East Prussia is a German province lost after WWII. Lost is perhaps inappropriate as it was actually taken and occupied by Soviet troops then given to them by the American, British and French governments.
Historically settled by medieval German knights and repopulated by Germans over the centuries as a way of expanding German influence and control. It is located up along the Baltic shore wedged between Lithuania and Poland with the big Russian bear to the east. Troops of various nationalities marched back and forth across these lands long before Hitler pushed his ill-fated march into Russia.
So it is an area of constant readjustments, mixed nationalities, ongoing flux. It has more in common with Nordic areas. Earliest peoples were pagan Prusa tribes. It is the last area of Europe to be Christianized. Note it didn't truly share a land boundary with Germany, applicable to other eastern German provinces. So it was in many ways cut off from direct German influence.
Don't confuse East Prussia with Prussia which was a more encompassing province focusing more on the area around Berlin, far, far, far to the west of actual East Prussia.
It is my ancestral homeland, the area from which my family was forced out in the last months of WWII. And an area I can visit only after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Communist Empire. But an area I grew up with, if only through reminisces at gatherings of friends and family by others who knew it firsthand.
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