The end of the fighting in the Crimea

By the middle of May 1944 the whole of the Crimean peninsula was once again under Soviet control. The last units of the German 17th Army, driven onto the Chersonese peninsula after the capture of Sevastopol, surrendered on 12 May; on the night of 12/13 May the last ships carrying troops sailed from the Crimean shore. Several tens of thousands of Germans and Romanians were taken prisoner, and many thousands drowned when Soviet aircraft sank overloaded ships. At the same time, since mid-April, some 130,000–150,000 people had been evacuated from the peninsula by sea and air.

War chronologies record under 13 May that the whole of the Crimea had come under Soviet control and that many thousands of German and Romanian soldiers had been taken prisoner, although many thousands had been evacuated. This reflects the situation faithfully, but needs one correction as to the date: the last resistance on the Chersonese ceased on 12 May, not 13 May; that is the date on which Soviet, German and Western historiography ends the Crimean operation. On 13 May there was no more fighting in the Crimea – all that remained was rounding up prisoners and picking the last survivors out of the sea.

The last position on the Chersonese

When, in the early hours of 9 May, Adolf Hitler at last agreed to an evacuation, it was already too late to carry it out in good order. The remnants of the German and Romanian divisions, pursued by the Soviet 19th Tank Corps, fell back behind the last line of defence, which ran across the neck of the Chersonese peninsula west of the city. On this scrap of land, within range of the Soviet artillery, some 30,000–50,000 soldiers, by various reckonings, were crammed together. Behind them lay the sea, the small Kamyshovaya and Kazachya bays, and an airfield from which the last transport aircraft were taking off. The army commander, General of Infantry Karl Allmendinger, reckoned that the position could be held for a few days, until ships arrived from Constanța.

It was almost exactly the same cape on which, in July 1942, after the fall of Sevastopol, tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers had been abandoned. Now it was their enemies who were trapped.

Evacuation under the bombs

The evacuation of the Crimea, conducted by the German and Romanian navies (the Romanians called it “Operation 60,000”, after the approximate number of their soldiers on the peninsula), had begun as early as 14–15 April, less than a week after the start of the offensive. In the first phase the wounded, rear services, prisoners, volunteers from the eastern formations and tens of thousands of Romanians were shipped to Constanța; then Hitler halted it. The last phase, from 10 May, was the hardest. Convoys arrived late, and ships approaching the shores of the Chersonese came under artillery fire and incessant attack by Soviet aircraft and the aircraft of the Black Sea Fleet. On the evening of 10 May the promised embarkation was put back by a day; some vessels could not safely come alongside and left only partly loaded.

The greatest tragedy was the sinking of two large transports, the Totila and the Teja – ships built in Hungary, originally ordered by the USSR and taken over by Germany. They had arrived at Sevastopol with a convoy from Constanța on 8–9 May; on the morning of 10 May they took thousands of German and Romanian soldiers aboard, and on the return voyage they were bombed and sunk by Soviet aircraft. The death toll is uncertain: sources give anything from 4,000–5,000 on each ship to some 8,000–10,000 in all; only a few hundred were rescued. The wreck of the Totila was found in 2013.

The Romanian navy of Rear Admiral Horia Macellariu, which committed all four of its destroyers – the largest Axis warships in the Black Sea – to the evacuation, and German vessels carried away more than 30,000 more people between 10 and 13 May, about 18,000 of them, according to Romanian figures, in Romanian ships. On the night of 11/12 May Soviet troops launched a final assault on the positions on the Chersonese. On 12 May the soldiers remaining on the peninsula – about 21,000 according to Soviet figures – laid down their arms. The last ship to leave the Crimea was the Romanian minelayer Amiral Murgescu with about a thousand soldiers on board; among them was General Walter Hartmann, who in the last days had commanded one of the 17th Army’s corps.

Prisoners, evacuees, dead

The toll of the fighting and the evacuation is disputed, because each side counted differently and the tallies partly overlap. According to German and Romanian figures, between 14 April and 13 May 120,853 people were shipped out of the Crimea by sea – some 58,500 Germans (including 12,000 wounded), 36,600 Romanians, 15,400 Soviet volunteers, more than 7,000 civilians, as well as prisoners and Slovaks – and roughly another 21,000 by air. Altogether this gives some 130,000–150,000 people, depending on who is included.

The 17th Army’s losses in killed, missing and captured amounted, according to German figures cited by the historian Rolf-Dieter Müller, to 31,700 Germans and 25,800 Romanians; other German calculations speak of more than 40,000 men who died at sea in May. Soviet historiography stated that 61,580 enemy soldiers were taken prisoner in the Crimean operation as a whole and that the 17th Army’s irrecoverable losses exceeded 100,000 men. The army also lost almost all its heavy weapons. On the Soviet side, Russian tallies give some 17,800 killed and missing and 67,000 wounded and sick.

Seeking the guilty

The defeat in the Crimea set the German high command looking for someone to blame – anyone but Hitler’s headquarters. Colonel General Erwin Jaenecke, who had demanded an evacuation and lost his command for it at the end of April, was saddled with responsibility for the loss of the peninsula; detained in Romania, he faced court-martial proceedings. The case was entrusted to General Heinz Guderian, who deliberately dragged it out; in June 1944 Jaenecke was quietly acquitted, and in January 1945 he was discharged from the army. Allmendinger too, who had taken over the army in a hopeless situation, was placed in the officer reserve in July 1944 and was given no further command until the end of the war. The army group commander, Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, kept Hitler’s confidence and soon took over Army Group North.

The defeat also soured German–Romanian relations. Marshal Ion Antonescu had been pressing for the evacuation of the peninsula since the autumn of 1943 and had warned Hitler that the loss of seven Romanian divisions in the Crimea could have serious consequences at home; Hitler brushed these fears aside. Among Romanians there was a strong conviction that their soldiers had not been given the same priority in the evacuation as the Germans, and that the German command had sacrificed Romanian units to cover the retreat. In Bucharest, where the opposition and the king’s circle were already looking for a way out of the war, the defeat in the Crimea was further proof that the alliance with the Reich was leading to disaster. Even the Germans, however, praised the Romanian navy for carrying out the evacuation: Macellariu received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

Place in the war

The loss of the Crimea closed the Red Army’s spring offensive in the south. The Black Sea Fleet regained Sevastopol, and Soviet aviation gained bases within range of the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria. The shattered divisions of the 17th Army had to be rebuilt in the rear, and Army Group South Ukraine lost the last of its reserves just as the Red Army was preparing to strike on the Prut and the Dniester. In August 1944, in the Jassy–Kishinev offensive, the German–Romanian front collapsed; on 23 August King Michael I had Antonescu arrested, and Romania went over to the Allies.

For the inhabitants of the Crimea the end of the fighting did not bring peace. As early as 10 May the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, presented Joseph Stalin with a plan to deport the entire Crimean Tatar nation, justified by the collaboration of some of them with the occupiers; on 11 May the State Defence Committee took the decision. On 18 May NKVD units began the deportation: in three days they carried off more than 180,000 people in goods wagons, mainly to Uzbekistan – most of them women, children and the elderly. The number who died in transit and in the first years of exile is disputed – NKVD documents indicate several tens of thousands of deaths by the end of the 1940s, while Crimean Tatar estimates and those of some historians approach half of those deported. In the following weeks Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians were also deported from the peninsula.