German Blood, Slavic Soil (Cornell University Press, 2023), a new book by Boston College Associate Professor of History Nicole Eaton, reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, 20th-century Europe’s two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. From the publisher: Eaton “details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a 700-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.”
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