The Germans take Kursk

During the night of 2–3 November 1941 the last Soviet units withdrew from Kursk, the capital of Kursk oblast and one of the most important railway junctions south of Moscow. The city, which according to the 1939 census had some 120,000 inhabitants, was occupied by troops of the 2nd Army under Colonel General Maximilian von Weichs, advancing on the southern wing of the German Army Group Centre. The capture of Kursk is usually dated to 3 November, and that date reflects the course of the fighting well: according to Russian regional studies, fighting was already going on in the city’s streets on 2 November, and the defenders abandoned it during the night of 2–3 November. Some sources give 4 November as the start of the occupation, and the history of the 9th Panzer Division gives 2 November; the difference concerns when the city was deemed fully secured rather than the course of the battle itself.

Kursk on the map of Typhoon

Kursk did not lie on the main axis of Operation Typhoon, which Field Marshal Fedor von Bock launched on 30 September and 2 October. The city was, however, of great importance for covering the operation’s southern flank. Through Kursk ran the main railway line from Moscow through Orel to Kharkiv and on to the Crimea and the Donbas, while a line from Voronezh reached it from the east. Nearby lay the iron-ore deposits of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, then only in the early stages of exploitation. Moreover, the boundary between Army Group Centre and Army Group South ran at the latitude of Kursk; Army Group South’s 6th Army under Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau had taken Kharkiv on 24 October and Belgorod the same day. The capture of Kursk was meant to close the gap between the two groupings.

According to German studies, at the beginning of October, after the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets had been closed, Adolf Hitler demanded that Kursk be taken by the 2nd Panzer Army of Colonel General Heinz Guderian. Guderian, however, had Tula and the road to Moscow in front of him, and his divisions were bogged down in mud and fighting at Mtsensk. The task therefore fell to Weichs’s army. It was given the XLVIII Motorised Corps of General of Panzer Troops Werner Kempf, which in October had closed the Bryansk pocket from the south and then, with Lieutenant General Alfred von Hubicki’s 9th Panzer Division and the 95th Infantry Division, set off towards Kursk through Lgov, Dmitriev and Fatezh. On the sodden roads progress was slow: the 9th Panzer Division reached Fatezh, some 45 kilometres north of Kursk, only on 25 October, and at the end of the month the German spearheads stood on the distant approaches to the city.

The defence of the city

On the Soviet side the Kursk axis was thinly held. The armies of the Bryansk Front, shattered and encircled in the first days of Typhoon, were breaking out of the pocket through Kursk oblast in the second half of October; Major General Avksentiy Gorodnyansky’s 13th Army fought its way across the Svapa river on 18 October and took up defensive positions near Lgov, but according to Russian data it was by then little stronger than a single division. On 24 October the Stavka ordered the front’s forces to withdraw to a new line from Tula to Livny and Kastornoye, far to the east of Kursk. At the same time, on the Stavka’s orders, the 7th Guards Rifle Division and the 133rd Tank Brigade, which until then had covered the city from the north-west, left the Kursk area for Moscow.

According to studies by Kursk historians, from 23 October the city was defended by the regiments of Colonel A. Z. Akimenko’s 2nd Guards Rifle Division, the 38th Motorcycle Regiment and volunteers from people’s militia regiments and destruction battalions raised in 31 districts of the oblast – some 3,500 men in all. On 22 October a city defence committee was formed under P. I. Doronin, secretary of the regional party committee, and took over full authority in the city. At the end of October the German corps, having taken Dmitriev, Lgov and Fatezh, reached the distant approaches to the city. On 1 and 2 November there was fighting on the approaches and in Kursk itself, in the streets, where militia volunteers also fought. According to the same sources, some 700 soldiers of the 2nd Guards Division and volunteers were killed in the fighting for Kursk. During the night of 2–3 November the defenders, under pressure from the 9th Panzer Division and the 95th Infantry Division, abandoned the city and fell back eastwards towards Shchigry.

Tula and the mud

The capture of Kursk was one of the last successes of Typhoon before the November pause. On the main axis the German advance had already stalled a few days earlier. From mid-October the rasputitsa, the autumn thaw, turned the roads into a quagmire, supplies of fuel and ammunition could not keep up with the spearheads, and the panzer divisions had only a few dozen serviceable tanks each. At the end of October, after the fighting on the Mozhaisk Line, Army Group Centre came to a halt 70–100 kilometres from Moscow.

On the southern wing Guderian reached Tula, the last large city on the road from Orel to Moscow, only on 29 October. He hoped to take it on the march, but the city was defended by an NKVD regiment guarding the Tula arms works, an anti-aircraft artillery regiment and a workers’ volunteer regiment, and from the evening of 30 October also by a tank brigade and the hastily gathered remnants of the 50th Army. According to Soviet data, between 30 October and 1 November the defenders beat off several attacks by two panzer divisions, and on 2 November German infantry divisions reached the city but also failed to take it. Attempts to bypass Tula were halted by Soviet counter-attacks on 7 and 10 November. Tula remained in Soviet hands, and Guderian had to look for a way to Moscow around it.

On 1 November Bock, who had earlier pressed for a continued advance, ordered that there should be “no further advance on a larger scale for the time being”, but that everything be prepared for the attack and the supply difficulties overcome as quickly as possible, so that the advance could resume the moment the frost came. The first frosts were already appearing on the roads: according to German and Russian studies a light frost set in on 3–4 November, and soon afterwards the ground froze hard. This freed the tanks from the mud, but at the same time revealed that the German troops had no winter clothing.

Place in the war

The capture of Kursk closed the gap between the German army groups and gave the Wehrmacht an important communications hub behind the front. In November Weichs’s 2nd Army pushed further east, towards Voronezh and Yelets: on 22 November it took Shchigry and at the end of the month, after several days of fighting, the small town of Tim. The front in this sector was now held by the 13th and 40th Armies of the South-Western Front, to which this axis was assigned after the Bryansk Front was disbanded on 10 November. In December, during the Soviet counter-offensive, troops of the South-Western Front routed two divisions of the 2nd Army near Yelets, but did not retake Kursk: the 40th Army’s winter offensive stalled in January 1942 a few dozen kilometres from the city.

The occupation of Kursk lasted until 8 February 1943. According to Russian and German studies, during that time the Germans shot some 3,000 inhabitants and deported some 10,000 for forced labour in the Reich, while more than 10,000 died of hunger and disease. After the city was liberated in the winter of 1943 a great salient formed in the front around Kursk, and in July 1943 it was the scene of the Battle of Kursk, the last great German offensive in the east. In November 1941, however, Kursk was only one of the cities taken on the flank of an operation that had already stalled on its main axis – and its fate would be decided not by the fighting for Kursk but by the battles for Tula, Klin and the approaches to Moscow.