Operation Bagration destroyed a German army group, freed Belorussia and much of Lithuania and eastern Poland, and carried the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw and East Prussia. It cost the Soviet Union more than three-quarters of a million casualties. For Belarus it was the end of an occupation that had killed one in every four of its people. In the West it is barely remembered. This chapter weighs the cost and visits the memorials.

The cost

The Soviet victory was costly. By the Soviet figures published after the war, the four fronts lost 180,040 men killed and missing and 590,848 wounded and sick, together with 2,957 tanks and self-propelled guns, 2,447 guns and 822 aircraft. The Germans lost about 400,000 men by their own count and more than half a million by the Soviet one. Almost every family in Belarus had already lost someone in the occupation.

The forgotten victory

Bagration is often called the forgotten offensive. In Western memory the summer of 1944 belongs to Normandy, Arnhem and the Bulge, and the war in the East appears, if at all, as Stalingrad and Berlin. The reasons are not hard to find: the offensive came sixteen days after D-Day, the Soviets released little about it, the Cold War made Western readers wary of Soviet victories, and for decades the main sources in English were the memoirs of German generals, who had little reason to dwell on their worst defeat. Only in the last generation, as Soviet archives opened and historians such as David Glantz wrote from them, has its scale become widely known. The American military historian Robert Citino, quoted by the Imperial War Museums, called it “perhaps the greatest single win in all of military history.”

Belarus remembers

No country suffered more in proportion to its size than Belarus. The Khatyn memorial north of Minsk, opened in 1969 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the liberation, stands on the site of a village burned with its people on 22 March 1943 by the SS Dirlewanger unit and Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118. Its Cemetery of Villages holds 185 symbolic graves, one for each Belarusian village destroyed with its inhabitants and never rebuilt; 433 more were burned and later rebuilt. A wall of niches remembers the camps, among them Maly Trostenets outside Minsk, one of the largest killing sites in the occupied Soviet Union.

On the Moscow highway 21 kilometers from Minsk, near the forests where the Germans trapped east of the city in July 1944 were destroyed, stands the Mound of Glory, built between 1967 and 1969 and topped by four bayonet-shaped obelisks for the four fronts of Bagration. In Minsk the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, founded in 1944 while the war was still being fought, moved into a new building in 2014. Vitebsk, Mogilev and Bobruisk each have their memorials, and at Brest the ruined fortress where the war in the East began is preserved as a memorial complex, opened in 1971. Belarus celebrates its Independence Day on 3 July, the anniversary of the liberation of Minsk.

Gallery · 10 photographs · select to enlarge

Memorials of Belarus

Gallery · in memory

Khatyn and Maly Trostenets

19772006

The North Carolina thread

North Carolina’s link to Bagration is a thin but real one. The Liberty ships built at the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company in Wilmington were part of the fleet that carried Lend-Lease supplies, among them the trucks that moved the Red Army across Belorussia (see Chapter 8). And, like Americans everywhere, North Carolinians followed the offensive in their newspapers in the summer of 1944, alongside the news of their own sons in Normandy and Italy.

People, places and pages in this chapter

Sources and further reading

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