The liberation of Kharkiv in August 1943

Early on the morning of 23 August 1943 units of the Soviet 183rd Rifle Division came out onto Dzerzhinsky Square in the centre of Kharkiv, and a red flag was raised over the Derzhprom building. Ukraine’s second-largest city was changing hands for the fourth time in this war: the Germans had taken it in October 1941, the Red Army had recaptured it in February 1943, and in March it had lost it again to an SS panzer corps. This time it was for good. That same day Moscow celebrated the victory with a salute of twenty salvoes from 224 guns, and Soviet historiography came to regard 23 August as the last day of the Battle of Kursk.

Kharkiv was the objective of the Belgorod–Kharkov operation, code-named Polkovodets Rumyantsev, which the Voronezh Front and the Steppe Front had launched on 3 August. Before they got there, the Soviet forces had to endure two weeks of heavy tank battles with the last reserves of Army Group South.

A city of four occupations and liberations

Kharkiv, before the war a great industrial centre with a tractor factory and tank and aircraft plants, was in 1941–1943 one of the most frequently captured cities on the Eastern Front. On 24 October 1941 it was taken by the German Sixth Army. In May 1942 the South-Western Front tried to recapture it, but the Second Battle of Kharkov ended with the encirclement and destruction of Soviet armies near Barvenkovo. After Stalingrad, troops of the Voronezh Front entered the city on 16 February 1943, but only a month later, in the Third Battle of Kharkov, II SS Panzer Corps retook it on 14 March in bloody street fighting.

The inhabitants paid a terrible price for all this. According to figures presented by the Soviet authorities, of the more than a million people in the city in the autumn of 1941 (including refugees), some 190,000 remained by August 1943. The same sources stated that about 120,000, mostly young people, had been deported to forced labour in Germany, 70,000–80,000 had died of hunger, cold and disease, especially in the winter of 1941–1942, and about 30,000 had been murdered by the Germans. Among those murdered were almost all the Jews who had been unable to flee before the occupation: confined from December 1941 in a ghetto (PL) on the outskirts, they were shot in the ravine of Drobytsky Yar – by various estimates between some 15,000 and more than 20,000 people. The British correspondent Alexander Werth, who visited Kharkiv after its liberation, considered the Soviet figures for those who had starved and for non-Jews killed somewhat inflated, and the number deported for labour understated. The city administration operating under the occupiers’ supervision recorded that more than 13,000 inhabitants died of hunger in 1942, more than half of all deaths in the city.

From Belgorod to Kharkiv

The Belgorod–Kharkov operation had been prepared since the spring as the main Soviet offensive of the summer of 1943. After the defensive battle of July, however, General Nikolai Vatutin’s Voronezh Front and General Ivan Konev’s Steppe Front needed three weeks to replenish. The operations of the two fronts were coordinated on behalf of the Stavka by Marshal Georgy Zhukov. The plan was to split the German grouping with a powerful thrust from the area north-west of Belgorod towards Bohodukhiv and Valki, and then to cut Kharkiv off from the west and south-west.

On 3 August, after a massive artillery preparation, the two fronts struck at the junction of the German Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf. General Mikhail Katukov’s 1st Tank Army and General Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army went into the breach. Belgorod was liberated on 5 August, the same day as Oryol in the north of the salient. Near Tomarovka and Borisovka the Soviets encircled and destroyed part of the German infantry divisions; on 7 August they took Graivoron, and by that day their spearheads had reached the line Okhtyrka–Bohodukhiv–Olshany–Zolochev, driving a deep wedge into the German front. Kharkiv was under threat of encirclement from the west.

The tank battles at Bohodukhiv and Okhtyrka

The commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, brought everything he could to the threatened sector. The Grossdeutschland motorised division returned south from Oryol, and from the Mius and the Donets, where in July they had beaten off Soviet attacks, came the SS panzer divisions Das Reich, Totenkopf and Wiking, which together with the army’s 3rd Panzer Division were placed under III Panzer Corps. From 11 to 17 August they struck south of Bohodukhiv at the flank of the 1st Tank Army and the 6th Guards Army. Rotmistrov’s army was thrown in to help Katukov. In heavy mobile battles the SS divisions destroyed a great number of Soviet tanks – by estimates the three Soviet armies lost more than 800 of the roughly 1,100 vehicles with which they had entered the fighting – and halted the outflanking of Kharkiv from the west, although they too suffered severe losses.

On 18 August the Germans struck a second time, now from near Okhtyrka, at the flank of the Soviet 27th Army. On 20 August the spearheads of Grossdeutschland and Totenkopf met in the rear of the Soviet units, encircling parts of two armies and two tank corps. The encircled forces, however, outnumbered those encircling them, and most of them, though with heavy losses, broke out again. This was Manstein’s last clear tactical success in the battle – won on the flank, while the fate of Kharkiv was being decided elsewhere.

“Hold at all costs”

While Manstein’s armoured reserves were being tied down in the west, Konev attacked Kharkiv itself from the north and east: the 53rd Army, the 69th Army, the 7th Guards Army and the 57th Army gradually tightened the ring around the city. On 12 August the commander of the grouping defending it, General Werner Kempf, asked for permission to abandon Kharkiv. Manstein did not object, but Hitler replied with an order to defend the city in all circumstances – after its recapture by the SS in March, the city had enormous prestige value for him, and he regarded its loss as a political blow that would affect the attitude of his allies and the neutral states. Kempf warned that clinging to the city would end in a “second Stalingrad”. On 14 August he was relieved of command; he was replaced by General Otto Wöhler, and the grouping was soon renamed the Eighth Army.

The new commander quickly came to the same conclusions. Supplying the troops in the city was becoming ever more difficult, and in some batteries the gunners, having fired their last shells, fought as infantry. On 21 August Manstein, against Hitler’s demands, gave his consent to the abandonment of Kharkiv, judging that saving the troops from encirclement was more important than holding ruins. On 22 August the 5th Guards Tank Army cut the last railway line linking the city with the west, and in the afternoon the Germans began withdrawing their troops from the centre to the southern districts beyond the river Udy and further, along two lines of retreat, towards Lyubotyn and Poltava and towards Merefa and Krasnohrad. As they withdrew they blew up industrial plants, bridges and transport hubs in the city.

23 August

The Soviet command noticed the slackening artillery fire and resistance in the front line and, at about two o’clock in the night of 22–23 August, threw its troops into the assault. There was no real battle for the centre any more: units of the 183rd Rifle Division advanced along Sumska Street to Dzerzhinsky Square, where they met soldiers of the 89th Guards Rifle Division, which on 5 August had been among the first to enter Belgorod. In the morning the red flag was planted on the Derzhprom building. The same units of the 183rd Division had also been the first to reach Dzerzhinsky Square in February.

The liberation of the city did not end the fighting within its boundaries. On the south-western outskirts, on the hills covering the roads to Poltava and Merefa, German rearguards – including Das Reich units near Korotych – held out for another week and inflicted heavy losses on the attackers. The last districts in the south of the city were taken on 29 and 30 August, and the threat of a German counter-attack on Kharkiv disappeared only at the beginning of September, with the capture of Merefa.

On the evening of 23 August Stalin announced in an order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief that troops of the Steppe Front, supported by the flanks of the Voronezh and South-Western Fronts, had taken Kharkiv by storm. Moscow fired a salute of twenty salvoes from 224 guns – a custom begun less than three weeks earlier, when the captors of Oryol and Belgorod had been honoured with a salute. Ten divisions received the honorific title “Kharkov”. 23 August is still celebrated in Kharkiv as the city’s day.

The balance

The victory cost the Red Army very dear. According to the tally compiled by General Grigory Krivosheev’s team on the basis of Soviet archives, the two fronts lost some 256,000 men in the Belgorod–Kharkov operation, including more than 71,000 killed and missing and about 184,000 wounded and sick, as well as about 1,900 tanks and self-propelled guns. German losses were much smaller – some authors estimate them at no fewer than 10,000 killed and missing and 20,000 wounded, others give higher figures – and in the tank battles at Bohodukhiv and Okhtyrka the Germans destroyed several Soviet vehicles for each of their own. Even so, the Wehrmacht had to fall back: the USSR could make good its losses, while Manstein’s divisions were melting away with no hope of being brought back to full strength.

Significance

The liberation of Kharkiv brought to an end the Battle of Kursk, which Soviet and Russian historians date to 5 July – 23 August 1943. It is often called the first successful large-scale Soviet summer offensive of the war. That is a simplification: the battle of Kursk proper began with a German attack, which the Red Army met on the defensive. The offensives were the two counter-offensives that followed – Kutuzov at Oryol and Polkovodets Rumyantsev at Belgorod and Kharkiv. In that sense the description is apt: in the summers of 1941 and 1942 the initiative had belonged to the Germans, and Soviet attempts to attack, such as the May 1942 offensive at Kharkov, had ended in disaster. In August 1943, for the first time in the war, the Germans were unable in summer either to halt a great Soviet offensive or to regain lost ground.

The events of the last weeks of August showed that the Soviet war machine had changed since Stalingrad. The armies of Zhukov, Konev and Vatutin, when halted in one direction, shifted the weight of their attack to another, and the German reserves, rushed from place to place, could not keep up with the successive blows. Still in August, offensives began in the Donbas and near Smolensk. At the end of August Manstein tried to convince Hitler that Army Group South could not hold a line east of the Dnieper, and in September he was given permission to withdraw behind the river. The retreating German troops left scorched earth behind them, and at the end of September the Red Army seized its first bridgeheads on the west bank of the Dnieper, and in November it liberated Kiev.

For Kharkiv itself, 23 August meant the end of the occupation but not the end of the war. In December 1943 the city saw the first trial of German war criminals before a Soviet military court, and the city, whose centre lay in ruins, took years to recover from the destruction. It never changed hands again.