The surrender on Bornholm

On the afternoon of 9 May 1945 five Soviet motor torpedo boats carrying a company of infantry entered the harbour of Rønne, the main town of the Danish island of Bornholm. More than 11,000 German soldiers were then stationed on the island, but no one opened fire. A few hours later the German commanders laid down their arms before the Red Army. So ended the war on the last scrap of Denmark still in German hands – and so began an almost year-long Soviet presence on the island, the only Danish territory occupied by Soviet troops after the war. The surrender had been preceded by two days of Soviet air raids on the towns of Rønne and Nexø, in which ten inhabitants were killed and several thousand were left homeless.

For several days the German command on the island had done everything it could to surrender not to the Russians but to the British.

An island on the escape route

Bornholm lies in the Baltic some 150 kilometres east of Copenhagen, closer to the coasts of Sweden and Pomerania than to the rest of Denmark. The Germans occupied it the day after they entered Denmark on 9 April 1940. For most of the war the occupation here was quiet: a small garrison guarded the coast, radar and listening stations were in operation, and in August 1942 a prototype V-1 flying bomb launched from Peenemünde crashed in a field on the island. Photographs and a sketch of the wreckage made by a Danish naval officer reached British intelligence as one of the first signs of the German rocket weapons.

In 1945 the island became an important point on the escape route across the Baltic. When the Red Army reached the sea in Pomerania and East Prussia, Courland and the mouth of the Vistula were cut off, the German navy shipped soldiers, wounded and hundreds of thousands of refugees out of them by sea. Some of the ships called at Bornholm, where thousands of people stayed on. In the spring of 1945 (in March or April, according to different sources) command of the island was taken over by a naval officer, Captain (Kapitän zur See) Gerhard von Kamptz. In the first days of May General of Artillery Rolf Wuthmann arrived on the island from East Prussia with the remnants of his corps. According to Russian studies, it was he who in fact directed the defence from 6 May, and the garrison grew to more than 12,000 men. They included volunteers from the Baltic states, among them soldiers of the Latvian SS legion.

Refusal

On 4 May, at Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s headquarters on Lüneburg Heath, the Germans signed the surrender of their forces in north-western Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. It came into force on the morning of 5 May. Bornholm formally belonged to Denmark, so the surrender covered it too, but in practice there were no British forces on the island to accept it. The nearest troops were the Red Army, in Pomerania, on the other side of a narrow strait.

Von Kamptz had orders to surrender only to the Western Allies. On 6 May he received a demand to surrender from the Soviet command and rejected it. The Germans sent several telegrams to Copenhagen asking for even a single British soldier to be sent to the island so that the garrison could surrender to him. The British sent no one. The island lay far to the east, within reach of the Red Army, and the Allied command had no intention of entering into a dispute with the USSR over who was to accept the surrender of its garrison. Meanwhile ships carrying refugees and soldiers anxious to avoid Soviet captivity continued to pass westwards through Bornholm’s ports. According to German biographical studies, von Kamptz ordered Soviet reconnaissance aircraft to be fired on as late as 7 May, and the Soviet side accused the garrison of covering the evacuation to the west in breach of the surrender of 4 May.

The raids on Rønne and Nexø

As early as the second half of April the Soviet command had been considering landings on Bornholm and Rügen to cut the German evacuation across the Baltic. From 5 May the aircraft of Admiral Vladimir Tributs’s Baltic Fleet attacked shipping around the island. When the garrison did not lay down its arms, Soviet ground-attack aircraft and bombers struck the ports and towns of Rønne and Nexø several times on 7 and 8 May. Their targets were ships and harbour installations, but bombs also fell on houses. According to Danish findings, more than 800 buildings were destroyed in Rønne and Nexø and some 3,000 damaged. About 3,000 inhabitants of Rønne were left homeless, and in Nexø most of the houses were damaged.

There could have been far more casualties. The inhabitants had been warned of the raids, and most of them managed to flee the towns to shelters and to the countryside. Ten Danes were killed and several dozen wounded. German soldiers and refugees were also killed. Danish radio did not report the bombing at the time, so as not to spoil the joy of liberation in the rest of the country, which had been celebrating the end of the occupation since 5 May. For the people of Bornholm, then, the war ended later and in a far harsher way than for the rest of Denmark.

The landing of 9 May

Germany’s final surrender, signed at Karlshorst on 8 May, came into force at 11.01 p.m. Central European Time. According to Russian studies, the Soviet command immediately afterwards broadcast a demand in plain language to the Bornholm garrison to comply with it. When no reply came and ships with soldiers were still leaving the island, it was decided to put a landing party ashore.

On the morning of 9 May six motor torpedo boats with an infantry company of 108 men sailed from Kołobrzeg (Kolberg). They were commanded by the chief of staff of the naval base there, Captain 2nd Rank D. S. Shavtsov. On the way the boats stopped a German barge and several motor boats carrying soldiers. In the afternoon five of the boats entered Rønne. According to Soviet accounts, a German officer demanded on behalf of General Wuthmann that the Russians leave the island, and Shavtsov threatened an air raid in reply. While the Germans were conferring, the Soviet soldiers, with the help of local people, seized the harbour and the telegraph office. A few hours later Wuthmann, his chief of staff and the naval commandant von Kamptz surrendered. They were taken to Kołobrzeg, where they signed the order for the garrison to surrender.

Fighting in the waters around the island went on for another dozen or so hours. Soviet aircraft attacked convoys trying to sail away westwards, and on the evening of 9 May Soviet torpedo boats clashed with a German convoy, which managed to get away to Denmark. During the night of 9–10 May the Russians stopped a tug towing a barge with several hundred soldiers that was trying to reach Sweden. On 10 and 11 May the whole of Major General Fyodor Korotkov’s 132nd Rifle Corps, from Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front, some 7,700 men strong, arrived on the island. The garrison was disarmed. According to Russian figures, 11,138 German soldiers were taken prisoner – all of them were shipped to the USSR – and some 4,500 German civilians were also removed. Danish and German sources usually speak of about 12,000 prisoners. Von Kamptz did not return from Soviet captivity until early 1954.

Thousands of refugees from East Prussia, Pomerania and the Baltic states, who had sought shelter there on their way west in the last weeks of the war, also remained on the island. Estimates of their number vary from some ten or fifteen thousand to more than twenty thousand. Those who had managed to sail to Denmark or Sweden before 9 May escaped Soviet captivity. The rest were removed from the island by the Soviet authorities over the following weeks. The fate of the soldiers from the Baltic states who had made their way across the Baltic to Sweden and in January 1946 were handed over by Sweden to the USSR became one of the most painful issues of post-war Scandinavia.

The Soviet occupation

Denmark had been liberated by the British, and from the very first days its government feared that the USSR would want to stay on Bornholm for good. The island lay at the exit from the Baltic and controlled the sea route to the Danish Straits, and Moscow had for centuries been interested in free passage through them. On 15 May the Soviet government announced that it had occupied the island temporarily and would hand it back to Denmark once the military questions in Germany had been settled. On the same day a Danish prefect took office on Bornholm and the administration returned to Danish hands, but several thousand Soviet soldiers (from about 7,700 to 10,000, according to different sources) were stationed on the island, and its ports served the ships of the Baltic Fleet that were clearing the Baltic of mines.

Relations between the soldiers and the inhabitants were generally correct, although there were thefts and incidents. Sweden helped with the rebuilding of Rønne and Nexø, giving the island several hundred wooden houses that still stand today. On 5 March 1946 Moscow informed Copenhagen that it was ready to withdraw its troops if Denmark garrisoned the island itself. On 5 April 1946 the last Soviet soldiers left Bornholm. Several dozen of them had died during their stay on the island, mainly of disease. They were buried in the cemetery at Allinge.

Place in the history of the war

The surrender on Bornholm was among the last acts of the war in Europe. In those same days, just before and just after Germany’s final surrender, German forces cut off in remote corners of Europe were laying down their arms – in Courland, in the Channel Islands, on Crete and on the islands of the Aegean. Bornholm also showed how hard the Germans tried in the last days of the war to surrender to the Western Allies rather than to the Red Army, and how little the British command could or would do to make that possible.

The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Bornholm in 1946 was an exception. The USSR rarely left territory that the Red Army had occupied. Some historians link the decision to a wish to keep Denmark out of Western military alliances and to the West’s acceptance of a Soviet sphere of influence in the Baltic states. When Denmark joined NATO in 1949, however, the government in Copenhagen, although it had never formally undertaken to do so, did not allow troops of other alliance members onto Bornholm throughout the Cold War. The island became an eastward-thrust listening post from which the Danes watched East Germany, Poland and the USSR. On 5 March 1953, the day Joseph Stalin died, the Polish pilot Franciszek Jarecki, defecting to the West, landed there in a MiG-15 fighter.