The capture of Tallinn

On the morning of 22 September 1944 a Soviet mobile group of the 8th Estonian Rifle Corps under General Lembit Pärn drove into Tallinn. In the space of a day it had covered more than a hundred kilometres and, according to Soviet accounts, was the first to enter the city. There was, in essence, no battle for the Estonian capital: the last German units had sailed from the port that same morning, having blown up the quays, the telephone exchange, the radio station and the rolling stock behind them. The only resistance now came from a few Estonian groups trying to defend the Otto Tief government. That same day Joseph Stalin, in an order of the Supreme Commander, thanked the captors of Tallinn, and Moscow honoured them with a salute of 24 salvoes from 324 guns.

Tallinn is sometimes described as “the first Baltic port lying beyond the minefields of the Gulf of Finland”. That is a simplification, although it captures the meaning of the event. Since 1941 the Baltic Fleet had been bottled up in the eastern part of the gulf, at Kronstadt and Leningrad, behind the German–Finnish mine barrages. Tallinn gave it its first large base at the mouth of the gulf in three years, but the city itself lay close to the western barrage, which stretched from the area of Naissaar island towards the Finnish Porkkala peninsula, and minesweeping in the gulf continued long after the war. Just as important for the fleet was the fact that, after Finland’s exit from the war, it could use the Finnish coastal routes.

War chronologies also record two later events: the occupation of the whole of mainland Estonia, dated to 28 September, and the start of the landings on the West Estonian islands, dated to 29 September.

Aster

The capture of Tallinn resulted from the German decision to abandon Estonia no less than from the Soviet offensive. After Finland ceased fighting on 4 September, holding the coast of the Gulf of Finland no longer made sense for the Germans. On 14 September the three Baltic Fronts launched their offensive towards Riga, threatening to cut off the whole of Army Group North. On 15 September the army group’s commander, Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, demanded permission to evacuate Estonia, and on 16 September he flew to Hitler to press the point; Hitler gave his conditional consent, and according to some accounts the order for Operation Aster was issued the same day. The plan provided for Army Detachment Narwa to withdraw through Viljandi and Pärnu into Latvia, while part of the forces and civilians would sail from Tallinn, Paldiski and Haapsalu.

On 17 September, before the retreat had begun, the 2nd Shock Army of the Leningrad Front attacked. After an artillery barrage its corps forced the Emajõgi river east of Tartu and shattered the weakened German II Army Corps. The front commander, Marshal Leonid Govorov, expected the Germans to defend Tallinn and wanted to cut their road to the capital. On the night of 18/19 September, however, the III SS Panzer Corps and the German 11th Infantry Division secretly abandoned their positions on the Narva, where the fighting on the Tannenberg Line and for the bridgehead had lasted half a year. Soviet reconnaissance missed the withdrawal. The 8th Army of General Filipp Starikov set off in pursuit late, and the German divisions marched at speed across Estonia to Pärnu and on towards Riga.

Estonians on both sides

The retreat was covered largely by Estonian units: border regiments made up of conscripts from the February mobilisation, the remnants of the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, a battalion of “Finnish boys” and Omakaitse home guard units. The German command assumed that the Estonians would not want to leave their country anyway. Near Tartu the battle group of Lieutenant Colonel Alfons Rebane held out to the end, but the rest of the Emajõgi front fell apart within a single day.

On the Soviet side the 8th Estonian Rifle Corps was advancing; it had been formed in the USSR largely from Estonians mobilised in 1941 and taken into the Soviet interior. On 20–21 September its units trapped the Estonian border regiments and the remnants of the SS division retreating from the Narva at Lake Porkuni in Virumaa. According to some accounts, based on Estonian studies, around 500 soldiers fighting on the German side were killed there and around 700 taken prisoner. Estonian sources, including the White Book of the state commission investigating repression, describe the killing of prisoners after the battle and the execution of 25–30 seriously wounded Estonian soldiers who had taken refuge in the church at Avinurme. For both sides it was a fratricidal struggle: fellow countrymen, often from the same villages, stood in the uniforms of the two armies that had taken turns occupying their country in 1940–1944.

In the last days of German rule there was also a crime whose victims were not Estonians. On 19 September, at the Klooga camp near Tallinn, the SS and formations under its command shot the prisoners – the vast majority of them Jews from the Wilno (Vilnius) and Kaunas ghettos – and burned their bodies on wooden pyres. Estimates of the number of victims range from several hundred to around 2,000. Soviet soldiers who reached the camp a few days later found pyres that had not burned out; the photographs from Klooga became some of the first evidence of the Holocaust shown to the world.

22 September

Tallinn had already been ravaged by war once: in August 1941 the Baltic Fleet had evacuated from its port, and in March 1944 Soviet bombers had burned part of the city centre. In September the port became the main evacuation point. The German navy under Vice Admiral Theodor Burchardi, with some 50 small warships and merchant vessels, took off from Tallinn, Paldiski and other ports within a few days – according to German figures – about 50,000 soldiers, 20,000 civilians and a thousand prisoners. Soviet aircraft attacked the convoys. On 22 September the hospital ship Moero, which had sailed from Tallinn the previous day with wounded and refugees, was hit by an aircraft and sank in the central Baltic. According to some accounts more than 600 people died; Estonian studies give higher figures, exceeding a thousand.

The Tief government, appointed on 18 September, was unable to gather forces to defend the capital. Its members left the city on 21 and 22 September. The last skirmish on the approaches was fought at Pääsküla by Estonian soldiers returning from the Finnish army. When the vanguards of the Leningrad Front appeared in Tallinn on the morning of 22 September, the streets were empty. The last German unit – the 531st Naval Artillery Battalion – had left the city that same morning. The Estonian flag that had been hoisted on the Tall Hermann tower on Toompea in those days was torn down and replaced by the red banner. According to Soviet figures, Pärn’s corps captured 25 aircraft, 185 guns, 230 motor vehicles and 15 ships in the port.

At the same time the Soviet Baltic Fleet went into action along the coast. Between 21 and 24 September it put small landing parties ashore in the bays near Kunda and Loksa and in Tallinn itself, and seized Naissaar island and the port of Paldiski. The fleet’s ships tried to interfere with the German evacuation, but – as Russian studies also admit – most of the German forces managed to get away to Riga or by sea.

All of mainland Estonia

After taking the capital, Soviet forces quickly overran the rest of the country. On 23 September the 2nd Shock Army took Pärnu, from which the SS division Nederland had pulled out into Latvia the same day after blowing up the port installations; on 24 September its rearguard fought the last skirmish on Estonian soil at Ikla. On 24 September the 8th Rifle Corps took Haapsalu and cleared the coast as far as Virtsu, opposite the islands. By the end of 26 September units of the 2nd Shock Army advancing along the Gulf of Riga had crossed the Latvian border and linked up with the troops of General Ivan Maslennikov’s 3rd Baltic Front. Thus ended the Tallinn operation, which lasted from 17 to 26 September.

Some compilations state that the Soviets occupied the whole of mainland Estonia on 28 September. Russian and English-language studies of the Tallinn operation, however, give 26 September as the day by which only the islands of the archipelago remained in German hands; in these accounts 28 September brings no breakthrough on land. In those compilations the date is therefore most probably two days out.

According to figures compiled in Russian studies, the Leningrad Front lost some 6,200 killed and more than 22,500 wounded in the operation, and the fleet 258 killed. Soviet communiqués spoke of 30,000 enemy soldiers killed and 15,745 taken prisoner; these figures, like many similar ones from the period, are difficult to verify. In any case the Germans managed to bring the main forces of Army Detachment Narwa out of Estonia; according to German and Soviet sources, the speed of the evacuation surprised both the Stavka and the German high command.

The landings on the islands

On the west coast there still remained the islands of the West Estonian Archipelago, which controlled the entrance to the Gulf of Riga and the Baltic sea lanes. They were defended mainly by the German 23rd Infantry Division, split between the islands. War chronologies date the start of the Soviet Moonsund operation to 29 September. According to Russian studies, the operation began two days earlier: on 27 September a naval infantry battalion, carried by torpedo boats, landed on Vormsi, which was secured by 28 September. On 29 September, by contrast, came the main landing – on Muhu, in the Kuivastu area. About 1,150 soldiers were put ashore there on the first day, and the next day the boats, in 181 runs, ferried over the entire 249th Rifle Division. The Estonian rifle corps and the 109th Rifle Corps took part in the landings, and American DUKW amphibious vehicles supplied under Lend-Lease were also used for transport. The Germans withdrew from Muhu after weak resistance, blowing up the causeway linking the island to Saaremaa.

Place in the war

The fall of Tallinn ended the struggle for northern Estonia that had been going on since January 1944 and opened the way for the Soviet Baltic Fleet from the Gulf of Finland into the central Baltic. In October Soviet forces took Hiiumaa and most of Saaremaa, while the German units pushed back onto the Sõrve peninsula held out, supported by the fire of heavy cruisers, until 24 November. In Latvia, Army Group North held Riga until mid-October and was then cut off in Courland.

For Estonians, 22 September marked the beginning of the second Soviet occupation. According to the White Book, as early as October the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Estonian SSR reported to Moscow 1,200 arrests and some 8,000 people registered as “public enemies”. Members of the Tief government ended up in prisons and the Gulag, some of the soldiers who had fought on the German side went into the forests and joined the Forest Brothers, and in 1949 a mass deportation sealed the collectivisation of the countryside. Soviet historiography described 22 September as the “liberation of Tallinn”; in independent Estonia the same day has been observed since 2007 as Resistance Day, commemorating the government that for a few days tried to restore the state between two occupations.