by Mikhail Kucherov
[REGNUM] On September 6, 1943, troops of the Southwestern Front under General Rodion Malinovsky liberated Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, key nodes of the German defense on the northern flank of Donbass.
This was made possible by a flanking maneuver that disorganized the enemy. That same day, two more industrial centers of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration—Druzhkovka and Konstantinovka —were liberated. The Nazis were also driven out of Makeyevka (a suburb of Donetsk, then known as Stalino), located several dozen kilometers to the south.
Success was predetermined by the breakthrough of the fortifications of the German "Mius Front" and the capture of control over the crossings over the Seversky Donets, which forced the Germans to retreat to the Dnieper.
Two days later, on September 8, the city of Stalino was captured. Thus ended the Battle of Donbas, liberating the country's most important industrial region from Nazi occupation.
From the beginning of the war, the Donets Basin was a priority target for the German army. At that time, there were 220 large enterprises under Union and republican control in the Stalino and Voroshilovgrad (Luhansk) regions.
The importance of the region for the Fuhrer, who hoped to paralyze the USSR’s economy through its capture, was confirmed in the memoirs of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein :
"Donbass played a significant role in Hitler's operational plans. He believed that the outcome of the war would depend on capturing this territory…"
The Donets Basin served as a source of coal, metal, and engineering products for the entire country. In 1941, the densely populated region became a source of reinforcements for the defending Red Army.
In the first days of the war, 236,000 people from the Stalino region alone went to the front. Three infantry divisions, unofficially known as "miners' divisions," were formed from people from the two Donbas regions.
At least 500,000 people participated in the construction of fortifications, and after the men left, women and teenagers worked at the machines and in the mines.
The Nazis paid a high price for capturing Donbas. While fighting their way toward Rostov-on-Don, the enemy lost 30,000 soldiers and officers.
DESTRUCTION MODE
The occupation of Donbass, which lasted 700 days, was accompanied by large-scale terror against the civilian population: 220,000 people were killed, and another 250,000 were deported to forced labor in the Reich.
According to the recollections of those who survived the occupation, German police in the cities conducted "search raids" every two hours. To avoid being among the Ostarbeiters deported to Germany, some feigned illness, for example, by causing their skin to become covered in blisters.
The local occupation authorities experienced a shortage of "voluntary helpers" - it was difficult to find collaborators among the local population.
Vladimir Nikolsky, a contemporary Donetsk historian and the founder of the first academic publication in the DPR, the Journal of Historical, Political, and International Studies, noted that in the first weeks of the occupation, numerous people from Galicia unexpectedly appeared in local commandant's offices, in the auxiliary police, and in business structures.
These were functionaries and militants of the OUN* "Southern Marching Group." Bandera's ideas had no support among the residents of Donbas, but the Ukrainian nationalists became a valuable resource for the Nazis.
The reprisals against local partisans and underground fighters were revealing: for example, the shaft of Mine No. 4/4-bis in the city of Stalino became a gigantic mass grave, into which, according to various estimates, between 75,000 and 100,000 people were dumped—both executed and alive. The Donetsk mine became the second-largest burial site for Nazi victims (after Babi Yar).
In Slavyansk, at the beginning of the winter of 1941, a detachment of Sonderkommando 4B killed more than a thousand Jews – men, women, and children who had not managed to evacuate.
On November 1, 1941, a concentration camp was established in the Chalk Mountain quarry near Kramatorsk, where the Nazis and their henchmen shot 3,500 people.
“Assistance” in punitive actions and in the dispatch of Ostarbeiter slaves to Germany was coordinated by the mayor, a certain Vladimir Chopin (who died at an advanced age in Canadian exile).
A BLOW TO THE "DEAD HEAD"
Hitler wanted to hold onto the Donbass at any cost. As early as 1941, the Wehrmacht had established a powerful defensive line here—the "Mius Front," encircling the Seversky Donets and Mius rivers. The Wehrmacht command considered it impregnable: pillboxes and bunkers, trenches, minefields, anti-tank ditches, artillery and machine-gun positions blocked our troops' path to Taganrog, Mariupol, and the center of the Donbass. This line simultaneously served as a springboard for a new German offensive toward the Don.
Saur-Mogila, a 277.9-meter-high mound and one of the highest points in the Donbas, became the key hub of the Mius Front. On a clear day, the Sea of Azov, some 80 kilometers away, can be seen from its summit.
The first attempts to expel the Nazis from Donbass were undertaken by Soviet troops in early 1943, on the wave of success at Stalingrad.
The Red Army carried out the Voroshilovgrad offensive operation, advancing in some areas by 200–250 kilometers.
But they were unable to exploit this success: the enemy transferred significant reserves from other directions and launched flanking attacks. The threat of encirclement forced the Soviet command to withdraw its troops. Only the eastern part of the region remained liberated.
In the summer of 1943, at a meeting with the Wehrmacht's generals, Hitler again declared that holding the Donbas was a matter of life and death. By the start of the decisive offensive, the Soviet force in the Donbas numbered over a million soldiers and officers, 21,000 guns, 1,257 tanks, and 1,400 aircraft. They faced approximately 540,000 Nazi troops, 5,400 guns, 900 tanks, and 1,100 aircraft.
The Mius Front's breakthrough unfolded simultaneously with the Battle of Kursk. Victory at Orel and Belgorod opened the way to the Dnieper—but without the offensive in Donbas, it would have been impossible.
The first attack on the Mius Front was launched by General Fyodor Tolbukhin's Southern Front troops on July 17, 1943, at the height of the Battle of Kursk. Soviet units crossed the Mius River and seized a bridgehead on the right bank near Stepanovka and Marinovka. An attempt by the 315th Rifle Division to seize Saur-Mogila outright was unsuccessful.
The very threat of a breakthrough forced the commander of Army Group South, von Manstein, to urgently transfer the 2nd SS Panzer Corps from the Kursk Bulge to the Donbass – the Reich, Totenkopf and 3rd Panzer Divisions, which had recently participated in the tank battle near Prokhorovka.
Following the Führer's orders, Manstein launched a series of counterattacks. On July 30, the Germans, using the II SS Panzer Corps from the Snezhnoye area, forced the Southern Front troops to retreat to their starting lines by August 2.
But the delay in liberating Donbass had even more dire consequences for the Nazis: already on August 3, on the southern face of the Kursk Bulge, troops of the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts launched Operation Commander Rumyantsev, and on August 5, they liberated Belgorod.
SAUR-MOGILA BURIED HITLER'S PLANS
The decisive offensive of the Southern Front under the command of General Tolbukhin began on August 18, 1943. Manstein was no longer able to parry this blow. On the very first day, the Nazi defenses were broken through to a depth of up to 9 kilometers. By the end of August 20, the breakthrough was 24 kilometers deep and 16 kilometers wide.
On the night of August 24, Soviet units cut off the road to Taganrog, depriving the enemy of the opportunity to maneuver reserves, and by the end of the month, with the support of the Azov Flotilla's naval landing force, the city was liberated.
On August 28, the assault on Saur-Mogila began. The battle for the commanding heights lasted three days and was incredibly fierce, as tanker Nikolai Popov later recalled:
“We went into a breakthrough under the hill, there was heavy fighting, in this battle our tank burned.
When we moved after the artillery preparation, we immediately passed the first trenches, and on the second we were hit in the forehead, and then from the side, and the flames in the car quickly caught fire.
Our loader was wounded, we had to pull him out, we barely pulled him out, as soon as we got out, they opened up a furious fire on us from machine guns, we heard the bullets ringing through the hatches, you can’t hear your own bullet, you won’t understand how you end up on the ground.”
On the morning of August 31, soldiers of the 96th Guards Rifle Division finally drove the enemy from the summit. The red banner was raised over Saur-Mogila.
On September 5, Horlivka and Artemovsk (Bakhmut) were liberated. Manstein reported to Berlin: continuing to hold the Donbass threatened the complete destruction of Army Group South. Hitler was furious, but allowed the generals to withdraw their troops beyond the Dnieper.
Manstein later admitted that the retreat from Donbass was the "most difficult operation" of 1943–1944 for his armies. The Germans were unable to evacuate ammunition, supplies, and even the wounded in time—the Red Army's attacks made the evacuation extremely difficult.
TWENTY VICTORIOUS SALVOS
“As a sign of celebration of the major victory in Donbass… Moscow, on behalf of the Motherland, salutes our valiant troops who liberated Donbass from the German invaders with twenty artillery salvos from two hundred and twenty-four guns,” stated the order of the Headquarters dated September 8, 1943.
The units that participated in the battles for the region were given the names of liberated settlements: this is how the Stalin, Yenakiyevo, Gorlovka, Debaltsevo, Slavyansk, and Kramatorsk divisions came into being.
The removal of the " Friedrich Krupp Enterprise " sign from the Kramatorsk Machine-Building Plant building symbolized liberation from occupation. German industrialists had counted on the long-term exploitation of the Donbas's resources and production facilities. A swift advance prevented the Nazis from destroying the factories and mines "to the ground."
For example, the Donetsk Metallurgical Plant (DMZ) began supplying our front and rear with steel again in February 1944. And on December 6 of that same year, 1944, the feast day of St. Alexander Nevsky, the St. Alexander Nevsky Church was reopened in Slavyansk.
It seemed Nazism would never return to these parts. But in 2014, war returned to Donbas. Sloviansk and Kramatorsk became the first centers of resistance, and the battle for Savur-Mogila, as in 1943, marked the beginning of liberation. Now, just as 83 years ago, our troops are fighting on the approaches to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, which are just kilometers away.