans. It raped those that it liberated from concentration camps, for God's sake. So, you know, of every nation. So it was one of the things that they did. But obviously against German civilians, there was a particular ingredient that led to real aggression and

real horror. Yeah, and just to underline the point you've made, Maradel goes on to write, it did not matter in this polyglot transition zone if the women were Germans or Poles, and thereby Russia's allies or anybody else, presumably, who'd been caught up in them. And I mean, kind of infamously, there were examples, of course, of Jewish former prisoners of concentration camps

also being raped. So as you say, there was no particular targeting. It was anyone they could get their hands on. Okay, let's go back to the campaign for a second. I mean, it's quite interesting. As I said at the beginning, you're absolutely right. There was an initial incursion into East Prussia

in the autumn of 1944. But the main campaign, which we're discussing today, begins in January. And by the end of the month, they push back most of the German forces. And the German forces, we should point out, I suppose, at this point,

Roger, were heavily outnumbered, weren't they? I mean, they're heavily outnumbered right across the Eastern Front. And all these actions also need to be seen in the context of the failed offensive on the Western Front, of course, the so-called Battle of the Bulge, the Ardennes Offensive, which has really used up pretty much the last remaining reserves of German armour and weapons.

All of the armies on the Eastern Front are now heavily outnumbered in terms of tanks, in terms of artillery pieces, in terms of air force, of course, too. I mean, I read a very good account by a young German pilot saying, you know, of course, earlier on in the war, we very much had the Russians on the run. But now we were so heavily outnumbered and we had so little fuel, we could only fly, you know, the occasional aircraft.

trip up and this plays also into doesn't it the degrading of the German ability to fight by the allies by their strategic bombing campaign which was not only destroying men and material but also making sure that the Germans were devoting really a large chunk of their air force and their anti-aircraft capability to defending the Reich itself.

In any case, getting back to East Prussia, by late January, you've really got three main pockets left. Heiligenwahl, Königsberg and the Samland Peninsula. So tell us a little bit about what's going on in those three, particularly Königsberg. I mean, why did it take so long to reduce them for starters? Because all three aren't knocked out, or at least the first of the three aren't knocked out until late March. So, you know, you've got at least a couple of months that they're fighting now. Okay.

You've got to understand, I suppose, German tactical thinking at this point, which is, you know, of necessity, rather desperate. But late in 1944, Hitler had given what he called the Festerplatz Order, which basically ordered troops to, it was like a sort of stand firm order like Stalin had done in 1941.

But the logic behind that, obviously, it's gone to that position because of desperation. But there is a sort of a logic to it, which is that, you know, if you can hold wherever you are, whether it's, you know, Königsberg or later on in Warsaw or Breslau, if you can hold that place essentially to the last man is the last bullet, you have a chance of holding up the Soviet juggernaut.

with the hope, ultimately, in sort of grand strategic terms, that the rather increasingly obvious inconsistencies and incompatibilities between the Allies, between the British, the Americans on one side, and the Soviets on the other, you know, would ultimately, you know, cause fissures between the Grand Alliance and that the Grand Alliance itself would fall apart. You know, this is why a lot of German commentators, not least senior Nazis, after...

Roosevelt's death in April, they start talking about the miracle of Brandenburg. You know, Goebbels talked about this in his diary, referring back to the Seven Years' War and Frederick the Great, whose fate is sort of rescued, I think it was by the death of, was it... Emperor Joseph? It was Emperor Joseph. It was one of his opponents. I've forgotten who it was. One of his opponents dies, essentially saves his bacon. So they're sort of referencing back to the miracle of Brandenburg. And that...

That's the sort of thinking is if we can hold out, then there's sort of the contradictions in that grand alliance will necessarily come to the fore and we could be saved. So there is a sort of a logic to it. But the problem is that you said that they're so outnumbered, both in terms of men and material on that eastern front and denuded really of armour, denuded of air cover to a large extent.

that, you know, however hard they try to sort of hold any individual city, whether that be Königsberg or anywhere else, you know, the Soviet forces can just sort of surround it, contain it and move on. And that's essentially what they do. And of course, they're being helped in this case by the weather because everything is frozen.

So it's actually quite good terrain for tanks with frozen ground. You can move fairly quickly. So you can see this actually in the East Prussian campaign because there is a sort of initial thrust directly from the east

abutting up against East Prussia in the direction of Königsberg. The real thrust comes from the south, actually. It comes from Rokossovsky, a great Soviet general of Polish extraction, who pushes up. Again, it's a bit like the Ardennes in 1940. He pushes up through Mwawa and up towards Allenstein and Elbing in a sort of surprise attack and essentially cuts East Prussia off. He gets to the...

what's known as the Frischer Nährung, the Frischer's Half rather, which is the lagoon of the Vistula. Before the locals, particularly in Elbing, there's a wonderful scene in Elbing where they consider themselves to be quite far behind the lines and people are still going about their normal daily business. And then suddenly there are Soviet tanks going down the main street of Elbing and there's sort of panic and they say, well, whose are these? They're not ours.

And it's kind of one of those slightly bizarre scenes where they actually realise that the war has intruded rather faster than they thought it would. So it's actually that operation by Rokossovsky which sort of, you know, cut off East Prussia effectively because he gets to the lagoon and they just carry on pushing west. So it sort of cuts everybody off and you get these pockets where, you know, individual, you know, troops, units of troops and so on are contained. It

while the Red Army as a whole moves on. And as you said, the most famous one being the Heiligenbeil pocket there, which contained 15 German divisions, believe it or not. It's a huge number and actually accounts for about 80,000 dead Heiligenbeil, German dead alone. It's a huge battle by anybody's standards. And it's, you know, there are, as I said before, everything is complicated by the fact that you've got, you know, civilians everywhere, all desperate to try and get out.

So very often they get to this lagoon. If you ever, if you want to look at it on the map, there's the Vistula Lagoon.

there's quite a wide waterway and at the far end of it there is a spit which runs all the way across the lagoon and sort of cuts it off from the Baltic and very often you'd get civilians coming up to that and of course it was all frozen at this point in January of 1945 and they'd come to that and they'd go out onto the ice to try and get to that spit to get to the land of that spit and then the Soviets of course would be shelling the ice to make sure that it broke so that they all fall into the freezing water I mean that's the kind of

That's the kind of scene that you have to imagine all taking place in driving snow, horses and carts across this ice and then sort of falling into the water is absolutely horrific by anybody's standards. So this is a sort of story that not many of us really have much of a handle on. And as I said before, the figures involved are huge in terms of losses and so on. I mean, just as I said, 80,000 killed in the

huge numbers of civilians killed in East Prussia in the process of all of this. It's really quite an astonishing story, which doesn't tend to find its way into the conventional Anglophone narrative on this stuff. So it's very good we're talking about it anyway.

Yeah, and I'm going to change at least some of that with my forthcoming book on the end of the war in which, you know, I'm going to be looking as much at the Eastern Front as I am at the Western Front and the Italian Front. Okay, we'll take a break there. Do join us in a moment when we'll hear about the tragic story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustav ship in January 1945.

Welcome back. So we mentioned the 2 million, roughly 2 million German civilians on the move. It was 2 million eventually get out. And that's one of the great heroic stories, really, of Ypres, isn't it? It's really the Marine effort to get them out. Most of them got out by ship, one or two by land, as he pointed out, crossing the spit. But most get out by ships. And they are, of course, a combination of Merchant Marine and also Kriegsmarine.

The most tragic story, famous story, is the sinking of the transport ship Wilhelm Gusloff. Tell us a little bit about that, Roger, and the sort of scale of losses on board the ship. I mean, this, again, is an operation that should be much better known. The whole operation, this sort of naval evacuation from East Prussia, was called Operation Hannibal.

And it's the largest sort of amphibious evacuation in history. It's bigger than Dunkirk, for example. We all know about Dunkirk. Of course we do. Not many of us out there, I think, would be able to name check Operation Hannibal. But it is vast. I mean, as you said, something like 2 million people are evacuated. And then...

And they use, you know, upwards of a thousand vessels. This is everything from, you know, destroyers to actually to submarines. You know, as we've talked before, my next book is on the U-boat war. There is an element here where they were using, because of course, all the U-boat training was out in the Eastern Baltic. They were still doing it at that point.

So a lot of these training squadrons and so on are flotillas, rather, out there in Eastern Baltic. And they all get the order to leave. And some of them say, well, you know, if it's say to the local sort of shipyard crews, they say, well, if you guys can get us underway or

by Tuesday, let's say, you know, as quickly as possible, we'll take you with us and we'll take your families. So a lot of them end up taking, you know, 40 or 50, you know, civilians with them in the U-boat as they go, which if you've ever been inside a German U-boat from this period, you know how little room there is to then add 40 people to the mix is quite an astonishing thought, but still they did it, you know,

Yeah, so there's, you know, as we said, I mean, there's certainly more than a million. Some estimate about 2 million people are evacuated. A thousand vessels. There are various vessels that go back and forward. There's one called the, a liner called the Deutschland, which I think did sort of 16 trips. It went back and forward between either Pilau was one of the main ports further east,

but also Danzig, of course, modern-day Gdańsk. That was one of the main sort of staging posts. So even those that I mentioned that were sort of going across the water to try and get to that spit, they then kind of go either left or right. If they go right, they go to Pilar. If they go left, they'll hopefully end up at Gdańsk. They're then evacuated by sea. So even if they get that far, they have to get to Gdańsk to get out. And then they're sort of put onto these various ships. And as you said, the most infamous of those is the Wilhelm Gustloff,

which was a pre-war cruise liner run by the Nazis. So they had this sort of part of the seduction effort of the German working and middle class was to offer them cruises, right? So they said, you know, a nice cruise to Madeira. If you're a welder from Dortmund, I always say, you've probably never actually been on holiday before. So the prospect of going to Madeira on a cruise was like, you know, it's like going to the moon.

So you can see how this was an essential part of the Nazi cell. And they did. They took Gustlov alone. He's reckoned to have taken about 750,000 people on various cruises. So it was a tremendous boon. Sorry, that was the whole of the KDF, to take people on these cruises. So it's a real thing. The Gustlov then was left as an Italy hospital ship, then later as a barrack ship in the harbor at Chedinia.

near Gdansk. And then it was filled up with evacuees as part of this Operation Hannibal. And it set sail on the 30th of January, 1945, left Gdansk, 30th of January. Initially, it had an escort, but the escort sort of fell away, trying to head west across the Baltic, so you get ideally to get to Kiel. And it's torpedoed by a Soviet submarine just off the Pomeranian coast, about sort of 40 kilometers off the Pomeranian coast.

torpedo that same night, 30th of January. It was carrying, bear in mind, this was a pre-war cruise liner designed to carry something like 1500 passengers, slightly more in terms of crew as well. So it was carrying when it left, they read, they stopped counting about 8,000. Wow. So the estimate is that it was probably carrying about 11,000 people. Crikey. Of those,

The estimate, again, I think is about 1,200 sort of survive the night. I mean, just falling into the Baltic water in late January 45 is kind of a death sentence because it's so cold. So the majority actually sort of freeze to death and then you've got bodies washing up on the beaches and so on endlessly thereafter. But yeah, so it's something like, I think it's about 1,200 that actually survive the guslov. The rest go down with it, which is the largest...

maritime disaster in terms of death toll in history, something like 9,000 people plus are killed. But it's one of many. There are others. There's the Goya, about 6,000, I think, killed on the Goya. There's the General Steuben is another one. So the Soviets are having a field day torpedoing these evacuation vessels as well. So this is a whole story that we really don't know anything about. It doesn't fit the narrative. It's not part of our sort of story in the English-speaking history. But it goes on January to March.

like about 300,000 civilians are killed in the process of this evacuation. But, uh,

as you said, about sort of between one and a half and two million actually get out and get west. So it's quite a remarkable story. And just to put this all into a grand strategic context, or certainly strategic context as far as the Russians are concerned, I mean, ultimately, they want to get to Berlin. They want to get there as quickly as possible because they want to get there before the Western allies. And yet, without having cleared this

I suppose you'd call it the northern shoulder of their advance into the Reich. They aren't prepared to launch their final attack on Berlin, actually, until well into April. So at least as far as, you could say, as far as the Western allies are concerned, and certainly as far as the Germans are concerned, there was a real value, I suppose, to the East Prussian campaign and the campaign of Pomerania, of course, which is happening at the same time. That's the next major province

before you get well into the Reich proper. It does play its part, certainly, doesn't it, in slowing down the Russians? Yeah, it does. It does. I mean, as I said, the policy was to try and hold these places, like Breslau. Breslau is a great example because that is invested on 13th of February, so surrounded by the Soviets. It actually holds out longer than Berlin. It holds out, from memory, I think, until the 4th or 5th of May, 1945.

And that did require large numbers of Soviet troops to do that. You know, they didn't just sort of surround it and sit. They actually fought to reduce it and so on. And that took a lot of effort and a lot of logistics and so on. And there was also great fear, particularly in Pomerania. So the Germans actually built, you know,

as much as they could in this sort of relatively short time before this all happened. But they built static defenses in Pomerania, for example. So I think there was a fear to some extent on the Soviet side that actually the Germans were still capable of

potentially springing a surprise. So you couldn't just send an armoured spearhead straight for Berlin because the chances are you'd get attacked on your flanks and that would be no good. And this is where we go into the Vistula order operation, which is again January. It's launched at the same time as the East Prussian operation. But they sort of designated these chunks. So between the Vistula River in the middle of Poland to the Oder River, which is now the western frontier of Poland,

You know, that was the next chunk and that was the next strategic objective was to get to the order so that you could then cross the order, which of course is then, you know, the next sort of most significant battle forthcoming. But they did very consciously think of it in terms of those chunks, in terms of those strategic objectives. And it was, as you say, although they were very keen to get to Berlin before the Allies, they were also...

to some extent, cautious about making sure that they sort of contained their enemy and cleared the enemy from those areas on their flanks as well. Yeah. And I suppose the final thought, Roger, is that...

Certainly in my mind, and the more I look at it, I'm sort of confirmed in this to a certain extent, but I'd be interested to hear your opinion on this. I mean, is it all over really for the Germans? I mean, they can't really spring a strategic surprise on the Russians any longer. It's just a question of delaying the inevitable, isn't it? They were probably hoping to come to some kind of a

accommodation with the Western allies. That was never going to happen, of course, with unconditional surrender. But that no doubt was the hope of some of them so that they could turn all their forces on the Soviets. It's really just a delaying action. There's no real jeopardy, I think, by 1945. Is there in the sense that the Germans can pull off some masterstroke?

No, I don't think there is. They just didn't have the hardware by that stage or the manpower, particularly on the Eastern Front. So, no, I think you're right. There's no real possibility that they can spring a surprise.

It's all about, you know, that delaying tactic. It's all about trying to buy time. And again, particularly to evacuate those, you know, civilian populations and so on. I have to add, you know, that Operation Hannibal is not, you know, the intention is not solely humanitarian. A lot of it was about, you know, shipping in manpower to fight and shipping out the wounded as well. So there's a very significant military component to all of that.

But it's interesting, if we jump forward, just to give a little bit of color to this to answer your question, if you jump forward to the rather short-lived Dönitz government in May 1945,

One of the reasons that Dönitz is trying to sort of string out negotiations with the Allies is because he's very keen to try and evacuate as many people as possible from the East at this point. So this is something that, you know, some people, not saying everybody, but some people within the Nazi hierarchy, he was one example, were very keen to try and do because they saw this as a, you know, apocalyptic. It was nothing short of apocalyptic.

what they expected the Soviets to do in terms of how they treated civilians, in terms of the political system they would bring with them. They saw this as the end of the world. There was an intention not only to fight it to the last man, but also to try and get as many women and children and elderly and all the rest of it out of the battle zone as possible.

So that was a really significant element of what they were doing. So that delaying as much as possible to try and delay that advance as much as possible all serve that purpose as well. So it's not just the grand strategic about hoping that the Grand Alliance would fall apart in due course.

It's also that humanitarian, again, I use it slightly in inverted commas, but that humanitarian element as well. Interesting. I never heard that link between Dönitz and an attempt to save some of the civilian population from the east. And that presumably, you've got a little bit of that information in your U-boat book, have you, about Dönitz? Indeed. You'll have to wait till October for that one. Fascinating. Okay. And something else we will have to wait for is a request from one of our listeners to

concentrate at some stage, you already name-checked it, the Siege of Breslau. We've talked about some horrific events today. I think we've gone easy on the actual horror because it's pretty overwhelming, the detail. And as you say, you've spoken about a lot of this in your book on Berlin already, or you've written about it in

your book on Berlin, but the siege of Breslau, modern Wroclaw in modern day Poland is singularly horrific, isn't it? And I think it would be interesting to look again at that. So I think we'll have a chat about that if you're willing at some stage, Roger. Yeah, I'll be dredging up my own ancient history. I was writing about that now 25 years ago. So forgive me if it's not wildly fresh, but yeah, I'd love to talk about it again.

So, Roger, I mentioned earlier the oddity that is the modern-day Russian control of Kaliningrad, which, of course, used to be Königsberg.

Tell us a little bit about the post-war settlement. I mean, what happened to East Prussia and also what happened to the remaining population? I think about 500,000 ethnic Germans left after the big evacuation. Yeah. So East Prussia, obviously, between Yalta and Potsdam, you know, Germany's fate is sealed. Those eastern provinces are taken away. So partly because Germany

The Soviets insisted on keeping what they'd taken from Poland in 1939, to go back to that, what they'd been granted in the Nazi-Soviet pact. So Poland was compensated at Germany's expense by taking Pomerania and Silesia and taking what is now the modern-day German-Polish frontier up to the line of the Oder and the Neisse rivers.

And that, of course, left East Prussia, which was not going to remain German, of course. So the population was deported after 1945, the remaining population, as we said. An awful lot of them got out in Operation Hannibal and beyond. Those that braved it and tried to remain were deported between 1945 and 1947, as they were from Silesia and Pomerania and elsewhere.

back into Germany. So they began a life as refugees, began again in occupied Germany. And then East Prussia was divided essentially down the middle. So it was discussed at the time, part of it was given to Poland. So the southern half effectively was given to Poland. And then the northern half, which included, of course, the former Königsberg, there was discussion at the time as to whether it should be given to Lithuania.

But I think the Soviets, given the strategic significance of Königsberg as a very significant ice-free port, effectively, on the Baltic, that meant that, in a sense, the Soviet Union, and of course this was all the Soviet Union, so to some extent it was a moot point, but you didn't want to give it to the Lithuanian Soviet Republic, so it was kept essentially by the Russian Federation. So this is why now that you've got a

a newly, once again, independent Lithuania, independent Baltic states. So to some extent, we're seeing an ebb tide of Russian influence in the Eastern Baltic. But that exclave or that enclave of East Prussia that was given to the Russian Federation is still part of the Russian Federation.

So you have this weird, you know, for a long time, it was a sort of closed military district and so on. To some extent, it still is. And there's still a lot of chat online you'll see between, you know, Polish and Lithuanian nationalists saying, what are we going to do when we get our hands on it sort of thing?

We don't know. I mean, as I said, it's part of that ebb tide. It probably can't go on forever. I suppose the problem for a lot of, for anyone that inherits that at some point in the future, Kaliningrad, is that it will be in a bit of a mess. I mean, it was really destroyed in the war. I remember going to, not far from there, going to that, the Frischershaf, as we were talking about, that lagoon there,

actually further up on the Lithuanian side, one of those lagoons. And it was bright green when I was there in the early 90s. So the sort of environmental sort of degradation in that area is going to be fairly horrific. But yeah, so it's still technically Russia. All of the German population was shipped out, as we said, and starting life as refugees. And we have to see how long that lasts. I mean, what Putin is doing in Ukraine is a crossover with our Ukraine podcast.

What Putin is doing is, to some extent, he's trying to arrest that ebb tide of Russian influence. He doesn't want Ukraine to sort of leave his sphere of influence, as he puts it. If he fails there, I think there's a chance that Kaliningrad, the Kaliningrad Oblast, as they call it, will also come under renewed scrutiny as to what happens to that. We'll see how long Russian influence can be maintained there.

Great stuff. Okay, thanks so much for that, Roger. We'll talk again soon. Lovely. Thank you. Well, that was great stuff. Thanks, Roger. Do join us on Friday for the latest from Ukraine and also next Wednesday when we'll have another episode of Battleground 45. Goodbye.