The Germans reach the Gulf of Finland

On Thursday 7 August 1941 the leading units of the German 254th Infantry Division reached the shore of the Gulf of Finland at Kunda, a small industrial town with a cement works, some hundred kilometres east of Tallinn. The same day other units of General Albert Wodrig’s XXVI Army Corps took Rakvere, the capital of Viru County, from which the staff of the Soviet 8th Army had fled in haste. The wedge driven from south to north across the whole of Estonia cut the only road and railway linking Tallinn with Narva and Leningrad. The Soviet 8th Army fell apart into two parts: the 10th Rifle Corps retreated west, towards Tallinn, the main base of the Baltic Fleet, while the 11th Rifle Corps, with divisions sent from Leningrad, fell back east, towards Narva. Ten days later, on 17 August, the Germans took Narva. All that remained to the Red Army in Estonia was the encircled Tallinn area, fragments of the west coast and the islands of the West Estonian Archipelago.

Popular war chronologies record these events under two dates: 7 August (the Germans reaching the Gulf of Finland and cutting Tallinn off from the rest of the front) and 17 August (the capture of Narva). They were two stages of the same advance. The date of 7 August agrees with Russian studies and with the Estonian monograph on the fighting for Tallinn; some Estonian compilations state that the German spearhead reached the sea at Kunda as early as 6 August and that Rakvere was taken on 7 August. The difference concerns a few hours’ march by individual units, not the course of the operation.

Estonia in the plans of Army Group North

Estonia was not an end in itself for the Germans. Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North was above all to take Leningrad, and the Baltic states were the road to it. After the capture of Riga on 1 July the group’s main forces, the 4th Panzer Group and the 16th Army, advanced on Pskov, Luga and Novgorod. Estonia was to be conquered by the 18th Army of General Georg von Küchler. The German command believed that the Soviet 8th Army, withdrawn from Latvia, was shattered and demoralised, and at first sent only two infantry divisions, the 61st and 217th, and part of I Corps into Estonia. It was mistaken. After initial successes – on 7 July the Germans crossed the border and took Pärnu and Viljandi – the advance stalled in the face of a Soviet counter-attack at Märjamaa and on the line of the Emajõgi river at Tartu. There, for two weeks, the Summer War was fought: alongside the advancing Germans, the Estonian Forest Brothers fought the Red Army and the destruction battalions, and from them the Omakaitse self-defence units were formed.

The halt in Estonia began to hamper the advance on Leningrad. The left flank of the 4th Panzer Group – which during July had been seizing bridgeheads on the Luga river and, after the counter-attack at Soltsy, had to wait for the infantry – remained exposed as long as the coast of the Gulf of Finland and Narva were in Soviet hands. Tallinn was, moreover, the main base of the Soviet Baltic Fleet; the cruiser Kirov, two destroyer leaders, several destroyers and dozens of smaller vessels lay there, and from airfields in Estonia and on the islands Soviet aircraft attacked German columns and shipping lanes in the Baltic. Adolf Hitler’s Directive No. 33 of 19 July and its supplements ordered the 18th Army to clear Estonia as quickly as possible and then to advance through the isthmus between Lake Peipus and the sea on Narva and onwards to Leningrad.

Küchler received reinforcements: the 291st Infantry Division came from Courland, the 93rd Infantry Division from the reserve, and the 207th Security Division to guard the rear. On 24 July the staff of XLII Army Corps arrived at Otepää and took over the 61st and 217th Divisions and the Tallinn axis. XXVI Corps, with the 254th and 291st Divisions, and from the beginning of August also the 93rd, was to strike north and north-east, towards Rakvere and Narva.

A wedge to the sea

The attack began on 22 July at the junction of two Soviet corps between Türi and Põltsamaa. The Germans split the 8th Army’s front and by 24 July had reached the shore of Lake Peipus at Kasepää. Two Soviet divisions, the 48th and 125th Rifle Divisions, which had been holding the Emajõgi line, were pushed back towards the lake and encircled between the Emajõgi and Mustvee; by 31 July XXVI Corps had destroyed them. According to Estonian studies, some 10,000 Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner. One and a half regiments of the Soviet 16th Rifle Division, which were to have come to their aid, failed to break through the front of the 254th Division, were themselves encircled south of Koeru and destroyed by 5 August.

From then on the road north lay open. On 2 August the 217th Division took Paide, in the centre of the country. On 4 August units of XXVI Corps entered Tapa, the railway junction on the Tallinn–Narva–Leningrad line; that day the road linking the Estonian capital with the rest of the front was cut. On 6 August the Germans were at Kadrina, and on 7 August they took Rakvere and reached the sea at Kunda. The Soviet command still tried to plug the gap. The 118th and 268th Rifle Divisions were sent from Leningrad, but, unloaded from trains under fire and without communications, the units did not have time to form a new line of defence; according to Russian studies, the 118th Division abandoned its positions at Kunda in disorder, which Soviet sources explain by its not having had time to deploy. On 7 August Major General Pyotr Pshennikov took command of the 8th Army.

The German advance in Estonia was conducted almost without air support. The Luftwaffe operated mainly on the Leningrad axis, and for most of the summer the skies over Estonia belonged to the Baltic Fleet’s air arm. On the evening of 7 August fifteen DB-3 bombers of the Baltic Fleet air arm under Colonel Yevgeny Preobrazhensky took off from Kagul airfield on the island of Saaremaa. According to Russian studies, five of them dropped their bombs on Berlin itself and the rest on its outskirts and on Stettin, and all returned. It was the first Soviet raid on the capital of the Reich. The damage was slight, but the propaganda value was enormous: the Germans, who two weeks earlier had begun raids on Moscow, learned that the war could come back to them. The raids from Saaremaa continued until the beginning of September, until the Germans drew near the islands.

An army cut in two

The advance to the sea trapped in western Estonia the Soviet 10th Rifle Corps of Major General Ivan Nikolayev (PL), the remnants of the 22nd NKVD Motorised Division, the 1st Naval Infantry Brigade, Estonian and Latvian workers’ regiments and destruction battalions. The figures must be given with reservations. Russian studies speak of just under 20,000 ground troops, joined over the following days by some ten to twenty thousand sailors transferred from the ships to land defence. Estonian historians estimate that, together with the army’s rear services, fleet personnel and NKVD formations, up to 70,000 people were in the Tallinn area. On the morning of 8 August the 8th Army tried to close the breach with attacks from both sides, west and east. The counter-attack failed: that same morning the German 291st and 93rd Divisions themselves struck east from Kunda, and the Soviet units had to abandon Jõhvi and fall back along the railway towards Narva.

From then on the two German corps advanced in opposite directions. XLII Corps turned west, against Tallinn, while XXVI Corps, which left one regiment of the 207th Security Division on the gulf to defend the coast, moved east. The Soviet troops around Tallinn spent several days strengthening their positions; the Germans, exhausted by three weeks of fighting, needed replacements and did not attack. On 14 August the command of the North-Western Direction under Marshal Kliment Voroshilov entrusted the defence of the city to the Military Council of the Baltic Fleet, whose commander, Vice Admiral Vladimir Tributs, became commander-in-chief of the defence of Tallinn, and on 17 August the cut-off units of the 8th Army were formally subordinated to the fleet.

Scorched earth in Virumaa

The Red Army’s retreat through north-eastern Estonia followed Joseph Stalin’s order of 3 July to leave nothing to the enemy. On 5–9 August the retreating units set fire to the oil-shale works at Kiviõli, and on 12 and 13 August to those at Kohtla-Järve, the most important centre for mining and processing the oil shale from which Estonia produced oil and petrol. On 16 August a destruction battalion burned, according to Estonian compilations, 173 buildings at Vaivara, and a church at Sillamäe. In the last days before the Germans arrived, the destruction battalions also murdered people suspected of sympathising with the “bandits”; among the most notorious crimes was the massacre of the inhabitants of the village of Viru-Kabala, among them small children.

In the areas they occupied the Germans were accompanied by Estonians. Omakaitse units took over small towns and rural municipalities and rounded up scattered Red Army soldiers and members of the destruction battalions, and their members served the Germans as guides and scouts. On 6 August the reconnaissance group “Erna” crossed to the German side of the front: several dozen Estonians trained in Finland, who had been operating behind Soviet lines since July and at the end of July had fought the destruction battalions in the Kautla bogs, shielding the civilians hiding there. From its members and new volunteers the Germans soon formed the “Erna II” battalion, which took part in the fighting for Tallinn. The Germans quashed from the outset Estonian hopes that the expulsion of the Soviets would bring the rebirth of the state: the Omakaitse was subordinated to Wehrmacht commandants, and Estonian flags were ordered to be taken down.

Narva, 17 August

Narva, Estonia’s third-largest city, lies on the Narva river, opposite Russian Ivangorod, on the only dry route from Estonia to Leningrad between Lake Peipus and the sea. Fighting on its approaches had been going on since 19 July, when the German 58th Infantry Division, advancing along the eastern shore of Lake Peipus, reached the source of the river. Now XXVI Corps was approaching from the west, along the road and railway from Tallinn. The defence here was conducted by the remnants of the 11th Rifle Corps and the 118th, 268th and 191st Rifle Divisions. On 16 August the retreating Red Army soldiers blew up the railway bridge over the Narva, and a destruction battalion the wooden bridge in the town. On 17 August the 291st Infantry Division burst into Narva from the west, and the spearheads of the 58th Division from the south. According to Estonian studies, the Germans took almost 6,000 prisoners in the operation east of Kunda. The remnants of the Soviet units withdrew beyond the river and further east along the coast.

The fall of Narva was bound up with events on the other side of the river, at the western end of the defensive line on the Luga. On 8 August, the day after the Germans reached the gulf at Kunda, Leeb began a new offensive against Leningrad. General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s XLI Motorised Corps attacked from its bridgeheads on the Luga around Ivanovskoye and Bolshoi Sabsk. On the first day, in rain that grounded the German air force, it met fierce resistance from people’s militia divisions and officer cadets from Leningrad, but over the following days it broke through the defences. On 14 August the Germans cut the railway from Krasnogvardeysk to Kingisepp, and on 16 August they took Kingisepp and Volosovo station. The Soviet units from Narva and Kingisepp, pushed back towards the Gulf of Finland, retreated east. On 20 August the 18th Army emerged from the Narva isthmus. The cover for the left flank that the German command had been waiting for since mid-July was at last assured.

Place in the war

Reaching the Gulf of Finland at Kunda sealed Tallinn’s fate. The Soviet troops around the Estonian capital no longer had an overland route east, and the fleet could take them off only by sea, through waters that from 8 August the Germans and Finns were densely mining off Cape Juminda. XLII Corps’ final assault on the city began on 20 August, and on 28 August Tallinn fell, while the Baltic Fleet fought its way through to Kronstadt, losing dozens of warships and merchant vessels to mines and bombs. On the islands of the West Estonian Archipelago the Red Army held out until October: Saaremaa fell at the beginning of October, Hiiumaa on 21 October. Estonia came entirely under German occupation and in December 1941 became a general district of the Reich Commissariat Ostland.

For Army Group North the capture of Narva opened the coastal road to Leningrad. The 18th Army advanced on Koporye and Krasnogvardeysk and, together with the 4th Panzer Group and the 16th Army, closed the ring around the city over the following weeks. The Soviet 8th Army, pushed back to the coast, nevertheless held on to a strip of land around Oranienbaum, which survived the entire siege and in January 1944 became the base for the offensive that broke it. A few months later, from February to July 1944, one of the hardest battles on the northern sector of the front was fought for Narva, with thousands of conscripted Estonians fighting on the German side and the Estonian Rifle Corps on the Soviet side. The same river across which the Germans had advanced eastwards out of Estonia in August 1941 then became the line which, for half a year, they defended against the return of the Red Army.