The fall of Tallinn

In the early afternoon of Thursday 28 August 1941 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 151st Regiment of the German 61st Infantry Division made their way through the burning suburbs to Town Hall Square in Tallinn and hung a swastika flag on the town hall. According to Estonian accounts, that same day Estonians raised the blue, black and white flag of independent Estonia on the Tall Hermann tower on Toompea hill, where the red flag of the Estonian SSR had flown for the past year. Meanwhile, in the roadstead and beyond the islands of Tallinn Bay, the convoys of the Soviet Baltic Fleet were forming up, having been leaving harbour since the morning under German artillery fire. Ahead of them lay some 300 kilometres across the Gulf of Finland to Kronstadt near Leningrad, and half-way along that route, off Cape Juminda, thousands of mines were waiting. The fleet’s passage – known in Russia as the “Tallinn breakthrough” and in Estonia as the “Battle of the Juminda minefield” – was one of the Soviet navy’s heaviest defeats of the entire war.

Popular chronologies record under 28 August that German troops, with the help of Estonian volunteers, captured Tallinn, and that the Soviet evacuation of the city cost “more than 12,000 dead and dozens of ships sunk” in Finnish and German minefields. The date and the course of events are correct. The figures need comment: no one counted exactly how many people died during the passage, and estimates differ several-fold. The role of the Estonian volunteers in the capture of the city, on the other hand, was more symbolic than military.

A base cut off

Tallinn became a base of the Soviet fleet under the mutual assistance pact that Estonia was forced to sign on 28 September 1939, ten days after the interned Polish submarine Orzeł escaped from its harbour. After the annexation of the country in 1940 the Baltic Fleet’s headquarters moved here. The city was not, however, prepared for defence from the landward side: it lay far from the frontier, and no one in Moscow had foreseen that the enemy might reach it. Work on fortifications began only in July. According to Estonian figures, up to 25,000 inhabitants worked in forced labour columns on anti-tank ditches, obstacles and shelters. Three defensive belts were built, the main one running 9–12 kilometres from the city, but they were never completed.

When on 7 August the Germans reached the Gulf of Finland at Kunda, Tallinn was cut off from the rest of the front. Russian historiography dates the defence of the city from 5 August, when units of the German 18th Army appeared on its distant approaches and cut the railway to Leningrad. It was defended by Major General Ivan Nikolayev (PL)’s 10th Rifle Corps – in reality a few bled-white divisions, most of them at a fraction of their establishment – the 1st Naval Infantry Brigade, Estonian and Latvian workers’ regiments, NKVD units and destruction battalions. In the second half of August more than a dozen detachments of sailors were formed from the crews of the ships lying in the roadstead, 14,000–16,000 men in all, including cadets of the naval school. They lacked training for land warfare, heavy weapons and experienced commanders. The defenders were supported by the guns of the cruiser Kirov, the flotilla leaders Minsk and Leningrad, destroyers, gunboats and coastal batteries, which according to Russian figures fired more than 13,000 shells during the defence.

On 14 August the High Command of the North-Western Direction under Marshal Kliment Voroshilov entrusted the defence of Tallinn to the military council of the Baltic Fleet. The fleet commander, Vice Admiral Vladimir Tributs, became commander-in-chief of the defence, with Nikolayev as his deputy for the land defence. Tributs had understood for weeks that the base could not be held. Already in July, after the fall of Riga, and then officially on 10 August, he had proposed taking the fleet to Kronstadt while there was still time. Voroshilov and the People’s Commissar for the Navy, Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov, refused. On 12 August the fleet received a directive that spoke not of evacuation but of stepping up operations. Only part of the equipment of the arsenal and shipyards was removed, along with, according to Russian figures, some 17,000 women and children and 9,000 wounded.

The assault

On the German side the capture of Tallinn was entrusted to General Walter Kuntze’s XLII Army Corps. It had three infantry divisions: General Siegfried Haenicke’s 61st, advancing along the highway from Tartu; General Richard Baltzer’s 217th on the highway from Viljandi; and General Walter Behschnitt’s 254th, coming from the east along the highway from Narva. From the south-west, from Pärnu, a composite battle group under General Rudolf Friedrich, with a regiment of the 291st Division, artillery and assault guns, was advancing. The divisions, which had been fighting in Estonia since July, had suffered heavy losses and before the assault received a few hundred replacements each. Estonians also took part in the attack: the Erna unit, converted into a battalion and made up of volunteers who had returned from Finland, Captain Karl Talpak’s Omakaitse company and Major Hirvelaan’s battalion. Estonian historians agree that their part in the fighting was small, although for the Estonians themselves it meant a great deal: they were returning to their own capital.

The attack began at dawn on 20 August and immediately broke through the forward positions. On 22 August the 254th Division reached the area of Maardu east of the city, and the 61st Division, in three days of fighting at Kiviloo, smashed the Tallinn communist workers’ regiments and a Latvian volunteer regiment. On 25 August the Soviet troops fell back to the main defence line, on the outskirts. The Germans found a gap in it by Lake Ülemiste and pushed two battalions of the 61st Division into it. From then on they had the whole harbour and roadstead within artillery range. The ships, with shells falling between them, had to keep changing their anchorage and gave the defence less support. On 26 August the Germans took the airfield at Lasnamäe and the Dvigatel works, and the Soviet air force lost its last landing ground near the city.

On the same day, 26 August, Voroshilov, having obtained the consent of Joseph Stalin, finally gave permission to abandon Tallinn. According to the accounts of Soviet admirals, Stalin was surprised that the fleet was still there at all. Headquarters wanted the ships and men at Leningrad, which the Germans had already come within a few dozen kilometres of. On the morning of 27 August Tributs issued the order to break contact with the enemy and embark. Sappers blew up and set fire to depots, workshops, the power station and harbour installations; the firemen were forbidden to put out the fires. Hundreds of railway wagons and locomotives were pushed into the sea. Rearguards covered the withdrawal in street fighting in Lasnamäe.

On the morning of 28 August, after a ten-minute artillery preparation, the 151st Regiment launched its final attack. Around noon its soldiers were at the Estonia Theatre, and, according to various accounts, at 1.30 or 2.30 p.m. in Town Hall Square. Soon the units attacking from the east reached the sea at Kadriorg. The same day the Germans took the port of Paldiski west of the capital. The inhabitants of Tallinn, who a year earlier had lived through the annexation and in June through the deportations, mostly welcomed the Germans as liberators; Estonian flags appeared on the houses.

According to German figures, 11,432 Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner in Tallinn. Almost 300 field, anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns, 91 armoured cars, two armoured trains, 4,000 naval mines and 3,500 torpedoes were captured. Many of the defenders did not reach the ships in time: some were picked up from the quays by the last sailors, others swam or paddled out to the ships on boats and rafts, and others were left on shore. Estonian studies, citing German data, put German losses in the Tallinn operation at 871 killed and 3,282 wounded.

Through the minefields off Juminda

The Germans and the Finns expected the fleet to try to escape and had prepared for it. The first mine barrages in the Gulf of Finland had been laid in the last nights before the attack on the USSR, and from 8 August German and Finnish minelayers densely mined the waters north of the Juminda peninsula, through which the main channel to Kronstadt ran. Finland, which had entered the war in June and was waging its own war against the USSR, contributed its ships. The numbers of mines given in the literature vary: according to Russian calculations, 36 barrages with some 2,000 mines and hundreds of explosive anti-sweep devices, intended to destroy sweeping gear, were laid in the gulf in July and August; according to some Western authors there were more than 2,500 mines off Juminda alone. On the cape the Germans set up a coastal battery, torpedo boats waited in Helsinki and among the Finnish skerries, and Ju 88 bombers stood ready on airfields in Estonia. The Soviet minesweepers, of which the fleet had already lost a third, did almost no sweeping of the channel before the departure, and there were no Soviet aircraft over the gulf.

The choice of route was bad, but there was no good one. The southern channel, along the Estonian coast, avoided the main barrage, but Voroshilov had forbidden it for fear of German artillery. The northern one, along the Finnish skerries, was feared by the fleet command. That left the central channel, through an unreconnoitred minefield. Embarkation began on the afternoon of 27 August under shellfire and bombing; according to Russian estimates, some 1,000 people died in the harbour at that time. Many ships sailed overloaded, others almost empty, and no one kept accurate lists. According to the most precise calculations, by the Russian historian Rostislav Zubkov, a total of 41,992 people boarded the warships and merchant vessels: some 28,500 soldiers and sailors and 12,800 civilians, among them the government and party authorities of the Estonian SSR. Aboard Kirov, Tributs’s flagship, travelled the republic’s gold reserves. In all, 225 warships and other vessels set out, organised into a main force, a covering force, a rearguard and four convoys.

Wind and confusion delayed the departure. The ships spent the night at anchor off the islands of Naissaar and Aegna and received the order to weigh anchor only before noon on 28 August. The columns stretched out over more than 15 nautical miles. In the afternoon the Junkers attacks began, and towards evening the leading vessels entered the minefield off Juminda. The headquarters ship Vironia, bombed and drifting onto mines, sank; minesweepers, the submarine S-5 and the transports Ella and Everita, with hundreds of people aboard, blew up and went down. Five destroyers were lost to mines – Yakov Sverdlov, Skory, Kalinin, Volodarsky and Artyom – and the flotilla leader Minsk and the destroyers Slavny and Gordy were badly damaged. Johannes Lauristin, the first chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Estonian SSR, died aboard Yakov Sverdlov. After dark no one knew any longer where the swept channel ended, and during the night Finnish torpedo boats struck at the scattered vessels. Tributs ordered the ships to anchor until dawn, in the middle of the barrage. According to Russian figures, by that point the fleet had lost 26 warships and other vessels.

At dawn on 29 August the warships that could still move set off at full speed for Kronstadt and arrived there in the evening. The transports – slow, overloaded and almost without anti-aircraft weapons – were left on their own. That day, around the islands of Rodsher and Gogland, the Luftwaffe sank one ship after another: Kalpaks, on which, according to Russian figures, more than 1,000 people died, including 870 wounded; Balkhash, Alev, Atis Kronvalds, Vtoraya Pyatiletka and others. The burning Ivan Papanin and the repair ship Serp i Molot, together with several other vessels, ran themselves aground on the shallows of Gogland, and Kazakhstan on the rocks of the islet of Vaindlo, which saved thousands of lives. More evacuees died on 29 August than on any other day. More than 9,000 survivors were pulled from the water that day, and more than 6,000 got ashore on Gogland from burning ships and ships being finished off. Vessels from Kronstadt, Gogland and Lavansaari went on ferrying survivors to Leningrad until 7 September.

The dispute over the figures

Russian studies state that 163 of the 225 vessels reached Kronstadt; of the only 20 transports that set out, two arrived. The number of warships and other vessels sunk ranges in different works from 50 (the naval historian V. Achkasov) to 62 (the official Soviet history of the navy); the most frequently cited tally speaks of 62 vessels, including 19 warships and small craft, 25 auxiliaries and 18 transports. Of these, 31 were sunk by mines and 19 by bombs. Some Estonian tallies count around 60 vessels.

Estimates of the human losses differ even more. Tributs himself wrote in his memoirs of some 5,000 dead, as did his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Yuri Panteleyev. Kuznetsov reported to Stalin that of 20,000 evacuees 12,225 had been brought through, which would mean almost 8,000 dead. The official Soviet naval publication gave about 10,000, and the memorial plaque dedicated to those who took part in the passage bears the figure 10,903. Zubkov, who compared the records of every vessel, arrived at 15,111 dead, including 4,628 civilians – more than a third of all who left Tallinn. Some German and Estonian authors give figures of up to 25,000, and the Russian writer Vladimir Beshanov, counting the crews of the sunk vessels and the civilians together, wrote of as many as 30,000–40,000. The frequently cited figure of “more than 12,000” falls in the middle of this range. The Luftwaffe lost, according to various figures, between three and ten aircraft.

Place in the war

The Tallinn passage was a defeat but not the destruction of the fleet. The cruiser Kirov, the flotilla leader Leningrad and most of the destroyers and submarines reached Kronstadt, and with the men who survived the Baltic Fleet took part in the defence of Leningrad. Its naval guns, together with the artillery of the battleships lying at Kronstadt and Leningrad, helped to halt the German assault on the city in September, and sailors from the shattered crews went to the front as infantry. For Wilhelm von Leeb the capture of Tallinn closed the Estonian campaign: the 18th Army could now advance on Leningrad in full strength, where Army Group North, after Hitler’s change in the direction of the offensive, had received reinforcements from Army Group Centre, and the Kriegsmarine gained a port through which it could supply the troops on the northern part of the front. On 8 September the Germans took Shlisselburg on Lake Ladoga and closed the land ring around Leningrad.

The Baltic Fleet, pushed back to the far eastern end of the gulf, was bottled up there. The Germans and Finns kept extending the minefields, and in 1943 they closed the gulf with anti-submarine nets. Soviet surface ships hardly ventured out into the open Baltic until almost the end of the war, and the losses among submarines trying to break out were enormous. After the fall of Tallinn the Red Army still held out on the islands of the West Estonian Archipelago, from which Soviet bombers had been flying to Berlin since August. The Germans landed on Muhu on 14 September; Saaremaa fell on 5 October and Hiiumaa on 21 October. The fleet evacuated the cut-off garrison of the Finnish Hanko peninsula between the end of October and the beginning of December, once again losing ships and thousands of men to mines.

For Estonia, 28 August marked the end of a year of Soviet rule and the beginning of three years of German occupation. On 29 August Hjalmar Mäe arrived in Tallinn; appointed by the Germans, he later headed the Estonian Self-Administration. Estonia did not regain its independence: in December it became a general district (Generalbezirk) of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, and the last Estonian Jews who had not managed to flee were murdered by early 1942. On 22 September 1944 the Red Army returned to Tallinn. In the USSR the tragedy of the passage was long spoken of only in hushed tones and described above all as the fleet’s heroic breakthrough; in 1970 Tallinn was awarded the Order of Lenin for its defence in 1941. A memorial to the victims was erected on Cape Juminda in 1981, and after Estonia regained its independence the Tallinn passage became a shared place of memory for Estonians, Russians and Finns: the seabed off Juminda is to this day one of the largest wreck graveyards in the Baltic.