German and Soviet troops meet

On 19 September 1939, the third day of the Soviet invasion, Red Army units took Wilno (Vilnius) and for the first time came into contact with the German troops who had been advancing into Poland from the west since 1 September. Outside Lwów (Lviv), Soviet tank crews and German mountain troops surrounded the city from two sides and exchanged fire by mistake. In Polesie a Soviet tank brigade was advancing on Brest, which had been in the hands of General Heinz Guderian’s corps for several days. The two armies that were to partition Poland under the secret protocol of 23 August met in the very heart of its territory.

Popular chronologies state that Soviet troops reached Wilno and Brest on 18 September, and that the German and Soviet armies joined hands at Brest on 19 September. These dates need correcting. The first Soviet tanks reached the outskirts of Wilno on the evening of 18 September, but the city was not taken until 19 September. The Red Army arrived at Brest later: on 19 September its 29th Light Tank Brigade was still at Prużana, on 20 September its reconnaissance met the first German units near the village of Widomla, and the brigade entered the city on the night of 21–22 September. The first contact between the two armies did take place on 19 September, but near Lwów. All these events, from Wilno to the handover of Brest on 22 September, are described below.

Two armies in one country

In the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Germany and the Soviet Union had drawn the boundary of their “spheres of interest” in Poland along the rivers Narew, Vistula and San. The document said nothing, however, about how the troops of the two states were to behave once they came close to each other. By mid-September German divisions were already far east of that line. Guderian’s panzer corps had broken through at Wizna into the rear of the Polish front and reached Brest on 14 September. From 14 to 17 September the Polish garrison under Brigadier General Konstanty Plisowski defended the fortress, and on the night of 16–17 September it withdrew across the Bug. On the morning of 17 September German infantry occupied the fortress. In the south, German troops had been besieging Lwów since 12 September, while other divisions were advancing into the Lublin region and Volhynia.

At 2 a.m. on 17 September Joseph Stalin, in the presence of Vyacheslav Molotov and Kliment Voroshilov, received the German ambassador, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, and informed him that the Red Army would cross the border at 6 a.m. He asked that German aircraft should not fly east of the Białystok–Brest–Lwów line. That same day the German command ordered its troops to halt on the line Skole–Lwów–Włodzimierz Wołyński–Brest–Białystok, but where units were already beyond it, they continued their operations. The soldiers of the two armies did not know each other’s orders, and the commanders had neither common maps nor communications. The risk of mistakes was enormous.

On 18 September radio stations in Moscow and Berlin read out a joint communiqué from the two governments. Stalin had written the text himself, finding the German draft, which spoke openly of a “new order” and “natural frontiers”, too candid. In the official version the operations of German and Soviet troops in Poland pursued no aim contrary to the non-aggression pact, and their task was “to restore order and peace in Poland, disrupted by the disintegration of the Polish state”. The next day Pravda printed the communiqué. On the evening of 18 September Stalin also told Schulenburg that he had doubts whether the German generals would hand over the territory they had occupied, since military men did not like giving up their gains.

Wilno, 18–19 September

Wilno was one of the most important military centres of north-eastern Poland, but by mid-September its garrison was improvised. The divisions stationed in the city in peacetime had gone to the German front. What remained were reserve battalions, units of the Border Protection Corps (KOP) brought in from the Lithuanian border, volunteers from the pre-military training organisation, a student battalion and scouts. According to Polish accounts there were some 14,000 men in the city in military and militarised units, but only about 6,500–7,000 of them had weapons, with a dozen or so field guns and a few anti-tank guns. Actual command was taken by Colonel Jarosław Okulicz-Kozaryn (PL).

On 18 September the commander of the Belorussian Front (PL), Army Commander 2nd Rank Mikhail Kovalyov, ordered Wilno to be taken by two mobile groups: the 24th Cavalry Division with the 22nd and 25th Tank Brigades from the north-east, and the 36th Cavalry Division with the 6th Tank Brigade from the south-east. That day the Polish command received an unclear order from the commander of Corps District III, Brigadier General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński, not to defend the city and to withdraw to Lithuania. Okulicz-Kozaryn at first ordered his units to stay in position and to fire only on express orders. When Soviet tanks appeared from the direction of Oszmiana after 5 p.m., he ordered a retreat towards the Lithuanian border. Some soldiers and policemen made for Grodno. Lieutenant Colonel Tadeusz Podwysocki, sent to the Russians with the message that the city would not be defended, came under fire and turned back.

Even so, fighting went on at several points in the city during the evening and night. The remaining units and volunteers, among them young people armed with petrol bombs, fired on the tanks in the suburbs, at the railway station, at the depots in Burbiszki and at the Green Bridge. On the morning of 19 September further Soviet groups entered the city, captured the bridges over the Wilia and by midday had taken Wilno. According to Soviet figures, Red Army losses amounted to 13 killed and 24 wounded, together with several tanks and armoured cars. Polish historians believe they were in fact higher. Polish losses cannot be established precisely. Many soldiers crossed into Lithuania and were interned there.

The first contact near Lwów

For a week Lwów had been fighting off the attacks of the German 1st Mountain Division, and its defence was directed by Brigadier General Władysław Langner. On hearing of the Soviet invasion the Polish command ordered its troops to fight only the Germans and to fire on the Red Army solely in self-defence. On the night of 18–19 September Soviet armoured units of the Ukrainian Front’s 6th Army approached Łyczaków from the east and occupied Winniki.

On the morning of 19 September, in the suburbs, a reconnaissance detachment of a Soviet tank brigade exchanged fire with a regiment of the German 2nd Mountain Division that was outflanking the city from the east. Both sides had orders to take Lwów, and both suffered casualties in killed and wounded. It was the first bloody incident between armies that were officially on friendly terms. At the Soviet headquarters in Winniki the commander of the German 2nd Mountain Division, General Valentin Feurstein, and the artillery chief of the Kiev Military District, Nikolai Yakovlev, then negotiated the course of the demarcation line. The same day Soviet envoys proposed talks with the Poles on handing over the city, assuring them that they had come to fight the Germans.

The fate of Lwów, however, was not decided by the commands outside the city. On 20 September Adolf Hitler ordered the German troops to withdraw to the line agreed in Moscow, and the German assault planned for 21 September was called off. On 22 September General Langner signed the capitulation to the Red Army at Winniki. The promise that officers would be free to leave was not kept.

Agreeing the demarcation line

On 19 September a German military delegation flew to Moscow. That evening Molotov summoned Schulenburg and protested that on a German map shown in Berlin Lwów lay on the German side. The ambassador explained that it was a provisional line. On 20 September Voroshilov and the chief of the General Staff, Boris Shaposhnikov, opened talks with the military attaché, General Ernst Köstring, Colonel Heinrich Aschenbrenner and Lieutenant Colonel Hans Krebs. A protocol was signed in the early hours of 21 September. The German troops were to withdraw in stages to the line of the rivers Pisa, Narew, Vistula and San, with Soviet units following them at a distance of about 25 kilometres. The Germans undertook to protect installations in the territory being handed over from destruction, and the Red Army, at the request of the German command, was to help in crushing “Polish units or bands” that might stand in the way of the withdrawing German columns. At the request of Walther von Brauchitsch the timetable was later put back by a day, since fighting was still going on outside Warsaw and Lwów. On 23 September Pravda published the course of the demarcation line.

Among the German generals the order to withdraw caused bitterness. The Army High Command regarded it as a humiliating concession, since territory won in battle had to be given up, some of the spoils left behind, and the evacuation of the wounded and prisoners organised.

Brest: the handover of the city on 22 September

The 29th Light Tank Brigade of Kombrig Semyon Krivoshein, part of Vasily Chuikov’s 4th Army, had been advancing since 17 September through Baranowicze and Prużana. On 20 September its reconnaissance stopped a group of officers from Guderian’s corps near Widomla. According to Krivoshein’s memoirs, which must be read with caution, he received them in his tent, raised a toast to both commanders and invited them to Moscow after the imminent victory over “capitalist England”. On the evening of 20 September the brigade was ordered to occupy Brest. After a night march its leading units reached the city on 21 September, and Krivoshein went to Guderian’s headquarters. According to Krivoshein, they spoke in French, and the talks went on until evening.

On 21 September an agreement on the handover of the city was signed in Brest. On the German side it was signed by the corps chief of staff, Colonel Walther Nehring, and on the Soviet side by Captain Gubanov. The German troops were to leave the city on 22 September; depots and stores were to pass into the hands of the Red Army; wounded men who could not be moved were to remain in Soviet care; and prisoners and captured equipment were to be handed over formally. The agreement provided for the troops of both sides to march past their commanders and for the flags to be changed to the sound of the national anthems. Guderian wanted a full joint parade. Krivoshein replied that his men were tired after their long march and proposed a different form: the German regiments would leave the city in marching columns, and the Soviet units entering the city would salute them with their colours.

At 10 a.m. on 22 September the German war flag, which had flown over the citadel for five days, was lowered, and the German infantry left the fortress. In the afternoon, at about 4 p.m., units of the German 20th Motorised Division marched with their band past a reviewing stand on which Guderian and Krivoshein stood side by side. Next to them stood Soviet tank crews of the brigade’s 4th Battalion and the brigade band. At the end the swastika flag was lowered and the Soviet flag raised. The ceremony was filmed by German newsreel cameramen. On the same day the Germans handed Białystok over to the Red Army.

This ceremony remains a subject of dispute. Some Russian historians stress that it was not a parade in the regulation sense, but a “ceremonial withdrawal of German troops under Soviet supervision”, and some commentators have even claimed that there was no parade at all. The surviving German and Soviet documents, photographs and film leave no doubt, however, that a joint ceremony took place in Brest, during which the commanders of the two armies together took the salute of the marching troops. Reports of similar parades in Grodno, Pińsk or Lwów find no confirmation in the sources. After the incident near Lwów both commands tended rather to keep their troops apart.

Significance

The encounter near Lwów and the ceremony in Brest showed what the alliance of August 1939 meant in practice: two armies that only a few weeks earlier had been preparing for war with each other were dividing up the territory of a state with which both their countries had non-aggression pacts. The Poles, who were still fighting at Warsaw, Modlin, Lwów and in the Lublin region, were caught in a vice. The government and the Commander-in-Chief had already crossed the Romanian border, and Polish units falling back eastwards now fell straight into the hands of the Red Army. In Brest itself and its surroundings the Russians took thousands of soldiers prisoner, men who kept arriving by rail for several days after the city had been handed over.

The demarcation line of 21 September did not last long. On 28 September Germany and the Soviet Union signed the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, in which Stalin ceded the Lublin region and part of the Warsaw province to Germany in exchange for Lithuania. The border moved to the Bug, and Brest remained on the Soviet side. In October Stalin handed Wilno to Lithuania in return for its consent to Soviet military bases, and in 1940 he occupied the whole of Lithuania. In the annexed lands the Soviet occupation began, with deportations and arrests, and in the spring of 1940 the NKVD murdered the captured officers and policemen in the Katyn massacre.

Brest returned to the history of the war on 22 June 1941. On that day German troops, among them Guderian’s panzer group, crossed the Bug at the very place from which they had withdrawn in September 1939 and attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet garrison of the Brest Fortress then held out for several weeks. The photographs of Guderian and Krivoshein on the same reviewing stand became one of the best-known symbols of the German–Soviet cooperation of 1939–1941, about which Soviet historiography kept silent for decades.