Where the Iron Crosses Grow

Between May 10 and May 13 the Kriegsmarine and Royal Romanian Navy evacuated another 47,825 personnel from the Crimea, including 28,992 German and 15,078 Romanians. Approximately 5,000 German and 3,000 Romanian personnel were lost at sea during the evacuation. Although the Romanians complained that the Germans favored their own troops in the evacuation, all three of the Romanian mountain divisions survived the debacle in the Crimea in better shape than any of the German divisions did. Of the five German division commanders, two were killed, one was wounded, and one was captured. Although detachments from each had been evacuated, these units had lost virtually all their vehicles and artillery and would require complete rebuilding. Although AOK 17 had not been destroyed as completely as AOK 6 was at Stalingrad, it was reduced to little more than a collection of poorly armed refugees. Thousands of trained troops were sacrificed just to hold the strategically useless Crimea for a few more months.

Soviet losses in the Crimea between April and May 1944 totaled 84,819, including 17,754 dead or missing.¹⁵ As Soviet victories went, the liberation of the Crimea was a relatively cheap triumph, which inflicted heavier losses on the enemy. With the Crimea liberated, the 4th Ukrainian Front was disbanded and Tolbukhin was sent to spearhead the invasion of Romania.

Four days after the evacuation ended, Vizeadmiral Brinkmann and Konteradmiral Schulz were both awarded the Ritterkreuz for their role in organizing the evacuation. Wehrmacht leaders, particularly Allmendinger, were acrimonious about these awards and claimed that the Kriegsmarine had fouled up the evacuation because of the abandonment of some units. These protests need to be taken with a grain of salt, since Allmendinger’s own performance in the Crimea had been far from stellar, and the senior leaders of AOK 17 had committed their own fair share of mistakes in the final week of the fighting around Sevastopol. Faced with defeat, Wehrmacht leaders were quick to point to the Kriegsmarine and the Romanians as scapegoats. German–Romanian relations deteriorated rapidly after the final campaign in the Crimea, and Romania was moving toward making an accommodation with Stalin before the Red Army crossed its borders.

Altogether, the fighting in the Crimea between 1941 and 1944 cost the Red Army something like 700,000 casualties. Five Soviet armies and numerous reputations were demolished in the Crimea. Axis losses in the Crimea were over 250,000, including at least 60,000 German and 15,000 Romanian dead or missing. Nevertheless, these horrendous military casualties have scant mention in the history of World War II. During their occupation of the Crimea, the Germans constructed elaborate cemeteries in Feodosiya, Yalta, and other locations for their soldiers killed in the 1941–42 campaign, but these were all eradicated after the Soviet liberation in 1944. Local Russians refused to bury German war dead in the Crimea, and either sent them back to Germany or dumped them in the Black Sea. Decades later, a warehouse near Sevastopol was found with the boxed remains of about 10,000 German military casualties. Finally, as German–Russian economic ties increased after the fall of the Soviet Union, a new German military cemetery was established near Sevastopol in 1998, where the remains of 11,000 Germans were re-interred.

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Just two days after the liberation of Sevastopol, Stalin signed a top secret document, State Defense Committee (GKO) Decree No. 5859ss, which authorized a massive operation to punish the Crimea Tatars. The document stated that: