The capture of Wilno

At about 11 a.m. on 13 July 1944 Officer Cadet Jerzy Jensch (“Krepdeszyn”) of the Home Army, having knocked out a German machine-gun nest on Castle Hill, raised the white-and-red Polish flag on the castle tower in Wilno (Vilnius) together with Corporal Artur Rychter (“Zan”). By evening Soviet units, supported by Polish partisans, had eliminated the last centres of resistance of the German garrison and taken the city. So ended a six-day battle that had begun on 7 July with the Home Army assault under Operation Ostra Brama and which in Soviet historiography formed part of the 3rd Belorussian Front’s Vilnius offensive. Moscow marked the capture of the city with an artillery salute, and Joseph Stalin thanked the troops who had taken it in an order of the day.

For the Home Army it was the last day of fighting side by side. Talks between its command and the front command continued for a few more days, but on 17 July the NKVD arrested the commander of the Wilno District, Lieutenant Colonel Aleksander Krzyżanowski (“Wilk”), and most of his officers, and over the following days surrounded and disarmed thousands of Home Army soldiers. Wilno, Polish in the eyes of the Polish government in London, once again became the capital of the Lithuanian SSR.

A fortress under siege

For the German command Wilno mattered more than other cities in Belorussia and Lithuania. It lay at the junction between Army Group Centre, shattered in Operation Bagration, and Army Group North, on the routes leading to East Prussia and the Niemen. Hitler declared it a “fortress” (fester Platz) and forbade any withdrawal. The garrison was commanded by the Luftwaffe general Rainer Stahel, who had at his disposal – according to German and Soviet figures compiled in the literature – some 15,000 men from various units: regiments of the 170th Infantry Division, a parachute battalion, anti-tank units and an assortment of soldiers retreating from the east. On 10 July a few hundred more paratroopers were dropped near the city.

After the capture of Minsk on 3 July, the Soviet 3rd Belorussian Front under General of the Army Ivan Chernyakhovsky sent General Nikolai Krylov’s 5th Army and the 5th Guards Tank Army of Marshal of Armoured Troops Pavel Rotmistrov against Wilno. The Stavka ordered the city to be taken by 10 July. By 8–9 July Soviet troops had closed the ring around Wilno, and according to Polish studies some 100,000 Soviet soldiers took part in the direct fighting, with several hundred tanks and strong air support. Even so, the battle for the city dragged on longer than planned. The Germans defended themselves in brick tenements, churches and bunkers; throwing tanks into street fighting cost the 5th Guards Tank Army many vehicles, for which Rotmistrov was later reproached.

Home Army soldiers fought alongside the Red Army. After the failure of the first assault on 7 July, some units went into action in the city. Captain Bolesław Zagórny’s (“Jan”) battalion took the Kalwaryjska district and from 8 July fought together with the Soviet 97th Rifle Division, crossing the Wilia (Neris) into the city centre on 10 July. Its companies advanced along Zamkowa, Wielka and Mostowa Streets, often together with Soviet tanks, and captured building after building. Captain Józef Grzesiak’s (“Kmita”) battalion took the block between Poznańska, Zawalna, Dominikańska and Trocka Streets by 12 July, and Second Lieutenant Marian Homolicki’s (“Wiktor”) unit seized Łukiszki prison and freed the prisoners. Jewish partisans from units that had been fighting in the Rudniki Forest as part of the Soviet partisan movement also entered the city, among them Abba Kovner, former commander of the United Partisan Organisation (FPO) in the ghetto. They were returning to a city whose Jewish community – after the mass murders at Ponary and the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943 – had practically ceased to exist.

Breakthrough and the end of the fighting

On 12 July the Germans attempted a relief. From the west, from the Niemen, the 6th Panzer Division of Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s 3rd Panzer Army attacked, with Reinhardt personally accompanying the thrust. The surprised and overextended Soviet units could not stop it; the division drove some tens of kilometres to the outskirts. On the night of 12–13 July part of the garrison – according to most sources about 3,000 men, led by Stahel – escaped from the city through a corridor in the Krawczuny area. At the crossings of the Wilia they clashed with Major Mieczysław Potocki’s (“Węgielny”) Home Army group, which inflicted losses on them but did not close the escape route. On the morning of 13 July a Soviet attack split the remaining defenders into two pockets of resistance – around the prison and the observatory – and wiped them out by evening.

Soviet sources, accepted in part of the literature, estimated German losses in Wilno at 12,000–13,000 killed and captured; these figures are hard to verify. Stahel, who was awarded the Swords to the Knight’s Cross for the defence of Wilno, became military commandant of Warsaw as early as 27 July. Polish studies estimate the Home Army’s losses in the whole operation in the Wilno region at several hundred killed, wounded and missing. The city itself also suffered, although its historic centre survived in far better condition than ruined Minsk.

Talks and arrests

From the first days of the fighting Lieutenant Colonel Krzyżanowski tried to arrange relations with the Red Army as the Tempest plan (“Burza”) envisaged: as the commander of the army of an allied state, not of a partisan force to be absorbed or disbanded. On 12 July he went for talks to the headquarters of the 3rd Belorussian Front, presenting himself as “General Wilk”. He proposed continued military cooperation, but under Polish command and with the units remaining in the Wilno region, and refused to acknowledge the incorporation of Wilno into the USSR. On 14 July the Soviet side unexpectedly agreed to the formation of an independent unit from the Home Army units of the Wilno and Nowogródek districts – Polish accounts speak of two infantry divisions and a cavalry brigade, historians of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) write of a corps – to fight as part of the front, armed and supplied by the Red Army. Krzyżanowski was to present detailed proposals by 17 July.

At the same time the opposite decision was taken in Moscow. Stavka Directive No. 220145 of 14 July, according to IPN historians, ordered the Belorussian and Ukrainian fronts to disarm Home Army units. The deputy People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Ivan Serov, arrived in Wilno with NKVD troops. On the morning of 17 July a Soviet liaison officer invited “Wilk” to Bogusze near Wilno to sign an agreement. Krzyżanowski went there with only his chief of staff, Major Teodor Cetys (“Sław”), and a driver; both officers were arrested on the spot. In the evening the same was done to most Home Army commanders, summoned to a supposed briefing near Wołkorabiszki. Representatives of the Government Delegation for the Wilno region were also arrested.

The units, deprived of their commanders, gathered on the edge of the Rudniki Forest. The new district commanders – Lieutenant Colonel Zygmunt Blumski (“Strychański”) in Wilno and Lieutenant Colonel Janusz Prawdzic-Szlaski (“Prawdzic”) in Nowogródek – left it to the soldiers to decide for themselves whether to try to break through westwards, towards Grodno and Białystok, or to disperse to their homes. NKVD and Red Army round-ups were launched against the units. According to a report by Serov and Chernyakhovsky to Stalin, more than 6,000 Home Army soldiers were disarmed within a few days, about 4,000 of whom were sent to the transit camp at Miedniki Królewskie; Lavrentiy Beria reported a total of 7,924 detained, of whom about 2,500 were released. More than 400 men were recruited into General Zygmunt Berling’s army. The officers were taken to an NKVD camp near Ryazan, and the rank and file and NCOs to Kaluga, where they were forcibly incorporated into the Red Army’s 361st Reserve Rifle Regiment and put to work felling timber. Most refused to take the Soviet oath. They were released gradually in 1946–1947.

Place in the war

The capture of Wilno was one of the major successes of the third phase of Operation Bagration. It opened the way for the 3rd Belorussian Front to the Niemen and to Kaunas, taken on 1 August, and at the end of July Soviet spearheads on the other side of Lithuania cut Army Group North’s land link with the rest of the front, reaching the Gulf of Riga. Beyond Wilno lay the borders of East Prussia. For the Germans the loss of the city was further proof that no “fortress” could stop the Soviet offensive.

For Poles, Wilno became the first clear test of how Tempest would end in lands the USSR regarded as its own. Home Army soldiers fought the Germans alongside the Red Army, then were disarmed and interned, and their commanders arrested. The same scenario was repeated within a couple of weeks in Lwów, where the Home Army went into action on 23 July and its officers were arrested on 31 July, and in the Lublin region. Some of the Wilno partisans who escaped the round-ups returned to the underground and to the fight – this time against the NKVD; Major Maciej Kalenkiewicz (“Kotwicz”), the originator of Ostra Brama, was killed on 21 August 1944 at Surkonty in a clash with NKVD troops. Colonel Krzyżanowski – promoted by the Commander-in-Chief in September 1944 – went through Soviet prisons and camps, and after returning to Poland was arrested by the UB (the communist security service) in 1948; he died in 1951 in the hospital of Mokotów prison.

The city itself returned to the Lithuanian SSR and again became its capital. Under an agreement concluded by the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) with the government of the Lithuanian SSR in September 1944, most of Wilno’s Polish inhabitants and some of the inhabitants of the surrounding villages left for Poland in 1944–1947, as “repatriates” in the official language. The Polish population, which for centuries had helped to shape the city, became a minority there; its place was taken by Lithuanians and newcomers from other Soviet republics. The border effectively drawn in July 1944 was finally accepted by the Great Powers at Yalta in February 1945 and by the Polish–Soviet border agreement of August 1945.