The surrender of Courland

On 8 May 1945, in accordance with an order from Karl Dönitz, who had become head of state after Hitler’s death, Colonel General Carl Hilpert, commander of Army Group Courland, accepted the ultimatum of Marshal Leonid Govorov and surrendered his troops unconditionally. At the western tip of Latvia, in Courland, some 190,000 soldiers laid down their arms – the remnants of two German armies that since October 1944 had been holding out in a Baltic bridgehead cut off from the Reich.

The Courland Pocket was one of the strangest fronts of the last year of the war. For seven months several dozen German divisions stood on a peninsula from which they could no longer influence the course of the war, while Hitler time and again rejected his own generals’ requests to withdraw them. When the Reich collapsed, these soldiers went almost to a man into Soviet captivity, and for the Latvians who had fought on their side the surrender marked the start of yet another, post-war chapter of the war.

How the pocket was formed

In the summer of 1944, after the destruction of Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration, the German Army Group North found itself in an increasingly precarious position in the Baltic states. In September the three Baltic Fronts and the Leningrad Front launched the Baltic offensive; the Germans abandoned Estonia, and in October Riga. On 5 October Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front struck westwards from the Šiauliai area and on 10 October reached the Baltic near Palanga and Klaipėda (Memel). Army Group North was cut off from East Prussia.

This created the Courland Pocket – an area stretching from around Tukums on the Gulf of Riga to the coast south of Liepāja (Libau). Its defence rested on the 16th and 18th Armies. According to figures cited in the German literature, in the autumn of 1944 there were some 500,000 servicemen of all branches on the peninsula, and besides about 230,000 inhabitants also some 150,000 refugees who were flocking to the ports. Supplies came in almost exclusively by sea, through Liepāja and Ventspils (Windau).

The army group’s commander, Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, tried in October to break through southwards to Klaipėda, but the attack stalled. Hitler forbade any further attempts and ordered “Fortress Courland” to be held at all costs.

Why Hitler would not give up Courland

From the autumn of 1944 the Chief of the Army General Staff, Heinz Guderian, repeatedly demanded that Courland be evacuated by sea. In his view the several dozen divisions shut up on the peninsula were needed to defend East Prussia, Pomerania and the Vistula line. After the January offensive began, his requests became even more insistent; according to his memoirs, they led to violent scenes with Hitler.

Hitler refused. He argued that Courland tied down large Soviet forces and protected the Swedish ore shipments and – above all – the eastern Baltic, which the Kriegsmarine needed as a training area for its new Type XXI submarines. On this last point he was backed by the head of the navy, Karl Dönitz, who hoped the new U-boats would turn the tide of the war in the Atlantic. Hitler also spoke of Courland as a bridgehead for a future offensive. In reality, evacuating several dozen divisions by sea under Soviet air attack would have been difficult, but even its advocates on the staff believed that delay only made the situation worse.

The only concession was the transfer of part of the forces. In January and February 1945 several divisions were shipped to the Reich through Liepāja, among them the 4th Panzer Division, the 32nd Infantry Division, the bled-white 227th, 218th and 389th Infantry Divisions, the Latvian 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS and – as part of III SS Panzer Corps – the Nordland Division, which went on to fight in Pomerania. The rest stayed. On 25 January, when the army groups were renamed, Army Group North became Army Group Courland.

Six battles of Courland

For half a year the Red Army tried to eliminate the pocket. German historiography counts six “Courland battles”, whose dates vary somewhat from source to source. The first began on 16 October 1944, a few days after the Germans lost Riga, and was meant to break through to Liepāja and Ventspils. The second, from 27 October to the end of November, was the heaviest: in the area of Skrunda and Saldus the Soviet armies, supported by hundreds of tanks, achieved penetrations of only a few kilometres. The third, which the Germans called the “Christmas battle”, was fought from 21 to 31 December by the 1st and 2nd Baltic Fronts; near Džūkste Latvians of the Soviet 130th Latvian Rifle Corps came face to face with Latvians of the German 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.

The fourth battle, from 23–24 January to the beginning of February 1945, brought fighting for bridgeheads on the Bārta and Vārtāja rivers south of Liepāja. The fifth, which began in the second half of February, and the sixth, fought from 17–18 March to the end of the month, cost both sides tens of thousands of men, yet the front line moved by only a few kilometres. The Courland terrain – forests, marshes and the autumn and spring thaws – favoured the defence, and the Germans had time to build successive lines of positions.

On the German side commanders changed frequently: in mid-January Schörner left for Army Group Centre and was followed in turn by Colonel Generals Lothar Rendulic and Heinrich von Vietinghoff; in March, after a brief return by Rendulic, command passed to Carl Hilpert, until then commander of the 16th Army. On the Soviet side the 2nd Baltic Front was disbanded on 1 April 1945, and the blockade of Courland was taken over by Marshal Govorov’s Leningrad Front. Moscow no longer regarded Courland as a priority – the war was being decided on the Oder and in Berlin.

According to German figures, on 20 February 1945 the army group still numbered more than 350,000 army troops, plus several tens of thousands of men from the Luftwaffe, the Waffen-SS and the Reich Labour Service. The evacuation of the wounded and of refugees also continued; after the fall of Klaipėda and the cutting off of East Prussia, Courland was one of the last routes to the west.

The last days

The news of Hitler’s suicide did not change Courland’s position. Dönitz and the OKW, seeking to surrender to the Western Allies and to save as many soldiers as possible from Soviet captivity, ordered in the first days of May the evacuation from Courland of everything that could be taken away by sea. After the surrender at Reims was signed on 7 May, it became clear that the guns had to fall silent at 11.01 p.m. Central European Time on 8 May. Until that moment, warships and merchant vessels were to take as many men as possible from Liepāja and Ventspils.

On the morning of 7 May Marshal Govorov sent an ultimatum to the headquarters of Army Group Courland, demanding that it lay down its arms within twenty-four hours. Hilpert, who had received the order to surrender from Dönitz, accepted it on 8 May. In an order to the troops he announced that Govorov had agreed to a ceasefire from 2 p.m. that day; the soldiers were to hoist white flags and wait for Soviet units to arrive. According to Western sources, better terms of surrender were negotiated with the Russians by the army group’s quartermaster, General Otto Rauser; Latvian tradition identifies the place where the act was signed as the former customs house at Ēzere on the Latvian–Lithuanian border, which now houses a memorial room. Hilpert went into captivity with his personal staff and the staffs of the armies.

The last convoys

The evacuation went on in parallel with the surrender talks. On 8 May the last convoys – five of them according to German studies – left Liepāja and Ventspils, made up of destroyers, minesweepers, cutters, landing barges and merchant ships, and covered to the end by the fighters of Jagdgeschwader 54. Each division could assign only a small number of men to the last transport, although some, such as the 14th Panzer Division and the 11th Infantry Division, were taken off almost in their entirety. According to German figures, some 27,000–28,000 soldiers reached the west in this way. Some vessels that left port after the hour of surrender, or were intercepted by Soviet aircraft and warships, were turned back; some small boats reached Sweden during the night of 8–9 May and over the following days, especially Gotland. In January 1946 Sweden handed over to the Soviet Union most of the interned German soldiers (about 2,500) and some 150 Balts, mostly Latvians, which caused a heated controversy in the country.

On 9 May Soviet troops entered Liepāja, and over the following days Ventspils and the other towns of the peninsula. A Soviet commission began interrogating the army group’s staff, while the prisoners were gathered at assembly points and marched eastwards – most of them initially ended up in camps in the Valdai area.

How many went into captivity

The figures given in the literature vary according to the source and the method of counting. The most frequently cited Soviet figures speak of 42 generals, 8,038 officers and 181,032 NCOs and other ranks – some 189,000 men in all – to which some 14,000 Latvians serving in SS formations and as auxiliaries with the Wehrmacht were added. Other tallies put the number of prisoners at about 180,000–200,000. By 23 May the round-up of prisoners in Courland was essentially complete, although individual groups hid in the forests for many weeks more. The commander of VI SS Corps, Walter Krüger, tried to break through to East Prussia with a few hundred men; when his unit was surrounded, he took his own life on 22 May.

The losses of both sides in the fighting for Courland are hard to establish. According to Russian figures, between mid-February and 9 May 1945 alone the Soviet forces lost more than 30,000 killed and some 130,000 wounded there; German losses from October 1944 onwards are estimated at tens of thousands killed.

Carl Hilpert, born in 1888, a veteran of the First World War who in 1942–1944 had commanded corps near Leningrad and Polotsk, went into captivity with his soldiers. He died in Soviet custody in 1947. Tens of thousands of his men returned from the prisoner-of-war camps only at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s; many never returned at all.

Latvians between the fronts

For the Latvians, the end of the fighting in Courland was not the end of the war. Tens of thousands of the country’s inhabitants had fought in German formations – above all in the Latvian Legion, in which some of the soldiers served as conscripts; many of them were driven above all by the experience of the Soviet occupation of 1940–1941 and the deportations of June 1941. After the surrender the Soviet authorities treated them as traitors: they were sent to filtration camps and to the Gulag. Some legionnaires did not lay down their arms and fled to the forests.

There they joined the Forest Brothers – the partisans of the anti-Soviet underground in the Baltic states. In Latvia their struggle lasted until the mid-1950s and was most intense in the first years after the war. The Soviet authorities responded with repression, and in March 1949 carried out a mass deportation of the rural population of the Baltic states (Operation Priboi), which deprived the partisans of their base of support. Latvia remained part of the USSR as the Latvian SSR until 1991.

Place in the history of the war

The surrender of Courland was one of the last acts of Germany’s defeat in Europe. On the same day that Hilpert laid down his arms, the West was celebrating Victory in Europe Day, and in Berlin-Karlshorst preparations were under way for the act of surrender to be signed again in the presence of all the Allies. In some sectors cut off from communications, fighting and exchanges of fire continued on 9 and 10 May, which is why some studies put the end of the fighting in Courland on those days; formally, however, the army group surrendered on 8 May, in accordance with Dönitz’s order.

The Courland Pocket became a symbol of Hitler’s strategy in the last months of the war – holding on to distant “fortresses” and bridgeheads regardless of the cost. Several dozen divisions that were missing on the Vistula, on the Oder and in East Prussia survived in Courland to the end only to go, all together, into Soviet captivity. For Latvia, May 1945 meant not liberation but reincorporation into the USSR, post-war repression and several years of partisan war in the forests.