The Baltic Offensive, also known as the Baltic Strategic Offensive, [3] denotes the campaign between the northern Fronts of the Red Army and the German Army Group North in the Baltic States during the autumn of 1944. The result of the series of battles was the isolation and encirclement of the Army Group North in the Courland Pocket and Soviet re-occupation of the Baltic States. [4]
In 1944, the Wehrmacht was pressed back along its entire frontline in the east. In February 1944, it retreated from the approaches to Leningrad to the prepared section of the Panther Line at the border of Estonia. In June and July, Army Group Centre was thrown back from the Belorussian SSR into Poland by Operation Bagration. This created the opportunity for the Red Army to attack towards the Baltic Sea, thereby severing the land connection between the German Army Groups.
By 5 July, the Šiauliai Offensive commenced, as a follow-on from Operation Bagration. The Soviet 43rd, 51st, and 2nd Guards Armies attacked towards Riga on the Baltic coast with 3rd Guards Mechanized Corps in the van. By 31 July, the coast on the Gulf of Riga had been reached; 6th Guards Army covered Riga and the extended flank of the penetration towards the north.
The German reaction was rapid, and initially successful. A counterattack, code-named Operation Doppelkopf, was conducted on 16 August by XXXX and XXXIX Panzer Corps under the command of Third Panzer Army, Army Group Centre. Acting in coordination with armored formations from Army Group North, they initially cut off the Soviet troops on the coast, and re-established a tenuous 30-kilometer-wide corridor connecting Army Groups Centre and North. The main objective of the attack was to retake the key road junction of Šiauliai (German : Schaulen), but the German tanks ran head-on into an in-depth defense by the 1st Baltic Front, and by 20 August the German advance had stalled with heavy losses. A follow-on attack, code-named Operation Cäsar, and launched on 16 September, failed in the same manner. After a brief period of respite, STAVKA issued orders for the Baltic Strategic Offensive, which lasted from 14 September-24 November.
In common with other Soviet strategic offensives, the Baltic Offensive covers a number of operational level operations and individual Front offensive operations: [5]
From the German defensive perspective, the period included the following operations:
The Baltic Offensive operation resulted in the expulsion of German forces from Estonia and Lithuania. The Soviet fronts involved in the battle lost a total of ca. 280,000 men to all causes (killed, missing, wounded, sick).
Communication lines between Army Group North and Army Group Centre were permanently severed, and the former was relegated to an occupied Baltic seashore area in Latvia. On 25 January, Adolf Hitler renamed Army Group North to Army Group Courland implicitly recognising that there was no possibility of restoring a new land corridor between Courland and East Prussia. [7] The Red Army commenced the encirclement and reduction of the Courland cauldron which retained a possibility of being a major threat, but were able to focus on operations on its northern flank that were now aiming at East Prussia. Operations by the Red Army against the Courland Pocket continued until the surrender of the Army Group Courland on 9 May 1945, when close to 200,000 Germans were taken prisoner there.
The German command released thousands of native conscripts from military service. However the Soviet command began conscripting Baltic natives as areas were brought under Soviet control. [4] While some ended up serving on both sides, many partisans hid in the woods to avoid conscription. (See also Forest Brothers )
112 Hero of the Soviet Union awards were given out during the offensive, of which three were given soldier's second award. [8]
Soviet rule of the Baltic states was re-established by force, and sovietisation followed, which was mostly carried out in 1944–1950. The forced collectivisation of agriculture began in 1947, and was completed after the mass deportation of civilians in March 1949. All private farms were confiscated, and farmers were made to join the collective farms. An armed resistance movement of 'forest brothers' was active until the mass deportations. Tens of thousands participated or supported the movement; thousands were killed. The Soviet authorities fighting the forest brothers suffered also hundreds of deaths. Among those killed on both sides were innocent civilians. Besides the armed resistance of the forest brothers, a number of underground nationalist schoolchildren groups were active. Most of their members were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The punitive actions decreased rapidly after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953; from 1956 to 1958, a large part of the deportees and political prisoners were allowed to return to their homelands. Political arrests and numerous other kind of crimes against humanity were committed all through the occupation period until the late 1980s. Although the armed resistance was defeated, the populations remained anti-Soviet. This helped the Baltic citizens to organise a new resistance movement in the late 1980s and then rapidly develop a modern society after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. [9]
Operation Bagration was the codename for the 1944 Soviet Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation, a military campaign fought between 23 June and 19 August 1944 in Soviet Byelorussia in the Eastern Front of World War II. The Soviet Union destroyed 28 of 34 divisions of Army Group Centre and completely shattered the German front line. It was the biggest defeat in German military history and the fifth deadliest campaign in Europe, killing around 450,000 soldiers., and 300,000 others were cut-off in Courland Pocket.
The Battle of Narva was a military campaign between the German Army Detachment "Narwa" and the Soviet Leningrad Front fought for possession of the strategically important Narva Isthmus on 2 February – 10 August 1944 during World War II.
The East Prussian Offensive was a strategic offensive by the Soviet Red Army against the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. It lasted from 13 January to 25 April 1945, though some German units did not surrender until 9 May. The Battle of Königsberg was a major part of the offensive, which ended in victory for the Red Army.
The Courland Pocket was an area of the Courland Peninsula where a group of Nazi German forces from the Reichskommissariat Ostland was cut off and surrounded by the Red Army for almost a year, lasting from July 1944 until May 1945.
The Battle of Memel or the Siege of Memel was a battle which took place on the Eastern Front during World War II. The battle began when the Red Army launched its Memel Offensive Operation in late 1944. The offensive drove remaining German forces in the area that is now Lithuania and Latvia into a small bridgehead in Klaipėda (Memel) and its port, leading to a three-month siege of that position.
The Vilnius Offensive occurred as part of the third phase of Operation Bagration, the strategic summer offensive by the Soviet Red Army against the German Wehrmacht in June and July, 1944. It lasted from 5 July to 13 July 1944 and ended with a Soviet victory.
The Leningrad Front was formed during the 1941 German approach on Leningrad by dividing the Northern Front into the Leningrad Front and Karelian Front on August 27, 1941.
The Vitebsk–Orsha Offensive was part of the Belorussian Strategic Offensive of the Red Army in summer 1944, commonly known as Operation Bagration. During the offensive, Soviet troops captured Vitebsk and Orsha. A Soviet breakthrough during the offensive helped achieve the encirclement of German troops in the subsequent Minsk Offensive.
The Bobruysk Offensive was part of the Belorussian Strategic Offensive of the Red Army in summer 1944, commonly known as Operation Bagration. In less than a week in late June 1944, the Soviet 3rd Army broke through in the north of the sector, trapping the German XXXV Corps against the Berezina. The 65th Army then broke through the XXXXI Panzer Corps to the south; by 27 June, the two German corps were encircled in a pocket east of Bobruysk under constant aerial bombardment.
The Polotsk Offensive was part of the second phase of the Belorussian Strategic Offensive of the Red Army in summer 1944, commonly known as Operation Bagration.
The Minsk Offensive was part of the second phase of the Belorussian Strategic Offensive of the Red Army in summer 1944, commonly known as Operation Bagration.
The Kaunas Offensive was part of the third phase of the Belorussian Strategic Offensive of the Red Army in summer 1944, commonly known as Operation Bagration. The Kaunas offensive was executed by the 3rd Belorussian Front on July 28 – August 28, 1944, with the aim of destroying the German concentration on the western bank of the Neman river, the occupation of Kaunas, and reaching the boundaries of East Prussia.
The Gumbinnen Operation, also known as the Goldap Operation, was a Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front late in 1944, in which forces of the 3rd Belorussian Front attempted to penetrate the borders of East Prussia.
Operation Doppelkopf and the following Operation Cäsar were German counter-offensives on the Eastern Front in the late summer of 1944 in the aftermath of the major Soviet advance in Operation Bagration with the aim of restoring a coherent front between Army Group North and Army Group Centre. The operation's codename was a reference to the German card game Doppelkopf.
The Šiauliai Offensive was an operation of the Soviet forces of the 1st Baltic Front, commanded by General Hovhannes Bagramyan, conducted from July 5 to August 29, 1944, during the Second World War. It was part of the third phase of the Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation, and drove German troops from much of Lithuania, with the main tactical objective of the city of Šiauliai.
The Riga Offensive (known in was part of the larger Baltic Offensive on the Eastern Front during World War II. It took place late in 1944, and drove German forces from the city of Riga.
The Tallinn Offensive was a strategic offensive by the Red Army's 2nd Shock and 8th armies and the Baltic Fleet against the German Army Detachment Narwa and Estonian units in mainland Estonia on the Eastern Front of World War II on 17–26 September 1944. Its German counterpart was the abandonment of the Estonian territory in a retreat codenamed Operation Aster.
The Tartu Offensive Operation, also known as the Battle of Tartu and the Battle of Emajõgi was a campaign fought over southeastern Estonia in 1944. It took place on the Eastern Front during World War II between the Soviet 3rd Baltic Front and parts of the German Army Group North.
This is a sub-article to Battle of Narva (1944).
The 6th Guards Army was a Soviet Guards formation which fought against Nazi Germany during World War II under the command of General Ivan Chistyakov. The Army's chief of staff was General Valentin Antonovich Penkovskii.
