The Red Army in Odessa

On 10 April 1944, after a night of fighting in the suburbs, units of General of the Army Rodion Malinovsky’s Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front entered the centre of Odessa. The German 6th Army, which only a few weeks earlier had been holding the line of the Southern Bug, withdrew west from the city across the Dniester, leaving behind it demolished port installations, the power station and the railway junction. Ukraine’s largest Black Sea port, since October 1941 the capital of Romanian Transnistria, returned to Soviet rule after not quite two and a half years of occupation.

The capture of Odessa completed the last stage of the great offensive in Right-Bank Ukraine, which from March 1944 had been driving the Germans and Romanians back across the Southern Bug, the Dniester and the Prut. The city had also been the scene of one of the worst crimes on the Eastern Front – the massacre of the Jews in October 1941 – and its liberation also meant a reckoning with those who had collaborated with the invader during the occupation.

The chronologies record briefly under 10 April that Soviet troops entered Odessa. The report is accurate: according to Soviet dispatches, by ten in the morning the whole city was clear of German and Romanian troops.

Romanian Odessa

Odessa fell on 16 October 1941 after a defence of more than two months that cost the Romanian army enormous losses. Hitler then handed Marshal Ion Antonescu the administration of the whole area between the Dniester and the Southern Bug. These lands, named Transnistria, were not formally annexed to Romania – Antonescu wanted above all to recover Transylvania, not to acquire a region where Romanians made up roughly a tenth of the population – but for two and a half years they were governed from Bucharest. The governor was a law professor, Gheorghe Alexianu, who from the autumn of 1941 had his seat in Odessa; the mayor of the city was the Bessarabian politician Gherman Pântea.

The first weeks of the occupation brought a massacre in which, after an explosion at the Romanian headquarters on 22 October 1941, between 25,000 and 34,000 people by various estimates were murdered, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. The crime did not end there. In January 1942 the Romanian authorities ordered all the Jews remaining in the city to report to a ghetto in Slobidka (Slobodka), from where they were taken by rail to the Berezivka district, some 90 kilometres to the north. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) states that more than 31,000 people were deported in this way in January and February 1942; in the frost, up to a quarter of them froze to death before departure or on the way. On arrival the deportees were driven to makeshift camps on the Southern Bug, where between January and June 1942 self-defence units of local ethnic Germans, subordinated to the SS, murdered some 33,500 Odessa Jews according to the USHMM. The last deportation train left Odessa on 23 June 1942. In April of that year 701 registered Jews officially remained in the city; the few who survived had been hidden by neighbours or employed as forced labourers.

For the city’s other inhabitants the Romanian occupation was milder than the German one in the rest of Ukraine. The American historian Alexander Dallin, author of the classic study of occupied Odessa, described a city where shops and markets opened, theatres and churches functioned, and private trade flourished as never before under Soviet rule; the collective farms, however, were not dissolved, and grain from Transnistria flowed to Romania. Beneath the city, in kilometres of underground passages left by old quarries – the famous Odessa catacombs – Soviet partisans and NKVD underground operatives were in hiding. The best-known detachment, commanded by the security officer Vladimir Molodtsov (code name “Badaev”), was destroyed in 1942 and its commander executed. The Romanians tried to smoke out those hiding in the catacombs with gas and walled up the exits, but the tunnels were never fully cleared.

The end of Transnistria

The Romanian administration began to fall apart even before the Red Army reached the Southern Bug. When in January 1944 the front approached the northern districts of Transnistria and German troops retreating from Ukraine poured into the region, Antonescu abolished the civil administration on 29 January and recalled Alexianu. Power passed to a military governor, General Gheorghe Potopeanu, who on 15 March ordered the evacuation of all Romanian personnel. The Germans took over one town after another even before the Russians arrived; on 24 March they removed the Romanian mayor of Odessa, and on 1 April 1944 what was left of Transnistria – Odessa, Tiraspol, Ovidiopol and a few districts along the Dniester – formally passed to German administration. Odessa thus lived through the last days of the occupation no longer as the capital of a Romanian province but as the rear area of a retreating Wehrmacht.

Unlike the Romanians, the Germans had no intention of leaving the city anything. They prepared to blow up the port, the industrial plants and the transport hubs, to carry off stocks and to round up men for forced labour. Many inhabitants fled to the countryside or went down into the catacombs to wait for the front to pass; partisan groups were active there again too, waiting for the Soviet troops to approach.

From the Southern Bug to the Dniester

Odessa was the objective of an operation that Soviet historiography calls the Odessa operation and dates to 26 March – 14 April 1944; it was part of the Dnieper–Carpathian offensive, the whole spring offensive in Ukraine. The plan was drawn up by Malinovsky together with the representative of the Stavka, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky; Stalin approved it on 19 March. According to Russian studies the 3rd Ukrainian Front numbered about 470,000 men but only 435 tanks and self-propelled guns, and it was attacking in the thaw, along roads turned to mud (the rasputitsa). Facing it were the German 6th Army and the Romanian 3rd Army – according to the same sources about 350,000 men in 16 German and 4 Romanian divisions – already badly bled by the winter retreats.

The spring defeat in Ukraine cost German commanders their posts. At the end of March Hitler dismissed Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist, commander of Army Group A, and sent in his place Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, known for his brutal enforcement of orders; on 5 April the army group was renamed Army Group South Ukraine. The commander of the 6th Army, General Karl-Adolf Hollidt, was also removed; by April the army was commanded by General of Artillery Maximilian de Angelis, who described it in his reports as utterly exhausted.

Malinovsky intended not so much to storm Odessa frontally as to outflank it from the north-west and cut its garrison off from the Dniester. On the right wing General Nikolai Gagen’s 57th Army and the 37th Army were to advance on Tiraspol. In the centre General Vasily Glagolev’s 46th Army, General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army – the defenders of Stalingrad – and General Issa Pliyev’s cavalry-mechanised group with 23rd Tank Corps were to strike at the railway station of Rozdilna, on the Odessa–Tiraspol line. On the left wing, along the coast, the attack was made by General Ivan Shlemin’s 6th Army, General Vyacheslav Tsvetaev’s 5th Shock Army and the 28th Army, supported by the aircraft and naval infantry of the Black Sea Fleet under Vice-Admiral (from 10 April Admiral) Filipp Oktyabrsky.

Mykolaiv, Ochakiv, Rozdilna

The attack began on the night of 25–26 March. The first attempts to force the Southern Bug in the centre failed, but on the right wing the 57th and 37th Armies widened their bridgeheads near Kostiantynivka and Voznesensk. In the south the assault began on Mykolaiv, a large port and shipbuilding centre at the mouth of the Southern Bug. On the night of 25–26 March 67 naval infantrymen under Senior Lieutenant Konstantin Olshansky crossed the estuary in fishing boats and landed in the port; for two days and nights they beat off counter-attacks, and only a dozen or so of them survived. On 28 March troops of the 6th, 5th Shock and 28th Armies took the city. On 30 March, after crossing the estuary with the help of a seaborne landing, the 5th Shock Army captured Ochakiv.

On the right wing Pliyev’s group and 23rd Tank Corps crossed the Southern Bug at the end of March and drove south-west. On 4 April the cavalry of 4th Guards Cavalry Corps, attacking on horseback with tank support, took Rozdilna and with it, according to Russian studies, several dozen locomotives and more than 900 wagons. The Odessa–Tiraspol railway was cut and the German 6th Army split in two: two corps fell back towards Tiraspol, while the rest – about ten German and two Romanian divisions – were pinned against Odessa. On 6 April part of the forces being encircled broke through the still weak positions of the Soviet 82nd Rifle Corps near Rozdilna and escaped towards the Dniester. Pliyev then turned south, and on 7 April his cavalry reached the Dniester Estuary, threatening the Odessa garrison’s last line of retreat.

The night of 9–10 April

Odessa was defended by the remnants of the German LXXII Army Corps and parts of XXXXIV Corps, making use of fortifications left over from the fighting of 1941 and of the many estuaries and flooded ravines. On the evening of 9 April divisions of the 5th Shock Army took the Sortirovochnaya and Kuyalnik railway stations and the Peresyp district, and at about 10 p.m. entered the northern quarters of the city. The 8th Guards and 6th Armies were reaching the suburbs from the north-west. The Germans now had only one escape route – to the south-west, through Ovidiopol and the crossings of the Dniester Estuary – and they sent their transport and retreating columns along it under Soviet air attack. Attempts were made to evacuate some troops and equipment by sea; according to Soviet figures, aircraft, torpedo boats and submarines of the Black Sea Fleet sank more than 30 vessels in those days.

During the night partisans and members of the underground came out of the catacombs and their hiding places and attacked the rear of the retreating troops. Soviet accounts credit them with saving parts of the port, the quays and the warehouses from demolition, and credit L. F. Gorbel’s detachment with destroying a German demolition party that was to breach the dam of the Khadzhibey Estuary and flood the Peresyp district, which gave the troops their way into the city. Resistance in the city itself quickly collapsed; at ten in the morning on 10 April, as the Soviet command reported, Odessa was free.

Salvoes in Moscow

On the evening of 10 April Moscow celebrated the capture of Odessa with an artillery salute – 24 salvoes from 324 guns – and Stalin’s order of the day named the commanders and units that had taken part in the fighting; many of them received the honorary title “Odessa”. That same day the recently instituted highest Soviet military decoration, the Order of Victory, was awarded for the first time: No. 1 went to Marshal Georgy Zhukov, commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, and No. 2 to Vasilevsky, who had coordinated the operations of the fronts in the south. Odessa was the largest city retaken by the Red Army since the liberation of Kiev in November 1943, and its capture rounded off the great spring offensive, after which only a strip of land in the west and Crimea remained in German hands in Ukraine.

The fighting did not end in the city. The 6th and 5th Shock Armies passed into the second echelon, but the rest of the front pursued the Germans and Romanians to the Dniester. On the night of 11–12 April the 37th Army took Tiraspol and seized a bridgehead on the right bank of the river; the 57th and 46th Armies won similar bridgeheads. Near Ovidiopol, Pliyev’s cavalry divisions were attacked on 10 April by columns retreating from Odessa and had to fall back, while Chuikov’s two corps, stretched over 60 kilometres, failed to close the escape route. Vasilevsky reprimanded Malinovsky for the “passive actions of Chuikov’s army”, which allowed the enemy to escape across the Dniester unpunished. On 14 April the Stavka ordered the 3rd Ukrainian Front to go over to the defensive.

According to Soviet figures the Germans and Romanians lost more than 27,000 killed and more than 11,000 prisoners, 443 tanks and assault guns and 952 guns in the whole operation. The 6th Army’s German records, cited in more recent studies, give for April alone 4,672 killed, more than 16,000 wounded and more than 6,000 missing; several divisions lost over half their strength. Full Soviet losses have not been published; surviving figures for individual armies point to thousands killed and well over ten thousand wounded in March and April alone. Russian studies also acknowledge that the front failed to encircle the 6th Army or to reach the Romanian border: part of the German and Romanian forces escaped across the Dniester and manned a new line of defence there.

The city after the occupation

Odessa, which before the war had some 600,000 inhabitants, had, according to Dallin, little more than 200,000 in April 1944. The port, the power station, the mills and the food warehouses were largely destroyed. The most terrible toll concerned the Jews: according to the USHMM, of some 200,000 Odessa Jews in 1939, a registration of inhabitants carried out by the Soviet authorities two months after the liberation found 2,640 in the city. Some survivors returned from the camps and ghettos of Transnistria or from evacuation deep inside the USSR, but the pre-war Jewish community of Odessa – one of the largest in Europe – had ceased to exist.

The NKVD and the military counter-intelligence service SMERSH returned with the army. People accused of collaborating with the occupier were arrested: officials of the Romanian administration and policemen, but also people who had run private businesses during the occupation or worked on newspapers published under the Romanians. Men of conscription age who had lived through the occupation were drafted en masse into the Red Army – as in other recaptured parts of Ukraine – often without training, and sent to the front on the Dniester. Anyone who had survived the occupation was henceforth suspect in the eyes of the authorities – the question about residence “in occupied territory” remained on Soviet personnel questionnaires for years. At the same time Soviet commissions documented the occupiers’ crimes, including the murder of the Jews; the material they gathered was later used in the trials of Romanian and German perpetrators and local collaborators. The partisans of the catacombs were honoured as heroes, and their memory became one of the pillars of the city’s Soviet legend.

Place in the war

The capture of Odessa gave the Soviet Union back the most important port on the north-western coast of the Black Sea and allowed the Black Sea Fleet to move light warships and aircraft there. The German and Romanian forces in Crimea, already cut off by land, thereby also lost a safe base at sea; two days before Odessa fell, on 8 April, the 4th Ukrainian Front had launched its offensive against the peninsula. The bridgeheads on the Dniester won near Tiraspol in April became the starting point in August 1944 for the Jassy–Kishinev offensive, which smashed the rebuilt German 6th Army and led on 23 August to the overthrow of Antonescu and Romania’s switch to the Allied side.

For Romania the loss of Odessa ended any illusions about conquests in the east. Transnistria, the only territory Romania actually administered beyond the Dniester, was lost, and the front came to a halt on the Dniester, on the eastern edge of Bessarabia, which the Red Army had already crossed in the north in March. After the war the People’s Tribunal in Bucharest sentenced Ion Antonescu and Governor Alexianu to death, among other things for the crimes in Odessa and Transnistria; both were executed in June 1946.