The Battle of the Tannenberg Line

At the end of July 1944 three low, wooded hills in north-eastern Estonia became the scene of one of the bloodiest battles on the northern sector of the Eastern Front. In the Sinimäed hills near Vaivara, a dozen or so kilometres west of Narva, the German Army Detachment Narwa – made up to a large extent of Estonians and of Waffen-SS volunteers from Western and Northern Europe – stopped the advance of two armies of the Leningrad Front. The fighting began on 26 July, immediately after the fall of Narva, reached its climax on 29 July and died down on 10 August, when the Soviet command called off the offensive. The Tannenberg Line held until mid-September. In Estonian memory the Battle of the Blue Hills (Sinimägede lahing) holds a special place; in Soviet historiography it was almost absent for decades.

Under 27 July popular chronologies state that from 27 July to 10 August there was fighting on the Tannenberg Line, in which 25 Estonian and 24 Dutch, Danish and Flemish infantry battalions fought on the German side, that the Soviet attack was halted, and that tens of thousands of men were killed on both sides. Under 29 July they record a decisive day that allowed Army Detachment Narwa to delay the Soviet Baltic offensive by another month and a half. The general picture is accurate, but several details need correcting.

The Sinimäed hills

The Tannenberg Line (Tannenbergstellung) was prepared in July on the orders of the commander of Army Group North, once it became clear that after the destruction of Army Group Centre the old front along the Narva river could not be held. The withdrawal to the new position, which Hitler agreed to around 22 July, took place on the nights of 24–25 and 25–26 July, partly under fire from the Soviet offensive.

The position was based on three hills stretching inland from the coast of the Gulf of Finland. Furthest east lay Orphanage Hill (Estonian Lastekodumägi), named after the children’s home that stood on it before the war; in the middle, Grenadier Hill (Grenaderimägi); in the west, Tower Hill (Tornimägi). None rose more than a few dozen metres above its surroundings, but on the flat isthmus between the sea and the marshes they dominated the road and the railway to Tallinn. Whoever held them barred the way into the heart of Estonia.

The opposing forces

According to a German strength return of 28 July, cited in Estonian and English-language studies, General of Infantry Anton Grasser’s Army Detachment Narwa numbered some 22,250 men on this sector in 25 Estonian battalions and 24 German, Dutch, Danish, Flemish, Norwegian and other battalions. The popular version thus leaves out the German battalions (especially those of the 11th Infantry Division) and the Norwegian ones, and the figures themselves, taken from such returns, are too precise to be taken literally: after the July fighting many battalions numbered only a few hundred men, and some only a few dozen. The core of the defence was General Felix Steiner’s III SS Panzer Corps: the Nordland division with the Danish Danmark regiment and the Norwegian Norge regiment, the Nederland brigade with the Dutch De Ruyter regiment (the General Seyffardt regiment had been destroyed during the withdrawal), the regiments of the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) and a newly arrived battalion of the Flemish SS assault brigade Langemarck. Alongside them fought Wehrmacht units and small naval detachments.

Most of the Estonians were not volunteers – they had been drafted under the call-up announced in February 1944. The underground National Committee of the Estonian Republic regarded them as the future army of an independent state whose continuity it had proclaimed in its June declaration. Estonian historians stress that these soldiers fought above all against the return of the Soviet rule the country had known in 1940–1941, not for the aims of the Third Reich. At the same time they were defending the front line of the very Reich that occupied their country – and this ambiguity still shapes the disputes over the memory of the battle.

On the Soviet side, Marshal Leonid Govorov, commander of the Leningrad Front, regarded the Tannenberg Line as Army Group North’s key position and sent his best forces against it. Lieutenant General Ivan Fedyuninsky’s Second Shock Army received additional rifle corps and was to break through the defences on Orphanage Hill, reach Jõhvi and get to the Kunda river by 1 August. Lieutenant General Filipp Starikov’s Eighth Army attacked on the southern sector, against the positions of the 11th Infantry Division. For the attack of 29 July Govorov concentrated 11 divisions and six tank regiments. Soviet aircraft ruled the skies – the Germans had only a few dozen dive bombers here and were short of fuel.

Orphanage Hill (26–28 July)

The first Soviet units reached the hills on 26 July, before the defenders had time to dig in. After an air raid and artillery bombardment that destroyed most of the forest on the slopes, the 201st and 256th Rifle Divisions, supported by a tank regiment, took the eastern part of Orphanage Hill. The following night the anti-tank company of the Danish SS regiment Danmark retook the lost positions.

On 27 July Soviet artillery again smothered the hills with fire. Steiner gathered all the serviceable armoured vehicles he had left – seven tanks – and positioned Nordland units between two of the hills. That day the new commander of Army Group North, Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, arrived at the command post and demanded that the whole of Orphanage Hill be retaken immediately and that resistance be “fanatical”. Straight after the conference at which the details of the counter-attack were settled, a shell splinter seriously wounded the commander of the Nordland division, SS-Brigadeführer Fritz von Scholz; he died the next day.

The night counter-attack of Nordland’s reconnaissance battalion and the 1st Battalion of the 47th Regiment (3rd Estonian) on 27–28 July, and a further attempt on the evening of 28 July, broke down when Soviet tanks arrived. Orphanage Hill remained largely in Soviet hands. Throughout 28 July the Leningrad Front brought up reinforcements: the Second Shock Army received two tank regiments, three howitzer brigades and nine heavy artillery regiments. Steiner, expecting a general assault, ordered some of his units to fall back to Grenadier Hill.

The decisive day (29 July)

On the morning of 29 July Soviet artillery fired, by German estimates, some 25,000 shells. The forest on the hills was cut down by the fire to a height of two or three metres, and the whole line was hidden by a cloud of dust. At about 9 a.m. some 6,000 men of the 109th Rifle Corps, supported by a regiment of IS-2 heavy tanks, went into the assault. The assault units took Orphanage Hill and broke onto Grenadier Hill, where – as Soviet accounts stress – a red flag was planted. Soviet tanks went round Grenadier Hill and reached Tower Hill; one got as far as the community hall in Vaivara. This was the furthest point west the Red Army reached in the battle. Around noon the Tannenberg Line was close to collapse.

Then Steiner threw his last tanks into a counter-attack. They struck the surprised Soviet armoured units below Tower Hill and drove them back; only one Panther came out of the counter-attack unscathed. On Grenadier Hill the remnants of the Norwegian Norge battalion, a German battle group and an Estonian battalion were still holding out on the western slope. The last reserve was the 1st Battalion of the 45th Regiment (1st Estonian), held back earlier because of its enormous losses. It was commanded by the Estonian Waffen-SS officer Paul Maitla. According to Estonian accounts, Maitla called for volunteers among the lightly wounded in the field hospital; about twenty came forward. With them, with the remnants of shattered sub-units, a detachment of sailors and the last Panther, he set off from the parish cemetery towards Grenadier Hill and cleared it of the enemy. In the afternoon Soviet units tried eight times to regain the summit; on the German side even supply troops were thrown into the fight. By evening the hill was still in the defenders’ hands.

The losses that day were enormous. According to figures cited in Estonian studies, only 225 men remained in the ranks of the assaulting units of the 109th Rifle Corps, and the 120th Rifle Division lost 1,808 killed and wounded. By evening Army Detachment Narwa had counted 113–120 Soviet tanks destroyed in the battle as a whole, almost half of them on 29 July; the Second Shock Army reported fifty tanks lost that day. The Germans lost about 600 men on 29 July. A political report from the Second Shock Army to Moscow at first maintained that Grenadier Hill was in Soviet hands, and explained the failure by poor cooperation between artillery, infantry and tanks, which had driven onto uncleared minefields.

29 July is often called the decisive day that made it possible to delay the Soviet Baltic offensive by a month and a half. This is the assessment accepted in Estonian and German literature, and one can agree with it with one reservation: Estonia’s fate was ultimately decided not by what happened in the Sinimäed hills but by the Soviet offensive in Latvia and southern Estonia.

Until 10 August

On 30 July the fighting followed a similar pattern: Soviet artillery fired, by German estimates, some 30,000 shells, and heavy tanks broke through the defences of the exhausted De Ruyter battalion, which had a few dozen men fit for combat left, but the assault on Grenadier Hill was beaten off with grenades. On 31 July the intensity of the Soviet fire fell markedly. The Stavka and Stalin himself, however, demanded that the defences be broken at any cost: Govorov set Fedyuninsky a deadline for taking Rakvere, more than a hundred kilometres away – 7 August. In the first days of August both armies received new rifle corps; the Second Shock Army again numbered more than 20,000 men.

The heaviest blow came on 3 August. After a bombardment comparable to that of 29 July, eleven rifle divisions and four tank regiments attacked again, once more mainly against Grenadier Hill. That day the attack was renewed three times, and each time it ended with a German counter-attack that restored the previous position. The attacks of 4–6 August were weaker. On 10 August the military council of the Leningrad Front ordered the offensive to be halted and the troops to go over to the defensive. Calm settled over the isthmus, broken only by patrols.

Losses

The scale of the losses is disputed. The often repeated claim that tens of thousands of men were killed on both sides needs correcting, at least as regards the German side. Between 24 July and 10 August the Germans buried 1,709 soldiers in Estonia; together with the missing, their irrecoverable losses are estimated at about 2,500 men, and their total losses, including the wounded, at about 10,000. The Estonian regiments and the foreign volunteer units suffered particularly heavily: the Nederland brigade was reduced to the size of a regiment, and the Flemish Langemarck battalion to a reinforced company.

Soviet losses are much less well documented. In Soviet times the battle of the Tannenberg Line was not written about at all, and the archival data available today cover individual months or units. The Estonian historian Mart Laar estimated them at about 35,000 killed and missing and about 135,000 wounded and sick; many researchers consider these figures inflated. Returns by the Leningrad Front staff give, for the whole front in August 1944, 1,702 killed, 6,538 wounded and 196 missing – but they do not cover July, when the heaviest casualties were suffered. What is beyond dispute is that Soviet losses were many times higher than German ones: armies that went into the attack on 24 July several tens of thousands strong had only a few thousand men fit for combat in the front line by the end of the month.

What followed

The front in the Sinimäed hills held until mid-September. In August Estonian volunteers from the Finnish 200th Infantry Regiment returned to Estonia and, together with conscript units, defended the front on the Emajõgi river near Tartu. The country’s fate, however, was decided by what happened elsewhere. At the turn of July and August Soviet units reached the Gulf of Riga near Tukums and cut off Army Group North for several weeks; on 4 September Finland ceased fighting the USSR. On 14 September three Baltic fronts advanced on Riga, and Hitler at last agreed to evacuate Estonia. On 18 September Army Detachment Narwa abandoned the Tannenberg Line without a fight. The same day Otto Tief’s government was formed in Tallinn, trying to proclaim Estonia’s independence in the interval between the Germans’ departure and the arrival of the Red Army. On 22 September Soviet troops entered Tallinn, and some members of the government, including Tief himself, were arrested; others managed to escape to Sweden. Some of the Estonian soldiers from the Tannenberg Line were killed in the retreat or taken prisoner; others went into the forests and joined the “Forest Brothers”, who went on fighting Soviet rule for years.

The Battle of the Tannenberg Line was one of the few cases in 1944 in which the Wehrmacht halted the Red Army for any length of time. Some Finnish and Estonian historians believe that the defence of the isthmus helped Finland to negotiate an armistice rather than a capitulation. In independent Estonia the battle became part of national memory – the site of annual veterans’ gatherings, commemorated among other things in the 2015 film 1944 – and at the same time a subject of controversy: the presence at these ceremonies of former Waffen-SS soldiers from abroad and slogans about a “fight for freedom” in German uniform have provoked protests in Russia and criticism in Western Europe.