The Germans take the Estonian islands

On 5 October 1941, at the southern tip of the Sõrve peninsula, a narrow tongue of land reaching out from Saaremaa towards Courland, the last Soviet resistance on Estonia’s largest island came to an end. The Germans occupied the positions of Coastal Battery No. 315, blown up by its own crew – a battery whose two turrets of 180-millimetre guns had been shelling German ships only a few days earlier – and took its wounded commander, Captain Aleksandr Stebel, prisoner. A week later, on 12 October, German infantry landed on neighbouring Hiiumaa, and on 21 October the fighting there ended too.

Popular chronologies record under 5 October that the Germans captured Saaremaa, and under 12 October that they captured Hiiumaa, “the last major Soviet outpost in Estonia”. Both dates need qualifying. Saaremaa did not fall in a single day: the Germans had crossed to it in mid-September, and 5 October marked the end of the fighting on the Sõrve peninsula, where the defenders had held out for more than ten days. Likewise, 12 October was the day of the landing on Hiiumaa, not of its capture, which came on 21 October. The description “the last major outpost” is accurate: only the tiny islet of Osmussaar, at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, was held longer by the Red Army, until early December.

An archipelago in Soviet hands

The West Estonian Archipelago – Saaremaa, Hiiumaa, Muhu, Vormsi and dozens of smaller islands – closes the Gulf of Riga to the north and guards the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. Whoever holds it controls shipping to Riga, Tallinn and Leningrad. The Germans knew this, having taken the islands from the Russians in October 1917 in Operation Albion, and so did Moscow, which as early as September 1939, under the mutual assistance pact, had forced Estonia to grant it bases on Saaremaa and Hiiumaa. After the annexation of Estonia the Soviet navy built coastal batteries there, among them three modern turret batteries of 180-millimetre guns: No. 315 on Sõrve, No. 316 on Hiiumaa and No. 314 on Osmussaar.

On 29 June 1941, a week after the German attack on the Soviet Union, all forces on the islands were placed under the newly created Coastal Defence of the Baltic Region of the Baltic Fleet (BOBR), with its headquarters in Kuressaare, the German Arensburg. It was commanded by Major General (from 16 September Lieutenant General) of the Coastal Service Aleksey Yeliseyev, an old sailor who had served in the batteries on these same islands during the First World War. According to Russian studies he had 23,663 men under him: the core was the 3rd Independent Rifle Brigade, some 6,500 soldiers, and alongside it the gunners of the coastal batteries, two battalions of the 16th Rifle Division, a naval infantry battalion, border guards, construction and engineer battalions, Estonian destruction battalions, and a dozen or so aircraft and minesweepers. There were 142 coastal, field and anti-aircraft guns for the defence.

In summer the islands lay behind the front, and for a time their garrison was itself on the attack. In mid-July a detachment from the islands recaptured for a few days the mainland port of Virtsu, through which ran the route to Muhu, and at the end of August battalions from Saaremaa and Hiiumaa landed once more on the coast of Läänemaa. More important, however, was the Kagul (Kogula) airfield on Saaremaa. On the night of 7–8 August DB-3 bombers of the Baltic Fleet’s air arm took off from it and became the first Soviet aircraft to reach Berlin, which Moscow presented as retaliation for the raids on its own capital. According to Russian tallies, by 5 September the fleet’s aviation and long-range aviation had flown ten missions from Saaremaa against Berlin and alternative targets, dropping some 36 tonnes of bombs, around 21 tonnes of them on the city itself, at a cost of 17 aircraft. The damage was slight, but Adolf Hitler, irritated by the raids according to Russian and German studies, demanded that the airfields on the islands be destroyed. On 6 September the Luftwaffe bombed Kagul so heavily that the raids ceased.

After the fall of Tallinn on 28 August, the fate of the islands was sealed. Headquarters did order the garrison to be evacuated, but after the losses suffered during the fleet’s passage to Kronstadt there was nothing left to carry it away. Yeliseyev was to hold the islands for as long as possible.

“Beowulf”

The German staff prepared two variants of the operation, both under the code name “Beowulf”. The first, modelled on Albion, envisaged a landing from Courland, but it became obsolete when the advance through Estonia dragged on all summer. The second, from the Estonian mainland, was carried out. The task went to the reinforced 61st Infantry Division of General Siegfried Haenicke from the 18th Army, the same division that had taken Tallinn; according to Russian studies part of the 217th Division also took part in the fighting for the islands, and together with assault pioneers, artillery and engineers the German force numbered more than 50,000 men. The crossing was provided by a special Kriegsmarine unit with Siebel ferries, barges and hundreds of assault boats. On the seaward side it was covered by the light cruisers Emden, Köln and Leipzig, torpedo boats and minesweepers.

To divert the defenders’ attention, the Germans and Finns prepared three feint operations: “Südwind” from the direction of Courland, “Westwind” from the west and “Nordwind” north of Hiiumaa. The last of these involved the Finnish coastal defence ships Ilmarinen and Väinämöinen. On 13 September, as the squadron was turning back south of the Finnish islet of Utö, Ilmarinen struck a mine and sank within minutes. 271 members of her crew were killed and 132 were rescued. It was the largest single loss suffered by the Finnish navy in the entire war.

The fighting began on the smaller islands. On 8–9 September the Germans landed on Vormsi, which they took after three days; the landing included the “Erna II” battalion of Estonian volunteers under Major Raimond Hindpere, carried in Finnish boats. On 10 September they took the islet of Kessulaid in the Suur väin strait, from which a heavy battery could shell the eastern shore of Muhu. On the night of 13–14 September soldiers of the Brandenburg special unit attempted, in a failed glider landing, to seize the coastal battery on the Kübassaare peninsula on Saaremaa; that evening ships took off the survivors.

Muhu and Saaremaa

The main landing began before dawn on 14 September on Muhu. The first wave, some 390 men in German, Estonian and Finnish boats, came ashore in the north of the island, where it met heavy fire, while a battalion that was meant to land elsewhere ended up near the port of Kuivastu and clung on for several hours behind the boulders on the shore. The defenders, at least 1,500 according to Estonian research, were supported across the strait by the battery at Kübassaare. With the second wave, which included more than two hundred Estonians of the “Erna II” battalion, the Germans took Kuivastu at midday and widened the bridgehead. On 16 September they reached the causeway linking Muhu with Saaremaa, and on 16–17 September they forced it, establishing a bridgehead near Orissaare.

On Saaremaa Soviet resistance weakened. Stretched along a long coastline, the garrison could not stop the advance in open country, so Yeliseyev fell back to prepared anti-tank lines. On 21 September the Germans entered Kuressaare. That same day the inhabitants began searching the courtyard of the episcopal castle, which the Soviet authorities had turned into a prison. On 25 September a mass grave was found there. According to Estonian historians, at least 90 detainees, mostly civilians, were murdered in the castle between July and September, on the sentence of a military tribunal and on the orders of the special department of the coastal defence, with the participation of the local NKVD. German propaganda made extensive use of the discovery, and the crime itself is well documented.

Around 22–23 September the remnants of the defenders – anywhere from several thousand to well over ten thousand men, according to different estimates – withdrew onto the Sõrve peninsula, closed off to the north by a narrow isthmus on which lines of fortifications had been built. The fighting for them lasted almost two weeks. German assault pioneers took bunker after bunker, and from 25 to 27 September the cruisers Leipzig and Emden, with torpedo boats, shelled the Soviet positions from the sea. Battery No. 315 returned fire. On the night of 2–3 October Yeliseyev and part of his staff crossed by boat to Hiiumaa, followed by a small part of the garrison. The rest held out until 5 October; the crew of Battery No. 315 blew up its guns before surrendering. According to Russian data some 150 men managed to escape by boat to Sweden, where they were interned.

Hiiumaa

Hiiumaa, Vormsi and Osmussaar were defended by the Northern Fortified Sector of Colonel A. S. Konstantinov: two rifle battalions of the 16th Division, construction battalions, border guards and several coastal batteries. The Germans called the operation against the island “Siegfried”. At dawn on 12 October, after an artillery preparation, two landing groups with the 176th Infantry Regiment and the reconnaissance detachment of the 61st Division set out from the ports of northern Saaremaa across the Soela strait, followed in the afternoon by battalions of the 151st Regiment. At the same time the Kriegsmarine staged feint landings at several other points; the cruiser Köln fought an artillery duel with the battery on the Ristna peninsula.

The south of the island fell without much resistance. The defenders, counting on evacuation, fell back northwards through Käina and the fortifications near Nõmba, where on 16 October they halted the advance for a day. On 18 October the Germans took the island’s only town, Kärdla, and the remnants of the garrison shut themselves up on the Tahkuna peninsula, covered by the fire of the batteries there. On 19 and 20 October the Germans broke through the last line of defence, and on 21 October the fighting ended at the very tip of the peninsula, by the lighthouse. Boats and cutters came over from Hanko, the Finnish peninsula still held by the Red Army; according to Russian data they took some 570 men off Hiiumaa between 14 and 22 October. Yeliseyev, according to his Russian biographical entry, was flown out on 20 October by an aircraft sent from Kronstadt.

The toll

Most of the islands’ defenders were killed or taken prisoner, and the figures vary from source to source. According to Russian tallies the BOBR alone lost 2,760 killed and missing and 12,875 prisoners, and the Northern Sector some 3,800 prisoners and more than two hundred killed. Estonian studies speak of more than 15,000 prisoners taken on the islands, while Western accounts, following German data, give 19,000 prisoners and 4,700 killed. The prisoners shared the fate of millions of Soviet soldiers in German captivity. Partial German figures for the period from 9 September to 5 October give 472 killed, almost 1,500 wounded and 92 missing; other tallies put total losses at between 1,850 and 2,850 men. Soviet authors stressed that the defence of the islands for more than a month tied down a German division, warships and aircraft while Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North was closing the ring around Leningrad.

Place in the war

The capture of the islands ended the campaign in Estonia. The Germans gained free passage for shipping to Riga and Tallinn, through which they supplied their troops before Leningrad, while the Baltic Fleet, bottled up in the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland, lost its last forward positions in the west. The fleet evacuated the cut-off garrison of Hanko between the end of October and early December, suffering heavy losses to mines, and on 2–3 December it also abandoned Osmussaar, where the Germans landed on 6 December. On the islands, as in the rest of the country, civil authority passed in December to the German administration of the General District of Estonia in the Reich Commissariat Ostland, alongside which operated the Estonian Self-Administration of Hjalmar Mäe.

Yeliseyev never again received an independent command. After brief service in Kronstadt and at a naval artillery range, he took his own life in December 1942, having been left without a posting. The islands were the last piece of Estonia that the Germans gave up: in the autumn of 1944 the Red Army recovered Muhu, Hiiumaa and most of Saaremaa, but on the same Sõrve peninsula where Soviet soldiers had held out in 1941, the Germans hung on until 24 November 1944.