Russia at war 1941-1945

Belorussia retreat, later referred to "a vast wooded and marshy area from the Dnieper nearly all the way to Minsk which was controlled by large partisan formations, and was never in three years, either cleaned up, still less occupied by German troops."

[K. Tippelskirch. Istoriya vtoroi mirovoi voiny. [Russ. ed.] p. 445.]

Nevertheless, the Germans succeeded in turning most of Belorussia into a "desert zone".

In the villages (according to Russian figures) over a million houses were destroyed; and when I travelled through Belorussia, shortly after the German rout, there was extremely little livestock to be seen.

Here (as distinct from the Ukraine) a large number of young people had evaded

deportation by joining the partisans; but even so, 380,000 had been deported from

Belorussia to Germany. The destruction in the cities was appalling: nearly all factories and public buildings had been destroyed, and at Minsk the majority of all other houses had been burned down, too. If the large Government House and some other public

buildings and nineteen out of 332 industrial enterprises had survived, it was only because they had been rapidly de-mined as soon as the Russian troops had entered the city. In Minsk alone 4,000 delayed-action bombs, mines and boobytraps had to be unprimed. The Red Army was full of admiration for those engineers "who never made more than one mistake."

The "bagging" of 100,000 Germans east of Minsk meant that the Red Army had torn a 250-mile gap in the German front, and that the road was now almost clear into Poland and Lithuania.

On July 4, even before the final liquidation of the Minsk "bag", the Soviet Supreme Command set new targets for the four fronts fighting in Belorussia: they were to advance, within a very short time into eastern Latvia, Lithuania, and on to Vilno, Kaunas, Grodno and Brest-Litovsk, and to force the Niémen in several places, with a subsequent advance to the East Prussian border and (farther south) into Poland.

The Red Army continued to advance at great speed, covering between ten and fifteen

miles a day; on July 8 Baranovichi was taken; on July 13 Vilno fell to the troops of Cherniakhovsky, on July 18, Rokossovsky's troops crossed into Poland, and on July 23, captured Lublin—an event of far-reaching political consequences. On July 28 they

captured Brest-Litovsk, and the whole of Belorussia was cleared of the Germans.

According to the Germans themselves, the Russian offensive in Belorussia was the

gravest defeat ever inflicted on the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Between twenty-

five and twenty-eight German divisions were destroyed, a loss of at least 350,000 men. In the words of the Official Journal of the OKW the rout of Army Group Mitte (in Belorussia) was "a greater catastrophe than Stalingrad."

[ Kriegstagebuch des OKW, IV-I, pp. 13-14.]

This figure of twenty-five divisions or 350,000 men lost occurs in other German post-war accounts. Thus, Guderian speaks of the "destruction of Army Groupe Mitte" and of "the total loss of some twenty-five divisions." The events, he says, were "so shattering" that

"Hitler moved his headquarters in mid-July from Obersalzberg to East Prussia."

[Guderian, op. cit., p. 336. Philippi and Heim speak of twenty-eight divisions and

350,000 men.]

The routing of Army Group Mitte in Belorussia had created highly favourable conditions for other Russian army groups to come into action. On July 13 the 1st Ukrainian Front under Konev started its Lwow-Sandomierz operation; in the north, the 3rd Baltic Front liberated Pskov on July 18 and broke into southern Estonia; the 2nd Baltic Front broke into southern Latvia, while the 1st Baltic Front under Bagramian, after capturing Yelgava (Mitau) broke through on July 31 to the Gulf of Riga at Tukkum, thus cutting off the whole of the German Army Group Nord in Estonia and Latvia from the rest of the German forces. However, three weeks later, the Germans succeeded in hacking out a

twenty-mile corridor south of the Gulf of Riga and thus partly restoring land

communication between Army Group Nord and western Lithuania and East Prussia.

Although, in Belorussia and eastern Lithuania the Russians had scored one of the greatest victories of the war—and one from which the Germans could never recover—their

further progress from about July 25 to the end of August was much slower for a number of obvious reasons: long-drawn-out communications, fatigue among the troops, and the throwing in of heavy German reserves against the Russian attempt to advance both