The Germans retake Kharkiv

On 14 March 1943 the German command announced that Kharkiv was once again in the hands of the Wehrmacht. The city, which Soviet troops had liberated only a month earlier, on 16 February, was taken by the divisions of the II SS Panzer Corps – the very ones that had abandoned it in mid-February against Hitler’s orders. Fighting in the city had been going on since 11 March, and the Germans spent a further two days mopping up isolated pockets of resistance in the south-eastern suburbs. On 18 March Belgorod fell as well. The recapture of Kharkiv brought to an end Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s counter-offensive, which since 19 February had turned the situation round on the southern wing of the Eastern Front.

The road to the city

At the beginning of March Erich von Manstein’s Army Group South had routed the Soviet groupings between the Donets and the Dnieper, and then the 3rd Tank Army of Lieutenant General Pavel Rybalko, which was supposed to cover Kharkiv from the south. On 7 March Manstein decided to press on before the spring thaw turned the roads into mud. Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army, with General Paul Hausser’s SS corps as its main striking force, was to bypass the city to the west and close it off from the north, cutting its defenders off from the rest of Colonel General Filipp Golikov’s Voronezh Front. From the north-west General Werner Kempf’s army detachment attacked with the Großdeutschland Division.

On 8 and 9 March the SS corps broke through to the north, driving a wedge between the Soviet 40th and 69th Armies, and on 9 March it swung east. Kharkiv’s defences were weak. Golikov and Rybalko had at their disposal the remnants of the 3rd Tank Army, several depleted rifle divisions, often numbering 3,500–4,000 men or fewer, an NKVD brigade and units hastily transferred from other sectors. According to Soviet figures, at the beginning of March the whole front had only about 70 tanks. Ammunition, fuel and food were all in short supply.

Hausser goes against the plan

Hoth’s and Manstein’s plan was for the SS corps to avoid being drawn into street fighting and to encircle the city instead. On 10 March the headquarters of the 4th Panzer Army instructed Hausser to take Kharkiv “as quickly as possible” if the opportunity arose, but without abandoning the outflanking manoeuvre. Hausser interpreted the order in his own way and decided to attack the city at once with all his forces: the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler from the north, Das Reich from the west, while Totenkopf was to cover the attack from the north and north-west. Hoth tried to hold him to the original plan, but Hausser pressed on with the assault. Some historians attribute this to the ambition of the Waffen-SS, which wanted to show that its divisions would recover the city they had been forced to give up in February, and to erase the impression left by their unauthorised retreat.

Four days of street fighting

On the morning of 11 March the Leibstandarte attacked the northern districts of Kharkiv in two columns, along the railway line and the road from Belgorod. The defenders put up stiff resistance, and Soviet T-34s drove some of the German infantry out of the Alekseyevka district; only the support of dive-bombers and assault guns allowed the Germans to gain a foothold in the suburbs. Das Reich, attacking from the west, was halted in front of a deep anti-tank ditch held by Soviet infantry and anti-tank guns.

That same afternoon, 11 March, Hoth ordered Hausser to pull Das Reich out of the fighting in the city and send it east to cut the defenders’ lines of retreat. Hausser refused, arguing that disengaging was too risky, and sent only a detachment of the Totenkopf Division to carry out the task. During the night of 11–12 March Das Reich crossed the anti-tank ditch and reached the main railway station. Hoth repeated the order after midnight, and Hausser again refused. Only the third order was obeyed: Das Reich withdrew from the city, passed through its northern part along a corridor held by the Leibstandarte, and took up positions east of Kharkiv.

On 12 March the Leibstandarte broke through the defences of the northern suburbs and began fighting house by house towards the centre. In the evening one of its battalions surrounded Dzerzhinsky Square (today Freedom Square), one of the largest squares in Europe and the site of the Derzhprom building. The Germans renamed it “Platz der Leibstandarte”. Contrary to an often repeated version, then, it was not Red Square but Dzerzhinsky Square, which during the first occupation had been called the Square of the German Army. During the night Joachim Peiper’s battalion crossed the Kharkiv river and opened the way into the south-eastern part of the city.

On 13 March the Leibstandarte cleared further blocks south of the river, while the Das Reich regiment left in the city crushed resistance in its south-western part. By the evening around two-thirds of Kharkiv was in German hands. On 14 March the fighting began to die down; the SS men advanced eastwards on a broad front, and towards evening the command announced that the whole city had been taken. Even so, fighting continued for two more days in the Kharkiv Tractor Factory on the south-eastern outskirts; sources state that the last clashes ended on 15 or 16 March.

On 14 March, with the city practically surrounded, Golikov issued the order to evacuate. Some units of the 3rd Tank Army and of the rifle divisions managed on 15–17 March to break out to the south-east and withdraw behind the Donets. Others, cut off in the city and its suburbs, were destroyed or taken prisoner.

Belgorod and the end of the counter-offensive

The fall of Kharkiv sealed the fate of the Soviet defence on the Donets. The Germans had taken Graivoron as early as 12 March, and after the capture of the city the Leibstandarte and Großdeutschland set off north towards Belgorod. On 18 March the spearhead of the SS division entered the town, practically without a fight. The Stavka, alarmed at the possibility of a further German advance on Kursk, sent new armies into the area, including the 21st and 64th Armies from Stalingrad and the 1st Tank Army. Joseph Stalin dispatched Marshal Georgy Zhukov to the Voronezh Front; he arrived in mid-March and helped to stabilise the front north of Belgorod. At the end of March General of the Army Nikolai Vatutin took over command of the front from Golikov.

After 20 March the Germans still tried to advance, but a thaw that came earlier than usual turned the roads into mud, and by the end of March the fighting on this sector had died down. Manstein’s original intention of striking at Kursk together with Army Group Centre was not carried out. The front line settled along the Donets, running south from Belgorod and on to the west of Kursk, forming a great salient driven into the German line.

Losses and crimes

Soviet statistics compiled after the war state that in the Kharkov defensive operation (4–25 March) the Voronezh Front and the 3rd Tank Army lost some 86,500 men, of whom more than 45,000 were killed, missing or taken prisoner. German losses are harder to establish. According to estimates based on German reports, the II SS Panzer Corps lost about 4,500 men by 17 March, including some 160 officers – a considerable part of its combat strength.

After taking the city, SS units committed crimes against the wounded and prisoners. According to the findings of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, at the military hospital in Trinkler Street, from which the wounded had not been evacuated in time, SS men killed more than 400 wounded Red Army soldiers, burning some of them alive inside the building. A few weeks earlier, on 17 February, soldiers of the Leibstandarte had murdered – according to Ukrainian sources – 872 inhabitants of the villages of Yefremivka and Semenivka south-west of Kharkiv, in reprisal for the wounding of two SS officers. The German occupation administration returned to Kharkiv, and with it came round-ups for forced labour in the Reich and reprisals against those who had cooperated with the Soviet authorities in February and March.

Kharkiv, which before the war had more than 800,000 inhabitants, was by then a starving and ruined city. The crimes committed in and around it in 1941–1943 became the subject of a trial held in Kharkiv in December 1943 – the first trial in which German war criminals stood before a Soviet court.

Its place in the war

The recapture of Kharkiv was the last great German victory on the Eastern Front. After the defeat at Stalingrad it allowed the Wehrmacht to stabilise the southern wing of the front, to regain a city that was an important railway junction and industrial centre, and to weaken the impression that the German army was in constant retreat. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda presented it as proof that the winter of 1942–1943 had been only a passing crisis. In April Heinrich Himmler came to Kharkiv, addressed the officers of the SS corps and praised them as the victors of Kharkiv. The Waffen-SS divisions emerged from the battle with a prestige that strengthened their position in the hierarchy of the Third Reich, and Hausser’s insubordination had no consequences for him.

For the Red Army, March 1943 was a painful lesson, similar to the one it had learned a year earlier in the Second Battle of Kharkov. The Stavka had overestimated its own strength and underestimated the enemy’s capacity to counter-attack. This time, however, the defeat was not on the catastrophic scale of May 1942, and the front was halted on the Donets and at Belgorod.

The most important consequence of the fighting proved to be the shape of the front line. Between Orel and Belgorod there remained a salient around Kursk jutting westwards, which Manstein had wanted to eliminate as early as March. Through the spring Hitler and his generals spent several months preparing to cut it off in Operation Citadel. When the Germans finally attacked in July 1943, the Red Army was waiting for them in deep, elaborately prepared defences. The Battle of Kursk ended in defeat for the Wehrmacht, and on 23 August 1943 Soviet troops liberated Kharkiv for the second and final time.