The withdrawal to the Tannenberg Line

In the second half of July 1944 the German command on the northern flank of the Eastern Front faced a decision that Adolf Hitler had been refusing for months. Since February the troops defending the isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Peipus had held on along the Narva river, in the ruins of the town and in a bridgehead at Ivangorod. After the destruction of Army Group Centre in Belarus, however, there were no longer enough men to man this long, curving line. The commander of Army Group North, Colonel General Johannes Frießner, had already ordered a shorter position to be prepared a dozen or so kilometres to the west – the Tannenberg Line in the Sinimäed hills. Around 22 July Hitler agreed that Army Detachment Narwa could fall back to it. The withdrawal began a few days later, already under fire from a Soviet offensive.

Popular chronologies record two events connected with this decision. Under 12 July: Hitler rejects a proposal by Walter Model to withdraw the German forces from Estonia and northern Latvia behind the Daugava (Western Dvina). Under 22 July: Hitler agrees to a withdrawal from the Narva to the Tannenberg Line in the Sinimäed hills, about 20 kilometres west of the town. Both entries need qualifying.

The Narva front in the summer of 1944

From 2 February 1944, when troops of the Leningrad Front crossed the river and seized the first bridgeheads, the Narva front was Army Group North’s most important sector. In winter and spring the Soviet armies tried several times to break through – in the February offensive and in the March attacks, preceded by the destruction of Narva by Soviet aircraft – but failed to cut the road to Tallinn. At the end of April the fighting died down and relative calm settled over the isthmus.

The front rested on three elements. On the eastern bank of the river the Germans held a bridgehead at Ivangorod covering the ruins of Narva. North of the town, along the river to the sea, ran the positions of General Felix Steiner’s III SS Panzer Corps. South of the town, in the marshes near Krivasoo and Auvere, the Russians held a large bridgehead on the western bank, which the defenders encircled in a semicircle. A front of this shape swallowed many troops: every division withdrawn from the isthmus weakened it dangerously.

Army Detachment Narwa (Armeeabteilung Narwa) was an exceptionally diverse force. The core of the III SS Panzer Corps consisted of the 11th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, in which Danes of the Danmark regiment and Norwegians of the Norge regiment, among others, served, and the 4th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Brigade Nederland with the Dutch regiments General Seyffardt and De Ruyter. At the end of July a battalion of Flemish volunteers from the SS assault brigade Langemarck arrived. An ever larger part of the force was Estonian: the regiments of the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian), formed from the legion and from men called up in the mobilisation announced in February, Estonian border guard regiments and police battalions. Alongside them fought ordinary Wehrmacht infantry divisions, including the 11th and 61st Infantry Divisions; the latter included the 44th Infantry Regiment, made up mainly of soldiers from East Prussia.

These men’s motives varied and should not be lumped together. Volunteers from Western Europe joined the Waffen-SS out of political conviction, anti-communism, a taste for adventure or the pressure of circumstances. Most Estonians were not volunteers: they had been drafted into the army by a call-up announced by the occupiers and backed by Jüri Uluots, Estonia’s last constitutional prime minister. Many of them fought – as Estonian studies put it – not for Germany but against the return of the Soviet rule the country had come to know in 1940–1941. The underground National Committee of the Estonian Republic hoped that when Germany collapsed Estonia would have an army of its own; in June it prepared a declaration on the continuity of the state.

The consequences of Operation Bagration

Change came with Operation Bagration. From 22 June four Soviet fronts were smashing Army Group Centre, and in the first days of July Soviet troops pushed west of Minsk and drove towards Wilno, Daugavpils and Kaunas. The southern flank of Army Group North was left hanging in the air: a gap opened between it and the remnants of Army Group Centre through which the Red Army could reach the Baltic and cut off all the German forces in Estonia and Latvia. At the same time the Leningrad Front had concluded its offensive against the Finns on the Karelian Isthmus and could shift its freed armies to Narva.

To patch the front in Latvia and Lithuania, Army Group North had to give up divisions, including some from Narva. Its commander, Colonel General Georg Lindemann, who had advocated shortening the front, was dismissed on 4 July. His place was taken by Frießner, until then commander of Army Detachment Narwa, and on 3 July the latter command passed to General of Infantry Anton Grasser. Steiner’s III SS Panzer Corps stayed in its positions, and it was to bear the main burden of the July fighting.

The proposal to withdraw behind the Daugava (12 July)

In the High Command of the Army (OKH) the conviction was growing that holding Estonia while the central front collapsed risked disaster. A withdrawal of Army Detachment Narwa and the Eighteenth Army to the Riga–Daugavpils line – in practice behind the Daugava, several hundred kilometres south of Narva – was under consideration. A shorter front would free divisions for the threatened centre. On 12 July Frießner put this plan to Hitler. According to studies based on German documents, the answer was: hold the Narva line at all costs.

The proposal is often attributed to Walter Model. The available studies, however, connect it with the command of Army Group North and with Frießner. Model commanded Army Group North only from January to the end of March 1944 – it was he who then conducted the retreat from Leningrad to the Panther Line on the Narva – and in July he was at the head of Army Groups Centre and North Ukraine. In that sense he was one of the commanders whose front would have been helped by a shorter line in the north, but he was not the author of the July request to leave Estonia.

Hitler had his reasons. Estonia screened the Gulf of Finland: as long as the Germans held it, the Baltic Fleet remained bottled up in Kronstadt and Leningrad, and German U-boats could train in the Baltic. Fuel was produced from the oil shale around Kohtla-Järve. Above all, though, Hitler feared that the loss of Estonia would persuade Finland to leave the war. The order was therefore unambiguous: no retreat.

The Tannenberg Line

Frießner, without waiting for permission, had ordered a new position to be built. The Tannenberg Line (Tannenbergstellung) ran through the Sinimäed hills (Estonian for “Blue Hills”) near Vaivara, some 15–16 kilometres west of Narva – the distance of 20 kilometres found in chronologies is a rounding. Three low, wooded heights – from the east, Orphanage Hill (Estonian Lastekodumägi), Grenadier Hill (Grenaderimägi) and Tower Hill (Tornimägi) – stretched inland from the coast. Although they rose only a few dozen metres above their surroundings, they dominated the flat isthmus, the road and the railway to Tallinn. To the south lay marshes and forests, difficult for tanks. The new line was much shorter than the front along the river and did not require the bridgehead at Ivangorod or the ruins of the town to be held.

The name of the position recalled the victory over the Russian army in East Prussia in August 1914. Work proceeded in haste, and in July the fortifications were still incomplete. What mattered most, however, was something else: according to the available studies, the Soviet command did not know the new line existed.

Hitler’s consent

In the middle of July German intelligence reported that Marshal Leonid Govorov’s Leningrad Front was concentrating troops brought from the Finnish border in front of Narva. Army Group North had no reserves left. On 21 July Frießner again asked Hitler’s headquarters for permission to withdraw Army Detachment Narwa to the prepared position. Hitler, still thinking of Finland, ordered that the views of the Finnish High Command be sounded out first. When it turned out that the Finns did not regard pulling the front back a dozen or so kilometres as a problem, he gave his consent.

The exact date of this decision varies in the sources. English-language studies speak of consent given on 21 or 22 July, others of an order transmitted on 23 July. The date of 22 July found in popular chronologies falls within this range. What is certain is that the withdrawal was planned for the night of 25–26 July and that the consent came late: the command was in the middle of a reshuffle, as Hitler had moved Frießner to command Army Group South Ukraine and brought in to replace him Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, known for his ruthlessness towards his own soldiers. The change took place between 23 and 25 July.

The decision was also taken in a peculiar atmosphere. On 20 July a bomb exploded at the Wolf’s Lair headquarters at Gierłoż, planted by Claus von Stauffenberg. After the failed assassination attempt Hitler’s trust in his generals fell still further, and every request to retreat was taken as a sign of defeatism. Against this background, consent to fall back a dozen or so kilometres at Narva was a very limited concession: leaving Estonia was out of the question.

Steiner’s plan

The withdrawal was prepared by the staff of the III SS Panzer Corps. Under Steiner’s plan the Nordland division and the Nederland brigade were to leave the Ivangorod bridgehead first, crossing the bridge over the Narva, passing through the ruins of the town and continuing along the Tallinn road to the Sinimäed hills. Their withdrawal was to be covered on the south, facing the Soviet bridgehead at Krivasoo, by the Estonian SS Grenadier Regiment 45 and the 44th Infantry Regiment, and on the north, along the river, by two Estonian battalions from Regiments 46 and 47. In the new positions the Dutch De Ruyter regiment was to take the northern flank by the sea, the Estonian units the centre and Nordland the south. The bridge over the Narva was to be blown by Nordland’s sappers.

The whole plan depended on surprise: to break contact with the enemy before he realised it and to occupy the hills before Soviet units got there first. One element let it down – time. The Leningrad Front was preparing an attack of its own, which the Germans knew about but whose date they did not know.

What followed

On 24 July, before the withdrawal had begun, the Soviet Eighth Army struck from the Krivasoo bridgehead towards Auvere station, and a day later the Second Shock Army crossed the river north of the town. The withdrawal took place under fire: most units reached the hills, but the Dutch General Seyffardt regiment was surrounded and destroyed. On 26 July Soviet troops entered the abandoned ruins of Narva. From 26 July to 10 August one of the hardest defensive battles on the northern sector of the Eastern Front was fought in the Sinimäed hills. The Tannenberg Line held, and on 10 August Govorov called off the offensive.

Far to the south, however, events took the course the advocates of a withdrawal behind the Daugava had feared. At the end of July a Soviet mechanised corps broke through Lithuania and reached the Gulf of Riga near Tukums, cutting the whole of Army Group North off from the rest of the front for several weeks. The Germans restored contact in August, but only through a narrow corridor along the coast. In September, when three Baltic fronts advanced on Riga and Finland concluded an armistice with the USSR, Hitler at last agreed to evacuate Estonia. On 18 September Army Detachment Narwa abandoned the Tannenberg Line, and on 22 September the Red Army entered Tallinn. The retreat Hitler had refused in July took place two months later in far worse conditions, and Army Group North was finally shut up in Courland, where it held out until the surrender in May 1945.