The front at Narva

On 2 February 1944 the leading units of the Soviet 2nd Shock Army reached the Narva River and crossed to its western bank straight off the march – north of the town of Narva, near the river’s mouth, and south of it, in the Krivasoo marshes. Facing them, on the narrow isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Peipus, stood the units of the German 18th Army that had fallen back from Leningrad. Thus was born the Narva front – a sector on which, for the next six months until August 1944, some of the heaviest fighting on the northern flank of the Eastern Front would take place.

This day is usually summed up in a single sentence: on Estonia’s eastern border the Narva front forms between Soviet and German forces. That is a fair summary, though the date is a convention. The front line took shape over several days: on 1 February Soviet troops took Kingisepp, on 2 February the first sub-units forced the river, and on 3 February – according to Soviet accounts – two corps of the 2nd Shock Army reached the Narva along a broader stretch. The border, too, needs a word of explanation: under the peace treaty of 1920, pre-war Estonia extended a dozen or so kilometres east of the river, including Ivangorod, which faces Narva across it. Soviet troops had therefore entered former Estonian territory even before the crossing.

From Leningrad to Narva

The Narva front was the direct result of the Leningrad–Novgorod offensive, launched by the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts on 14 January 1944. Within two weeks the Red Army had broken through the fortifications that had held the city in their grip for two years, and on 27 January Leningrad celebrated the end of the siege with artillery salvoes. The German 18th Army, badly mauled, nevertheless avoided encirclement. Its left wing – General of Infantry Otto Sponheimer’s LIV Army Corps and SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner’s III SS Panzer Corps, which had spent the winter facing the Soviet Oranienbaum bridgehead – fell back westwards along the coast towards the Narva.

The offensive in this direction was conducted by the Leningrad Front under General of the Army Leonid Govorov. From 1 February its next stage was known in Soviet accounts as the Kingisepp–Gdov operation. During the night of 31 January to 1 February the 109th Rifle Corps, supported by tanks, took Kingisepp, formerly Yamburg, the last sizeable town before Narva; on 4 February Soviet troops captured Gdov on Lake Peipus. German rearguards slowed the pursuit enough for the main forces to cross the river and occupy positions prepared in advance.

Those positions had a history of their own. Since the autumn of 1943 the Germans had been building, in the rear of Army Group North, the so-called Panther Line, the northern section of the fortifications that propaganda called the Eastern Wall. It ran along the Narva, the western shore of Lake Peipus and the Velikaya River through Pskov. The army group’s commander, Field Marshal Georg von Küchler, had long wanted to withdraw to it, but Adolf Hitler refused. At the end of January he dismissed Küchler and replaced him with Colonel General Walter Model. Model, an advocate of elastic defence – giving up ground only in order to counter-attack – conducted the retreat in stages towards the Panther Line itself, and on the Narva he decided also to hold a bridgehead on the eastern bank, at Ivangorod.

The Narva isthmus

The importance of the place was dictated by geography. Between the Gulf of Finland and the northern shore of Lake Peipus lies a strip of land some 45 kilometres wide, cut across by the Narva. The terrain is low-lying, mostly wooded and broken up by extensive marshes that large formations could cross at only a few points. The only serious roads to the west – the highway and the railway from Narva to Tallinn – ran along the coast. Whoever held the isthmus barred the enemy’s shortest route into the heart of Estonia.

For both sides the stakes were higher than a few kilometres of swamp. For Moscow, a breakthrough at Narva would open the coastal road to Tallinn, and the loss of Estonia would force Army Group North to retreat from the Baltic states altogether. The Baltic Fleet, bottled up since 1941 at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland, would regain access to the Baltic, and Finland would come within range of aircraft and landings from Estonian bases. For the Germans, Narva protected their command of the Baltic and the supply of Swedish iron ore, as well as the oil shale deposits around Kohtla-Järve, from which fuel was produced – especially valuable to the Kriegsmarine. The German command also reckoned that a collapse of the Narva front would prompt Finland, already looking for a way out of the war, to make a swift peace with the USSR.

On the eve of the fighting the town itself stood empty. Narva, which before the war had more than 20,000 inhabitants – most of them Estonians – was one of the most beautiful towns in the country, with a Baroque old town and a medieval castle facing the fortress of Ivangorod. The Germans began evacuating the population on 25 January 1944; according to Estonian accounts the evacuation lasted until 2–3 February. Those inhabitants who survived never returned to their homes.

The first bridgeheads

Soviet troops tried to cross the Narva off the march before the Germans could consolidate. On 1 February the first attempts near the river’s mouth were repulsed. The next day sub-units of the 4th Rifle Regiment of the 98th Rifle Division (43rd Rifle Corps) found a gap in the German defences north of the town and seized a scrap of the western bank around the villages of Kudruküla, Riigiküla and Vepsküla. On the German side this stretch of the coast was held only by naval battalions, an Estonian police battalion and battle groups cobbled together from retreating soldiers; over the following days the Russians fed in reinforcements, and naval infantry also tried to land near Narva-Jõesuu. In the weeks that followed, these bridgeheads north of Narva became some of the most bitterly contested spots on the whole front.

At the same time, some 10 kilometres south of the town, the 122nd Rifle Corps crossed the river near the village of Vääska. The 1078th Rifle Regiment of the 314th Rifle Division broke through the defences of the Estonian 29th Police Battalion and pushed into the waterlogged ground of the Krivasoo marshes. This created the Krivasoo bridgehead, which over the following months was the main Soviet foothold on the western bank. In the days that followed, units of the 314th Division, reinforced by the 125th Rifle Division, drove west towards Auvere railway station, about 10 kilometres west of Narva. Had they taken it, they would have cut the only railway line supplying the German troops defending the town and the Ivangorod bridgehead. On 6 February the Russians reached the line, but fire from German artillery, including coastal guns, forced them to withdraw the same day. The fighting for Auvere would flare up again throughout the spring and summer.

Further south, about 40 kilometres from Narva, near the villages of Omuti and Permisküla, the river was defended by the Estonian 30th Police Battalion. Several Soviet attacks here on 2 February and the following days ended with heavy losses, and only a small sub-unit held on to the western bank. To hamper crossings, the Germans blew up the ice along a long stretch of the river from Lake Peipus to the Krivasoo marshes.

Group Sponheimer and Steiner’s corps

The defence of the isthmus was entrusted to a force named after its commander: Group Sponheimer. As early as 1 February the command of Army Group North ordered it to hold the section of the Panther Line between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Peipus at all costs, and on 4 February it was detached from the 18th Army and placed directly under the army group. Its core was Steiner’s corps, made up largely of foreigners: the 11th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division “Nordland”, in which Danes and Norwegians served alongside Germans, and the 4th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Brigade “Nederland”, formed from Dutch volunteers (later expanded into the “Nederland” division). These units held the Ivangorod bridgehead – a semicircle of trenches some 11 kilometres long on the eastern bank, covering the bridges. The first Soviet attacks along the highway and the railway, carried out by four divisions of the 43rd and 109th Rifle Corps, broke down with heavy losses.

Hitler ordered the threatened sector to be reinforced. The Panzergrenadier Division “Feldherrnhalle” was flown in from Belarus via the airfield at Tartu – according to some accounts, more than 10,000 men as early as the beginning of February. In the following weeks there arrived a battalion from the “Großdeutschland” division, an improvised grenadier regiment “Gnesen” made up of replacement units from occupied Poland, the 214th Infantry Division from Norway, and the Tiger heavy tanks of the 502nd Battalion. On 23 February Group Sponheimer was renamed Army Detachment Narva (Armeeabteilung Narwa), headed by General of Infantry Johannes Frießner, who took command on 2 February according to some sources and on 23 February according to others. According to figures cited in the literature, by 1 March he had more than 120,000 men under his command.

Estonians between two occupations

The front came to rest on the soil of a country that had already lived through two occupations in four years. In 1940 Estonia was occupied by the Red Army and incorporated into the USSR, and the year of repression that followed – arrests, the deportations of June 1941, executions – left a lasting mark on the memory of its people. In the summer of 1941 the Germans arrived, preceded by the Summer War, in which Estonian partisans fought the retreating Soviet units. The Germans, however, did not restore independence. The country was run by Hjalmar Mäe’s Self-Administration, which carried out the occupier’s orders, and German rule brought crimes of its own, including the murder of those Estonian Jews who had not managed to flee.

When the Red Army approached the border in January 1944, most Estonians faced a choice with no good option. The return of Soviet rule meant a repeat of 1940–1941; fighting on the German side meant serving an occupier with no intention of giving the country its freedom. Many chose the Narva front in the conviction that they were defending their own country, not the Third Reich. On 1 February 1944 Mäe, with the consent of the German authorities, proclaimed a general mobilisation of men born in 1904–1923; in the first days of fighting Estonian police battalions were already standing on the river, and from mid-February they were joined by border guard regiments made up of conscripts. The Estonian 20th SS Grenadier Division, formed from the Estonian SS Legion and still in the process of becoming a division, was also brought up from the front near Nevel. Estonians fought on the other side of the front too – in the ranks of the Soviet 8th Estonian Rifle Corps, formed from residents of the republic evacuated in 1941 and from those mobilised in the USSR, which joined the Leningrad Front at the turn of February and March 1944.

“Take Narva no later than 17 February”

Moscow expected a quick decision. In an order to Govorov, Joseph Stalin demanded that Narva be taken by 17 February 1944 at the latest, stressing that both military and political considerations required it. The political ones were obvious: ever since the autumn of 1939, when the USSR forced military bases on Estonia, the Kremlin had regarded the Baltic states as its own sphere, and a swift entry into Estonia was also meant to put pressure on Finland, which had been fighting the USSR in the Continuation War since 1941 and was just beginning cautiously to explore the possibility of peace.

The first days showed, however, that the Red Army had reached the Narva at the end of its strength. Divisions that had been fighting without a break in snow and frost since mid-January were seriously under strength. The retreating Germans had destroyed roads and bridges, and the thaw began to wash out the few remaining tracks, so ammunition and fuel reached the front late. In a report of 8 February the military council of the Leningrad Front criticised the preparation of the crossings and the reconnaissance, and the Soviet partisan groups sent into Estonia were quickly broken up. Govorov failed to break through the defences or to encircle the numerically weaker enemy before it brought up reinforcements. Stalin’s deadline passed, and Narva remained in German hands.

Place in the war

The front formed at the beginning of February 1944 lasted for six months. In the weeks that followed, Soviet troops tried to widen their bridgeheads: in mid-February a naval infantry landing at Mereküla behind German lines ended in almost total destruction, and the offensive of General Ivan Fedyuninsky’s 2nd Shock Army, launched on 15 February, brought no breakthrough. In March, after further failed attacks, Soviet aircraft bombed Narva and Tallinn. The Germans, reinforced by Estonian conscripts, eliminated the bridgeheads north of the town, though the Krivasoo bridgehead survived. At the end of July 1944 Army Detachment Narva abandoned the almost completely destroyed town and withdrew to the prepared Tannenberg Line on the Sinimäed hills, where it beat off further attacks until 10 August. Only in September, after Finland’s exit from the war and Soviet successes further south, did the Germans leave Estonia.

The fighting on the Narva was among the bloodiest on the northern sector of the Eastern Front; figures for the losses of both sides remain disputed to this day and vary from source to source. For Estonians, the Narva front became one of the most painful chapters of the war: their compatriots fought on both sides, and the hope that delaying the Red Army’s return would make it possible to rebuild an independent state proved an illusion. It lives on in collective memory to this day, and the town itself was rebuilt after the war as an entirely different Narva – its former inhabitants were not allowed to return, and people from other parts of the USSR were brought in to take their place. In January 1945 the Soviet authorities drew the boundary between the Estonian SSR and the Russian SFSR along the Narva, handing Ivangorod and the land beyond the river to Leningrad Oblast. The line drawn in this way still divides Estonia and Russia in practice today.