Siege of Odessa, 1941: 73 days on the Black Sea

For ten weeks in 1941 a city on the Black Sea held out behind its trenches while the front of the war moved on past it to the east. Odessa did not fall to assault. It was given up, its garrison taken off by sea, and its capture opened one of the worst massacres of the Holocaust.²

Background: the port and the war

Odessa was a port city from its beginning: a new fortress went up on the site in 1792 and 1793, and a naval base and a commercial quay followed in 1794. By the early twentieth century its Jewish community was one of the largest and most vibrant in eastern Europe, and the city was a renowned center of Jewish culture, of Hebrew literature and of the Zionist movement.³

On 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies, Romania among them, invaded the Soviet Union. Romanian and German troops quickly retook Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the provinces Romania had been forced to cede a year earlier. The Romanian leader, General Ion Antonescu, then agreed to carry the war beyond the Dniester and to take over the land between the Dniester and the Southern Bug, the region that became the Romanian province of Transnistria.⁴

Armies and commanders

The attack on Odessa fell to the Romanian 4th Army, with German help in the air and on the ground. Over the weeks Romania fed one infantry division after another into the siege lines, as the day-by-day account of Victor Nitu, written for WorldWar2.ro from Romanian records, and the Ukrainian encyclopedia both show.⁵

The defenders were the Soviet Coastal Army, with the 25th and 95th Rifle Divisions among its formations, the troops of the Odessa naval base, marines and local volunteers. Both the Ukrainian encyclopedia and Nitu put the defenders at about 34,500 men when the siege began. Behind them stood the Black Sea Fleet, whose command of the sea decided the shape of the siege.⁶

The siege in phases

August: the ring closes. In early August the 4th Army crossed the Dniester and pushed east. By 13 August Odessa was cut off from the land, both sources agree, but it could never be fully surrounded, because the Black Sea Fleet held the sea. Ships brought in men and supplies and carried out the wounded and civilians. The city was ringed by lines of fortifications, and the Romanians had to fight their way forward from one line to the next.⁷

Late August and September: the costly advance. Through the second half of August and into September the Romanian corps forced the outer defenses back in costly frontal attacks, and the defenders answered again and again with counterattacks. Neither side could break the other, and the siege settled into a grinding fight for each line of trenches.⁸

Reinforcement by sea. In mid-September the 157th Rifle Division came in by sea. The two sources count it differently: 12,600 fresh troops in Nitu's figures, 19,500 men with 102 guns and 40 tanks, including attached units, in the Ukrainian encyclopedia's.⁹

Turning point: the Grigorievka landing

On the night of 21 to 22 September the defenders struck back in the eastern sector. Naval infantry landed from the sea behind the Romanian lines at Grigorievka while the 157th Division attacked from the front, with the guns of the fleet and aircraft in support. The Romanian line in the sector gave way before reserves stopped the advance. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine singles out the operation for its coordination of sea and air landings, ground attack and naval fire.¹⁰

The evacuation

The siege was decided elsewhere. With the Soviet Southern Front in crisis and German troops breaking into the Crimea, the Soviet high command ordered Odessa evacuated, both sources agree. The last troops left their positions in secret in mid-October and boarded ship. Both sources put the soldiers taken off at the end at 86,000; the Ukrainian encyclopedia adds 15,000 civilians, while Nitu writes that about 350,000 soldiers and civilians were evacuated from the city in all.¹¹

The Romanians noticed heavier naval activity from 14 October. On the morning of 16 October their forward patrols entered Odessa, and by evening the city was theirs.¹² › Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Aftermath

The cost was lopsided. Both the Ukrainian encyclopedia and Nitu give the Soviet losses as 41,268, of whom 16,578 were dead and missing and 24,690 wounded, and both put the Romanian 4th Army's losses at more than 90,000. Nitu's exact figure is 92,545: 17,729 dead, 63,345 wounded and 11,471 missing.¹³

Romania made Odessa the capital of its Transnistria Governorate. On 22 October an explosion destroyed the Romanian military headquarters in the city. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts the dead at more than 60, including the Romanian general in command of the city, and says it was not clear who was responsible; Yad Vashem speaks of hundreds of Romanian soldiers killed and attributes the blast to Soviet sappers. The Romanian authorities blamed the Jews. Many of the city's Jews had fled east before the siege closed, Yad Vashem estimates about half, but tens of thousands remained, and the museum puts those trapped at between 70,000 and 120,000.¹⁴

Under orders that both institutions trace to Antonescu, the Romanian authorities answered with a massacre and then with mass deportations. Romanian troops hanged and shot Jews in the city and drove thousands to the village of Dalnyk on its outskirts, where they were murdered. The museum puts those killed in Odessa and its suburbs in the days after the explosion at 25,000 to 30,000; Yad Vashem gives at least 25,000. Tens of thousands more were deported to camps and villages in Transnistria, where most of them died.¹⁵

The survivors of the massacre were crowded into a ghetto in the Slobidka district, about 25,000 people in the estimates of both the museum and Yad Vashem, where hunger and cold killed many. Many of the Jews trapped in the city were not even Odessans: refugees from Bessarabia had fled there from the Romanian advance earlier that summer.¹⁶

In December 1941 Antonescu decided that Odessa should be emptied of Jews. On his orders the governor of Transnistria, Gheorghe Alexianu, had the remaining Jews deported. On 10 January 1942 they were given two days to move into the Slobidka ghetto, and from there they were sent in freezing weather to villages in the rural districts, where most of them perished or were murdered. The ghetto was closed on 10 June 1942. The museum concludes that in less than a year Odessa's once vibrant Jewish community was nearly destroyed.¹⁷

Odessa stayed under Romanian rule until the spring of 1944. Soviet forces retook the port in April 1944, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine records that the war had destroyed much of the port, industry and housing.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

Britannica sums up the siege as a prolonged and unsuccessful defense that left the city heavily damaged. For Romania, the costly victory at Odessa was followed by the crimes of its occupation, which the Holocaust museum and Yad Vashem document.¹⁹

One defender became famous far beyond the city. Lyudmila Pavlichenko enlisted at Odessa and fought on the front line through the siege; the National WWII Museum and the National Park Service both record the 187 kills credited to her there before her unit withdrew to Sevastopol. In 1942 the Soviet government sent her to North America to argue for a second front; she was received at the White House and toured the United States with Eleanor Roosevelt, and both institutions credit her with 309 kills in all.²⁰