The Summer War in Estonia

On 3 July 1941, in Pärnu County in south-western Estonia, armed men who had been hiding in the forests for several weeks came out onto the roads and took control of several rural municipalities and of the small town of Kilingi-Nõmme. German troops were still in Latvia at the time, several dozen kilometres to the south. In the days that followed, similar groups disarmed the Soviet militia, attacked Red Army columns and units of the so-called destruction battalions, and hoisted blue, black and white flags in one small town after another. The Estonians called these weeks the Summer War (Estonian: suvesõda): the struggle of insurgents known as the Forest Brothers (metsavennad) against the retreating Soviet 8th Army and NKVD formations, waged at first on their own and from 7 July alongside the advancing German 18th Army. On 10 July, as the Soviet troops dug in behind the Emajõgi river, the insurgents took the southern part of Tartu. A day earlier the NKVD had murdered 193 prisoners in the city’s gaol, and the retreating army had blown up the eighteenth-century Stone Bridge, the symbol of the city.

Popular war chronologies list these matters under three days: 3 July (the start of the Forest Brothers’ attacks), 5 July (the entry of the first German forces from Latvia) and 10 July (the Emajõgi line, Tartu, the executions and the demolition of the bridge). Together they form a single sequence of events from the first two weeks of July. One date needs correcting: Estonian and Russian studies agree that the German 18th Army crossed Estonia’s southern border on a broad front on 7 July, and in the following days entered Pärnu and Viljandi. On 5 July only Estonians were yet fighting in Estonia.

A year of Soviet rule

Estonia, assigned to the Soviet Union in the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, was forced in September 1939 to sign a mutual assistance pact and admit Soviet garrisons to its territory. In June 1940, after an ultimatum, the Red Army occupied the whole country, and in August Estonia was incorporated into the USSR as the Estonian SSR. President Konstantin Päts and the commander-in-chief, General Johan Laidoner, were deported into the interior of Russia. Over the following year thousands of former officials, officers, policemen and members of the Kaitseliit, the volunteer defence league dissolved in 1940, were arrested; the Estonian army was turned into the Red Army’s 22nd Territorial Rifle Corps, and its officers were gradually removed and arrested.

The heaviest blow was the June deportations. During the night of 13–14 June 1941 and the days that followed, the NKVD deported more than 10,000 people from Estonia, among them thousands of women and children. Many men who escaped arrest hid in the forests and marshes. When on 22 June Germany attacked the Soviet Union, others followed them into the forests: the Soviet authorities had declared mobilisation and were sending conscripts into the interior of the USSR, and many Estonians did not want to fight for a state that a year earlier had taken away their independence. According to Estonian research, more than 30,000 men were mobilised and taken east in 1941; most ended up in labour battalions, where thousands died in the first winter of the war.

The first armed clashes between Estonians in hiding and the militia and NKVD were recorded as early as the last days of June. Those in hiding were called “forest brothers”; the same name was later borne, after 1944, by the members of the armed anti-communist underground in the Baltic states. They were most numerous in the south, in the counties of Pärnu, Viljandi, Tartu, Valga and Võru, where the forests ran up to the Latvian border and where the German offensive was to arrive first.

Destruction battalions and “scorched earth”

Against them the Soviet authorities deployed, besides border troops and NKVD units, the destruction battalions (istrebitelnye batalony). A resolution of 24 June 1941 ordered them to be formed throughout the frontline zone to fight saboteurs and paratroopers. They recruited communists, Komsomol members, militiamen and workers; according to Soviet figures of 8 July, there were 13 such battalions in Estonia, numbering some 2,600 men. Their tasks were broadened by the radio address that Joseph Stalin delivered on the morning of 3 July, the day of the Forest Brothers’ first actions in Pärnu County. Stalin called for “not a kilogram of bread, not a litre of fuel” to be left to the enemy in the territories abandoned by the Red Army, for grain, livestock, machinery and rolling stock to be removed or destroyed, and for partisan detachments to be formed in the enemy’s rear. In Estonia these scorched-earth tactics were carried out above all by the destruction battalions.

Their actions provoked the greatest wave of resistance. The battalions burnt farms, mills, dairies and schools, requisitioned horses and cattle, and arrested and killed people suspected of contacts with the “bandits”, and often their families as well. Estonian research attributes to them the killing of some 1,850 people in 1941, the overwhelming majority civilians and unarmed men; this figure also includes victims from the later weeks of fighting in the north of the country. In the countryside, therefore, there grew not only hostility to Soviet rule but also a need for self-defence: many forest groups were formed in order to protect their own farmsteads from being burnt.

The first weeks of July in the south

The insurgents took power earliest, on 3 July, in the municipalities of Tali, Saarde, Tihemetsa and Laiksaare and in Kilingi-Nõmme in Pärnu County, and on 4 July in further municipalities along the Latvian border. That same day, near Kilingi-Nõmme, a unit led by Major Paul Lilleleht, a veteran of the War of Independence of 1918–1920, fought a battle with a detachment of some 150 men of the NKVD and a destruction battalion. On 5 July the insurgents took power in Mõisaküla and Tõrva, and at Palupera railway station they derailed a train carrying a destruction battalion from the direction of Valga; according to Estonian studies, more than a hundred of its members were killed or wounded. There was also fighting that day near Antsla in Võru County. On 6 July the insurgents took Vastseliina, preventing it from being burnt, and near Laiuse in Tartu County they routed a larger force of destruction battalions. Within a few days the forest groups began to form municipal and county self-defence units, which took the name Omakaitse (“Home Guard”) and saw themselves as heirs of the dissolved Kaitseliit. No one counted the insurgents precisely. The Estonian historian Hannes Walter estimated that 25,000–35,000 people were hiding in the forests, of whom some 12,000, armed to some degree, took part in the fighting; according to Omakaitse documents, the organisation had more than 10,000 members on 15 July.

This fighting took place in the rear of the retreating Red Army. Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s German Army Group North had taken Riga on 1 July and was pressing north-east. Its main forces, the 4th Panzer Group and the 16th Army, were advancing on Pskov and Ostrov towards Leningrad; Estonia was to be taken by General Georg von Küchler’s 18th Army. Facing it was the Soviet 8th Army of Lieutenant General Fyodor Ivanov, part of the North-Western Front, commanded from 4 July by General Pyotr Sobennikov. Cut off from the rest of the front after the fall of Gulbene, the 8th Army withdrew from Latvia northwards in reasonably good order between 4 and 7 July and took up a line running from Pärnu along the northern shore of Lake Võrtsjärv to Tartu, and then along the Emajõgi to Lake Peipus. On a front of some 225 kilometres from the Baltic to Peipus it had only six bled-white rifle divisions and one brigade left, supported by the 22nd NKVD Motorised Division; half of southern Estonia thus lay beyond the reach of its regular units.

On 7 July German infantry divisions crossed the old Estonian–Latvian border and advanced through Ikla on the Gulf of Riga to the outskirts of Pärnu, which they took on 8 or 9 July (the sources differ by a day) almost without a fight. On 8 July the Germans also entered Viljandi. The first thrust was rapid: the 217th Infantry Division set off north from Pärnu and by the evening of 9 July had covered half the distance to Tallinn. Here, however, the Red Army managed a counter-attack. From 9 to 15 July the remnants of the 10th Rifle Division, the fresh 16th Rifle Division, border guards and volunteer workers’ detachments drove the Germans back some 30 kilometres from Märjamaa. The German command, which had initially sent only two divisions (the 61st and 217th) and part of I Corps into Estonia, decided that it had to halt for the time being.

Tartu, 8–12 July

Tartu, Estonia’s second-largest city and the seat of the country’s oldest university, lies on both banks of the Emajõgi. When on 7 and 8 July the retreating Red Army units passed through the city to the north bank of the river, only the NKVD, the militia and the destruction battalions remained in the southern part. More than 220 detainees were still being held in the prison on Jaani Street; most of the more than six hundred prisoners held at the end of June had already been taken east by rail, and arrests were continuing. According to the findings of Estonian historians, a meeting at the county committee of the Communist Party, attended by the heads of the local NKVD, decided to kill the remaining prisoners. During the night of 8–9 July a few members of a destruction battalion and guards shot 193 people, men and women, in the prison courtyard. The bodies were thrown into a well and into pits dug in the yard and covered with earth. Those murdered included workers, craftsmen, farmers, schoolchildren and officials, as well as the writer and teacher-training college director Jüri Parijõgi, the Lutheran clergyman Aksel-Erich Vooremaa and a former member of parliament, August Usai, director of the secondary school in Petseri (Pechory). Several more bodies were found in the garden and cellar of the NKVD headquarters. It was one of the prison massacres committed by the Soviet security apparatus in the summer of 1941 from Lithuania to Ukraine; in Estonia it was the most notorious, because the victims were discovered immediately after the Soviets withdrew. The execution is sometimes placed under 10 July; most sources speak of 8 and 9 July.

On the morning of 9 July the retreating Soviet units blew up both bridges over the Emajõgi in the centre of Tartu: the Freedom Bridge and the Stone Bridge (Kivisild), a three-span granite bridge built in 1779–1784 with money from Catherine II and for a long time the only stone bridge in the Baltic states. Ammunition depots in the suburb of Ropka were also blown up. Local boys and forest brothers carried hundreds of rifles out of the surviving stores. On 10 July armed Estonians rose in the southern part of the city and drove out the remnants of the Soviet units. Groups from the already liberated south, from Otepää and Elva, came to their aid; on 11 July Captain Karl Talpak’s company arrived, and Major Friedrich Kurg, a former cavalry officer of the Estonian army, became city commandant. That same day an Estonian city administration began to function. Four Omakaitse companies were formed from the men who had taken part in the fighting, and they beat off Soviet attempts to cross the river. The first German reconnaissance units appeared in Tartu on 10 and 11 July, and on 12 July – the day usually given as the Germans’ arrival on the new front line – larger German forces occupied the southern part of the city and took over the riverside sector from the Estonians.

For two weeks Tartu became a frontline city. Soviet artillery on the north bank shelled the southern districts, and the fires of 12 and 13 July destroyed, among other buildings, the headquarters of the Kaitseliit and the buildings of the university’s veterinary and agricultural faculties, together with part of its libraries; a considerable part of the housing was also destroyed. The last Red Army units did not leave the northern part of Tartu until 25 July, when the resumed German offensive outflanked the Emajõgi line.

The front on the Emajõgi

After reaching the Pärnu–Võrtsjärv–Emajõgi line, the Germans halted for almost two weeks. Army Group North’s main effort was directed east of Lake Peipus, towards Luga and Leningrad, and the 18th Army was waiting for reinforcements. On the Emajõgi front, from Võrtsjärv to Peipus, Omakaitse units stood alongside the Germans and, according to Estonian accounts, were still beating off Soviet attempts to cross on 15 July. In the west, in mid-July, the front line ran only a few kilometres, or a dozen or so, from Pärnu, which Soviet aircraft from the islands bombed from the end of July. On the Soviet side the defence was directed from 10 July by the command of Marshal Kliment Voroshilov’s North-Western Direction, and on 14 July the 8th Army was placed under the Northern Front. Meanwhile the Germans brought three more divisions and the headquarters of XLII Corps into Estonia.

Behind the Soviet front, in northern Estonia, the Summer War went on. During the night of around 10 July, 42 men of the “Erna” reconnaissance group landed on the north coast from Finland: Estonians who had fled to Finland after 1940 and whom Finnish intelligence, with the participation of the German Abwehr, had trained to operate behind the front line; formally the group was a sub-unit of the Finnish army, Finland having entered the war on 25 June. It was led by Colonel Henn-Ants Kurg, a former Estonian military attaché in France. The group hid in the Kautla marshes, some 60 kilometres south-east of Tallinn, where many people fleeing mobilisation and repression had also taken refuge. From 24 July destruction battalions combed the area, burning farms and killing their inhabitants; they murdered more than twenty people in the vicinity, many of them after torture. On 31 July and 1 August “Erna” and the forest brothers fought a battle with them that allowed the civilians in hiding to slip out of the encirclement.

On 22 July the 18th Army resumed its offensive at the junction of two Soviet corps between Türi and Põltsamaa, splitting the 8th Army. Between 22 and 25 July the Germans and the Omakaitse took Jõgeva, Mustvee and the northern part of Tartu; retreating soldiers and destruction battalions burnt Mustvee. At the beginning of August the Germans reached the Gulf of Finland near Kunda, cutting Tallinn off from the rest of the front; on 17 August they took Narva, and on 28 August Tallinn, from which the Baltic Fleet fought its way through to Kronstadt, losing dozens of warships and merchant vessels to mines (the evacuation of Tallinn). The fighting for the West Estonian islands lasted until 21 October, when Hiiumaa fell. In August, before the fall of Tallinn, destruction battalions murdered the inhabitants of the village of Viru-Kabala, among them a two-year-old child and a six-day-old baby.

The toll and the other side of the Summer War

The figures for the Summer War must be given with caution. The Estonian historian and later prime minister Mart Laar wrote that the forest brothers killed some 4,800 Soviet soldiers and officials and took 14,000 prisoner; these figures cannot be verified in the documents, and many researchers consider them inflated. What is certain is that the insurgents freed a considerable part of southern Estonia from Soviet rule before the Germans arrived, and saved many villages and small towns from being burnt. According to Estonian tallies, more than three thousand farms and some 13,500 buildings were burnt down in the war.

The Estonians, who greeted the Germans as liberators, hoped for the restoration of their state. The last constitutional prime minister, Jüri Uluots, tried to persuade the Germans to restore Estonian authorities, and in the liberated areas the Forest Brothers set up local governments in accordance with the pre-war laws. The Germans had no such intention. The Omakaitse units were subordinated to the local Wehrmacht commandants (in Tartu on 11 July); on 29 July the command of Army Group North ordered them to be disbanded, and from 2 August they were re-formed as an auxiliary formation under German supervision. Estonian flags were replaced with German ones.

The Summer War also had a dark side, the memory of which was long suppressed in Estonia. From the first days the Omakaitse and the Estonian political police arrested thousands of people suspected of collaborating with the Soviet authorities, members of the Communist Party and of the destruction battalions, and often their relatives too. In Tartu a camp for detainees was set up on the orders of Major Kurg as commandant, in which prisoners were shot over the following months. Behind the German troops came Martin Sandberger’s Sonderkommando 1a of Franz Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe A, which, with the participation of the Estonian police and the Omakaitse, began murdering Jews. Of some 4,500 Estonian Jews, roughly three-quarters managed to flee or were evacuated into the interior of the USSR. The rest – 929 people according to the most recent calculations (German reports gave 921 and 963) – were murdered by the beginning of 1942. The Holocaust in Estonia struck a smaller community than in Latvia and Lithuania, where the June Uprising had also opened the way to pogroms, but it was just as total. According to the findings of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, between 1941 and 1944 the occupation authorities and their Estonian auxiliaries also killed some 6,000 ethnic Estonians and 1,000 Russians, most often as real or alleged communists.

Place in the war

The Summer War showed how profoundly a year of Soviet rule, ending in deportations, had changed the mood of a country that in 1939 had wanted nothing but neutrality. For tens of thousands of Estonians Germany was the lesser evil, and its arrival a liberation. It soon became clear that the Germans would not restore independence: Estonia became a General District of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, with a puppet “Land Self-Administration”, and German plans envisaged its gradual Germanisation. From the Omakaitse and from volunteers came the Estonian police battalions, which in the following years fought Soviet partisans and took part in atrocities, and later the Waffen-SS legion and division, into which men were also conscripted in 1943–1944. Thousands of Estonians fled to Finland and fought in its army. Conversely, of the more than 30,000 men mobilised into the Red Army in 1941, those who survived the labour battalions largely ended up in the Estonian Rifle Corps, which returned to the country with the Soviet front in 1944. Estonians thus fought on both sides.

When the Red Army reoccupied Estonia in September 1944, many former participants in the Summer War went back to the forests. The armed underground of the Forest Brothers fought Soviet rule until the early 1950s, and individual partisans remained in hiding even longer. The Summer War itself, portrayed in Soviet historiography solely as the work of “bourgeois nationalists” and collaborators, became after 1991 an important part of Estonian memory, alongside the June deportations and the massacre in the Tartu prison, whose victims are commemorated by a monument in the Pauluse cemetery.