Many fled when the Soviet Army was closing in; at one point Königsberg was encircled by the Soviets and people tried to escape over the sea, and many of them drowned. The remaining ones were expelled to East or West Germany when the Soviets took over. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, the western parts of Germany took in millions of refugees from those parts of Germany that were annexed by Poland and Russia, including East Prussia.