The Baltic offensive begins

On the morning of 14 September 1944 three Soviet fronts – the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Baltic Fronts – simultaneously opened an attack on the positions of the German Army Group North in Latvia and southern Estonia. This was the start of the Baltic offensive, counted in Soviet historiography among the “ten Stalinist blows” of 1944. Its first and most important element was the Riga operation: converging thrusts on Riga were to split the German forces in the Baltic states and destroy them piecemeal. Three days later, on 17 September, the Leningrad Front joined the offensive in Estonia. The fighting that began that day lasted – counting the landings on the Estonian islands – until 24 November and ended with the remnants of Army Group North shut up in Courland.

A narrow strip along the Baltic

By mid-September Army Group North was in a position that the American historian Earl F. Ziemke described as an elongated, winding and dangerously shallow bridgehead. The defeat of Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration had laid bare its southern flank. At the end of July Soviet spearheads had crossed Lithuania – Kaunas fell on 1 August – and reached the Gulf of Riga at Tukums, cutting the whole army group off from the rest of the front for several weeks. In the second half of August the Germans retook Tukums in Operation Doppelkopf and opened a narrow corridor along the coast, but they did not recover Šiauliai, the key road junction in Samogitia. North of the latitude of Königsberg the front had become a strip of land about 110–130 km wide and more than 600 km long, narrowing between Tukums and Riga to about 30 km.

In the north, in Estonia, Army Detachment Narwa had been beating off the assaults of the Leningrad Front since February, and since the end of July it had been holding the Sinimäed hills on the Tannenberg Line. West of Lake Peipus German divisions were defending the line of the Emajõgi river near Tartu, together with Estonian conscript units and volunteers, joined in August by the “Finnish Boys” returning from Finland. Prime Minister Jüri Uluots had called on his compatriots to fight in an appeal in August, in the hope that the front would hold until the end of the war.

The political arguments for clinging to the coast, on which Adolf Hitler had long insisted – covering Finland, control of the eastern Baltic, the Estonian oil shale and the Kriegsmarine’s training grounds – had largely lapsed. On 4 September Finland ceased hostilities with the USSR and undertook to expel German troops from its territory. Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, in command of Army Group North since July, had already prepared a directive for a retreat under the code name Aster. According to Ziemke it was described as a “map exercise”, because Hitler could not abide the planning of retreats; in reality it was a ready-made order for Army Detachment Narwa and the Eighteenth Army to withdraw to the Wenden position in the area of the town of Cēsis, about 90 km north-east of Riga.

The Stavka’s plan

In August Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky took over coordination of the three Baltic Fronts on behalf of the Stavka. Marshal Leonid Govorov’s Leningrad Front remained directly under the Stavka; its left wing, however, was shifted south to the sector near Tartu between Lake Peipus and Lake Võrtsjärv, and in September Govorov moved the 2nd Shock Army from the Narva to the bridgehead on the Emajõgi, from where it was to strike north into the rear of Army Detachment Narwa.

The three Baltic Fronts were to advance on Riga along converging axes, each initially with two armies on its main line of attack. General of the Army Ivan Maslennikov’s 3rd Baltic Front was to move south-west through Valga and Valmiera; General of the Army Andrei Yeremenko’s 2nd Baltic Front straight west from around Madona; and General of the Army Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front north from the area of Bauska. Bagramyan had the shortest distance to cover: from Bauska to Riga was less than 60 km. Ziemke notes that, according to German intelligence reports of the time, the 1st Baltic Front had, in addition to the 4th Shock Army and the 43rd Army at Bauska, an even stronger group in the area of Jelgava – the 5th Guards Tank Army and the 6th Guards and 51st Armies – which could cut the Tukums–Riga corridor; Soviet accounts of the planning are silent about any such second thrust.

The scale of the undertaking was enormous. According to the Russian study of losses edited by Grigoriy Krivosheev, some 1.55 million Soviet soldiers took part in the Baltic offensive as a whole, of whom – according to Russian studies – about 1.35 million fought in the Riga operation alone. National formations made up of inhabitants of the Baltic republics also fought in the ranks of the Red Army: a Latvian rifle corps and an Estonian rifle corps. On the German side Army Group North comprised the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies and Army Detachment Narwa, which included, among others, Estonian and Latvian Waffen-SS divisions (among them soldiers of the Latvian Legion), police battalions and the Estonian Home Guard (Omakaitse). Throughout the summer the Germans had watched the concentration of Soviet troops and built a network of switch positions in depth: the Wenden position, on an arc about 100 km from Riga; the Segewold position near Sigulda, a dozen or so kilometres closer; and positions on the Daugava and east of Jelgava, about 30 km south of the city. Riga, with its port and its bridges over the Daugava, was the keystone of the whole system: through it ran the line of retreat from Estonia and northern Latvia to Courland.

14 September

The attack of all three fronts began simultaneously on the morning of 14 September, after artillery and air preparation. Bagramyan did best. According to Soviet accounts, the 4th Shock Army and the 43rd Army broke through the German defences at Bauska on a front of about 25 km and by evening had penetrated more than 10 km; Ziemke, drawing on German documents, writes of a dent in the front about 6 km deep. The blow fell on the German X Corps, which was shattered within a few days. In the sectors of the 2nd and 3rd Baltic Fronts the attack met fierce resistance and made slow progress on the first day, as on the next. The terrain – lakes, rivers, swamps and a sparse road network – favoured the defenders, and the positions there had been prepared for weeks.

Exploiting the breach of the first day, the spearheads of the 1st Baltic Front reached the German position east of Jelgava, about 40 km south of Riga, on 15 September. On 16 September the 43rd Army broke into Baldone, and a detachment of the 3rd Guards Mechanised Corps reached the Daugava. Only a few dozen kilometres now separated Riga from the Soviet tanks. In the north, in the Eighteenth Army’s sector, losses were so heavy that – according to figures cited in the literature – within four days ten of its eighteen divisions had dwindled to the strength of battle groups.

Hitler agrees to Aster

On 15 September Schörner demanded permission to evacuate Estonia, declaring that this was the last moment to get out of there at all. The next day he flew to Hitler’s headquarters to present the situation in person. Hitler, as usual, resisted a retreat. According to the accounts on which Ziemke draws, he argued that III SS Panzer Corps on the extreme flank along the Gulf of Finland would not be able to withdraw anyway, that the Soviet Union was putting out peace feelers and that he needed the Baltic territories as a bargaining chip, and he also lamented the loss of the Kriegsmarine’s Baltic training waters. In the end, on 16 September, he gave a conditional “yes” once he had been assured that the retreat would begin only two days later and could be called off until then. According to some accounts, that same day the Army High Command (OKH) issued the order for Operation Aster, in which Estonian units were to cover the German withdrawal.

At the same time, also on 16 September, Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s Third Panzer Army, still formally part of Army Group Centre, launched Operation Cäsar from the area of Dobele and Auce: a thrust into Bagramyan’s western flank towards Jelgava, intended to restore a secure link between the two army groups. On the first day the three divisions committed found no weak spot in the Soviet front and by evening had been driven out of the few places they had penetrated. That night the Chief of the Army General Staff, Heinz Guderian, told Reinhardt that because of “great matters” in foreign policy Hitler “absolutely must have a success”. Over the following days the attack gained a dozen or so kilometres, but by 21 September it had petered out; Reinhardt considered that it had at least tied down Bagramyan’s reserves at a critical moment.

Between two armies

For the people of Estonia and Latvia the offensive meant the return of the power that in 1940–1941 had carried out annexation, arrests and mass deportations. Their compatriots stood on both sides of the front: in the German ranks, volunteers and conscripts of the Waffen-SS divisions, police battalions and self-defence units; on the Soviet side, the soldiers of the national corps, formed largely from men mobilised in 1941 and evacuated into the interior of the USSR. At times units made up of Estonians or Latvians fought directly against each other. Historians in both countries describe this as a choice “between two occupations” rather than a declaration for one ideology or the other; this does not alter the fact that some collaborationist formations had earlier taken part in the crimes of the German occupation, including the Holocaust.

A wave of refugees moved with the front. As early as September tens of thousands of Estonians tried to escape from the coast to Sweden in boats or to sail to the Reich on German ships; Latvians likewise fled to Courland and from there further west. Some soldiers of the Estonian and Latvian units who, after their units had been disbanded, wanted neither to be evacuated nor to join the Red Army went into the forests and swelled the ranks of the Forest Brothers, who fought Soviet rule in both countries until the early 1950s.

What the offensive achieved

The day after Schörner’s conversation with Hitler, the Aster plan lost any semblance of an orderly retreat. On 17 September the 2nd Shock Army broke through the defences on the Emajõgi north of Tartu, and Schörner ordered III SS Panzer Corps on a forced march from the Narva to Pärnu on the Gulf of Riga. According to German figures, within a few days the Kriegsmarine evacuated about 50,000 soldiers, 20,000 civilians and a thousand prisoners through the ports of Tallinn, Haapsalu and Pärnu. The Leningrad Front, together with the Estonian rifle corps, occupied mainland Estonia within ten days; Tallinn fell on 22 September.

On the Riga axis, however, the attack failed to bring a decision. Between 20 and 24 September Vasilevsky renewed the attempt to split Army Group North: the 2nd Baltic Front smashed the German X Corps west of Madona, and the 3rd Baltic Front broke through the defences at Valga and reached Valmiera. But on 22 September the SS Division Nordland, brought by forced marches from the Narva, arrived in time before Riga. On 24 September the Stavka decided to shift the main effort from Riga to the Memel (Klaipėda) axis, and by 27 September the Germans had manned the Segewold position, about 60 km from Riga, where the 2nd and 3rd Baltic Fronts came to a halt.

The decision came only with Bagramyan’s manoeuvre. On 5 October the 1st Baltic Front struck west from Šiauliai and on 10 October reached the Baltic north of Klaipėda, cutting Army Group North off from East Prussia for good. The Germans began to abandon Riga; Soviet troops took the part of the city on the right bank of the Daugava on 13 October and the whole city on 15 October. The landings on the Estonian islands, from Muhu and Hiiumaa to Saaremaa, ended on 24 November with the capture of the Sõrve peninsula. Some thirty German divisions were trapped in the Courland Pocket, which – from January 1945 as Army Group Courland – held out until Germany’s surrender in May 1945.

According to Krivosheev’s figures, Soviet losses in the Baltic offensive as a whole amounted to some 61,500 killed and missing and about 218,600 wounded and sick. Soviet sources put German losses at more than 200,000 men, including about 33,500 prisoners; these figures are hard to verify. The offensive launched on 14 September did not achieve its original aim – the destruction of Army Group North in the Baltic states – but it drove the Germans out of Estonia and almost all of Latvia and Lithuania. For Joseph Stalin it meant the recovery of the territories seized in 1940. For Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania it opened nearly half a century of Soviet rule: new deportations (the largest in March 1949), forced collectivisation and years of armed resistance by the underground – until independence was regained in 1990–1991.