This chapter brings the different groups of actors together in the environment in which they would experience the final months of the war: Festung Königsberg. Establishing the role cities played during wartime, it reconstructs how the fortress strategy came into being. It then explores how the new balance of power in fortresses manifested itself and how the fortress strategy was perceived by those ordered to defend them. During the Soviet 1944 summer offensive, Operation Bagration, the strategy proved to be a failure, yet the High Command persisted with it as the Wehrmacht was forced back onto German soil. After analysing why the strategy was retained on home soil, this chapter examines the working relationship between the military and the Party in these fortresses. The origins and nature of this relationship had significant consequences for the everyday rule of the besieged fortress. Both Party and Army demanded final authority in Königsberg, but it was ultimately claimed by the latter. Factors such as personal standing, reputation, and commitment among the different groups all shaped local dynamics at the fortress command and shaped the organisation of the city’s defence and evacuation.

This chapter assesses the emergent mindset and the city’s insular nature by providing an analysis of the propaganda created in Königsberg during its siege. As the idea of Volksgemeinschaft steadily lost its appeal, propagandists struggled to convey their message to the fortress’s population. By drawing attention to the efforts of local propagandists, this chapter examines the impact of the Wehrmacht ‘on the ground’, and discusses the need to forge a Kampfgemeinschaft, based on Königsberg’s ‘battle’ rather than on Germany’s ‘struggle’. Rather than encouraging the population to leave the city, the fortress command instead propagated a false sense of safety. An assessment of the themes portrayed in local media reveals how, in a fractured Germany, local authorities presented their message and how they sought to link it to the larger regional picture of events. A martial narrative came to dominate Königsberg’s propaganda while the unfolding events were consistently explained by drawing parallels to the city’s Prussian past, offering an alternative to the National Socialist rhetoric. The population’s reluctance to leave the city until the very end is a sombre testament to the propagandists’ success in downplaying the dangers to which all were exposed.

Divided political landscapes such as that of the Classic Maya are, with a relentless regularity, filled with competing ambitions and deeply felt animosities. The periodic rupture of hidden fault-lines exposes where the pressure points and conflicting interests lay at any one time. War is one of the most complex of all social phenomena. While violent conduct may seem chaotic and emotionally driven it is, in the end, grounded in a calculation between the risks and rewards sufficient to motivate a life-threatening activity. Nonetheless, wherever we find it, warfare is shaped by powerful cultural understandings that dictate its form and meaning and these comprise an equal part with any pragmatic understanding.