Konigsberg was overrun by the Red Army 1945. And any encyclo today will tell you it’s been part of Russia ever since. But as Raymond A. Smith points out, Russia has never held any formal legal title to the Oblast at all.
At the end of the war, Germany was being given away by the Allies like at a garage sale. Actually, totally against the Hague Laws of War of 1907. In this illegal way, Germany lost some 25% of its pre-war territory.
Prussia was abolished. So too were Pomerania and Silesia, following the bizarre arrangement in which the whole of Poland was simply ’shunted to the left and up a bit’. The Americans, who by this time were calling the shots, probably couldn’t even pronounce Pomerania, let alone point to it on a map.
Hey, Where The Fark Is Pomerania?
The arbitrary line delineating the southern border of the Kaliningrad Oblast was drawn by Stalin – they say on the back of fag packet at Yalta. The Great Powers always meant to have experts look at this border in detail, but never quite got around to it.
Moreover, Stalin’s stated claims to the Konigsberg region – because the Soviets wanted revenge and an ice-free port – never had any basis in International Law either. But the Red Army were there and not going away any time soon. So really, Kaliningrad was born out of muddle, bluff and procrastination. All Stalin ever had on paper was an acknowledgement of temporary administration pending review.
So why hasn’t any smart-ass International Lawyer brought all this up before? Basically, the Cold War intervened and no one wanted to poke the Bear with a stick. To be fair to participants, the Potsdam Conference of 1945 envisaged that many territorial issues concerning Germany would be buttoned down at a subsequent meeting – the ‘Final Settlement’. But again, due to the Cold War, this next meeting didn’t happen until forty five years later – not until the re-unification of Germany in 1990. Here, the contentious issue of Kaliningrad was sensitively left off the agenda.
In so doing, as Raymond Smith puts it, the precise legal status of Kaliningrad in International Law has been forever ‘lost in transit’.
Though Raymond A. Smith argues the case for restitution rather well he admits it is largely an academic exercise and three possible claimants could dispute the territory – all apparently with a stronger legal case than Russia.
In the unlikely event of a successful court case, the lucky country would win a population of 900,000 Russians, several million tons of Soviet concrete buildings and the world’s oldest collection of Czechoslovakian trams.
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