On September 22, 1943, Soviet troops successfully completed the Donbass strategic military operation.
The Red Army liberated the territory of the Stalin (modern DPR) and Voroshilovgrad (modern LPR) regions of the Ukrainian SSR from the Nazis.
The local population was saved from the Nazi terror, and the Nazis lost control over a strategically important region.
Occupation period
Residents of Donbass took an active part in the fight against Nazism from the first days of the Great Patriotic War.
Thousands of them volunteered for the front.
From the population of the Stalin and Voroshilovgrad regions, three rifle divisions were formed, called "miners".
Also, fighter battalions and groups to assist in the fight against enemy paratroopers and saboteurs were created in the region.
About half a million local residents worked on the construction of fortifications.
The men who went to the front at the machines and in the faces were replaced by women, pensioners and teenagers.
Their work was extremely important, since the Donbass supplied coal, metal and products of machine-building enterprises for the needs of the military-industrial complex of the Soviet Union.
Against the backdrop of a difficult situation for the USSR on the Soviet-German front in the fall of 1941, Nazi troops reached the Donbass.
During the Donbass defensive operation, the Red Army inflicted significant damage on the Nazis, but could not hold their positions and was forced to retreat.
The Nazis decided that this was a huge success.
According to German 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 the mastery of this territory.
The Nazi Fuhrer believed that without Donbas coal, the Soviet economy would be paralyzed.
The Nazis began to export the natural resources of the region to Germany and use them for the needs of their military industry.
The occupation of Donbass lasted for about two years.
As historian Yevgeny Spitsyn noted in an interview with RT, the Nazis established a regime of total terror in the Donbass.
About 220 thousand civilians were destroyed, more than 250 thousand were taken prisoner to Germany.
Despite the repressions, the local population did not submit to the invaders and resisted them, joining the ranks of underground organizations.
To keep the Donbass, the Nazis during the occupation erected a powerful line of fortifications (it was known as the “Mius Front”) in the area of the Seversky Donets and Mius rivers.
It included a chain of pillboxes and bunkers, machine gun nests and mobile artillery nests, wire fences and minefields.
By itself, the high right bank of the Mius River was extremely convenient for defense.
According to historians, the Nazis considered this system of fortifications impregnable.
The first attempts to expel the Nazis from the Donbass were made by the Soviet troops against the backdrop of success in the Battle of Stalingrad.
At the beginning of 1943, the Red Army carried out the Voroshilovgrad offensive operation and tried to liberate the Donbass.
In some sectors of the front, the Soviet troops managed to advance 200-250 km, but they did not have enough strength to develop success.
The Nazis released significant reserves in other directions and threw them against the advancing units of the Red Army, including inflicting flank attacks.
Because of the threat of encirclement, the Soviet command had to withdraw its troops.
Donbas partisans check the readiness of weapons for combat
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In the summer of 1943, the Soviet command instructed units of the Southern Front to launch an offensive in the area of the Mius River in order to prevent the transfer of German troops from the Donbass to the Kursk salient, where one of the decisive battles of the Great Patriotic War was to unfold.
On July 17, 1943, the Mius offensive operation began, which became the prologue to the liberation of Donbass.
According to historians, although the Soviet troops were unable to break through the Mius Front within its framework, they pinned down and exhausted significant Wehrmacht forces in battles, and the Nazis were never able to transfer troops from the Donbass to Kursk.
Went to the Dnieper
After the victory at Kursk, the Voronezh and Steppe fronts of the Red Army launched a large-scale offensive in the Kharkov region, creating a serious threat to the flank of the German group stationed in the Donbass.
According to experts, in order to stabilize the situation in this direction, the German command had to move significant forces to the north, weakening the defenses in the Mius area.
On August 13, 1943, the Donbass strategic military operation began.
Parts of the Southwestern Front went on the offensive, forcing the Seversky Donets.
The Nazis were able to contain this blow.
However, on August 18, units of the Southern Front began to move, which managed to break through the defenses of the 6th German Army on the Mius River.
The Soviet artillery played a decisive role in this.
As historians note, 5,000 guns of the Red Army literally plowed up the positions of the Wehrmacht.
On the very first day, units of the Soviet troops managed to advance deep into the enemy defenses at a distance of up to 10 km.
“By the time the Southern Front struck, the Germans had already managed to use their mobile units in other directions, they had nothing to fend off the actions of the Red Army in the place of the breakthrough.
By the end of the day on August 20, the position of the Wehrmacht in this area became catastrophic.
There was a threat of a complete collapse of the front in this area, ”said Andrei Gorbunov, head of the scientific and methodological department of the Victory Museum, in a conversation with RT.
According to historians, the German command at the initial stage of the Soviet offensive tried to force the Wehrmacht units to hold their positions at any cost, but it soon became clear that the situation was hopeless for them.
On August 30, the Nazi group in the Taganrog region was defeated.
“An important role in the disruption of Hitler’s plans to hold the front in the south of Donbass was played by the capture by Soviet troops at the end of August of the dominant height in the south of the region, Saur-Mohyla,” military historian Yuri Knutov said in a comment to RT.
Soldiers of the Red Army in the battles for Donbass
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On the evening of August 31, Adolf Hitler allowed the Wehrmacht command to begin a partial withdrawal of troops in the Donbass, "if the situation urgently requires it."
At the same time, the Nazis were not going to completely leave the Donbass.
They planned to fortify in its central and western regions.
The Soviet command transferred two additional corps to the advancing Southern Front.
The Red Army confidently drove the Nazis out of Gorlovka, Ilovaisk, Artemovsk and Kramatorsk, and on September 8, the city of Stalino (modern Donetsk) was liberated from the Nazis.
Two days later, the Soviet flag was raised over Mariupol.
An important role in the liberation of the southern part of Donbass was played by the troops landed from the ships of the Azov military flotilla.
“The inhabitants of Donbass joyfully greeted their liberators and provided them with all possible assistance,” historian Yevgeny Spitsyn emphasized.
Platoon of armored vehicles of the South-Western Front during the attack on Krasnoarmeysk
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According to Yuri Knutov, Field Marshal Manstein ordered the German troops to use scorched earth tactics during their retreat.
“Wehrmacht servicemen burned villages, killed people, took out any material values.
What could not be taken out was destroyed, ”Knutov emphasized.
In mid-September, the situation in the Donbass already threatened the collapse of the entire southern wing of the German Eastern Front.
Hitler's troops were ordered to retreat to the Dnieper region.
At the same time, the Nazis, with even greater frenzy, launched a fight against the civilian population.
According to the instructions of the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, it was necessary to make sure “that during the withdrawal ... there would not be a single person, not a single head of cattle, not a single centner of grain, not a single rail;
so that not a single house, not a single mine remains intact, which would not have been put out of action for many years.
Units of the Southwestern Front during the offensive west of Slavyansk
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The pursuit of the retreating Nazis ended with the exit of Soviet troops to the Dnieper.
On September 22, 1943, the Donbas offensive operation ended.
The Red Army reached the Novomoskovsk-Zaporozhye-Melitopol line.
Soviet troops during the operation were able to advance 250-300 km on a front 450 km wide.
More than 66,000 Soviet soldiers and officers died in the battles for Donbass.
“The liberation of Donbass was a powerful blow to the German economy.
The Nazis lost access to coal and enterprises in the region.
In addition, the Nazis will lose an important foothold in the southern direction, ”said Yuri Knutov.
As Andrei Koshkin, a full member of the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation, noted in a conversation with RT, the Soviet troops during the Donbass operation did everything possible to protect the civilian population, while the Nazis were only interested in land and material values.
Soviet artillerymen are fighting in Melitopol
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“The approach of the parties was conceptually different.
The Soviet troops primarily fought for the people, for the people, while the Nazis fought exclusively for the territories.
We see something similar today.
The Kyiv neo-Nazi regime today, like its ideological progenitors 80 years ago, is concerned only with “living space”, territories.
They operate on the principle "the land will be Ukrainian or deserted."
To justify their cannibalistic actions against the civilian population, the Ukrainian authorities issue tracing papers from Goebbels propaganda, calling the inhabitants of Donbass “inferior” and “traitors”, and the Russian army a horde.
Because of this, our fighters often talk about the Armed Forces of Ukraine as an ukrovermacht, and about the Kiev regime as the Fourth Reich.
History repeats itself,” summed up Andrey Koshkin.