The Germans at Khimki

At the beginning of December 1941 Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre was making its last attempts to reach Moscow or encircle it. Popular war chronologies record under 2 December that a German sapper patrol, looking for a gap in the Soviet defences, reached the small town of Khimki, the closest point to Moscow that the Germans ever reached. Under 4 December they state that the temperature on the Moscow front fell to minus 37 degrees and that the German attacks were collapsing. Both entries capture the essence of those days, but they need qualifying: the Khimki episode is poorly documented and variously dated, and such low temperatures were recorded rather a few days later, and not in Moscow itself.

The patrol at Khimki

Khimki then lay on the Leningrad highway and the Moscow Canal, some eight kilometres from the city limits of the day and little more than 20 kilometres from the Kremlin. The story of a German patrol reaching it comes mainly from German and Western authors and differs a little in every version. According to Paul Carell, author of popular books on the war in the East, motorcyclists of the 62nd Engineer Battalion, sent out on 30 November by the commander of the 4th Panzer Group, Colonel General Erich Hoepner, ahead of the leading elements of the 2nd Panzer Division towards Lobnya station, drove into Khimki unopposed, caused panic among the inhabitants and turned back. The American journalist and historian William L. Shirer, on the other hand, wrote that on 2 December a reconnaissance battalion of the 258th Infantry Division broke into Khimki, from where the towers of the Kremlin could be seen, and that the next morning it was driven out by Soviet tanks and a unit of mobilised workers. Some German studies likewise link the raid on Khimki with 2 December and with the 62nd Engineer Battalion.

Russian historians, among them Alexei Isaev, accept that a small detachment of motorcyclists did indeed reach Khimki, but there is no agreement on when. One version moves it to 16 October, the days of the Moscow panic, another to 30 November. Shirer’s account is often regarded as a mistake: on 1–3 December the 258th Division was fighting far away, west of Moscow near Naro-Fominsk. The image of German soldiers gazing at the domes of the Kremlin through binoculars is also more legend than fact – at that distance, and with the suburbs in the way, it would have been hard to see anything. One thing is certain: if the patrol did reach Khimki, it was a brief reconnaissance raid, not the capture of the town. The continuous German front stood further back, and the furthest point reached and held by larger forces is usually taken to be Krasnaya Polyana – today part of the town of Lobnya – taken on 30 November by the German V Army Corps and armoured units of the 4th Panzer Group, some 27–30 kilometres from the Kremlin. On this sector stubborn resistance was offered by units of Lieutenant General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 16th Army and by hastily brought-up formations, among them anti-aircraft batteries firing at tanks over open sights. Today a monument in the shape of giant anti-tank obstacles, unveiled in 1966, stands in Khimki at the 23rd kilometre of the Leningrad highway. It commemorates, however, the defence line of the capital, not the exact spot that the Germans reached.

The last attacks

North of Moscow, after the failed attempt to hold a bridgehead across the canal at Yakhroma, the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups spent the first days of December still trying to break through towards the capital, but their divisions had only a few dozen serviceable tanks each, and their infantry companies were down to a few dozen men. Progress was measured in hundreds of metres, and Soviet counter-attacks recovered some of the villages that had been taken.

In the centre the last attempt was made by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s 4th Army, which had stood still for most of the November offensive. On 1 December its corps struck the positions of the Soviet 33rd and 5th Armies north and south of Naro-Fominsk. Two infantry divisions with several dozen tanks broke through the front of the 222nd Rifle Division, were halted near the village of Akulovo, turned onto a side road and on 2 December reached the villages of Yushkovo and Burtsevo, heading towards Golitsyno in the rear of the 5th Army. It was a deep but narrow wedge. On 3 December a Soviet counter-attack drove the Germans out of Yushkovo, and by the morning of 5 December – according to Russian studies – they had been pushed back to their start line. Kluge, who had been sceptical about the attack’s chances from the outset, according to German studies ordered the advanced units to withdraw as early as 3 December.

In the south Colonel General Heinz Guderian, whose headquarters was at Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy’s former estate, tried at last to close the ring around Tula. His 2nd Panzer Army, bypassing the city to the east, attacked north of it from 2 December in order to link up near Kostrovo with XLIII Army Corps, which was attacking from the west. On 3 December the leading elements of the German XXIV Motorised Corps cut the Tula–Serpukhov road and railway near Revyakino, the defenders’ last links with Moscow. On 4 December, however, the Soviet 340th Rifle Division and 112th Tank Division struck the flank of this wedge, while units of Lieutenant General Ivan Boldin’s 50th Army, defending Tula, attacked from the city. The corps attacking from the west failed to break through. On 5 December Guderian called off the attack and began to withdraw his forward divisions. He later wrote in his memoirs that the attack on Moscow had failed and that the enemy’s strength and capabilities had been underestimated.

The frost

The first days of December brought a sudden drop in temperature. According to readings at the Moscow weather station, the temperature in the capital fell to about minus 21 degrees during the night of 4 December, and on 5–7 December it stayed at around minus 22–25 degrees even by day; a brief thaw followed. At the front, in the open field, lower readings were recorded. After the war German commanders wrote of 30–38 degrees of frost: Erhard Raus, then a colonel in the 6th Panzer Division and later a general, named 4–7 December as the coldest days, with temperatures of minus 36–38 degrees, and Bock is said to have recorded even lower values. Such accounts may have been exaggerated, since they stressed the role of the weather in the German defeat. The frequently quoted figure of minus 37 degrees falls within the range of these recollections, but not of the Moscow measurements, and probably does not apply to 4 December itself.

Whatever the exact readings, the effects were dreadful. The German troops had not received their winter clothing, which was stuck on congested railway lines in Poland and Belarus. Soldiers wrapped themselves in blankets and captured clothing, lit fires under tank engines to get them started, and lubricant froze solid in the breeches of machine guns. The number of cases of frostbite rose rapidly: over the winter the Wehrmacht recorded more than a hundred thousand of them. The frost was just as harsh for the Red Army, but its soldiers had quilted jackets, felt boots and sheepskin coats, and their base – Moscow – at their backs.

Place in the war

In Soviet and Russian memory Khimki and Krasnaya Polyana became symbols of the place where the Germans were stopped “at the gates of Moscow”. The Wehrmacht never came any closer to the Kremlin. By then the exhaustion of Army Group Centre was obvious to its commanders: on 1 December Bock reported to the Army High Command that his troops were at the end of their strength. On 5 December Guderian and the commanders of the panzer groups called off their attacks, and on the evening of 6 December army group headquarters ordered a switch to the defensive. But on 5 December the Soviet Kalinin Front had already struck, followed on 6 December by the Western Front of General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, reinforced with reserves of which German intelligence knew nothing. Within a few days the Germans had been thrown back from Krasnaya Polyana and the Khimki area, and by mid-December they were retreating along the whole front before Moscow. The first days of December 1941 were thus the last in which the Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet capital – and the end of Hitler’s hopes of finishing the war with the Soviet Union in a single campaign.