The capture of Brześć

On 28 July 1944 troops of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 1st Belorussian Front took Brześć (Brest) – a city on the Bug which until September 1939 had been the capital of the Polesie Voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic, officially named Brześć nad Bugiem (until 1923, Brześć Litewski, i.e. Brest-Litovsk). For three days before it fell, encircled units of the German XX Army Corps held out near the city; when the ring tightened, their remnants broke out to the west with heavy losses. The capture of Brześć ended the fighting for Belarus in Operation Bagration and opened the Red Army’s road to Warsaw through Podlasie.

Between Polesie and the Lublin region

After the liberation of Minsk on 3 July and the destruction of the German forces in the pocket east of the city, the right wing of the 1st Belorussian Front advanced west through Baranowicze (Baranavichy), taken on 8 July, and Polesie. On 14 July the 61st Army, supported by the Dnieper Military Flotilla, took Pińsk (Pinsk), and by 16 July the right wing of the front had reached the line Świsłocz–Prużana–the western outskirts of Pińsk. The vast Polesie marshes, which at the start of the offensive had separated the front’s two wings, were left behind, and the front line was almost halved in length.

It was then that the front’s left wing, which had so far stood still, concentrated in Volhynia around Kovel, went into action. On 18 July the Lublin–Brest offensive began. The attack struck the weakened junction of the German Army Groups Centre and North Ukraine, both of which were then commanded by Field Marshal Walter Model, while further south the 1st Ukrainian Front’s Lwów–Sandomierz offensive, under way for five days, was tying down the German reserves. The 47th Army and General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army broke through the defences and on 20–21 July reached the Bug – the line Moscow regarded as the border of the USSR. Behind them came the 2nd Tank Army and General Zygmunt Berling’s Polish First Army, whose first units crossed the Bug between 20 and 22 July.

From then on the front’s left wing operated in two directions. The main forces went straight west: they took Chełm on 22 July and Lublin on 24 July, where on the outskirts Soviet troops came upon the camp at Majdanek, abandoned by the Germans. The northern group – the 70th and 47th Armies and General Vladimir Kryukov’s cavalry-mechanised group – turned north-west towards Biała Podlaska and Siedlce to cut off the Germans at Brześć from their line of retreat to the west.

The Brześć pocket

Brześć was defended as one of the German “fortified places” meant to halt the Soviet advance. In and around the city stood units of the XX Army Corps of the German Second Army – Korps-Abteilung E, a division-sized group formed from the remnants of three previously shattered infantry divisions, the 203rd Security Division and smaller units. Three Soviet armies were converging on Brześć: from the north General Aleksandr Luchinsky’s 28th Army, reinforced with a mechanised corps, a tank corps and a guards cavalry corps; from the east General Pavel Belov’s 61st Army; and from the south, across the Bug, General Vasily Popov’s 70th Army. On 20 July the right wing of the front took Kobryń (Kobryn), and according to Russian studies the ring around the German forces in the Brześć area was closed on 25 July.

The Germans tried to hold open a corridor. On 28 July the 102nd Infantry Division attacked towards Brześć from the west to ease the withdrawal of the encircled troops. That same day the remnants of the Brześć group broke through the ring, and Soviet troops took the city and the fortress. German losses are given variously. According to Soviet figures some 7,000 German dead were left on the battlefield and only about 110 men were taken prisoner – which shows that some of the encircled troops managed to break out; other studies speak of some 17,000 killed and captured in all. The shattered German formations fell back towards Siedlce, where, together with SS divisions brought in from other sectors, they held up Kryukov’s group for several days; Siedlce fell on 31 July.

Moscow honoured the capture of the city in the usual way: on the evening of 28 July a salute was fired in the capital, and several dozen units later received the honorific title “Brest”.

A city of three occupations

The Brześć that the Red Army took had changed hands an exceptional number of times in five years of war. In September 1939 the fortress was defended for four days by the Polish garrison of Brigadier General Konstanty Plisowski against Heinz Guderian’s panzer corps; on 17 September the defenders withdrew south. A few days later the Germans handed the city over to the Red Army, and the meeting of the two invaders’ armies culminated on 22 September in a joint ceremony handing over the city. Brześć was incorporated into the Belorussian SSR as the seat of a new oblast. In 1939–1941 the NKVD arrested thousands of inhabitants, above all Poles, and deported them deep into the USSR, and the Brześć prison became one of the largest in western Belarus.

On 22 June 1941, in the first hours of the German attack on the USSR, Brześć found itself in the front line. The city fell the same day, but the garrison of the fortress held out for about a week, and isolated groups for longer still. The Germans incorporated Brześć into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. In December 1941 they set up a ghetto in the city for its Jewish inhabitants – in 1931 Jews accounted for some 21,000 of the city’s 50,000 people. On 15 and 16 October 1942 the ghetto was liquidated: most of its inhabitants, an estimated 16,000 people, were shot in the forest near Bronna Góra (PL) and in the city itself. When the Red Army entered Brześć in July 1944, only a few dozen Jews had survived there, according to known accounts.

Place in the war

The fall of Brześć ended the pursuit across Belarus. Three years earlier it was from here, on the Bug, that the divisions had set out east which encircled the Soviet Western Front at Białystok and Minsk; in the summer of 1944 the Red Army returned to its starting line of 22 June 1941 along the whole length of Belarus. Two weeks earlier Wilno (Vilnius) had fallen, and the Polish Committee of National Liberation, subordinate to Stalin, had been set up in Moscow and had settled in Lublin.

For the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front the capture of Brześć meant that the right wing could advance further west, towards Siedlce, Węgrów and the Bug near Serock, and the left wing towards the Vistula. At the end of July the Polish First Army reached the Vistula near Dęblin and Puławy and, in the last days of July and early August, tried unsuccessfully to cross the river; in August its units entered the bridgehead at Magnuszew captured by Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army. On 31 July the spearheads of the 2nd Tank Army stood before Praga, Warsaw’s right-bank district, and on 1 August the uprising broke out in Warsaw.

Polish Brześć never returned to Poland. As early as 27 July 1944 representatives of the PKWN signed a secret agreement in Moscow accepting essentially the Curzon Line as Poland’s eastern border, and the border treaty of 16 August 1945 left the city in the Belorussian SSR, right on the border, opposite Terespol. Most of the Polish inhabitants of Brześć and Polesie left for the far side of the Bug in 1944–1946 under the so-called repatriation, and Home Army soldiers from these lands who came out of hiding were disarmed and arrested by the NKVD. The ruins of the fortress, where Soviet soldiers had held out in 1941, were made by the Soviet authorities into one of the main memorial sites of the “Great Patriotic War”; in 1965 the fortress received the title of Hero Fortress, and in 1971 a large memorial complex was opened on its grounds.