Why read German Blood, Slavic Soil?

Book cover of German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Koenigsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad

Book description

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.

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Why read it?

1 author picked German Blood, Slavic Soil as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Alexis Peri

Author

I was consumed by this harrowing account of Kaliningrad, a city caught between Hitler and Stalin, and how the people there fought, collaborated with, and suffered from both armies.

Without reviving the tired “who was worse” debates about Hitler and Stalin, this book shows readers the unique horrors that each regime visited upon the local population during the war and for decades afterward, as Stalin tried to denazify its German residents. Huge questions of purity, morality, and humanness undergird this searing story about surviving two of the most violent regimes in history.

From Alexis' list on The best books that grasp the gritty, brutal, and heartrending reality of life in the war-torn Soviet Union.