German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad

by Nicole Eaton

Overview

German Blood, Slavic Soil reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe's two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes.

Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost bastion of Hitler's Third Reich and the launching point for the Nazis' genocidal war in the East. She then describes how, after being destroyed by bombing and siege warfare in 1945, Königsberg became Kaliningrad, the westernmost city of Stalin's Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own—in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes.

German Blood, Slavic Soil presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II. Eaton impressively shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501767364
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2023
Series:	Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History
Pages:	330
Sales rank:	521,420
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.12(d)

About the Author

Nicole Eaton is Assistant Professor of History at Boston College. Follow her on X @nicolemeaton.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Bridge and the Bulwark
2. Empire in the East
3. Downfall
4. Liberation and Revenge
5. City of Death
6. Living Together
7. Slavic Soil
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Brandon Schechter

German Blood, Slavic Soil seamlessly brings together urban and military history with Russian and German studies to understand major ruptures in the twentieth century. Eaton deftly toggles between individual experience and high politics, rendering select characters as complex people and explaining the nuances of political decision-making under two dictatorships.

Michael David-Fox

In German Blood, Slavic Soil, Nicole Eaton traces how Nazi Königsberg became Stalinist Kaliningrad, exploring how two dictatorial regimes and ideologies interacted and diverged within one borderland city. This vivid and important study reveals how revolutions of Right and Left overlapped and unfolded in a single, and most singular, locale.

Editorial Reviews

01/16/2023

Boston College history professor Eaton debuts with a detailed study of “the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own domain.” Founded by Teutonic knights in the 13th century, Königsberg was part of East Prussia until 1946, when the Soviet Union took over and renamed the city Kaliningrad. Eaton describes how a “peculiarly local variant of Nazism” developed in East Prussia, which was isolated from the rest of Germany. “Precisely because East Prussia was trapped behind the Polish Corridor, because it had long lagged in industrial development, because its agriculture suffered and its population had stagnated from outmigration,” local Nazi leaders argued that the region “would become the foremost site for the great Nazi experiment in full societal transformation.” Instead, East Prussia took the brunt of the Red Army’s offensive in the spring of 1945. Relying on eyewitness accounts, Eaton details atrocities committed by advancing Soviet soldiers and retreating Nazis. With Königsberg destroyed and millions of survivors facing starvation, Moscow mostly neglected East Prussia while local administrators sought to expel the province’s German population and pursued a program of rapid collectivization. Comprehensive and fine-grained, this is a meticulous study of a city torn between two “radically transformative and violent revolutionary regimes.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A very important and inspiring scholarly contribution. Through an episode of German-Soviet history, it sheds light on the history of East Central Europe in the twentieth century and stimulates further critical reflection on modern historical narratives in this part of the world.

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