The Białystok–Minsk pocket

On Saturday 28 June 1941, the seventh day of the German–Soviet war, at about five in the afternoon, tanks of the German 20th Panzer Division broke into Minsk, the capital of the Byelorussian SSR, from the north-west. The city, bombed and burning for several days, fell almost without a fight. The same day the leading units of the second German armoured group were approaching Minsk from the south, while German infantry were linking up east of Białystok. The main forces of the Soviet Western Front – three armies which only a week earlier had stood on a border running through the lands of pre-war Poland – found themselves encircled, cut up into several pockets between Białystok, Wołkowysk (Vawkavysk), Nowogródek (Navahrudak) and Minsk.

Popular chronologies speak under this date of a “huge German encirclement of 300,000 Red Army soldiers near Minsk and Białystok”. The figure is close to the truth, but it belongs to later days: on 28 June the pocket was only just closing, and fighting with the encircled forces went on until 8–9 July. Only then did the command of the German Army Group Centre announce the capture of just under 290,000 prisoners, and the Wehrmacht high command’s communiqué of 11 July almost 324,000. It was the first of the great encirclement battles of 1941 and the first great defeat of the Red Army in the war that the Russians themselves later called the Great Patriotic War.

The trap of the Białystok salient

The shape of the battlefield was determined by the partition of Poland in 1939. After the Soviet invasion of Poland the German–Soviet border ran along the Bug and the Narew, and then in an arc west of Grodno towards East Prussia. Białystok, Grodno, Łomża and Brest ended up on the Soviet side and in the autumn of 1939 were incorporated into the Byelorussian SSR. This created the so-called Białystok salient – a wedge of Soviet territory driven between East Prussia and the General Government. For the Red Army it was a convenient springboard for a strike into the Germans’ rear; for the Germans it was a trap that needed only to be closed at its base.

In the salient and behind it stood the troops of the Western Special Military District (PL), which was renamed the Western Front on the outbreak of war. It had been commanded since June 1940 by General of the Army Dmitry Pavlov, a hero of the Spanish Civil War and former head of the Red Army’s armoured forces. In his first echelon he had three armies: the 3rd Army near Grodno, the strongest, the 10th Army, in the salient itself, and the 4th Army near Brest; the new 13th Army existed only as a headquarters. The front numbered some 670,000 men, nearly 2,900 tanks (only some of them serviceable and few of them modern) and more than 1,700 aircraft. These figures, however, did not reflect its real strength: the mechanised corps were still forming and lacked lorries, communications and spare parts, many divisions were far from their designated positions, and most of the fortifications of the new border, the so-called Molotov Line, had not yet been armed.

Facing them was the strongest of the three German army groups – Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre, supported by Luftflotte 2. Its plan was a classic double envelopment. From the north, from the Suwałki area, Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 was to strike through southern Lithuania; from the south, on both sides of Brest, Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s Panzer Group 2. The two were to meet in the Minsk area, some 300 kilometres from the border. Meanwhile the infantry of the 9th and 4th Armies was to close a smaller, inner ring east of Białystok.

The first days: a front without communications

The German attack on the USSR at dawn on 22 June caught the Western Front just as the directive putting the troops on alert was reaching the headquarters; many units did not receive it before the first shots. On the evening of 21 June, according to the account of his deputy, Lieutenant General Ivan Boldin, Pavlov was watching an operetta at the House of Officers in Minsk and did not interrupt the performance despite reports of German troop movements on the Bug. In the first hours the Luftwaffe bombed the district’s airfields, where aircraft stood in neat rows; according to Soviet figures the front’s air force lost more than 700 machines on the first day, most of them on the ground. The commander of the district’s air force, Major General Ivan Kopets (PL), shot himself in his office on 22 June (according to some sources, the following day). German bombing and saboteurs cut the telephone lines, and radio sets were few and their operators untrained. For the first few days the headquarters in Minsk had almost no idea where its armies were.

On the evening of 22 June Moscow, unaware of the situation, issued Directive No. 3, signed by the People’s Commissar of Defence, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, and the Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, which ordered an offensive to carry the fighting onto enemy territory – in the case of the Western Front, towards Suwałki. Pavlov therefore sent Boldin to lead the 6th and 11th Mechanised Corps and the 6th Cavalry Corps in a counter-attack near Grodno. The attack of 23–25 June was badly organised, the tanks ran out of fuel and ammunition, and the German air force ruled the skies; the 6th Mechanised Corps, one of the best equipped in the Red Army, lost almost all its equipment. The counter-attack did delay the Germans, but it tied down the front’s best forces in the western part of the salient while the armoured pincers reached far to the east.

On the southern flank, Major General Alexander Korobkov’s 4th Army fell apart on the very first day. Guderian crossed the Bug on both sides of Brest; the city fell on 22 June, although the garrison of the fortress held out for another week and isolated groups for longer still (the defence of Brest Fortress). Guderian’s corps drove along the highway through Kobryń and Słonim to Baranowicze (Baranavichy), which they took on 26 June. In the north Hoth crossed the Neman at Alytus; on 24 June his divisions entered Wilno and then swung south-east through Mołodeczno (Maladzyechna) towards Minsk. As early as 25 June the first German tanks stood on its approaches.

Retreat and the closing of the pocket

On the evening of 25 June, when the German XLVII Corps had driven in between Słonim and Wołkowysk, Pavlov ordered the troops to withdraw from the salient behind the Shchara river. It was already too late. Most units could not disengage from the enemy, and those that did withdraw went on foot, without fuel or transport, under constant air attack; the roads were choked with columns of troops, abandoned equipment and refugees. On 27 June Soviet troops abandoned Białystok, and the Germans entered it. On 28 June they took Wołkowysk, and the infantry of the German 9th and 4th Armies closed the inner ring east of Białystok. The encircled forces were cut into a smaller Białystok pocket, which held mainly the 10th Army, and a larger pocket in the forests between Wołkowysk, Słonim and Nowogródek, reaching as far as the Naliboki Forest, with the remnants of the 3rd and 10th Armies and parts of the 4th and 13th.

Minsk was defended by two rifle corps, under the orders of the headquarters of Lieutenant General Pyotr Filatov’s 13th Army from 27 June. Timoshenko ordered that the city not be given up even if encircled. On the afternoon of 28 June units of Hoth’s 20th Panzer Division broke into Minsk from the north-west; Guderian’s divisions, which had taken Stołpce (Stowbtsy) the day before and Dzerzhinsk on 28 June, were approaching the city from the south. The dates for the fall of Minsk and the closing of the outer ring vary in the literature – from 26 June to 1 July – because the leading units of the two panzer groups made contact before a continuous encirclement front had formed. German war diaries and Russian studies give 28 June as the date the city fell. In the space of a week the German tanks had covered over 300 kilometres. The Soviet Information Bureau did not report the loss of Minsk.

Attempts to break the ring from outside, made in the last days of June by the 20th Mechanised Corps and the 4th Airborne Corps, failed. The encircled divisions tried to break out eastwards; some succeeded, especially where the German infantry, marching on foot behind the tanks, lacked the strength to seal the pockets tight. Boldin, with a small group, marched behind German lines for a month and a half and in August led more than 1,600 soldiers out near Smolensk. Organised resistance in the pockets ceased on 8–9 July.

Moscow faces defeat

The news of the fall of Minsk reached the Kremlin late and shook Joseph Stalin. On 29 June he went with members of the Politburo to the People’s Commissariat of Defence and, having learned nothing certain about the situation of the Western Front, provoked a violent quarrel with Timoshenko and Zhukov. According to the memoirs of Anastas Mikoyan, on leaving he remarked that Lenin had left them a great inheritance and that they, his heirs, had “squandered” it all (he used a far cruder word). He then shut himself away in his dacha at Kuntsevo. On 30 June members of the leadership, with Vyacheslav Molotov and Lavrentiy Beria, came to him with a plan for a State Defence Committee, which Stalin was to chair; he did not address the nation until 3 July.

On 30 June Pavlov was removed from his post and summoned to Moscow. The front was taken over briefly by Lieutenant General Andrei Yeremenko, and on 2 July by Timoshenko himself. Looking for culprits, Stalin turned his anger on the front command: Pavlov was arrested on 4 July, and with him his chief of staff, Major General Vladimir Klimovskikh, the head of signals, the head of artillery, Korobkov and several other generals. NKVD interrogators first tried to extract from them a confession to a “military conspiracy”; in the end the court convicted them of cowardice, dereliction of duty and the collapse of command. Pavlov, Klimovskikh, Major General Andrei Grigoryev and Korobkov were shot on 22 July 1941, and Stalin’s order announcing the sentence was read out to the officer corps of the whole army as a warning.

The reckoning

According to Russian statistical compilations, the Western Front lost 417,790 men between 22 June and 9 July, of whom 341,073 were killed, missing or taken prisoner; these figures do not include the NKVD border troops or reservists who had not yet reached their units. The German side gave figures for prisoners and booty that depended on the day and the scope of the tally: Bock’s order of 8 July spoke of 287,704 prisoners, 2,585 tanks and 1,449 guns, the Wehrmacht high command’s communiqué of 11 July of 323,898 prisoners, 3,332 tanks and 1,809 guns. Historians usually estimate the number taken prisoner at 290,000–330,000. German losses were many times smaller, though not negligible: the fighting against encircled troops, who often fought to the end, was costly, especially for the infantry. The front’s air force lost, according to various tallies, from about 1,200 to more than 1,600 aircraft.

Those taken prisoner faced a fate that set this war apart from the campaigns in the West. Prisoners were driven on foot to makeshift camps where hunger reigned and there was a lack of water, shelter and medical care. At the Drozdy camp near Minsk, in July, the Germans crammed tens of thousands of prisoners and men from the city into an open field; selected groups, above all Jews, commissars and some of the intelligentsia, were shot. According to historians’ estimates, most of the Soviet prisoners taken in 1941 died in German captivity – of hunger, disease, exhaustion and at the hands of their guards – a large proportion of them before the end of the first winter of the war.

Crimes behind the front

Behind the retreating Soviet front the same thing happened as throughout the belt of lands seized in 1939–1940. The prisons in the former Polish north-eastern borderlands were overcrowded – arrests and the June deportations had continued until the last days before the war. On 24 June Beria ordered that political prisoners who could not be evacuated be shot. In the area the battle passed through, whether the order was carried out depended on the speed of the German advance: in Brest, Grodno, Białystok, Wołkowysk and Słonim the guards fled and the prisoners walked free, although in Grodno several dozen inmates were killed first. Further east the NKVD drove prisoners on foot in so-called death marches. A column from the prison at Berezwecz near Głębokie (Hlybokaye), driven towards Vitebsk, was massacred on 28 June – the day Minsk fell – near the Taklinovo collective farm; Soviet sources speak of 714 victims, Polish estimates of about 1,000–2,000. Prisoners from Minsk, among them many Poles arrested in the borderlands, were driven towards Mogilev on 24–27 June; more than a thousand of them were shot in the forests near Cherven (the Minsk–Cherven death road). The largest of these crimes took place outside the area of the battle, in Lwów (Lviv), where between 3,500 and 7,000 prisoners were killed by 28 June. Historians most often estimate the total number of victims of the NKVD prisoner massacres in the former eastern lands of the Second Polish Republic at 20,000–30,000; NKVD documents give a lower figure, about 10,000, but their reliability is sometimes questioned.

Together with the Wehrmacht came units whose task was to fight the “enemies” of the new order: Einsatzgruppe B of the Security Police and the SD, and battalions of the Order Police. In Białystok, however, the first great crime was committed not by the Einsatzgruppen but by the men of Police Battalion 309, who entered the city on 27 June together with the 221st Security Division; Wehrmacht soldiers also took part. A sweep of the city turned into a pogrom in the Jewish quarter. According to estimates accepted in the literature, between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews were murdered that day; several hundred people – most often given as 700–800, by some accounts as many as 2,000 – were herded into the Great Synagogue and burned alive. The synagogue’s Polish caretaker, Józef Bartoszko, opened a back door and saved a dozen or several dozen people. German reports presented these events as fighting against partisans and “snipers”. In July the executions in and around Białystok were taken over by Einsatzgruppe B and the battalions of Police Regiment Centre, and in the small towns of the Łomża and Białystok region there were murders and pogroms involving the local population, acting at German instigation or with German consent (the massacres of Jews in Białystok). Soviet and German crimes struck the same towns and villages in the same weeks.

Its place in the war

The Białystok–Minsk pocket was the first great success of Operation Barbarossa and seemed to confirm all the assumptions of the German planners: the Red Army was to be destroyed near the border before it could withdraw into the interior. In less than a week German tanks had covered a third of the way to Moscow. The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, noted in his diary on 3 July that it would be no exaggeration to say that the campaign against Russia had been won within fourteen days. The battle, however, also revealed tensions in the German command. Adolf Hitler feared that the panzer divisions would get too far ahead of the infantry and leave gaps in the ring; Guderian and Hoth wanted to press on east before the Russians could organise a new defence. For nearly a week the panzer divisions had to guard the pocket, and their further advance began only at the start of July – towards the Dnieper and Smolensk, where another great encirclement battle was fought in July.

For the Soviet side it was a catastrophe comparable only to the later defeats at Kiev and Vyazma. The Western Front, covering the shortest route to Moscow, ceased to exist and had to be rebuilt from armies brought up from the interior. At the same time the Germans’ hope that resistance would collapse once the border armies had been smashed was not fulfilled: the Red Army fielded army after army, and soldiers who slipped out of the pockets joined them or the first partisan units in the Belarusian forests. The execution of Pavlov and his generals was meant to show that the commanders, not Stalin’s pre-war decisions, were responsible for the defeat; only in 1957 did a court quash the sentence, and later historiography concluded that the orders Pavlov received in June 1941 had been impossible to carry out.

The lands across which the battle passed changed occupiers for the second time in two years. In the summer the Germans detached Białystok and its surroundings as the Białystok District (Bezirk Bialystok), placed under the administration of East Prussia, and Minsk became the centre of the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia. Ghettos were set up in both cities as early as July and August, and the series of executions of the first days of the war turned into the systematic extermination of the Jews in the occupied territories of the USSR.