The Germans take Rostov

On 23 July 1942 German troops broke into Rostov-on-Don, a large industrial city and railway junction where the Don flows into the Sea of Azov, known as the gateway to the Caucasus. It was the second time the city had been taken in this war. In November 1941 the Germans had already captured Rostov once, but a week later the Red Army retook it – one of the first Soviet victories. This time the defence lasted less than three days. The main forces of the Soviet 56th Army under Major General Aleksandr Ryzhov withdrew to the southern bank of the Don on 23 July and blew up the bridges. By 24 July the city was in German hands, and according to German sources the last fighting in its western part ceased on 25 July. Reports of the Soviet General Staff spoke of isolated units fighting in the streets until as late as 27 July.

On the same day, 23 July, Adolf Hitler signed at his headquarters near Vinnytsia Directive No. 45, which changed the entire plan of the summer campaign. War chronologies record under this date that the Germans took Rostov and that the Red Army was in general retreat along the Don. Both statements are accurate, though they need some qualification: the capture of the city took from 23 to 24 July, and the Soviet retreat, in places disorderly, did not end in the encirclement of the main forces. That was precisely what the German command had been counting on.

The race to the lower Don

After the start of Operation Blue on 28 June, the German pincers that were meant to trap the Soviet forces between the Donets and the Don had mostly caught rearguards. After Army Group South was divided on 9 July, the troops advancing on Rostov came under Army Group A of Field Marshal Wilhelm List. Its 1st Panzer Army under Colonel General Ewald von Kleist broke through the front on the Donets on 11 July and drove east and south-east. From the west, along the coast of the Sea of Azov, came the 17th Army of Colonel General Richard Ruoff, which together with the Romanian 3rd Army and the Slovak Mobile Division formed the so-called Army Group Ruoff. On 13 July Hitler also sent the 4th Panzer Army of Colonel General Hermann Hoth south, towards the lower Don. He wanted the three armies to trap the Southern Front of Lieutenant General Rodion Malinovsky at Rostov.

The pocket, however, did not close. On 15 July the Southern Front was ordered to withdraw behind the Don and to occupy its southern bank and the Rostov Fortified Region. Some of its armies broke through to the east, others to the south, many in disorder, with communications between headquarters and units lost. In mid-July the Germans closed a smaller pocket at Millerovo, and on 18 July Kleist’s troops entered Kamensk-Shakhtinsky. On 21 July Shakhty fell, and on 22 July Novocherkassk, the old capital of the Don Cossacks. The two panzer armies, the 1st and the 4th, converged on the roads in front of Rostov. Kleist later complained that the 4th Panzer Army had merely clogged his roads, and that had it carried on eastwards it could have taken Stalingrad in July.

The assault on the city

For both sides the city mattered far more than its size alone would suggest. Before the war it had over half a million inhabitants. The main railway line from the heart of the country to the Caucasus ran through Rostov and over its railway bridge across the Don. Whoever held Rostov controlled the road to the Kuban, Maykop and beyond to Grozny and Baku, the source of most Soviet oil. For the Germans the capture of the city was the precondition of the entire second part of the plan, the march on the Caucasus. For the Russians its loss meant that oil from Baku would have to travel a roundabout route across the Caspian Sea and up the Volga.

Rostov had been fortified since the winter. Three rings of trenches, anti-tank ditches and shelters had been built around the city, and barricades in its streets. The Soviet command wanted to bring the main forces of the 56th Army across to the southern bank of the Don but to hold the city itself as a bridgehead. On 20 July the Germans noticed explosions in the Soviet positions indicating preparations for withdrawal, and the next day they went over to the attack. On the morning of 22 July, after artillery preparation and air raids, they broke through the outer rings of the defences at several points.

On 23 July German units, among them the 13th Panzer Division and the SS Division “Wiking”, forced their way into the city and pushed towards the bridges over the Don. In the streets the defenders were units of the 56th Army, regiments of NKVD troops – according to Russian studies, among them the 230th Convoy Regiment – and the Rostov people’s militia regiment. The fighting went on for barricades and individual blocks, including along Budyonny Prospekt, and German soldiers remembered defenders who fired to the last round. Even so, the defence of the city resembled neither Sevastopol nor the later battle of Stalingrad. Most of the troops crossed to the southern bank that same day, and the railway and road bridges were blown up.

German engineers began building crossings on the afternoon of 23 July, and during the night the first units crossed the Don within the city. Of key importance was a raid by the special forces unit “Brandenburg”, which on 24–25 July seized a bridge and a causeway several kilometres long across the Don floodplain towards Bataysk. As a result the Russians were unable to flood the low-lying ground on the southern bank, which could have held up the tanks for many days. The Germans were secure in the eastern part of the city by 24 July, while the remnants of the defenders in the western districts fought on for another day or two. According to Russian studies, about 18,000 soldiers of the entire 56th Army gathered south of Bataysk. By the end of July Army Group A held several bridgeheads beyond the Don along a stretch of some 200 kilometres, from the Sea of Azov to the area of Tsimlyansk.

Directive No. 45

The directive signed on 23 July, the day the Germans entered Rostov, was largely the product of an illusion. In it Hitler wrote that the objectives of the first phase of the campaign had been “largely achieved” and that only “weak enemy forces” had managed to escape encirclement. In reality the main forces of the South-Western Front and the Southern Front, though badly beaten, had got away behind the Don and towards the Volga. On this basis Hitler turned the successive phases of a single operation, set out in April in Directive No. 41, into two simultaneous offensives in diverging directions. Under the original plan the march on the Caucasus was to begin only after the Red Army had been destroyed in front of the Don and Stalingrad had been reached; now both tasks were to be carried out at once.

Army Group A was to destroy the Soviet forces that had crossed the Don south and south-east of Rostov, then occupy the entire eastern coast of the Black Sea with the ports of the Black Sea Fleet and advance towards Grozny and Baku. This part of the plan was named Edelweiss. Army Group B was at the same time to build up a defensive line on the Don, strike at Stalingrad, smash the forces assembled there, take the city and block communications between the Don and the Volga, and then advance along the Volga to Astrakhan. This plan received the code name Fischreiher (Heron). At the same time Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s 11th Army, freed by the fall of Sevastopol, was sent to Leningrad, and the SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler to France. The forces that were to carry out two great tasks simultaneously were thus smaller than those with which it had been planned to carry them out one after the other.

The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, noted in his diary that day that the chronic tendency to underestimate the enemy’s capabilities was assuming “grotesque proportions”. He did not protest publicly. Some historians, Christer Bergström among them, defend Hitler’s decision, pointing out that the shattered and scattered Southern Front offered the only opportunity to open the way to the Caucasus. Most, however, regard Directive No. 45 as one of the main causes of the later defeat: the two lines of advance diverged, and between them and on their flanks hundreds of kilometres of thinly held front opened up.

Retreat on the Don

For the Soviet leadership the loss of Rostov was a shock. The city had been presented as a fortress, and its recapture in 1941 as a symbol of the Red Army’s ability to win. Now it had fallen quickly, together with Novocherkassk, without prolonged resistance. Eleven days earlier the Stavka had formed the Stalingrad Front in the great bend of the Don, but in the south the line of defence had practically collapsed. On 29 July the Germans cut the last direct railway line linking the heart of the country with the Caucasus.

On 28 July Joseph Stalin, as People’s Commissar of Defence, signed Order No. 227, known by its words “Not a step back!”. The order, read out to the troops but not published in the press, openly admitted that the country had lost vast territories, people, grain and industry, and that further retreat meant ruin. It introduced penal companies and battalions as well as blocking detachments behind unreliable divisions. That same day the Southern Front was disbanded and its troops were incorporated into the North Caucasian Front of Marshal Semyon Budyonny.

Place in the war

The capture of Rostov opened the way for the Wehrmacht to the Kuban and the Caucasus. On 25 July Army Group A set off south from the Don. In August its tanks entered Maykop, whose oilfields the Russians had already destroyed, and reached the foothills of the Caucasus, but they never took Grozny or Baku. Army Group B, whose task in Directive No. 45 had looked the easier, became bogged down in Stalingrad, which from the autumn tied down ever more forces. The splitting of the offensive on 23 July meant that by November both army groups were stretched along a front of a length they could not hold, and the weak flank on the Don, manned by allied armies, became the target of the Soviet counter-offensive. At the turn of 1942 and 1943 the Germans had to withdraw from the Caucasus, and on 14 February 1943 the Red Army retook Rostov for the second time.

The second occupation of Rostov, which lasted nearly seven months, brought the city the largest crime of the Holocaust on the territory of present-day Russia. Sonderkommando 10a (PL) of Einsatzgruppe D entered the city behind the Wehrmacht. The Jews were ordered to register and wear identifying badges, and on 11 August, on the pretext of resettlement, they were summoned to assembly points. Taken outside the city, they were murdered in the Snake Ravine (Zmievskaya Balka) and in the nearby botanical garden, shot or killed in gas vans. According to estimates cited in the literature, about 27,000 people were killed there during the occupation, among them 15,000 to 18,000 Jews, as well as Soviet prisoners of war and other inhabitants of the city.