The Red Army at the border of East Prussia

Early on the morning of 17 August 1944 units of two divisions of the Soviet 5th Army (PL) – the 184th and 159th Rifle Divisions – reached the border river Šešupė along a stretch of some fifteen kilometres, from near the small town of Kudirkos Naumiestis (Polish: Władysławów) to the mouth of the stream Nova. On the far bank lay East Prussia and the small border town of Schirwindt. For the first time since June 1941 Soviet troops stood on the pre-1939 frontier of the German Reich, and a few sub-units crossed the river and seized small bridgeheads on the German bank.

Many war chronologies record this event under 18 August. According to Russian studies of the Kaunas operation and the history of the 184th Rifle Division, however, the troops reached the border a day earlier, on 17 August, and these works give that date as the day the Red Army reached the German frontier. For being the first to reach the border, the commander of the 184th Division, Major General Basan Gorodovikov (PL), was later made a Hero of the Soviet Union.

This was the only sector in which the armies of General of the Army Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front reached the border in August. Elsewhere they were held up a few kilometres or a dozen or so kilometres short of it, on fortifications the Germans had been feverishly building since the summer, and in the north they had to beat off a strong German counter-offensive. For Soviet propaganda, however – whose pre-war doctrine had promised to beat the enemy “on his own territory” and which since 1941 had repeated the slogan of driving the occupier from Soviet soil – it had symbolic significance, and for the Germans in East Prussia it was a foretaste of what was to come.

From Kaunas to the Šešupė

After the capture of Kaunas on 1 August, the Supreme High Command (Stavka) expected Chernyakhovsky to reach the line Raseiniai–Suwałki within ten days and to halt there to prepare the entry into Germany. The plan proved too optimistic. The armies of the front, exhausted by six weeks of continuous advance from Vitebsk and Orsha through Minsk and Wilno (Vilnius), with overstretched supply lines, ran into defences prepared in advance near the border. From 2 to 6 August the rifle divisions attacked the border belt of fortifications without success; they managed to penetrate it in only two sectors, north of Vilkaviškis and west of Kalvarija. On the right flank the 39th Army and the 5th Guards Tank Army crossed the Dubysa and took Raseiniai on 9 August.

That same day the Germans struck. After a heavy artillery and air preparation, German armoured units broke through the defences of the 33rd Army, reached the Marijampolė–Vilkaviškis road and retook Vilkaviškis; their further advance on Kaunas was stopped by Soviet anti-tank artillery and the 2nd Guards Tank Corps. On 14 August the 7th Panzer Division attacked north of the town, retook Raseiniai and surrounded part of the Soviet forces. Only when the German command began shifting panzer divisions north against the 1st Baltic Front did Chernyakhovsky’s armies resume their advance towards Gumbinnen on 15 August. By 22 August they had moved forward a mere 6–14 kilometres and retaken Vilkaviškis. Only the left wing of Colonel General Nikolai Krylov’s 5th Army reached the border.

First on the border river

The Šešupė, a left-bank tributary of the Neman, had marked the border between Prussia and Lithuania at this point since the Treaty of Melno of 1422 – one of the longest-unchanged borders in Europe. After the partitions of Poland and the Napoleonic Wars it separated Prussia from the lands under Russian rule, and after 1918 from independent Lithuania. On the Soviet side, stories were later told of the first soldiers to stand on its bank. According to Soviet and Russian veterans’ accounts, the first to reach the border was the 4th Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 297th Rifle Regiment of the 184th Division, under Senior Lieutenant Vasily Zaitsev (not to be confused with the far better-known sniper of Stalingrad); Zaitsev was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. On the western bank of the river units of the 5th Army seized several small bridgeheads. The Germans tried to eliminate them throughout the following week, most strongly on 22 August. The bridgeheads were held, but they lost their significance once the offensive came to a halt; at the turn of August and September the troops were withdrawn from them to the eastern bank. The town of Schirwindt itself, which the history of the 184th Division calls the first German town captured, fell only in October 1944.

Doppelkopf

At the same time as the fighting on the border, a battle was being fought to restore contact with Army Group North. At the end of July the spearheads of General of the Army Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front had reached the Gulf of Riga near Tukums, cutting off the German forces in Estonia and Latvia from East Prussia. On 16 August – the day on which Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt replaced Field Marshal Model at the head of Army Group Centre and General Erhard Raus took over the Third Panzer Army – the Germans launched Operation Doppelkopf. Two panzer corps – General Otto von Knobelsdorff’s XL and General Dietrich von Saucken’s XXXIX – attacked from the Liepāja and Tauragė areas towards Šiauliai and Jelgava.

The thrust towards Šiauliai stalled against the defences of the Soviet armies, which Bagramyan had reinforced with artillery and reserves. On the northern flank, on 20 August, the battle group of General Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz, preceded by fire from the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen in the Gulf of Riga, retook Tukums and linked up with units of the Sixteenth Army. By the end of August the restored corridor along the coast was about thirty kilometres wide. The Germans failed, however, to recover Šiauliai or to cut off the Soviet forces threatening Riga. The attack did, on the other hand, draw part of the Soviet forces and German panzer divisions away from the Prussian axis – which explains why the front near Vilkaviškis, though so close to the border, stood almost still in the second half of August.

East Prussia waits

East Prussia, cut off from the rest of the Reich between the wars by the Polish “Corridor”, was a symbol for German propaganda – the cradle of the Prussian state, the land of the victory at Tannenberg in 1914 and the soil on which a Russian army had already once stood in August of that year. In 1944 it was also home to Adolf Hitler’s main headquarters – the Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg (Kętrzyn), scene of the 20 July plot a month earlier – and to the headquarters of the Wehrmacht’s high commands. The Gauleiter and Oberpräsident of the province, Erich Koch, until then also Reich Commissioner for Ukraine, had since the summer been directing the construction of field fortifications along the border, for which the party had rounded up tens of thousands of civilians, members of the Hitler Youth and forced labourers. The party authorities long held back the evacuation of the civilian population, regarding it as a sign of defeatism; the removal of inhabitants from the most threatened border districts began only later and on a limited scale.

Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda presented the defence of the border as a struggle for the survival of the nation, while Soviet propaganda presented the arrival at the border as the start of the reckoning with the enemy in his “lair”, as Germany was often called in Soviet slogans. In front-line newspapers and appeals to soldiers who had marched through the burnt villages of Belarus and the sites of mass executions, hatred of the Germans was a constant theme. For the population of East Prussia this was to have tragic consequences in the months that followed.

The end of Bagration

On 29 August the Stavka ordered the 3rd Belorussian Front to go over to the defensive. In Soviet and Russian historiography this day closes Operation Bagration, which had begun on 22 June. In ten weeks the Red Army had destroyed Army Group Centre, moved the front 500–600 kilometres west, liberated Belarus and most of Lithuania, and reached the Vistula and the Narew and, in the north, the Gulf of Riga and the border of East Prussia. Its troops, however, were exhausted, and their supply lines stretched for hundreds of kilometres across a devastated country. Along the whole front from the Baltic to the Carpathians there was a pause in major offensives; the weight of operations shifted to the south, where the offensive in Romania began on 20 August, and to the north, towards Riga and Estonia.

Outside Warsaw, where the Uprising had been fighting since 1 August, the front also came to a standstill. Stalin’s decision to halt his forces on the line of the Vistula, and the reasons for it, are still disputed by historians; for East Prussia it meant almost two months’ respite.

Place in the war

Reaching the Šešupė heralded a new stage of the war: fighting on German soil. The first attempt to break through the defences of East Prussia – the 3rd Belorussian Front’s Gumbinnen–Goldap operation of 16–30 October 1944 – brought the capture of Schirwindt, Eydtkuhnen and Goldap and a penetration several dozen kilometres deep into the province, but it was halted before Gumbinnen. On 21 October Soviet tank crews occupied the village of Nemmersdorf on the Angerapp; Goebbels’s propaganda publicised the killing of the German civilians and prisoners there throughout the country and, according to most modern researchers, also exaggerated its scale. East Prussia was conquered only in the winter offensive of 1945, and at the Potsdam Conference it was divided between Poland and the USSR.

For Joseph Stalin, August 1944 closed the period in which the Red Army was liberating its own territory. From then on it fought on the soil of neighbouring states and of Germany itself, and their future was decided not only on the battlefield but also by who would be first to enter them.