The liberation of Kharkiv

On 16 February 1943 troops of the Soviet Voronezh Front took Kharkiv, the fourth-largest city in the Soviet Union and one of the main centres of its arms industry. After sixteen months of occupation it was the largest city the Red Army had recovered since the start of the war. The Germans gave it up without a street-by-street fight: an SS panzer corps withdrew from Kharkiv in defiance of Adolf Hitler’s explicit order to defend it to the last man. The victory, however, proved short-lived. A few days later Field Marshal Erich von Manstein launched a counter-stroke that in mid-March brought the Germans back into the city.

A front that had ceased to exist

Kharkiv had been taken by the German Sixth Army on 24 October 1941. In the spring of 1942 the Red Army tried to recover it, but its offensive ended in encirclement and defeat in the Second Battle of Kharkov. At the beginning of 1943 the situation was quite different. After the encirclement of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and the destruction on the Don of the armies of Germany’s allies – the Italian, the Hungarian and the Romanian ones – a gap several hundred kilometres wide had opened on the southern wing of the Eastern Front. In January General Filipp Golikov’s Voronezh Front routed the Hungarian Second Army and retook Voronezh, and on 2 February, the day the last units at Stalingrad surrendered, it launched a further offensive.

The Stavka now assumed that the Germans were beaten and falling back behind the Dnieper. Two operations were based on this optimistic assumption. The Voronezh Front’s Operation Star (Zvezda) was to lead to Kursk, Belgorod and Kharkiv. Operation Gallop, mounted by General Nikolai Vatutin’s South-Western Front and begun on 29 January, was directed through the Donbas towards the Sea of Azov and the Dnieper crossings in order to cut off the whole of the German Army Group Don. The spearhead of this thrust was General Markian Popov’s mobile group of four tank corps.

Kursk, Belgorod, Kharkiv

The advance on Kharkiv came from three directions: from the north General Kirill Moskalenko’s 40th Army, from the east, through Vovchansk, the 69th Army, and from the south-east General Pavel Rybalko’s 3rd Tank Army, supported by the 6th Guards Cavalry Corps. On the front’s right wing General Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s 60th Army took Kursk on 8 February; the city had been captured by the Germans in November 1941. The next day, 9 February, the 40th Army retook Belgorod and turned south towards Kharkiv. The 3rd Tank Army forced the Donets and took Chuhuiv.

Kharkiv was defended by General Hubert Lanz’s force (Armeeabteilung Lanz). Its strongest component was SS General Paul Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps, freshly arrived from France with the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler and Das Reich divisions, and alongside it the army’s Großdeutschland motorised division. Hitler, for whom Kharkiv was a matter of prestige, forbade the city to be given up. Meanwhile the Soviet armies were bypassing it from the north and the south, and by mid-February the city was surrounded on three sides. Fighting was already going on in the outer districts, and the only line of retreat, to the south-west, was in danger of being closed.

On 15 February Hausser concluded that further defence would end in the encirclement and destruction of his corps, as had recently happened to the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Against the orders of Hitler and Lanz he led the SS divisions out of the city. The next day, 16 February, units of the 40th and 69th Armies and the 3rd Tank Army entered Kharkiv. A Sovinformburo communiqué announced the recapture of the city, and the Soviet press presented the victory as further proof that after Stalingrad the Germans were unable to stop the Red Army.

Hausser got away with his insubordination, probably because he was one of the leading commanders of the Waffen-SS and because his decision was soon shown to have been right. The consequences fell on Lanz, who was replaced a few days later by General Werner Kempf.

Hitler at Zaporizhzhia

The loss of Kharkiv coincided with the most dangerous moment of the whole winter in the south. In the north the Voronezh Front was pushing on westwards towards Poltava and Sumy. In the south Popov’s group reached Krasnoarmeysk on 11 February, cutting the railway that supplied the troops on the Mius, while Vatutin’s armies were approaching the Dnieper near Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia, where Manstein had his headquarters. After giving up Rostov, the German forces were struggling to hold the Mius line. On 12 February (14 February according to some sources) Army Group Don, reinforced by part of the dissolved Army Group B, was renamed Army Group South.

Hitler, incensed at the loss of Kharkiv, at first demanded that the city be retaken at once. On 17 February he flew to Zaporizhzhia and stayed there until 19 February. Manstein convinced him that a frontal attack on Kharkiv had no chance and put forward a different plan: first to strike at the Soviet spearheads between the Donets and the Dnieper, overextended and exhausted by their long advance, and to recover the city later. When Hitler flew out on 19 February, Soviet tanks were, according to German accounts, only a few dozen kilometres from the airfield. On 19 and 20 February Manstein launched his counter-stroke, in which the SS divisions brought out of Kharkiv, the Fourth Panzer Army and the First Panzer Army took part. For several days the Soviet command took the German regrouping for preparations for a further withdrawal and kept pushing its troops forward.

The city after the occupation

Kharkiv, which had had more than 800,000 inhabitants before the war, emerged from the occupation depopulated and devastated. In the winter of 1941–1942 the city was struck by famine; according to the figures of the German-run city administration, more than 13,000 of its inhabitants died of hunger in 1942 alone. In December 1941 the Germans confined the Jews in a makeshift ghetto (PL) in barracks on the outskirts, and from mid-December to January 1942 they shot them in the ravine of Drobytsky Yar. The number of victims is usually estimated at about 15,000–16,000, though some studies give up to 30,000 murdered, most of them Jews. Tens of thousands of inhabitants were deported to the Reich for forced labour.

Place in the history of the war

The liberation of Kharkiv was the high point of the Soviet winter offensive of 1942–1943 in the south. In two and a half months the Red Army had moved the front several hundred kilometres west, from the Don to Kharkiv and the Donbas. Yet its troops were exhausted: divisions were down to a few thousand men, few tanks remained, and supply lines stretched across devastated territory without working railways. The Stavka, convinced that the enemy was disintegrating, failed to notice in time that Manstein was gathering his forces for a counter-attack.

Manstein’s counter-stroke, known as the Third Battle of Kharkov, smashed Popov’s group and parts of Vatutin’s and Golikov’s armies in the second half of February and early March. On 15 March Hausser’s SS divisions retook Kharkiv after several days of street fighting, and on 18 March the Germans took Belgorod. According to the data compiled by Grigori Krivosheev, the Red Army lost more than 150,000 men in the Voronezh–Kharkov operation as a whole (13 January – 3 March), including some 55,000 killed and missing; German losses in the counter-stroke were many times smaller.

The spring thaw halted both sides on a line that left a lasting bulge around Kursk, held by the Red Army. It was there that in July 1943 the Germans launched their last great offensive in the east. Kharkiv was finally liberated on 23 August 1943. February 1943 showed both the scale of the turn of the tide after Stalingrad and that the Wehrmacht, despite its defeat, was still capable of dangerous counter-attacks.