The Germans take Kiev

On 19 September 1941 units of Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau’s German 6th Army entered Kiev, the capital of Soviet Ukraine and the third-largest city of the Soviet Union. Soviet troops had left the city during the night of 18–19 September, blowing up the bridges over the Dnieper behind them. Kiev, which the Red Army had defended since the beginning of July, fell with almost no street fighting – not because its defence had collapsed, but because a few days earlier, far to the east of the city, the German panzer groups had closed a ring of encirclement around the entire South-Western Front.

War chronologies record under 19 September that the capture of Kiev became “formal” and that the Red Army suffered heavy losses defending the city. The date is correct. The Soviets suffered their heaviest losses, however, not in Kiev itself but in the enormous pocket between the Dnieper, the Desna and the Sula, where fighting went on for another week. There, on 20 September, the front commander, Colonel General Mikhail Kirponos, was killed, and on 26 September resistance ceased.

A city on the front line

Kiev was within reach of the war from its very first days. On 22 June 1941, the day of the German attack on the USSR, the first bombs fell on the city. Kirponos’s South-Western Front, the strongest in the Red Army, was falling back from Volhynia and Galicia but had not been broken, and its counter-attacks near Dubno, Łuck (Lutsk) and Brody delayed the German advance. On 10–11 July the tanks of Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group reached the Irpin river, a dozen or so kilometres from the city. Hitler then forbade sending tanks into the great city, and the German infantry came to a halt in the approaches to Kiev, before the fortifications of the Kiev Fortified District, built since the 1930s.

The defence of the city was directed by the front staff and its military council, which included the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev. Tens of thousands of residents were turned out to dig ditches and build barricades, and volunteers and mobilised workers were formed into militia units numbering, according to Soviet figures, some 29,000 men. From August Kiev was defended by the 37th Army of Major General Andrei Vlasov, later a collaborator, which in August threw the German 6th Army back from the line of fortifications. At the same time factories, offices, institutions and tens of thousands of people were evacuated eastwards, and in the more important buildings NKVD sappers laid radio-detonated explosive charges, intended to go off once the Germans had settled into the city.

A supplement to Directive No. 34 of 12 August provided that Kiev would be destroyed with incendiary bombs and artillery, and the assault on the city itself was halted. Kiev’s fate, however, was decided elsewhere. Hitler’s order of 21 August sent Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s panzer group into the rear of the South-Western Front, and from 12 September Kleist struck northwards from the bridgehead at Kremenchuk. On 15–16 September the two groups linked up at Lokhvytsia, some 200 kilometres east of Kiev.

The last days of the defence

On 16 September, as the ring was closing in the east, the German 6th Army launched its final assault on the Kiev fortifications. The blow was struck by General Hans von Obstfelder’s XXIX Army Corps, led by the 71st and 296th Infantry Divisions and supported by assault guns. The Soviet divisions, weakened by the transfer of part of their strength northwards against the German 2nd Army advancing from Chernihiv, were still holding out, but their rear had already been cut.

The same day Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, who on 13 September had replaced Semyon Budyonny as commander of the South-Western Direction, sent Major General Ivan Bagramyan to Kirponos’s headquarters at Pyriatyn with a verbal order to withdraw to the Psel river. Kirponos, whom Joseph Stalin had expressly forbidden on 11 September to give up Kiev, asked Moscow for written confirmation early on 17 September. In the evening, waiting no longer, he ordered his armies to break out eastwards. A few minutes later he lost contact with them. During the night of 17–18 September the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, passed on the Stavka’s consent – but only for the 37th Army to leave Kiev and cross to the left bank of the Dnieper.

The 37th Army withdrew from the city during the night of 18–19 September. Sappers blew up the Dnieper bridges behind it, having already destroyed or removed from the city everything that might be of use to the occupier, from factory equipment to railway rolling stock. The units of the 37th Army that crossed to the left bank had nowhere left to go. Trapped in two groups, east and south-east of the city, they held out until 21–23 September.

The Germans in Kiev

On the morning of 19 September the first German infantry units entered the city from the west and south. Only isolated groups still offered resistance. German photographs from that day show sentries on the Kiev citadel and columns of troops in the streets of the city centre. Some residents greeted the arrivals with bread and salt, hoping for an end to Stalinist terror and the collective farms; most waited in silence. Of nearly 900,000 pre-war inhabitants – after evacuation, call-up into the army and flight – some 400,000 remained, according to historians’ estimates.

The 6th Army command feared booby traps. As early as 13 September it had forbidden soldiers to enter the city centre without written permission from army headquarters, and on 19 September, after an anonymous warning, sappers began searching the larger buildings suitable for headquarters and billets. Some of the charges were found and defused. Power in the city was taken over by the German military commandant’s office, which soon set up a city administration and auxiliary police drawn from local people. German propaganda presented the fall of the Ukrainian capital as further proof that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse.

The death of Kirponos

In the pocket east of the Dnieper the Soviet armies broke up into groups cut off from one another. On 18 September the German 4th Panzer Division captured the headquarters of the 21st Army. The German LI Army Corps, driving from north to south, cut the pocket in two, and on 19 September it was split into three: the largest around Boryspil, with the troops of the 37th Army; a second near Orzhytsia, with the remnants of the 26th Army; and a third between Pyriatyn and Lokhvytsia, where the front command and the 5th Army were. Masses of soldiers tried to break out eastwards. Some attacks briefly breached the German ring, and on 18 September Soviet units from outside the pocket came within a kilometre of Romny, where Guderian had his headquarters. But the Luftwaffe controlled the battlefield and destroyed columns of lorries on the roads.

The column of the South-Western Front and 5th Army headquarters was fighting its way east from Pyriatyn. On the morning of 20 September, near the hamlet of Dryukovshchyna, some 15 kilometres south-west of Lokhvytsia, it ran into the main body of the German 3rd Panzer Division. After losing several guns and armoured vehicles, the remnants of the column – according to Soviet accounts about a thousand men, including several hundred officers and generals – took refuge in the small Shumeikovo grove. The Germans attacked the grove for several hours. Kirponos, already wounded in the leg, was killed by a fragment of a mortar bomb or mine that struck him in the head. Also killed were the member of the front’s military council Mikhail Burmistenko, second secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and the front chief of staff, Major General Vasily Tupikov. The commander of the 5th Army, Major General Mikhail Potapov, was taken prisoner, badly wounded. Bagramyan and part of the staff managed to escape the encirclement. Kirponos was buried in the grove; his remains were found after the liberation of Ukraine and moved to Kiev in 1943.

The end of the pocket

The remnants of the 5th and 21st Armies near Pyriatyn held out until 23–25 September, and the 26th Army near Orzhytsia until 26 September. Then the fighting in the pocket ended, although groups of stragglers, many in civilian clothes, went on hiding in the forests and marshes for a long time. Few got out of the encirclement; among them were three army commanders: Vlasov, Lieutenant General Fyodor Kostenko of the 26th Army and Lieutenant General Vasily Kuznetsov of the 21st Army. Budyonny, Timoshenko and Khrushchev, who were outside the ring, escaped Kirponos’s fate.

The headquarters of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South announced that 665,000 prisoners, almost 900 tanks and more than 3,000 guns had been taken in the battle of Kiev. Russian historians consider this figure inflated; some researchers point out that the Germans also counted as prisoners men of military age whom they had detained and stragglers from earlier fighting. According to the calculations of the team led by General Grigori Krivosheev, in the Kiev defensive operation as a whole, from 7 July to 26 September, the South-Western Front lost 700,544 men, of whom 616,304 were killed, missing or taken prisoner. Whatever the figures, it was the greatest battle of encirclement in the history of warfare and the largest single defeat of the Red Army. For hundreds of thousands of prisoners it was the beginning of captivity in overcrowded camps, often in the open air and with almost no food: of the more than three million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner in 1941, some two million had died by the spring of the following year.

Place in the war

Five days after the Germans entered, on 24 September, charges laid by Soviet sappers began to explode in the buildings the occupiers had taken over on Khreshchatyk, Kiev’s main street. The fire consumed the city centre and lasted until 29 September. Figures vary from about two hundred to several hundred Germans killed, along with an unknown number of residents, and tens of thousands of people were left homeless. The occupiers blamed the Jews and made the explosions a pretext for a crime: on 29 and 30 September, in the Babi Yar ravine on the edge of the city, the Germans shot, by their own report, more than 33,000 Kiev Jews. The explosions in Kiev also led Hitler in October to forbid his troops to enter Moscow and Leningrad.

The capture of Kiev and the destruction of the South-Western Front opened the way into eastern Ukraine for the Germans: Kharkiv fell in October, and in November Rostov-on-Don and almost all of Crimea. Hitler could at last turn towards Moscow, but Operation Typhoon began only on 30 September and 2 October, a month later than his generals had wanted. Kiev became part of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, ruled by Erich Koch from Równe (Rivne), and for more than two years lived in the hunger and terror of occupation. The Red Army retook it on 6 November 1943. In the USSR the memory of Kirponos and the city’s defenders became part of the legend of the “hero city”, which for decades passed over in silence the fact that it was Stalin’s prohibition that had condemned hundreds of thousands of soldiers to encirclement.