Assault on East Prussia 3/ 5

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East Prussia German: Ostpreußen Lithuanian: Rytų Prūsija or Rytprūsiai; Polish: Prusy Wschodnie; Russian: Восточная Пруссия or Vostochnaya Prussiya) refers to the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to 1945. From 1772--1829 and 1878--1945, the Province of East Prussia was a province of the German state of Prussia. The capital of East Prussia was Königsberg. East Prussia enclosed the bulk of the ancestral lands of the Baltic Old Prussians. During the 13th century, the native Prussians were conquered by the crusading Teutonic Knights. The indigenous Balts who survived the conquest were gradually converted to Christianity. Because of Germanization and colonisation over the following centuries, Germans became the dominant ethnic group, while Poles and Prussian Lithuanians formed minorities. From the 13th century on, East Prussia was part of the monastic state of the Teutonic Knights, which became the Duchy of Prussia in 1525. The Old Prussian language became extinct by the 17th century or early 18th century. In 1618 the Duchy of Prussia entered into a personal union with the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg, and was separated from Brandenburg by territory of Poland. Because the duchy was outside of the Holy Roman Empire, the prince-electors of Brandenburg were able to proclaim themselves kings in Prussia beginning in 1701. After the annexation of most of Polish Royal Prussia in the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, East Prussia was connected with the rest of the Prussian state and reorganized into the Province of East Prussia the following year. Between 1829 and 1878, the Province of East Prussia was joined with West Prussia to form the Province of Prussia. The Kingdom of Prussia became the leading state of the German Empire after its creation in 1871. The Treaty of Versailles following World War I made East Prussia an exclave of Weimar Germany, while the Memel Territory was added to Lithuania. Following Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II in 1945, war-torn East Prussia was partitioned between Soviet Union (the Kaliningrad Oblast), the People's Republic of Poland (the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship), and the Lithuanian SSR (the constituent counties of the Klaipėda Region). The capital city Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946. The German population of the province largely evacuated during the war, during the years 1944--46, but an estimated 300.000 (around one fifth of the population) died due to war circumstances and the remainder were subsequently expelled. In 1944 the medieval city of Königsberg, which had never been severely damaged by warfare in its 700 years, was almost entirely destroyed by two Allied air raids on the night of 26/27 August 1944 and three nights later on the 29/30 August 1944. Winston Churchill (The Second World War, Book XII) erroneously considered the city "a modernised heavily defended fortress". Gauleiter Erich Koch protracted the evacuation of the German civilian population until the Eastern Front approached the East Prussian border in 1944. The population of the province had been systematically disinformed by Endsieg Nazi propaganda about the real military state of affairs. As a result many civilians fleeing westward were overtaken by retreating Wehrmacht units and the rapidly advancing Red Army. Reports of Soviet atrocities in the Nemmersdorf massacre of October 1944 and organised rape spread fear and desperation among the civilian populace. Thousands lost their lives during the sinkings of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the Goya, and the General von Steuben. The capital Königsberg surrendered on April 9, 1945, following the desperate four-day Battle of Königsberg. The exact number of civilian victims of the fight has never been determined but is estimated to be at least 300 000 with most of them dying under miserable conditions. However, most of the German inhabitants, which at that point consisted mainly of children, women, and old men, did escape the Red Army as part of the largest exodus of people in human history A population which had stood at 2.2 million in 1940 was reduced to 193,000 at the end of May 1945

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Category: Film
Uploaded: May 16th, 2008 @ 3:06 am
Author: hagbatana

Length: 09:49
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Views: 539

Tags: baltic coast documentary east evacuation königsberg. ostpreußen prussia prusy wschodnie ww2 Восточная Пруссия

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