The Red Army at the Romanian border

On 20 March 1944 units of the Soviet 38th Army, after three days of street fighting and a crossing of the Southern Bug, drove the Germans out of Vinnytsia – the city near which, only a few months earlier, Hitler had directed the war from the easternmost of his headquarters. The day before, troops of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 2nd Ukrainian Front had taken Mohyliv-Podilskyi on the Dniester, and since 17 March their spearheads had already stood on the far bank of the river, in Bessarabia, which Romania regarded as one of its provinces. Two weeks after the start of the offensive in Right-Bank Ukraine the Soviet advance showed no sign of slowing, and the German front on the southern wing was breaking into pieces.

War chronologies record two items under 18 and 20 March: that the Red Army was approaching the Romanian border, and that its offensive in Ukraine was continuing with great success. Both are accurate and describe the same sequence of events. They call for one clarification, however: in March 1944 “the Romanian border” meant one thing in Bucharest and another in Moscow.

Two borders

Until 1940 the border between Romania and the Soviet Union ran along the Dniester; the USSR had never recognised the union of Bessarabia with Romania in 1918. In June 1940, after a Soviet ultimatum, Romania gave up Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and the Prut became the new border. A year later, joining Germany in the war against the Soviet Union, Marshal Ion Antonescu’s Romania recovered both provinces and also took over the administration of the land between the Dniester and the Southern Bug, named Transnistria, with Odessa as its capital.

For the Romanians, then, Konev’s soldiers crossing the Dniester on 17 March were entering the territory of the Romanian state. For Soviet propaganda they were stepping onto “Soviet soil”, and the state border lay only at the Prut. When the spearheads of the 2nd Ukrainian Front reached the Prut on 26 March, along a stretch of some 85 kilometres north of Ungheni, Moscow announced in an order of the day from Stalin that the Red Army had reached the state border of the USSR with Romania, and marked the occasion with an artillery salute.

Across the Southern Bug and the Dniester

After taking Uman on 10 March, Konev’s forces gave the Germans no time to organise a defence on the Southern Bug. Three tank armies – the 2nd, 5th Guards and 6th – crossed the river on a broad front, using captured bridges, pontoons and boats, while the infantry followed knee-deep in mud. General Otto Wöhler’s German Eighth Army could not form a new line of defence; its shattered divisions fell back to the south and south-west, abandoning equipment that could not be dragged out of the mud.

On 17 March the leading units of the front’s right wing seized bridgeheads on the right bank of the Dniester south of Mohyliv-Podilskyi. On 19 March Mohyliv itself fell. The crossing of the Dniester mattered in two ways. Militarily, because the Eighth Army was cut off from the neighbouring First Panzer Army and placed under Army Group A, and the German front in Ukraine split into two parts, a northern and a southern. And politically, because for the first time since 1941 the Red Army had entered land that Romania considered its own, and Romania’s alliance with Germany faced a direct test.

Between the Southern Bug and the Dniester Soviet troops reached the ghettos and camps of Transnistria, to which the Romanian authorities had deported the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina in 1941–1942, as well as sites of mass murder of the local Jewish population, as earlier in Odessa. A large proportion of the deportees did not survive hunger, typhus and executions. Historians estimate the total number of Jews – deportees and local Jews alike – who died in Transnistria at around 150,000–250,000, depending on the method used.

Vinnytsia and Zhmerynka

North of Konev, Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Ukrainian Front was attacking. Since 10 March its main forces had been locked in an exhausting struggle with German panzer divisions for the Tarnopol (Ternopil)–Proskurov railway, but the front’s left wing, the 18th and 38th Armies, kept moving forward. General Kirill Moskalenko’s 38th Army took Zhmerynka, an important railway junction, on 18 March and then closed in on Vinnytsia. The Germans, driven out of the eastern part of the city on 17 March, blew up the bridges over the Southern Bug and held out in the western part. Soviet regiments crossed the river north and south of the city and cut the road to Proskurov, and on 19 March a battalion of the 183rd Rifle Division crossed straight into Vinnytsia. By the morning of 20 March the city was in Soviet hands.

Vinnytsia had a special significance for the Germans. For a long time it had housed the headquarters of the German forces on the southern wing of the Eastern Front, and in a forest near the village of Stryzhavka, a dozen or so kilometres north of the city, Soviet prisoners of war had been made to build Hitler’s Werwolf headquarters in 1941–1942. Hitler stayed there three times – in the summer and autumn of 1942, when he directed the offensive towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus from it, in the spring of 1943, and for the last time in late summer 1943. The retreating Germans blew up its bunkers. The city and its surroundings were also a scene of crimes under the occupation: in 1941–1942 the Germans murdered almost the entire Jewish population of Vinnytsia, and in 1943 Goebbels’s propaganda used the exhumation of victims of the NKVD from 1937–1938 in its struggle against the USSR.

On the same day, 20 March, Zhukov’s main forces were completing their regrouping for a second blow. On 21 March the 60th Army and 1st Guards Army, supported by three tank armies, resumed the attack southwards from the Volochysk–Chorny Ostriv line, towards the Dniester and Chernivtsi.

Hungary and Romania

The Red Army’s approach to the Carpathians and the Dniester caused nervousness in the capitals of Germany’s allies. Admiral Miklós Horthy’s Hungary had for months been sounding out the Western Allies about leaving the war; Hitler, fearing that Budapest would abandon him just as the front reached the Carpathians, ordered the occupation of Hungary on 19 March. Romania – although its army had been bled white since Stalingrad, and in mid-March an envoy of the Romanian opposition, Prince Barbu Știrbey, had arrived in Cairo for talks with the Allies – remained a loyal ally for the time being: oil from Ploiești was irreplaceable for Germany, and Romanian divisions were now being incorporated into the German Eighth Army and sent to the front on the Dniester and the Prut.

Place in the war

The second half of March brought further German defeats. On 25 March Zhukov’s troops took Proskurov, and on 26 March Kamianets-Podilskyi. General Hans-Valentin Hube’s First Panzer Army, some 200,000 men, was encircled north of the Dniester. In a heated meeting on 25 March Field Marshal Erich von Manstein wrung from Hitler permission for it to break out of the pocket to the west rather than to the south, and for a relief force to be sent from France. Hube’s “wandering pocket” fought its way through to the troops of the II SS Panzer Corps near Buczacz (Buchach) in early April. Before that, on 30 March, Hitler dismissed both Manstein and the commander of Army Group A, Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist, presenting each of them with a high decoration as a farewell. Neither held a command again before the end of the war.

In the south, Konev’s troops crossed the Prut on 28 March and entered the territory of Romania proper; on 29 March General Mikhail Katukov’s Soviet 1st Tank Army from Zhukov’s front took Chernivtsi. On 2 April the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, gave an assurance that the USSR had no intention of taking any of Romania’s territory or changing its social order – a declaration that, however, left out Bessarabia and Bukovina, which Moscow regarded as Soviet land. In April the Soviet advance petered out on the approaches to Iași and Chișinău and at the foot of the Carpathians, and the front stabilised for four months.

The spring victories in Ukraine opened the way to the Balkans for the Red Army. When the Jassy–Kishinev offensive was launched from the Prut and the Dniester in August 1944, it routed the German and Romanian forces within a few days, and on 23 August King Michael I had Antonescu arrested and Romania went over to the Allies. Soon afterwards Bulgaria too dropped out of the war on Germany’s side, and the Germans lost Romanian oil and the entire southern wing of the Eastern Front. The Red Army’s entry into Bessarabia in March was the first step on that road; it also settled that Bessarabia and northern Bukovina would return to the USSR after the war and that Romania would fall within the Soviet sphere of influence.