 "The people of Königsberg shall never expunge these nights of terror from their memory," Wieck wrote.When the Red Army, after a bitterly fought siege lasting nearly three months, conquered Königsberg on April 9, 1945 – one month before the end of World War II – the city had become a vast graveyard of rubble.Of the 316,000 people who had lived there before the war, perhaps 100,000 remained, and Wieck estimated that about half of these were to die of hunger, disease, or maltreatment before the last Germans were allowed (or forced) to leave in 1949-50.