Saturday 7th April 1945 – two days before the Fall – the Red Army attack has begun in earnest after four days of bombardment. The breach of the first position is growing wider in the north-west as the 3rd Byelorussian drive towards Gross Holstein on the Frishes Haff coast, and also begin to breach the second position's minefields and barricades on the edges of the northern suburbs. On the south the second position is also being breached as the Byelorussians drive towards the southern suburbs.

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Twenty five years before, one of the most momemtous outcomes of the Great War was the rebirth of Poland, which included the old Polish province of West Prussia. This formed the hinterland of Danzig, and its re-incorporation into the Polish state 146 years after the first partition of Poland again separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Danzig was also separated from Germany as a Free City under a League of Nations mandate to provide a neutral port for both Polish and German trade. Plebiscites were held in the southern districts of East Prussia (Masuria and Marienwerder) to determine their future national alignment: in 1922 a vote of 97% favoured remaining in Germany. North of Königsberg the city of Memel was also under a League of Nations mandate until the new Lithuanian army occupied the city in 1923 and annexed it to Lithuania.

By the mid 1920s, after five years of turmoil since the Indian summer of 1918, including the period of hyper-inflation, Königsbergers could begin to feel some sense of peace, however isolated. Sea and rail links were re-restablished with Germany, and new air links were established. The city's economy struggled, but this was to some extent countered by the annual Deutsche Ostmesse ('East fair'), a huge trade fair held on a specially designed site in Königsberg between 1920 and 1941.

North of the city, the Samland coast and the Kurische Nehrung had been something of a bohemian retreat since the early 1900s. The Niddener Künstlerkolonie (artist colony) was established in the 1920s by Impressionist painters such as Ernst Mollenhauer at Nidden, a fishing village on the Kurische Nehrung, and other artists in the area included the painter Max Pechstein and the epic novelist Thomas Mann, the sculptor Herman Brachert at Georgenswalde, and the painter and photographer Käthe Koller at Rauschen. The Nazis considered Impressionist art 'degenerate', and most of the Niddener or Kurische artists, as they were sometimes known, were banned from exhibiting their work during the fascist period.

An underlying discontent that had simmered since the autumn of 1918 was manifested when the Nazi Party took control of the East Prussian government in a coup in 1932 following victories in some local elections. Hitler dissolved all state governments in 1934, and established the same centralised, repressive machinery of fascist government in the state as elsewhere in Germany.