Between Giants (52 page)

Soviet infantry advance in the face of determined resistance in Latvia, 1944.

Whilst many were coerced into serving in the foreign divisions of the SS, others volunteered, often in response to recruitment campaigns in occupied territories from France in the west to Estonia in the east.

4th Panzer Division was assembling in the area immediately north of Priekule, in preparation for a major attack to restore contact between Army Group North and the rest of the Wehrmacht. The new assault would be close to the coast; this would allow German naval units to offer support, and was also the shortest possible path for such an assault. The operation, codenamed
Geier
(‘Vulture’), would involve all three of the panzer divisions trapped in Courland, with 4th Panzer Division close to the coast, 14th Panzer Division operating alongside, and 12th Panzer Division as a second echelon. With support from 126th, 87th and 11th Infantry Divisions, the panzer divisions would first thrust to Klaipėda, and from there would push on to East Prussia. But even as detailed planning for the operation began, Chistiakov continued to put pressure on the German lines. On 15 October, in the sector held by VI SS Corps, 19th SS Waffen-Grenadier Division (1st Latvian) experienced a heavy artillery bombardment, followed by a determined thrust to the north of Dobele. The following day, after another heavy artillery preparation, an assault was made in III SS Panzer Corps’ area against the segment of front held by
Nordland
and 30th Infantry Division, to the east of Priekule. Immediately, a deep penetration was achieved, forcing Schörner to commit 4th Panzer Division to restore the situation. Early on 17 October, the division’s artillery fired in support of
Nordland
and 30th Infantry Division, but the division diary suggests that III SS Panzer Corps had restored the situation sufficiently to require minimal further assistance.
³⁰
Fighting continued for several days, with no significant ground being gained by either side. Over a week of heavy fighting resulted in the Red Army advancing no more than a mile, on a front of about six miles, for disproportionately heavy losses.

The tardy advance of 5th Guards Tank Army was one of the few areas of concern for the Red Army High Command. Vasily Timofeevich Volskii, who had taken command of the army after Rotmistrov was demoted earlier in the year, was suffering from tuberculosis, and although he remained with his army through the winter, he was hospitalised in early 1945. He died the following year; it is not clear how much his illness affected his ability to command his formations.

To the rear of the front line, the Soviets set about restoring their control of the Baltic States. Bagramian regarded the moment as a happy one:

As has been discussed, partisan activities in the three Baltic States were actually fairly minimal, and in the main were carried out by Russians rather than Lithuanians, Latvians or Estonians. Imants Sudmalis had been an active member of the Latvian Communist Party before the war and was arrested several times during the 1930s; he fled his homeland in 1941, fighting with Belarusian partisans before his clandestine return to Latvia in 1942. He was captured in early 1944, and executed in May; although Soviet sources credit him with organising substantial partisan forces, there is little objective evidence for the efficacy of these units. Marytė Melnikaitė was only 17 when the Red Army first occupied Latvia, but she too left her homeland in 1941, returning in 1943; she was almost immediately wounded and captured during an encounter with German anti-partisan units, and subsequently executed. Although Aartee was an Estonian who fought as a partisan against the Germans, this was mainly to the east of the Estonian–Soviet frontier.

For many – perhaps most – Baltic citizens, reality was somewhat different from Bagramian’s view. An early consequence of the arrival of the Red Army in the Baltic States was a wave of summary executions. In Lithuania, between 400 and 700 people were summarily shot in Kaunas, Zarasai and Šiauliai without any legal process.
³²
Another early impact of Soviet rule that was felt in all three Baltic States was forcible mobilisation of manpower for the Red Army. Many of these recruits, particularly those who had deserted from the various SS or police formations raised by the Germans, were deployed in the first waves of attacks without weapons, in order to draw German fire.
³³
Estonia saw a call-up of all men aged between 18 and 33 in August 1944, even while fighting continued on Estonian territory. Partly due to the ongoing combat, but more due to the unwillingness of Estonians to answer the call-up, it was repeated in March 1945. As with forcible recruits from Latvia and Lithuania, those who claimed to have had no involvement with the German occupiers were sent to serve in the ongoing war against German forces in Courland, while those who had performed ‘non-armed’ service for the Germans were instead used as forced labour. Whilst this was onerous, it was less likely to result in death, resulting in more and more men claiming ‘non-armed’ service for the German authorities. At the end of their forced labour, this declaration came back to haunt some of them, when they were labelled as war criminals and dispatched to Siberia.

Many Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians had their first experiences of the return of Soviet rule at the hands of the Red Army. As was the case in the eastern provinces of Germany, rapes were frequent and widespread, especially after the better trained and better disciplined first wave of Soviet troops had moved on. It was commonplace for Soviet soldiers to treat all Baltic citizens as ‘fascists’, which served to accentuate a deep-seated Russian belief in their superiority over those who were from the Baltic States. This attitude even extended to children, who were labelled as ‘fascist children’ and treated badly as a result.
³⁴

The assertion of Soviet control over every aspect of the Baltic States commenced almost as soon as the territory had been cleared by the Red Army. In the eastern parts of Latvia and Lithuania, the resumption of Soviet policies from 1940 was already underway by the time that Riga was abandoned by the Wehrmacht. Soviet organisations and administrative structures were once more imposed, and were dominated by non-Baltic citizens; even by the end of 1945, ethnic Latvians made up only 35 per cent of the Latvian Communist Party.
³⁵
Nevertheless, assertion of Soviet control was often hampered by a shortage of suitable personnel to take policies forward. In Tallinn, a visiting group of western journalists found little enthusiasm for Soviet rule in late 1944:

The Estonians, it soon became evident, despised and feared the Russians … I don’t think a single one of us spoke to a single person during the whole trip who had a good word to say for the Russian re-occupation – except, of course, the spokesmen produced by the Russians.
³⁶

Deportations of elements of the population began almost immediately, and continued for eight years. By 1953, Latvia alone had lost 100,000 citizens as a result of deportations, perhaps 10 per cent of the pre-war Latvian population. To this figure should be added some 330,000 deportees from Lithuania, and about 100,000 from Estonia. In addition to those regarded as having collaborated with German rule – and this included even low-ranking officials in most parts of the civilian administration – the same categories that had been targeted in the pre-war deportations were once more selected. Those who had in some way collaborated with the Germans were labelled ‘war criminals’, while those who were thought to be Baltic nationalists were regarded as ‘enemies of the people’. Inevitably, as will be seen later, the harshness of Soviet rule and the widespread availability of weapons resulted in a burgeoning resistance movement, and the families of those suspected of being involved in the armed resistance were also likely to be deported.
³⁷

There were three main motives for the deportations. Firstly, the policy allowed for the population to be ‘cleansed’ of those regarded as hostile to Soviet rule. Secondly, the previous Soviet occupation had shown how the largely rural populations of the three countries were opposed to collectivisation of land, and the deportations were designed to reduce or eliminate this resistance. Thirdly, the threat of deportation was regarded as a major weapon in the suppression of the anti-Soviet armed resistance; not only were the families of suspected resistance fighters deported, but also the widespread depopulation of the rural landscape – similar to the German anti-partisan policy of creating ‘dead zones’ – would deprive resistance fighters of support and supplies.

Even Latvian communists adopted a pro-Russian (and implicitly anti-Latvian) attitude, perhaps out of a sense of self-preservation. Many sought to portray ethnic Russians as the saviours of the Latvian nation. Whilst some Latvian communists were opposed to Stalin’s clear intention to ‘Russify’ Latvia, it was over a decade before any felt bold enough to articulate nationalistic views without fear of immediately being branded ‘anti-communist’.

With the isolation of Army Group North, almost all of the Baltic States were back in Soviet hands, with only Courland and the city of Klaipėda still being held by the Germans. The details of the fighting for Klaipėda are beyond the scope of this account. The three German divisions within the city when it was surrounded – 58th Infantry Division, 7th Panzer Division and
Grossdeutschland
– first came under serious attack on 10 October. Despite extensive artillery and aerial bombardment, the attacks, which continued for three days, were beaten off with heavy losses; the support of German warships off the coast proved to be invaluable, with their ability to respond rapidly and accurately with massive firepower proving decisive at key points in the battle.
³⁸
After a pause of only two days, Bagramian tried again, and though the German 58th Infantry Division was forced back on the northern side of the city, the defensive line continued to hold. A final attack was made on 23 October, and this too failed to make significant headway. Thereafter, both sides slowly withdrew forces from the area, and the city was finally evacuated by the Wehrmacht in January 1945, as Soviet forces pressed into East Prussia.

As will be seen, Courland was the scene of bitter fighting for what remained of the war, every bit as intense and costly as the battles that had brought the Red Army to the Baltic coast. The status of the German forces trapped in Courland, though, was – and remains – controversial. Stalin dismissed the ‘bridgehead’ as little more than an open-air prison compound, where the remnants of nearly 30 German divisions were confined in an increasingly irrelevant part of Europe, while the main battlefront moved west. This view, which has been largely the opinion of Soviet and Russian writers in the post-war era, is in contrast to the German view, which was that the divisions of Army Group Courland, as it became known, played a vital role in tying down significant Soviet forces, which would otherwise have accelerated the collapse of the Eastern Front. The determined attempts by the Red Army to reduce Army Group Courland suggest that the Soviet leadership was not content merely with trapping and containing the German divisions, but to an extent, the German viewpoint may have been fuelled by the desire of the trapped German soldiers to believe that their continuing struggle was worthwhile. Hans Christern, commander of 4th Panzer Division’s panzer regiment, wrote after the war: