The capture of Saaremaa

In the last days of November 1944 the struggle ended for Saaremaa – Estonia’s largest island and the Wehrmacht’s last sizeable foothold on Estonian soil. On the night of 23–24 November German warships took off the remnants of the garrison from the ports at the southern tip of the Sõrve peninsula, where it had held out for six weeks on a narrow strip of land reaching out towards Courland. On the morning of 24 November Soviet troops occupied the last positions on the peninsula. This brought to a close the Soviet amphibious operation against the West Estonian Archipelago, and with it the entire offensive in the Baltic states.

Many war chronologies record under 25 November that Soviet troops captured the island of Saaremaa, the last major German outpost in Estonia, crowning the Moonsund operation. Two qualifications are needed. First, the Red Army had already taken most of the island, including its capital, Kuressaare, between 5 and 8 October; in November the fighting was only for the Sõrve peninsula. Second, Soviet historiography takes 24 November as the end of the operation, and the German defenders sailed away on the night of 23–24 November. Estonian studies, on the other hand, state that the last German sub-units left the Sõrve spit (Sõrve säär) on 25 November. The date of 25 November thus marks the final end of the fighting on the island rather than its capture.

An island at the entrance to the Gulf of Riga

Saaremaa (German and Swedish Ösel) covers some 2,700 km² and is Estonia’s largest island. Together with Hiiumaa, Muhu and Vormsi it forms an archipelago that closes off the Gulf of Riga to the west and guards the sea lanes to the Gulf of Finland. The south-westernmost part of the island is the Sõrve peninsula (German Sworbe), about 30 km long and only a few kilometres wide at its narrowest point. Its tip, Cape Sääre, faces the coast of Courland, from which it is separated by the Irbe Strait – the main entrance to the Gulf of Riga.

Both world wars demonstrated the importance of the place. Before 1914 the Russians had built coastal batteries on the peninsula, which the Germans captured only in October 1917. In 1941 the roles were reversed: the Soviet garrison defended Sõrve against the Wehrmacht until 5 October, and the last fighting on the Estonian islands ceased a dozen or so days later. Three years on, the Germans were defending themselves in the same place, partly in trenches and shelters built by the Red Army.

From the landings to the Sõrve line

The Moonsund operation was the final phase of the Soviet offensive in the Baltic states, which had begun on 14 September. After the Red Army entered Tallinn on 22 September and occupied the whole of mainland Estonia within a few days, only the islands remained in German hands. The landings were carried out by the 8th Army of Marshal Leonid Govorov’s Leningrad Front, supported by the ships and aircraft of Admiral Vladimir Tributs’s Baltic Fleet. They involved the 8th Estonian Rifle Corps – made up largely of Estonians evacuated into the interior of the USSR in 1941 and of conscripts called up in the autumn of 1944 – and the 109th Rifle Corps.

On the German side the islands were defended by Lieutenant General Hans Schirmer’s 23rd Infantry Division, dispersed over several islands and reinforced with coastal artillery. The Soviets took Vormsi on 27–28 September, Muhu on 29 September – 1 October and Hiiumaa on 2–3 October, from which the Germans withdrew to Saaremaa. They also blew up the causeway linking Saaremaa with Muhu. The command of Army Group North shipped reinforcements to the island, including elements of the 218th Infantry Division and the 12th Luftwaffe Field Division.

On 5 October Soviet infantry landed on the northern shore of Saaremaa, between Jaani and Keskvere, while simultaneously advancing from the direction of Muhu. The Germans fell back, resisting on successive lines. On the night of 8–9 October, near the village of Tehumardi at the neck of the peninsula, one of the bloodiest battles on the island took place: a column of a Soviet mobile group, which was to cut the Germans off from Sõrve, collided in the dark with retreating German units, and the fighting turned into a chaotic hand-to-hand struggle. The clash halted the Soviet advance for more than a day and allowed the defenders to man the lines on the peninsula. By then the rest of Saaremaa was in Soviet hands.

Six weeks on the peninsula

The Sõrve peninsula proved a hard nut for the Red Army to crack. The narrow isthmus, washed by the sea on both sides, made it impossible to outflank the positions, and the Germans had barred it with several lines of trenches, wire entanglements, minefields and anti-tank ditches, with the strongest fortifications around the village of Kaimri. Soviet studies, following the German term, call these positions the “Irbe shield”, because they covered the entrance to the strait. The attackers faced flat, wooded and marshy terrain in which the German batteries were hard to locate. To direct the fire of their own artillery, the Soviets sent up tethered observation balloons.

The first attempts to break through the defences between 10 and 14 October achieved nothing. An attempt to outflank the positions from the sea ended in tragedy. Before dawn on 12 October the 300th Rifle Regiment of the 7th Estonian Rifle Division landed near the village of Vintri on the eastern shore of the peninsula, behind the German line. The landing force was cut off and destroyed. According to the Estonian historian Peeter Larin, of the roughly 745 soldiers who took part, 575 did not return; other Estonian studies speak of at least 230 killed and 215 taken prisoner. Almost all of them were Estonians.

The next attack began on 19 October. The 249th Estonian Rifle Division attacked in the first echelon, supported by tanks and artillery, with the 131st Rifle Division of the 109th Corps in the second. On 20 October the Soviets broke through the first line and reached the Lõpe–Kaimri position. The Germans, however, strengthened the defence with a grenadier regiment from the 16th Army, heavy artillery, assault guns and, from 23 October, units of the 12th Luftwaffe Field Division. The attack of 24 October, involving the 64th Guards Rifle Division brought over to the island, also stalled and was called off the next day.

The Kriegsmarine played a special role in this fighting. As the defenders had neither strong artillery nor air support, warships firing from the sea made up for what they lacked. In October a squadron under Vice Admiral August Thiele operated off the western shore of the peninsula. On 23 and 24 October the heavy cruiser Lützow shelled Soviet positions and, according to German accounts, helped to repulse the last October attack. After that a relative calm settled on the front at Kaimri for several weeks, broken by artillery fire and air raids.

The November attack and the evacuation

After the collapse of the offensive towards Riga and the Red Army’s arrival on the Baltic near Klaipėda (Memel), Army Group North found itself cut off from East Prussia in Courland. Sõrve became its outermost, northernmost point, separated from the rest of the front by the strait. The garrison was weak and increasingly exhausted; on 12 November its strongest component, the 12th Luftwaffe Field Division, was sent back to Courland. Moreover, the approaching winter threatened to freeze the shallow waters around the islands, which would hamper both supply and evacuation.

On 18 November, after a heavy artillery and air preparation, the 109th Rifle Corps (the 109th and 131st Rifle Divisions and the 249th Estonian Rifle Division) launched a new attack from the line near the village of Lõu. This time the defence gave way. The Germans fell back step by step to successive positions deeper in the peninsula. According to Estonian sources, as early as 19 November Lieutenant General Schirmer received orders to withdraw to the area of the ports of Mõntu and Sääre and form an evacuation bridgehead there. On the same day the German 18th Army in Courland had to fight off a new Soviet attack.

Once again warships supported the final days of the defence. On 20–21 November the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and four torpedo boats fired some 500 main-calibre shells at Soviet positions. On 22 November she was relieved by the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer with two destroyers and a torpedo-boat flotilla; her anti-aircraft guns beat off Soviet air attacks. Lützow was summoned again for 23 November, but by that day the evacuation was already under way. For several days the weather prevented flying, and Soviet aircraft were able to support the infantry only on 23 November.

On 23 November the Soviets launched their final assault, supported by tanks. The decision to evacuate the peninsula was taken by the commander of Army Group North, Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner. The literature repeatedly states that he did so in defiance of an earlier order from Hitler to hold the island to the last man, merely reporting the withdrawal to him. Hitler, who had left the Wolf’s Lair on 20 November, took no action against Schörner. On the night of 23–24 November warships and auxiliary vessels carried the defenders from Mõntu and Cape Sääre to Ventspils (Windau) in Courland. Equipment that could not be taken away was destroyed and, according to German accounts, about 1,400 horses were also shot.

Outcome and losses

The number of men evacuated varies from source to source. The figure most often given is about 4,500 soldiers, including some 700 wounded, said to have been roughly a quarter of the original force; studies of Admiral Scheer give a figure of 4,694 men. Estonian sources, by contrast, speak of 7,087 soldiers, 758 wounded, 169 Soviet prisoners and a number of civilians and volunteers taken off on the night of 23–24 November. The discrepancies probably arise from whether only the last voyage was counted or earlier transports as well.

The Soviet side claimed that in the whole operation on the islands it had destroyed the 23rd and 218th Infantry Divisions and part of the 215th, as well as a number of coastal batteries and security battalions, and that the Germans had lost up to 7,000 killed and some 700 prisoners. These figures are not confirmed by German sources and should be treated with caution. Soviet studies give no details of their own losses; it is known that the Estonian units in particular bled heavily, at Tehumardi and Vintri as well as in the November attack. According to Russian data, the Baltic Fleet sank or damaged some 100 German vessels during the operation.

Civilians on the island

For the island’s inhabitants the fighting on Saaremaa was the second time in three years that the front had passed over them. The worst affected was the parish of Salme at the neck of the Sõrve peninsula, described in Estonian studies as the area of the country most devastated by the war. In November the Germans evacuated some 3,000 local inhabitants from Sõrve to Germany. Earlier, along with the wounded and prisoners, they had also taken off the island Estonian civilians who did not want to find themselves under Soviet rule again.

This evacuation was part of a wider flight of Estonians in the autumn of 1944. In September, as the Otto Tief government was disintegrating, thousands of people set out from the west coast and the islands for Sweden, often in overloaded fishing boats; others fled to the Reich on German ships. Estimates speak of several tens of thousands of refugees in all, including some 25,000–30,000 who reached Sweden. Their main motive was the memory of the mass deportations of June 1941. Some of those who stayed on the island later ended up in the Gulag and in exile, among others during the March deportation of 1949.

Place in the war

The abandonment of Sõrve ended the fighting on Estonian territory; only the small island of Ruhnu in the middle of the Gulf of Riga was not occupied by the Red Army until 19 December. Soviet historiography takes 24 November as the end date of the entire offensive in the Baltic states, which had begun on 14 September. In those ten weeks the Germans lost Estonia, Lithuania and most of Latvia, Riga included.

For the Kriegsmarine the loss of the islands meant that the Soviet Baltic Fleet could more freely sail out of the Gulf of Finland into the central Baltic, and its submarines and aircraft could attack shipping to Courland and East Prussia. On the other hand, the fighting for Sõrve showed that German heavy ships, by now without a role in the Atlantic, could provide effective support for coastal defence. In this role Lützow, Admiral Scheer and Prinz Eugen operated over the following months off the coasts of Courland, East Prussia and Pomerania, covering the evacuation of troops and civilians.

The soldiers evacuated from Sõrve went to Courland, where Army Group North (from January 1945 Army Group Courland) held out until Germany’s surrender in May 1945. Hitler refused to withdraw it by sea to the Reich, even though its divisions were needed on other fronts.

For Saaremaa the end of the fighting opened almost half a century of Soviet rule. The island became a closed border zone with military bases, for which even Soviet citizens needed special passes, and from 1952 to 1988 Kuressaare was called Kingissepa, after the Estonian communist Viktor Kingissepp. For decades the memory of the fighting on Sõrve, in which Estonians died on both sides, was presented only in its Soviet version. Only after Estonia regained its independence in 1991 did open research begin into, among other things, the tragedy of the Vintri landing and the fate of the Estonian refugees.