The Germans take Kharkiv

On 24 October 1941 units of the German Sixth Army under Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau took the centre of Kharkiv, one of the largest cities of the Soviet Union and the most important industrial centre of Soviet Ukraine. On the same day a neighbouring corps of the Sixth Army took Belgorod. The fighting for the city itself lasted only a few days, and the last Soviet units withdrew eastwards on the night of 25–26 October. The Germans, however, captured a largely empty city: the most important factories, above all the plants producing T-34 tanks, had been evacuated beforehand to the Urals and the Volga, and whatever could not be removed in time had been blown up or mined.

War chronologies record under 24 October that Kharkiv, an important mining and industrial centre, fell to the troops of Army Group South. The date is correct. Kharkiv, however, was above all a centre of the engineering industry and a railway junction; the coal mines lay further to the south-east, in the Donets Basin, which the Germans were occupying in the same weeks.

City of factories

Until 1934 Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine, and during the first Five-Year Plan it grew into one of the main centres of Soviet industrialisation. According to Soviet figures it had 901,000 inhabitants in May 1941, and considerably more in the autumn after the influx of refugees from the west. The Kharkiv Locomotive Works named after the Comintern, designated Plant No. 183, had designed and produced the T-34 tank; according to Russian studies, most of the tanks of this type built by the autumn of 1941 came from there, while Plant No. 75 was the only factory in the country making tank diesel engines. The Kharkiv Tractor Factory, the largest in the USSR, repaired tanks and was preparing to produce T-60 light tanks, and the aircraft works built Su-2 bombers. Railway lines linking Moscow with the Crimea and the Caucasus, and the Donets Basin with the rest of the country, ran through the city.

In August and September Hitler stressed several times that the Kharkiv industrial region mattered more to him than Moscow. In the August directives that led to the change in the direction of the advance on 21 August, the Kharkiv industrial region was named, alongside the Crimea and the Donets Basin, as an objective of Army Group South under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.

Evacuation

When the German armies reached the Poltava line after the fall of Kiev, the Soviet authorities decided to remove everything they could from Kharkiv. On 16 September, the day after the Kiev pocket was closed, the State Defence Committee adopted resolutions on evacuating the factories, as well as women and children, from Kharkiv and its region. Less than a month was allowed for dismantling and loading the plants. Tramlines were laid up to the factory gates so that machinery could be taken straight to the railway ramps. According to figures cited in the literature, the equipment of about 70 large factories was removed in 320 trains, and the evacuation was essentially complete by 20 October.

Plant No. 183 was moved to Nizhny Tagil in the Urals, to the site of Uralvagonzavod, where the first T-34s rolled out of the workshops as early as December 1941, and where the largest T-34 factory grew up in the following years. Engine Plant No. 75 was taken to Chelyabinsk, where together with the local tractor factory and plants evacuated from Leningrad it formed the combine known as “Tankograd”. The aircraft works were moved to Molotov, today’s Perm, and the equipment of the tractor factory was dispersed into the interior; part went to Stalingrad, and part later became the tractor factory at Rubtsovsk in the Altai. Engineers and workers travelled with the machines, together with their families. The transfer of Ukrainian, Belarusian and Leningrad industry to the east was one of the most important operations of 1941: it was thanks to it that the Soviet Union was able to produce more tanks than Germany in 1942.

At the same time Kharkiv was mined. On 27 September the General Staff sent to the city Colonel Ilya Starinov, a specialist in mines and sabotage, who reached Kharkiv at the end of September with one of the last convoys before the Germans cut the road from Moscow. His sappers mined roads, bridges, railway lines and buildings, some of them with radio-detonated mines. Similar preparations had been made earlier in Kiev, where explosions at the end of September burned out the city centre.

The battle for the city

The Southwestern Front, re-formed after the disaster at Kiev under Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, was much weaker than the Germans. In October the Stavka was taking divisions away from it to save Moscow after the defeat at Vyazma and Bryansk, while in the south Kleist had just destroyed two armies of the neighbouring Southern Front on the Sea of Azov. On 6 October the Sixth Army advanced through Sumy and Okhtyrka on Belgorod and Kharkiv, and the Seventeenth Army from Poltava on Lozova and Izium. The Soviet 38th Army of Major General Viktor Tsyganov and the 6th Army of General Rodion Malinovsky fell back, trying to avoid encirclement. The German advance, however, was slowed by the autumn rains. The roads turned to mud, destroyed bridges had to be replaced with pontoons, and supplies from the distant Dnieper got through with ever greater difficulty.

The Stavka did not intend to defend Kharkiv to the last man. The city was to hold out until the evacuation and the withdrawal of neighbouring forces were complete. Its immediate defence lay with the poorly trained 216th Rifle Division, re-formed after its destruction at Kiev, the 57th NKVD Brigade, a Kharkiv people’s militia regiment and a detachment of obsolete tanks – fewer than 20,000 men in all, according to Russian figures. On 20–21 October the German LV Army Corps of General of Infantry Erwin Vierow approached the western suburbs, and on 22 October the defenders counter-attacked.

On 23 October, after an artillery preparation, the 57th Infantry Division of Major General Anton Dostler went into the assault, supported by assault guns, with the 101st Light Division attacking from the north. The Germans advanced along the streets towards the station and the Lopan river. Some of the bridges survived because the demolition charges failed. On 24 October there was fighting for the central Dzerzhinsky Square and the Gosprom building, where the militia volunteers and the NKVD troops held out longest. By evening the Germans had reached the eastern districts. The remnants of the garrison withdrew across the Donets on the night of 25–26 October. The Soviet Information Bureau did not admit the loss of Kharkiv until 29 October.

Reichenau’s order and the first weeks of occupation

According to Russian estimates, more than 450,000 inhabitants remained in the city. Dostler became the city commandant. Fourteen days earlier, on 10 October, Reichenau had issued an order to the soldiers of the Sixth Army on the “conduct of troops in the East”. In it he wrote that the soldier in the East was not only a fighter but also “the bearer of an inexorable national idea”, who had to understand the necessity of “a severe but just atonement on Jewish subhumanity”. Rundstedt circulated the order with his approval to the other armies, and Hitler deemed it exemplary. In Kharkiv, from the first days, real and alleged members of the underground were publicly hanged from balconies in the city centre, and passers-by were forced to watch.

At the same time the army was afraid of mines. Since 7 October an order from Hitler, issued under the impression of the explosions in Kiev, had been in force forbidding troops to enter Moscow and Leningrad. In Kharkiv German sappers defused hundreds of charges, but not all of them. On the night of 14 November a radio signal sent from Voronezh, several hundred kilometres away, detonated a mine in the villa at 17 Dzerzhinsky Street, a former residence of party leaders. The commander of the 68th Infantry Division and garrison commandant, Lieutenant General Georg von Braun, was killed along with several officers. In reprisal the Germans hanged and shot hundreds of hostages: according to some sources about 50 were hanged and 200 shot, according to others about 200 people, mainly Jews, were hanged and a thousand taken hostage.

Place in the war

The occupation brought catastrophe to Kharkiv. The army took food for itself, and the city, cut off from the countryside, had nothing with which to feed its inhabitants. In the winter of 1941–1942 famine set in; according to figures from the German city administration, more than 13,000 inhabitants of Kharkiv died of hunger in 1942 alone. On 14 December 1941 the military command ordered all Jews to move within two days to barracks in a suburb near the tractor factory. From there, between the end of December and January 1942, Paul Blobel’s Sonderkommando 4a – the same unit that had carried out the massacre at Babi Yar in September – took them to the Drobytsky Yar ravine on the eastern edge of the city and shot them, killing some in a gas van. The number of victims is most often estimated at about 15,000–16,000; some sources give more than 20,000.

The capture of Kharkiv and Belgorod brought the autumn campaign of the Sixth and Seventeenth Armies to an end. The German divisions, exhausted and bogged down in the mud, halted on the Donets and went over to the defensive, while further south only Kleist’s tanks, advancing on Rostov, and Manstein’s army in the Crimea were still attacking. For the Wehrmacht, Kharkiv became for a year and a half the main supply hub and repair base of the southern wing of the front. For the Red Army it was an objective over which it fought one bloody battle after another during the next two years: in May 1942 Timoshenko’s offensive ended in encirclement at Barvenkovo; in February 1943 Soviet troops liberated the city, but in March Manstein recaptured it. Kharkiv was finally liberated on 23 August 1943. By then, according to various estimates, only about 190,000–230,000 people were living there. Dostler, the first German commandant of Kharkiv, was sentenced to death after the war by an American military court for the shooting of fifteen American prisoners of war in Italy in 1944, and was executed in December 1945.