Battle of Kiev (1941)

The Battle of Kiev was the largest battle of encirclement in the history of warfare. For more than two and a half months in the summer of 1941 the Soviet Southwestern Front under Colonel General Mikhail Kirponos defended the capital of Soviet Ukraine and the line of the Dnieper. In July, in the first weeks after the German attack on the USSR, German panzer divisions came within a dozen or so kilometres of the city but failed to take it on the move. In August Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South smashed Soviet armies at Uman and reached the Dnieper along its whole length from Kiev to the Black Sea, while Kirponos’s troops, still holding on around Kiev, found themselves in a huge salient. It was then that Adolf Hitler, against the wishes of his generals, who wanted to march on Moscow, sent Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s panzer group south, into the rear of this salient. From the south, from the bridgehead at Kremenchuk, Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s panzer group came out to meet it.

Until the very last moment Joseph Stalin refused to allow Kiev to be abandoned. He dismissed the Chief of the General Staff, who had advised giving up the city, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Southwestern Direction, Marshal Semyon Budyonny, who had asked for permission to retreat. On 15–16 September the pincers of Guderian and Kleist met at Lokhvytsia, some 200 kilometres east of Kiev, trapping four Soviet armies and the front headquarters in the pocket. On 19 September the Germans entered Kiev, on 20 September Kirponos was killed trying to break out of the encirclement, and by 26 September the fighting in the pocket had died down. The Germans announced that they had taken 665,000 prisoners. It was the Wehrmacht’s greatest single success in the east – and at the same time two months that it would lack before Moscow in the autumn.

Name and dates

In Germany it was called the battle of encirclement at Kiev (Kesselschlacht bei Kiew); Soviet and Russian historiography speaks of the Kiev strategic defensive operation, which comprises the defensive operations at Korosten, on the approaches to Kiev and at Uman, together with the Kiev–Pryluky operation of September. Many Western studies, and some other accounts, limit the battle to the pocket, that is, to the period from the second half of August, when Guderian turned south, until 26 September. Russian tallies adopt the framework of 7 July to 26 September 1941: on 7 July, after the end of the frontier fighting in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, the troops of the Southwestern Front were falling back to the old pre-1939 border, and the German 11th Panzer Division entered Berdychiv and broke through the fortifications of the so-called Stalin Line. On 26 September the last organised fighting in the encirclement ceased, and the Soviet command abandoned further attempts to come to the aid of the encircled troops.

The broader framework, from 7 July to 26 September, is the more apt, because only within it can the whole battle be seen: the defence of Kiev itself, which lasted more than two months, and the encirclement that was its tragic conclusion. The battlefield covered central Ukraine on both banks of the Dnieper over a width of some 300 kilometres, and in that time the Soviet forces fell back some 600 kilometres.

The dates of individual episodes also vary, above all the closing of the pocket. On the evening of 14 September the first small groups of the two German pincers made contact; on 15 September, according to German and Russian studies, the spearheads of Lieutenant General Walter Model’s 3rd Panzer Division from the north and Major General Hans-Valentin Hube’s 16th Panzer Division from the south linked up; and by 16 September the ring was continuous. The pocket can therefore be regarded as closed on 15–16 September.

Background

The Southwestern Front after the defeats of June

Directive No. 21 of December 1940 sent Army Group South towards Kiev and Ukraine west of the Dnieper. For Hitler, Ukraine was the granary and industrial base of the USSR, and Kiev the country’s third-largest city, the capital of the republic and a hub of roads and railways on the Dnieper. Rundstedt had Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau’s 6th Army, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel’s 17th Army and Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group, and in Romania the 11th Army together with allied Romanian, Hungarian and Slovak forces, joined from August by Italian ones.

Facing them was the strongest of the Soviet fronts. The Kiev Special Military District, which Kirponos had taken over in January 1941, was renamed the Southwestern Front on the day of the invasion. According to various calculations it numbered 860,000–900,000 soldiers and several thousand tanks, including a considerable share of the Red Army’s modern T-34s and KVs, because Moscow expected the main German blow to fall precisely on Ukraine. Kirponos, who as late as 1939 had been commandant of the infantry school in Kazan, had made a meteoric career after the Great Purge, which had devastated the army’s command cadre. In the Winter War he commanded the 70th Rifle Division, which in March 1940 crossed the ice of the Gulf of Finland into the rear of Viipuri (Vyborg), and for this he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. In less than a year and a half he had risen from a division to the most important military district in the country, but he had never commanded a front before.

In the last days of June Kirponos threw his mechanised corps into a counter-attack in Volhynia. In the battle around Dubno, Lutsk and Brody, the largest tank battle of the first weeks of the war, Soviet tanks delayed Kleist’s advance by a week, but most of them were lost, fighting without reconnaissance, communications or air cover. On 30 June the Germans took Lwów (Lviv), and the Stavka ordered Kirponos to withdraw by 9 July to the fortifications of the old border at Korosten, Novohrad-Volynskyi (Zviahel) and Latychiv. The retreat came too late. On 7 July the German 11th Panzer Division was in Berdychiv, and a wide gap opened between Major General Mikhail Potapov’s Soviet 5th Army in the north and the 6th Army in the south, leading along the highway through Zhytomyr straight to Kiev. On 3 July, in a radio broadcast, Stalin called for every inch of land to be defended and for everything that could not be evacuated to be destroyed.

The Kiev Fortified District

The city was shielded from the west by the Kiev Fortified District, built from 1929 onwards as part of the fortifications on the old border. Along a front of some 85 kilometres, from the Dnieper north of the city, along the River Irpin, to the Dnieper in the south, ran a belt of bunkers between one and several kilometres deep. After the border moved west in 1939 the fortifications were partly disarmed, and in June 1941 they were hastily manned again. The inhabitants dug anti-tank ditches and built new defence lines; according to Soviet figures more than 160,000 people worked on them every day. People’s militia (opolcheniye) units and destruction battalions were formed, which according to Soviet calculations enrolled several tens of thousands of Kievans. Factories, offices and part of the population were sent east. Responsible for the defence on behalf of the party was a member of the front’s Military Council, the First Secretary of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev.

Course of the battle

Before Kiev in July

General Eberhard von Mackensen’s III Motorised Corps from Kleist’s group drove through the gap between the Soviet armies. On 8–9 July the Germans took Zhytomyr, and on 11 July the reconnaissance units of the 13th Panzer Division reached the Irpin, less than 20 kilometres from Kiev. Panic broke out in the city, but the garrison – according to Western studies several rifle divisions, an airborne brigade, NKVD units, military-school cadets and nearly 30,000 militiamen – manned the fortifications.

The question of an assault on the move was decided by the high command. Rundstedt and Reichenau were initially in favour, but Hitler feared that the tanks would bleed to death in street fighting. During the night of 9–10 July the Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, forbade in Hitler’s name the use of panzer divisions against the city other than for reconnaissance and screening. Encircling the Soviet armies west of the Dnieper was more important.

At the same time Kirponos, carrying out the Stavka’s orders, struck at the flanks of the German wedge. From 10–11 July Potapov’s 5th Army, with the remnants of three mechanised corps, attacked southwards from the Korosten area across the Zhytomyr highway, while Lieutenant General Fyodor Kostenko’s 26th Army struck from the south. The counter-attacks cost the last of the Soviet tanks – the three mechanised corps of the 5th Army were left with a few dozen – but they tied down the German 6th Army, which Rundstedt had to stretch northwards against the 5th Army. Potapov’s troops, backing onto the marshes of Polesia, remained a thorn in the left flank of Army Group South and the right flank of Army Group Centre throughout the summer.

On 10 July Stalin set up the command of the Southwestern Direction under Budyonny, to which the Southwestern and Southern Fronts were subordinated. The important decisions were made in Moscow all the same.

Uman and the advance to the Dnieper

In the second half of July Kleist’s main forces turned south-east. The German 17th Army broke through the front at Vinnytsia, and the panzer group swung round through Bila Tserkva to outflank from the east the Soviet 6th and 12th Armies, which were falling back from Galicia and Podolia. On 25 July the Stavka transferred them to the Southern Front and for a long time would not allow them to give ground to the south-east. On 2–3 August the ring closed around Uman. By 8 August the Germans had destroyed some 20 divisions in the pocket and, by their own count, taken 103,000 prisoners, including both army commanders, Lieutenant General Ivan Muzychenko (PL) and Major General Pavel Ponedelin.

The defeat at Uman opened Rundstedt’s way to the lower Dnieper. In the second half of August his troops took Mykolaiv and Kherson and seized bridgeheads on the left bank at Kremenchuk, in Dnipropetrovsk and at Beryslav. The Southwestern Front now stood along the Dnieper from Kiev to Cherkasy and held on the right bank only Kiev itself with its fortifications. In the north its 5th Army and the armies of the neighbouring Central Front defended Polesia and the Gomel area. The whole Soviet front formed an ever deeper salient jutting westwards between two German army groups.

Kiev holds out

At the end of July the Soviet command realised how dangerous the front’s position was. On 29 July the Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army Georgy Zhukov – as he himself recalled – presented Stalin with his assessment that the weakest point of the Soviet defence was the junction with Army Group Centre in the Gomel area, and that the Germans could strike from there into the rear of the Southwestern Front. He proposed withdrawing the troops behind the Dnieper. Asked what would become of Kiev, he replied that it would have to be given up. Stalin called this nonsense, and Zhukov lost his post (formally on 30 July) to Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov and took over the Reserve Front. Kiev was to be defended like Leningrad, at any cost.

Meanwhile the 37th Army was formed for the immediate defence of the city under Major General Andrei Vlasov, who took command at the beginning of August. At the turn of July and August the infantry of the German 6th Army, which Reichenau had at last ordered to take Kiev, attacked the fortifications from the west and south. At the beginning of August the Germans broke into the southern sector of the defences, into the woods and suburbs on the southern edge of the city a few kilometres from the centre, while the Soviet bunkers fought on surrounded. On 7–8 August Kirponos threw fresh forces into a counter-attack, among them Colonel Alexander Rodimtsev’s 5th Airborne Brigade. By mid-August the defence line had been restored. According to Russian studies the fighting for the Kiev Fortified District alone cost the Red Army some 48,000 and the Wehrmacht some 14,000 killed, wounded and missing.

In the end the attack was called off by Hitler himself. The supplement to his Directive No. 34 of 12 August forbade an assault: Kiev was to be destroyed with incendiary bombs and artillery fire as soon as sufficient means were available. The front before the city fell silent for more than a month. In the north, by contrast, the German 6th Army and Colonel General Maximilian von Weichs’s 2nd Army, advancing from Gomel, pushed back Potapov’s 5th Army. On 8 August the Germans took Korosten, and on 19 August the Stavka allowed the 5th Army to withdraw behind the Dnieper. The retreat was hurried, and on 23 August a detachment of the German 11th Panzer Division captured intact the long wooden bridge over the Dnieper at Okuninovo, a few dozen kilometres north of Kiev. Soviet ground-attack aircraft soon burned it, cutting off for a few days the Germans who had already crossed the river, but neither the Soviet divisions nor the Dnieper Military Flotilla managed to eliminate the bridgehead. Kiev was now threatened from the north as well.

Guderian’s turn

The gravest threat, however, came from another direction. For weeks a dispute over the direction of the advance had been going on in the German command. Halder, the commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, wanted to throw everything at Moscow. Hitler considered Ukraine, the Donbas and the Crimea more important. On 21 August he settled the dispute by order: Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group and Weichs’s 2nd Army were to turn south, into the rear of the Southwestern Front, and together with Army Group South destroy it east of the Dnieper. On 23 August Guderian, sent by Bock and Halder to Hitler’s headquarters to argue for the advance on Moscow, allowed himself to be persuaded and returned with an order that he set about carrying out with all his energy.

On 25 August Guderian’s tanks set off south from the Starodub area, and on 26 August Model’s 3rd Panzer Division captured intact a bridge several hundred metres long over the Desna at Novhorod-Siverskyi. In their path stood the newly formed Bryansk Front of Lieutenant General Andrei Yeremenko, who had promised Stalin that he would smash “that scoundrel Guderian”. The Stavka believed that Guderian was heading for Bryansk and then on to Moscow from the south-west, and took his turn towards Ukraine for a feint. Yeremenko’s counter-attacks at the turn of August and September and more than four thousand Soviet air sorties against the German columns between 29 August and 4 September delayed the Germans by a few days but did not stop them. The weak 40th Army of Major General Kuzma Podlas, formed in mid-August to block Guderian’s path south, was thrown back eastwards by the German panzer divisions. The 21st Army, retreating from Gomel, was cut in two and pushed deep into the emerging pocket.

At the beginning of September the German tanks crossed the River Seym and approached Konotop. On 7 September Kirponos asked for permission to withdraw the troops of his northern wing behind the Desna, and Budyonny asked for reserves or permission to retreat. The Stavka agreed only to the withdrawal of the 5th Army and the right wing of the 37th Army behind the Desna, facing north. On 8–9 September the German 2nd Army took Chernihiv, and on 10 September Model’s 3rd Panzer Division entered Romny, deep in the rear of the Southwestern Front.

The pincers close

The other arm of the pincers was being prepared by Army Group South. On 31 August the German 17th Army seized a bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnieper at Derievka, south of Kremenchuk, and in the first days of September enlarged it, beating off counter-attacks by the weak Soviet 38th Army of Major General Nikolai Feklenko (PL). On 8 September, at a conference at Rundstedt’s headquarters attended by Brauchitsch and Halder, it was decided that it would not be infantry but Kleist’s panzer group that would advance north from the bridgehead, towards Lubny and Romny, to meet Guderian. On 11 September Hube’s 16th Panzer Division crossed the Dnieper, and on 12 September General Werner Kempf’s XLVIII Motorised Corps struck north over sodden roads into the rear of the Southwestern Front. It smashed the divisions of the 38th Army standing in its way and within two days reached Khorol.

In Moscow, meanwhile, politics was deciding matters. On 11 September Budyonny telegraphed Stalin that only strong reserves could prevent the encirclement of the front, and that if there were none the troops must be withdrawn eastwards to the River Psel at once. That same day Stalin spoke to Kirponos by teleprinter. The front commander assured him that he was not thinking of retreat, but asked for reinforcements. Stalin forbade him to abandon Kiev or to blow up the bridges without the Stavka’s permission. On 12 September Budyonny was recalled, and command of the Direction was taken over by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, who arrived at the headquarters in Poltava on 13 September. Some studies give the date of Budyonny’s recall as 11 or 13 September.

On 13 September a small battle group of the 3rd Panzer Division – a few tanks, armoured cars and a couple of guns – took Lokhvytsia and its bridge over the Sula. On 14 September Kleist’s spearheads reached Lubny, where they met fierce resistance from NKVD units. Early in the morning of 14 September the front’s chief of staff, Major General Vasily Tupikov, sent Shaposhnikov a telegram: “The beginning of the catastrophe known to you is a matter of a few days.” Shaposhnikov replied that this was panic and demanded that Stalin’s order of 11 September be carried out. On the evening of 14 September small detachments of the two German pincers made first contact in the Lubny area; on 15 September the spearheads of Model’s and Hube’s divisions linked up; and by 16 September the ring was continuous. East of Kiev, in an area of some 20,000 square kilometres, the 5th, 21st, 26th and 37th Armies and the headquarters of the Southwestern Front were trapped.

The fall of Kiev and the destruction of the front

On 16 September Timoshenko sent the head of his operations department, Major General Ivan Bagramyan, to the front headquarters at Pyriatyn with a verbal order: abandon Kiev and break out to the Psel. He gave no written order, and Kirponos, mindful of Stalin’s ban, would not act without confirmation from Moscow and asked for it on the morning of 17 September. In the evening, before the reply arrived, he ordered his armies to break out eastwards on his own authority. During the night of 17–18 September Shaposhnikov conveyed the Stavka’s consent, but only to the abandonment of Kiev. The 37th Army withdrew from the city during the night of 18–19 September, blowing up the bridges over the Dnieper behind it. On 19 September divisions of the German XXIX Corps of the 6th Army entered Kiev.

An orderly breakout from the pocket was no longer possible. Without communications, fuel or ammunition, under constant attack from the Luftwaffe, which had complete command of the air, the encircled troops tried to break through in columns and small groups. From outside, the 2nd Cavalry Corps and Soviet tank brigades attacked near Romny. On 18 September they came within a kilometre of the town, where Guderian’s headquarters stood, but were beaten back. On 19 September the pocket broke up into several parts: around Boryspil, where the 37th Army was fighting; near Orzhytsia, where the 26th Army was trapped; and between Pyriatyn and Lokhvytsia, where the remnants of the 5th and 21st Armies were moving with the front headquarters.

On 20 September a column of the headquarters of the Southwestern Front and the 5th Army, numbering some thousand men, several hundred of them officers, ran into the German 3rd Panzer Division near the Drukovshchyna farmstead, some 15 kilometres south-west of Lokhvytsia. The remnants of the column took refuge in the Shumeikovo grove and held out there for several hours. Kirponos was wounded in the leg and shortly afterwards was killed by a mortar fragment. Also killed were a member of the front’s Military Council, the Second Secretary of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, Mikhail Burmistenko, and General Tupikov. Potapov, seriously wounded, was taken prisoner. Groups of the 37th Army held out until 21–23 September, the Pyriatyn group until 25 September, and the last units of the 26th Army near Orzhytsia until 26 September. According to Russian data only about 15,000 men had escaped from the pocket by the beginning of October, among them Kostenko, Vlasov, the commander of the 21st Army Lieutenant General Vasily Kuznetsov, and Bagramyan.

Losses

According to German figures some 665,000 prisoners were taken at Kiev by 26 September, and 884 tanks and more than 3,000 guns were captured or destroyed. Researchers consider this figure inflated: it also included men captured over many weeks across the whole area of the fighting, rear-area troops and militiamen, and, according to some historians, civilian men of military age as well. According to tallies of the Russian General Staff compiled by a team under Colonel General Grigoriy Krivosheev, the Southwestern Front lost 700,544 men in the Kiev defensive operation between 7 July and 26 September, including 616,304 killed, missing and captured and 84,240 wounded and sick. On 1 September the front numbered some 760,000 soldiers, and according to the same data some 452,000 of them were caught in the pocket. Five armies – the 5th, 21st, 26th, 37th and 38th, 43 divisions in all – ceased to exist, and the 40th Army was badly mauled. The defeat surpassed even the destruction of the Western Front at Białystok and Minsk, and the Southwestern Front had to be rebuilt from scratch.

German losses were many times smaller, but heavy. There are no precise tallies for the battle alone, because German medical reports covered whole army groups, and fighting was going on in other sectors at the same time. The infantry of the 6th Army and the panzer divisions, which had been fighting almost without a break since June, suffered most.

Occupation and crimes

For the prisoners from Kiev, captivity usually meant death. Columns of exhausted men were driven on foot to transit camps, where they were held in the open air with almost no food or water. Political commissars and Jews were singled out and shot. In the autumn of 1941 the Germans released some of the prisoners of Ukrainian nationality to their homes, but tens of thousands of others died of hunger, disease and cold by the spring of 1942, like most of the more than three million Soviet prisoners of war taken in 1941.

Kiev, which was to have been razed to the ground, passed into German hands almost untouched, because there was no fighting in the city itself. Soviet sappers had, however, left mined buildings behind, and some of the charges were detonated by radio. On 24 September explosions destroyed buildings on the city’s main street, Khreshchatyk, where German military offices had set up. Fire raged in the centre for several days, killing many Germans and inhabitants and leaving thousands homeless. Although the charges had been laid by Soviet sappers and the NKVD, the German authorities blamed the Jews and made the explosions a pretext for a crime. On 29–30 September Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, assisted by police battalions and Ukrainian auxiliary police, shot 33,771 Kievan Jews in the ravine of Babi Yar, according to its own report. It was one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust. The city, covered by the German Hunger Plan, then lived through two years of occupation, terror and food shortages.

Significance

In terms of the number of soldiers encircled and taken prisoner, the Battle of Kiev has no equal in the history of warfare, and it was the greatest victory of Operation Barbarossa. The Wehrmacht destroyed the strongest Soviet front, captured the capital of Ukraine and opened the way to eastern Ukraine, the Sea of Azov, the Donbas and Kharkiv, which fell on 24 October, and to the Crimea. In Germany the victory strengthened the conviction that the Red Army was on the verge of collapse and that Moscow could be taken before winter. Impressed by the Kiev mines, Hitler subsequently forbade his troops to enter large cities, Moscow and Leningrad among them, and ordered that they be surrounded and destroyed by artillery fire and from the air.

At the same time the battle cost the Germans time. Guderian’s panzer group returned to the Moscow axis only at the end of September, exhausted and with a large proportion of its tanks in need of repair. The offensive against Moscow, Operation Typhoon, began on 30 September and 2 October, and after the great encirclements at Vyazma and Bryansk it bogged down in the autumn mud and frosts. After the war German generals presented the turn towards Kiev as a mistake that had cost them Moscow. Many modern historians judge it more cautiously: without the destruction of the Southwestern Front, Army Group Centre would have marched on Moscow with its right flank exposed.

For the USSR, Kiev was the most terrible defeat of 1941, and it showed how dearly a ban on retreat issued from Moscow against the judgement of the commanders in the field could cost. Stalin did not draw the lesson at once: in the spring of 1942 Soviet armies fell into similar pockets at Kharkiv and on the Kerch Peninsula. Kirponos, acknowledged as a fallen hero, was buried with honours in 1943 in liberated Kiev, which the Red Army recaptured on 6 November 1943. The pocket produced men who went on to play very different roles in the war: Bagramyan rose to the rank of marshal, while Vlasov, taken prisoner on the Volkhov in 1942, became the head of the collaborationist Russian Liberation Army. Despite its losses the Red Army survived, and the weeks Guderian spent in Ukraine became one of the reasons why the Germans ran out of time before Moscow in the autumn.