Belgrade offensive

• 1. Introduction

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  The Belgrade offensive, fought from the 15th of September to the 24th of November 1944, was one of the most complex joint military operations of the Second World War in Europe. Three separate armies, speaking three different languages and serving three different governments, converged on a single city to drive out a common enemy. What made it remarkable was not just the scale of the fighting but the speed of it, the political friction it generated, and the diplomatic negotiations that had to happen before a single soldier crossed a border.

  By the summer of 1944, the Germans had effectively lost control of most of the mountainous interior of Yugoslavia. Desertion from their ranks was running high. Recruits were joining the partisan forces faster than weapons could be found for them. Berlin could read the map. But reading a map and evacuating an entire army group from the southern Balkans were two very different problems. The Germans needed to hold Belgrade long enough to pull their forces back through it. The Soviets, the Yugoslav Partisans, and the newly switched Bulgarian Army needed to stop them. This documentary follows how they did it.

• 2. A Region in Flux

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  The Bulgarian coup d'etat of 1944 reshaped the entire southern front almost overnight. A pro-Axis government fell, replaced by a Fatherland Front administration under Kimon Georgiev. Bulgaria declared war on Germany, and four Bulgarian armies totalling 455,000 men were rapidly mobilized and reorganized. By early October 1944, three of those armies, around 340,000 men in total, were massed on the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border.

  Romania's earlier defection had already triggered a crisis for the German forces defending the region. The Second Jassy-Kishinev offensive in late August 1944 had shattered German positions in that theater, forcing both Bulgaria and Romania to switch sides. Berlin responded by ordering Army Group E to withdraw into Hungary. But the partisan-and-Allied-air campaign known as Operation Ratweek, launched on the 1st of September 1944, struck railway bridges and transport installations across the region. The 117th Jager Division had been loaded onto forty-four trains in Athens on the 19th of September; only seventeen of those trains had reached Belgrade by the 8th of October. The rest were stopped cold.

  The political dimension was just as tangled as the military one. Marshal Josip Broz Tito arrived in Soviet-controlled Romania on the 21st of September and flew from there to Moscow, where he met with Joseph Stalin. The two men reached a specific agreement: Bulgarian troops would be permitted to operate on Yugoslav territory as part of the joint offensive. That permission mattered enormously for what followed, and it also generated diplomatic friction that outlasted the battle itself.

• 3. Race to the Blue Line

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  German planners had identified what they called the "Blue Line," a proposed front running from the southern slopes of the Carpathians over the Iron Gates down the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. Both sides raced to fill it. By the end of September, the Soviets had managed to push some nineteen rifle divisions to the line, though this was a fraction of the ninety-one rifle divisions that had fought in the Second Jassy-Kishinev offensive. Roads were poor and damaged. Logistical problems slowed everyone. But Army Group F faced worse difficulties in concentrating its forces, and the Red Army achieved substantial numerical superiority along the Blue Line by the end of the month.

  The 75th Rifle Corps was the first Soviet formation to reach the Iron Gates area. On the 12th of September, its reconnaissance elements made contact with partisans on the Yugoslav side of the Danube. But in the days that followed, German forces pushed the partisans off the riverbank and launched a limited attack on Red Army elements across the water. Rather than wait for the full 57th Army transfer, which was not expected to complete until the 30th of September, the 75th Corps crossed the Danube on the 22nd of September. German forces from the 1st Mountain Division counterattacked fiercely and pushed them back to the shore. The main 57th Army attack therefore launched on the 27th and the 28th of September, with troops ferried across overnight.

  In the partisan-held territory of eastern Serbia, the 23rd Division had fought a fierce battle against Order Police battalions and seized Zajecar on the 7th of September. Five days later, on the 12th of September, a Yugoslav delegation led by Colonel Ljubodrag Duric crossed the Danube near Negotin to make contact with the Red Army's 74th Rifle Division. The 1st Battalion accompanying that delegation would fight alongside the Soviet 109th Regiment until the 7th of October.

• 4. The Breakthrough

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  On the 3rd of October, Soviet and Yugoslav forces liberated Bor, known for its large copper mine. Inside the city, the 7th and 9th Serbian Brigade found approximately 1,700 forced laborers, most of them Jews from Hungary, and freed them. Four days later, on the 7th of October, the German battle group holding Zajecar finally broke under the combined assault of the 64th Rifle Corps and elements of the 45th Division.

  The decision that changed the shape of the offensive came on the 7th of October, when Soviet command chose to exploit open roads rather than pause to destroy the German battle groups still fighting in their rear. The 5th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade, reinforced with a self-propelled artillery regiment and an anti-tank regiment, marched from Negotin through Rgotina and Zabica to Svilajnac. In twenty-four hours the brigade covered 120 kilometers, reaching the Great Morava valley on the 8th of October, leaving the German front-line formations far behind.

  What followed was a race for a bridge. On the 9th of October, the 93rd Rifle Division pushed into the Morava valley through Petrovac. Its commander formed a special task force under Captain Liskov to capture the only thirty-ton bridge over the river near the village of Donje Livadice. Liskov's group neutralized the German guards and stopped them from destroying the bridge. On the 10th of October, Soviet forces secured the bridgehead on the western bank. Two days later, on the 12th of October, in the area of Natalinci, twelve kilometers east of Topola, the 4th Guards Mechanized Corps crossed that bridge and linked up with the 4th Brigade of the 21st Serbian Division. The Corps brought 160 tanks, 21 self-propelled guns, 31 armored cars, and 366 guns and mortars.

• 5. Closing In on Belgrade

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  General Friedrich-Wilhelm Muller, former commander of German forces on Crete, took over the front south of the Danube on the 2nd of October. His headquarters sat in Kraljevo. General Wilhelm Schneckenburger retained command north of the Danube and was tasked directly with Belgrade's defense. On the 5th of October, as the city became an increasingly unstable zone, Army Group F headquarters relocated from Belgrade to Vukovar, though Felber and Schneckenburger remained.

  The attack on Belgrade's outskirts began on the 12th of October. That same day, of the entire area between Kragujevac and the Sava River, the Germans held only isolated strongholds at Sabac, Obrenovac, Topola, and Mladenovac. The 36th Tank Brigade led the main assault, with the 4th Battalion of the 4th Serbian Brigade mounted on tanks. At Topola, partisan units were already pressing the garrison from the west when the 36th arrived from the east. A joint charge overran the position. Moving north, the brigade encountered a German assault gun battalion marching the other direction, nine kilometers above Topola. After a fierce engagement with losses on both sides, the Soviet column continued. Before the day was over, Mladenovac, the last significant obstacle before Belgrade, had also fallen.

  On the 13th of October, an auxiliary flank attack reached the Danube near Bolec, splitting German forces into two separate groups: the Belgrade garrison and a battle group retreating from eastern Serbia through the Smederevo area. That stranded group, the 1st Mountain Division, the 2nd Brandenburg Regiment, and assorted other units under General Walter Stettner, was cut off and faced destruction. Its attempts to break through and link with the Belgrade garrison produced fierce fighting over the following days.

  The 4th Guards Mechanized Corps broke through the last resistance south of Belgrade on the 14th of October and reached the city. Soviet forces engaged on the northern bank outskirts while the Yugoslavs advanced from the south of the Sava River. The assault was briefly diverted to deal with thousands of encircled German troops southeast of the city. On the 20th of October, Belgrade was completely overrun by joint Soviet and Yugoslav forces.

• 6. The Flanks and the Aftermath

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  On the southern flank, the Bulgarian 2nd Army pushed into the Leskovac-Nis area and almost immediately clashed with the 7th SS Mountain Division "Prinz Eugen." On the 8th of October, the Bulgarian Armored Brigade struck German positions at Bela Palanka, reaching Vlasotince two days later. On the 12th of October, supported by the 15th Brigade of the 47th Partisan Division, the Armored Brigade took Leskovac. The strategic goal in the south was not to pursue the retreating SS division but to begin the liberation of Kosovo, which would have cut the withdrawal route for Army Group E moving north from Greece. On the 17th of October, the leading Bulgarian units reached Kursumlija. Podujevo fell on the 5th of November after heavy losses negotiating the Prepolac Pass, but Pristina remained out of reach until the 21st.

  On the northern flank, the 2nd Ukrainian Front's 46th Army advanced to outflank the Belgrade defenses from the north, striking the river and rail supply lines along the Tisa. Its 10th Guards Rifle Corps crossed the Tamis and Tisa rivers north of Pancevo, threatening the Belgrade-Novi Sad railroad.

  Once Belgrade fell, the bridgehead on the left bank of the Danube in Baranja was seized in November, creating the staging ground for the 3rd Ukrainian Front's subsequent Budapest offensive. German Army Group E, cut off from Hungary, was forced to fight its way through the mountains of Sandzak and Bosnia; its first echelons did not reach the Drava until mid-February 1945. The Yugoslav 1st Army Corps pushed German forces roughly 100 kilometers westward through Srem before the Germans stabilized a front in mid-December. Soviet propagandists listed the Belgrade offensive alongside the Budapest Offensive and the East Carpathian Offensive as one of what they called Stalin's ten blows.

  A Medal "For the Liberation of Belgrade" was established by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on the 19th of June 1945. The Liberators of Belgrade Memorial, which contains the remains of over 3,500 Yugoslav Partisans and Red Army soldiers who died in the offensive, has since become the site of commemorations at every major anniversary, with senior Russian officials including Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin attending in person.