The liberation of Dnipropetrovsk

On 25 October 1943 troops of the Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front under General of the Army Rodion Malinovsky took Dnipropetrovsk, one of the largest industrial cities of Soviet Ukraine, together with Dniprodzerzhynsk (today Kamianske), a few dozen kilometres upstream. Both cities lie on the right, western bank of the Dnieper, behind the line on which Hitler had hoped to halt the Red Army. After more than two years of occupation, the troops who entered the city found burnt-out blocks, blown-up factories and only a few thousand inhabitants in the right-bank part of the city.

The capture of Dnipropetrovsk was one link in a long chain of fighting known in Soviet and Russian historiography as the Battle of the Dnieper – a series of operations by four fronts along the stretch from Gomel to the Sea of Azov which in the autumn of 1943 drove the Germans out of left-bank Ukraine and opened the way west of the river.

A city on the Dnieper bend

Dnipropetrovsk, founded in 1787 as Yekaterinoslav and renamed in 1926 (since 2016 it has been called Dnipro), was one of the pillars of Soviet industrialisation in the interwar years. It lay between the iron ore of Kryvyi Rih and the coal of the Donbas, and had steelworks, engineering plants and a railway junction with bridges over the Dnieper. In 1939 it had more than half a million inhabitants. Since the 19th century it had also been one of the important Jewish centres of the former Pale of Settlement: in 1939 Jews made up nearly a fifth of the city’s population.

The Wehrmacht took Dnipropetrovsk at the end of August 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, as German panzer divisions were pushing towards the lower Dnieper and, to the north, the encirclement of Soviet forces around Kiev was taking shape. The occupation lasted – according to the dating accepted in the literature – from 26 August 1941 to 25 October 1943. In the autumn of 1941 the city passed from military government to the civil administration of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine as the seat of one of its general districts.

The crime of October 1941

Many of Dnipropetrovsk’s Jews managed to evacuate eastwards or leave with the Red Army before the Germans arrived. Between about 30,000 and 55,000 remained in the city, according to various estimates, mostly elderly people, women and children. On 13–14 October 1941 the Germans ordered them to report with their valuables at a department store in the centre, and then drove the columns to a ravine near the university botanical garden on the edge of the city. Some of the victims were also murdered near the Jewish cemetery. The executions were carried out by men of the special detachment of Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader Russia-South, by soldiers of Order Police Battalion 314, and by the local auxiliary police.

The number murdered in those two days is put at between about 10,000 and 15,000: German Einsatzgruppen reports spoke of 10,000, Yad Vashem gives about 11,000, and other studies up to 15,000. In the following months those who had survived the first action were murdered. According to figures cited in the literature, only a few hundred registered Jews eventually remained in the city. This was part of the Holocaust in Ukraine, whose best-known site became Babi Yar in Kiev.

In and around Dnipropetrovsk the Germans also ran prisoner-of-war camps, above all Stalag 348, where by estimates more than 30,000 Soviet prisoners died. The city’s population fell month by month: in November 1941 it was put at 233,000, and in the spring of 1942 at under 180,000. Hunger, deportations for forced labour in the Reich and the occupier’s repression meant that at the time of liberation, according to Soviet figures, no more than 5,000 people were living in the right-bank part of the city.

The race to the Dnieper

After the Battle of Kursk the Red Army seized the initiative in the south. In August 1943 Kharkiv was liberated, in September the Donbas, and on the central sector of the front, on 25 September, Smolensk. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of Army Group South, argued to Hitler that he could not hold a front east of the Dnieper, and in September he was allowed to withdraw behind the river. On the western bank the Eastern Wall was to be built – the Panther–Wotan line, which along many stretches in reality existed mainly on staff maps.

The retreat was conducted under orders to apply scorched-earth tactics: German troops blew up factories, bridges and railway lines, destroyed stocks and crops, drove off livestock and herded civilians fit for work westwards with them. The Stavka and Joseph Stalin pressed for the river to be reached as quickly as possible – not only to deny the Germans time to dig in, but also to save at least part of the harvest and the cities. A directive of 9 September 1943 promised the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for crossing the Dnieper; for the crossings of the autumn of 1943 it was awarded about 2,400 times.

At the end of September the leading units of several fronts reached the river and crossed to the western bank straight off the march, in fishing boats and on rafts made of barrels and planks from dismantled barns. A series of small bridgeheads was formed: at Bukrin and Lyutezh, south and north of Kiev, near Kremenchuk, and – on 24 and 25 September – in the Dniprodzerzhynsk and Dnipropetrovsk area. An attempt to enlarge the Bukrin bridgehead with an airborne landing on the night of 24–25 September ended in disaster: the paratroopers were scattered over a wide area, many were killed, and the survivors went over to partisan warfare. The October attacks from Bukrin also stalled.

October on the lower Dnieper

In the south two fronts were operating, coordinated on behalf of the Stavka by Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky: Malinovsky’s South-Western Front and the Southern Front of General of the Army Fyodor Tolbukhin. On 20 October 1943 the Stavka renamed the fronts fighting in Ukraine: the Voronezh Front became the 1st Ukrainian Front, General of the Army Ivan Konev’s Steppe Front the 2nd Ukrainian Front, the South-Western Front the 3rd, and the Southern Front the 4th Ukrainian Front. Dnipropetrovsk was thus taken by a front that had borne its new name for five days.

First the German bridgehead on the left bank at Zaporizhzhia had to be eliminated. It covered the dam and the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station – a symbol of the first Five-Year Plans, partly blown up by the retreating Soviet forces as early as August 1941. After several days of attacks Malinovsky’s troops – among them the 8th Guards Army (PL) of General Vasily Chuikov, the defenders of Stalingrad – took the left-bank part of Zaporizhzhia in a night assault on 14 October. As they withdrew, the Germans blew up part of the dam’s installations once again.

Further south, Tolbukhin’s front had been assaulting the German defence line on the Molochna river, which covered the approach to the Crimean peninsula, since the end of September. The fighting for Melitopol, defended by the Sixth Army, re-formed after Stalingrad, went on street by street and ended on 23 October. The German front on the Nogai Steppe broke, and in the following days Soviet troops advanced towards the lower Dnieper and the Perekop Isthmus.

At the same time, north of Dnipropetrovsk, Konev’s 2nd Ukrainian Front struck on 15 October from its bridgeheads near Kremenchuk, broke through the front of the German First Panzer Army and within a few days took the railway junction at Piatykhatky, cutting the supply lines of the German forces in the Dnieper bend. By the end of October its tanks stood before Kryvyi Rih. Manstein had to bring up reserves to stop this thrust – and it was at this very moment that Malinovsky attacked.

An attack from two bridgeheads

The troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front held two small bridgeheads on the right bank: north of Dnipropetrovsk, near the village of Auly, and south of the city, near the village of Voiskove. The plan of operations, prepared in a few days, envisaged attacks from both sides, linking the bridgeheads and breaking through to the rear of the German force defending the city. The opponent was the First Panzer Army of General of Cavalry Eberhard von Mackensen, taken over at the end of October by General of Panzer Troops Hans-Valentin Hube. Its best forces were committed at Kryvyi Rih, and the Dnipropetrovsk sector had been weakened.

On 23 October the 8th Guards Army attacked from the southern bridgehead, and on 24 October the 46th Army from the northern one. According to Soviet studies, up to 100,000 soldiers and about 2,000 guns and mortars took part in the operation, with a very limited number of tanks; German forces on this sector were estimated at about 25,000 men and a few dozen tanks. The two armies broke through the defences, linked the bridgeheads and on 25 October took Dnipropetrovsk and Dniprodzerzhynsk. Threatened with encirclement, the Germans withdrew to the south-west.

In the evening Moscow celebrated the victory with an artillery salute – 20 salvoes from 224 guns, as for other large cities recaptured in 1943. The Supreme Commander’s order of the day singled out, among others, the 39th Guards and 152nd Rifle Divisions; ten units and formations were given the honorific title “Dnepropetrovsk”.

The next day the attack advanced a further ten to twenty kilometres, but then slowed markedly. Manstein moved several panzer and motorised divisions into the area, and counter-attacks near Kryvyi Rih in the last days of October threw back Konev’s leading units. By the end of the month Malinovsky’s troops had gained a few dozen kilometres in places, but had taken neither Kryvyi Rih nor Nikopol.

The city after liberation

The units that entered Dnipropetrovsk found the city in ruins. The retreating Germans had blown up factories, power stations and the bridges over the Dnieper and burned many buildings in the centre, and for weeks on end, while the front ran along the river, both banks had been under artillery fire. Most of the inhabitants of the right-bank part had been killed, had fled or had been deported; over the following months the workers evacuated in 1941 returned, and the rebuilding of the factories, which were once again to work for the front, began almost at once.

With the return of Soviet power came investigations into the occupier’s crimes and repression of people accused of collaboration. In the official Soviet narrative the victims of the murder of the Jews in October 1941 were long described as “peaceful Soviet citizens”, without any mention that they had died because they were Jews.

Place in the war

The capture of Dnipropetrovsk was one of many Red Army successes in the autumn of 1943, but it did not mean the collapse of the German front in the Dnieper bend. Hitler, against Manstein’s advice, ordered the Nikopol bridgehead and the Kryvyi Rih area to be held at all costs – for the sake of their manganese and iron ore, and also for the sake of the Crimea, whose defence he refused to give up. In November and December Malinovsky renewed his attack several times but gained little ground; on 23 December operations on this sector were halted. Nikopol and Kryvyi Rih were not liberated until February 1944.

Meanwhile the battle went on elsewhere. At the beginning of November troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front reached the lower Dnieper and the Perekop Isthmus, cutting the land route to the Crimea, where the German Seventeenth Army of Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist’s Army Group A remained; on 1 and 3 November Soviet troops landed on the Kerch Peninsula – at Eltigen and north of Kerch. On 6 November, after shifting its armour from the Bukrin bridgehead to the Lyutezh bridgehead, the 1st Ukrainian Front liberated Kiev, and then repulsed Manstein’s counter-offensive near Zhytomyr. From their bridgeheads on the western bank of the river, at the end of December 1943 the Red Army launched the offensive that in the winter and spring of 1944 drove the Germans out of right-bank Ukraine.

The Battle of the Dnieper cost both sides enormous losses, and its burden was also borne by the people of Ukraine: millions lost their homes in burnt-out towns and villages, and hundreds of thousands were deported westwards. After the war Dnipropetrovsk was rebuilt as one of the main centres of the Soviet armaments and rocket industry. The memory of the Jews murdered in 1941, passed over in silence for decades, returned to the city only after the collapse of the USSR – today it is kept alive by memorials at the execution sites and by a Holocaust museum in Dnipro.