Fall of Hitler's Fortress City, The: the Battle of Konigsberg, 1945 - Tapa dura

World War II Database", May 2007"This book is well presented and extremely readable. Denny did an excellent job casting a totally non-military perspective on the fortress of Konigsberg, unlike most WW2 books that focus more so from a military strategy point of view. She presented Konigsberg and its rich history as the cultural gem of East Prussia, and beyond the broken families and the lives lost, a piece of human history was destroyed when the Russian conquerors practically razed the city. Even in the post-war years, Russian authorities deliberately refused to maintain or outright demolish buildings of historical value in order to wipe out Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad, from German memory ... This book is a wonderful source for those looking for the human side of war. Glorious battles and duels of ideologies aside, it is the civilians who truly suffer, and Denny did a great job illustrating it with first-hand accounts."

In 1945, two and a half million people were forced out of Germany's most easterly province, East Prussia, and in particular its capital, Konigsberg. Their flight was a direct result of Hitler's ill-fated decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. The horrors of Leningrad and Stalingrad were to be avenged by an army determined not only to invade Germany but to take over its eastern-frontier territories. The Russians launched Operation Bagration in June 1944, to coincide with the D-Day landings. As US and British forces pushed west the Russians liberated Eastern Europe and made their first attacks in the autumn of 1944. Konigsberg itself was badly damaged by two British air raids at the end of August 1944, and the main offensive against the city by the Red Army began in January 1945. The depleted and poorly armed German army could do little to hold it back, and by the end of January East Prussia was cut off. The Russians exacted a terrible revenge on the civilian population, who were forced to flee across the freezing Baltic coast in an attempt to escape. On 9 April, the city surrendered to the Russians after a four-day onslaught. Through first-hand accounts as well as archival material, "Konigsberg 1945: The Annihilation of Hitler's Fortress City" tells the dramatic story of a place and its people that bore the brunt of Russia's vengeance against the Nazi regime. It is Isabel Denny's first book.