The book you are holding describes precisely the moment of population replacement in the capital of East Prussia. The situation in which the protagonists find themselves is truly perverse: the remnants of the German population of a once beautiful city, reduced to ruins by the war and stripped of all human rights, are forced to interact with those who have arrived to take their place. Yet, some protoganists managed not only to survive, but also to preserve their dignity and withstand the most brutal moral and psychological blows.
The Last Autumn of Königsberg
Copyright © 2026 by Armen Gasparyan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 979-8-1606074-7-4
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means; graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any infor-mation storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher/author.
Technical editor: Andrew Andersen
Cover design: Katie Alberts
About the author
From East Prussia alone, divided between the Soviet Union and Poland after the war, more than two million indigenous inhabitants were deported simply because they had been born German. These people were not only robbed of all their property. They were deprived of something far more precious — their homeland, which their ancestors had shaped and cultivated over centuries.
That wound never healed in their hearts, and it remains, at least in part, in the hearts of their descendants. I still remember a gray-haired old man from Königsberg whom I met in Germany in 1989. A wealthy and successful entrepreneur, he said to me at the time: “If only they would let me return, I would run there barefoot and start rebuilding everything...”
Some will say: “It was retribution for the crimes of Nazism.” But were all the inhabitants of Königsberg responsible for Hitler’s rise to power and, consequently, for the policies of the Third Reich? Some were. But surely not all. Especially considering that in 1933, in the Reichstag elections in Königsberg and East Prussia, the National Socialists received only 6% of the votes. And, for that matter, among the Russian settlers who arrived in cities that were foreign to them — cities they had not built — and on land they had not cultivated, not all were “innocent lambs” either...
It would be no exaggeration to say that The Last Autumn of Königsberg is not merely a brief excursion into a largely forgotten chapter of history, but also a lesson of sorts in how to remain human under any circumstances — even the most dramatic and devastating ones.