The liberation of Rostov

On 14 February 1943 units of the Soviet Southern Front took Rostov-on-Don. The city, known as the “gateway to the Caucasus”, was changing hands for the fourth time since the start of the German-Soviet war: captured by the Germans in November 1941, retaken by the Red Army a week later, it had fallen again in July 1942 at the start of the great German summer offensive. This time the Germans never returned. Yet it was also a belated victory: the main body of the German forces withdrawing from the Caucasus had already passed over Rostov’s bridges and crossings.

The race for Rostov

After the encirclement of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the whole of Army Group A, strung out from the Black Sea to the Terek, was in mortal danger. Rostov was the only major railway and road junction through which it could return north. Had the Red Army reached it first, several hundred thousand German and Romanian soldiers would have been trapped, and the disaster would have been greater than Stalingrad.

On 1 January 1943 General Andrei Yeremenko’s Southern Front (until that day the Stalingrad Front) advanced on Rostov and Salsk. At the same time General Eberhard von Mackensen’s First Panzer Army, part of General Ewald von Kleist’s Army Group A, began its withdrawal from the Terek. Throughout January the road to Rostov was screened by the remnants of General Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, which on the steppe along the Manych and the Sal fought off the attacks of four Soviet corps. On 23 January Joseph Stalin, in a Stavka directive, ordered the main blow to be directed at Bataysk and Azov on the south bank of the Don in order to cut the Germans’ line of retreat, but the troops of the Southern Front, worn out by a march of several hundred kilometres, could not do so in time. At the turn of January and February the main body of the First Panzer Army passed through Rostov and joined Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Army Group Don. The rest of Army Group A, above all the Seventeenth Army, fell back westwards to the lower Kuban and the Taman Peninsula.

Withdrawal to the Mius

On 2 February, the day the last units at Stalingrad surrendered, Stalin gave command of the Southern Front to General Rodion Malinovsky, until then commander of the 2nd Guards Army. His armies, among them the 2nd Guards and the 28th, 44th and 51st, pressed on the Germans from the east and from the south, across the Don. At the same time, further north, the South-Western Front advanced through the Donbas towards the Sea of Azov, threatening to cut off the whole of Army Group Don.

Manstein concluded that continuing to hold the exposed “balcony” on the lower Don would lead to disaster. On 6 February he flew to the Wolf’s Lair and after a conversation lasting many hours extracted from Adolf Hitler permission to shorten the front: to give up Rostov and the eastern part of the Donbas and to withdraw to the fortified line of the Mius – the same river on which the Germans had halted after their defeat at Rostov in 1941. Manstein wanted to move the panzer divisions freed in this way to his northern wing, where the Soviet offensive was heading for the Dnieper.

On 7 February Soviet troops took Bataysk, cutting the last railway link with the German forces in the Caucasus. On the night of 7–8 February a battalion of the 159th Rifle Brigade of the 28th Army crossed the Don on the ice and seized part of Rostov’s railway station. The force, commanded by Senior Lieutenant Ghukas Madoyan, held out there for six days, beating off several dozen counter-attacks according to Soviet accounts; Madoyan was made a Hero of the Soviet Union for it. In the following days other units of the 28th Army and of neighbouring armies also fought for bridgeheads on the right bank and for the suburbs, but the Germans were defending the city mainly in order to withdraw their troops and equipment undisturbed.

On 12 February Soviet troops took Shakhty, and on 13 February Novocherkassk, the old capital of the Don Cossacks. On the night of 13–14 February the last German rearguards left Rostov, blowing up the bridges and some of the industrial plants behind them. On the morning of 14 February units of General Vasily Gerasimenko’s 28th Army, together with units of the neighbouring armies, occupied the whole city. The same day troops of the South-Western Front retook Voroshilovgrad (today Luhansk), and two days earlier, on 12 February, the North Caucasus Front had liberated Krasnodar, the chief city of the Kuban.

On the western wing the Red Army was still trying to cut the Seventeenth Army off from the Taman Peninsula. On the night of 3–4 February a naval infantry detachment under Major Tsezar Kunikov landed at Stanichka on the outskirts of Novorossiysk and established a bridgehead, later known as Malaya Zemlya (the Little Land), but the main landing at Yuzhnaya Ozereyka failed. After the capture of Krasnodar the North Caucasus Front’s offensive soon bogged down in front of the fortifications the Germans called the Gotenkopfstellung.

The city after the occupation

Rostov, before the war one of the largest cities of southern Russia with more than half a million inhabitants, emerged from the occupation in ruins. The centre, the railway station, the river port and the industrial plants, including the great Rostselmash agricultural machinery works, had been largely destroyed in the fighting and by the retreating Germans. The population fell sharply: many inhabitants had been evacuated in 1942, many had been killed, and tens of thousands had been deported to Germany for forced labour.

The worst crime of the occupation was the massacre at Zmievskaya Balka (the Snake Ravine) on the outskirts of the city. In August 1942 Sonderkommando 10a shot the Jewish inhabitants of Rostov and Jewish refugees there and killed others in gas vans, and in the following months it also murdered Soviet prisoners of war and other inhabitants. According to estimates cited in the literature, some 27,000 people were killed at Zmievskaya Balka, including more than ten thousand Jews; the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, which investigated the site after the liberation, gave higher figures.

Place in the history of the war

The recapture of Rostov closed the winter campaign in the North Caucasus. Within six weeks the Red Army had recovered the lands from the Don to the Terek that the Germans had conquered in the summer of 1942, but it failed to achieve the main aim of the operation: it did not encircle any of the armies of Army Group A. The First Panzer Army passed through Rostov and reinforced Manstein’s forces, while the Seventeenth Army shut itself up in the Kuban bridgehead, which the Germans held until October 1943. Soviet historiography acknowledged that the Southern Front, weakened by its long march, had not managed to cut the enemy’s lines of retreat in time.

On 18 February Malinovsky’s troops reached the line of the Mius and halted there: their attacks on the fortified German positions broke down, and the front along the river stabilised for half a year. The withdrawal from Rostov gave Manstein the divisions he needed for the counter-stroke he launched a few days later between the Donets and the Dnieper. In March 1943 the Germans retook Kharkiv and Belgorod, but they made no further attempt to recover Rostov.

From then on Rostov remained on the Soviet side of the front for good. In the summer of 1943 the Southern Front broke through the defences on the Mius and on 30 August recaptured Taganrog, opening the way to the whole of the Donbas. For the Germans 14 February marked the final closing of the “gateway to the Caucasus”: of the plans to seize Caucasian oil, which had been the main objective of the offensive in the summer of 1942, nothing remained but a bridgehead on the Kuban.