Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides Nicole Eaton explores not only what
Germans and Soviets thought about each other but also how the war brought them together. She
details an intricate timeline first describing how Königsberg a seven-hundred-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. German Blood
Slavic Soil presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II. Eaton
impressively shows how this outpost city far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin
became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in
societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the
encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.
