Brest fortress

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Brest fortress
Brest Fortress: Cholmer Gate

Brest Fortress: Cholmer Gate

Alternative name (s): Brest-Litovsk fortress, Brest-Litovsk citadel
Creation time : 1836–1842, modernization and expansion 1864–1888 and 1914
Castle type : Niederungsburg
Conservation status: partially preserved
Place: Brest
Geographical location 52 ° 5 '0 "  N , 23 ° 39' 10"  E Coordinates: 52 ° 5 '0 "  N , 23 ° 39' 10"  E
Brest Fortress (Belarus)
Brest fortress

The Brest Fortress ( Belarusian крэпасць Брэсцкая , Russian Брестская крепость , Polish Twierdza Brzeska ), also known as Fortress Brest-Litovsk (the Polish name of the city was Brześć Litewski), is a 19th-century fortress on the western outskirts of Brest at the Confluence of the Muchawez in the bow . Today it is one of the most visited attractions in Belarus.

Construction and expansion

In the 1960s, the wooden foundations of a medieval settlement were uncovered on the site of the Brest Fortress - the city began here, protected on islands. For the construction of the fortress, Brest was "moved" about two kilometers to the east, regardless of its inhabitants: the city was largely torn down or burned down. Therefore, there are no buildings in today's city that are more than 170 years old. Some of the buildings of old Brest have been preserved and adapted for military use.

The fortress was built in the years 1836–1842 to secure the Russian western border against Congress Poland at the confluence of the Mukhavets and Bug rivers . The facility, which was later modernized and expanded, was intended to block attackers from entering the interior. It is considered the largest fortress of the 19th century in the Russian Empire . Many buildings had to be demolished for the construction, including the Old Great Synagogue from 1568.

Brest fortress and the adjacent forts around 1912.

The author of the original project was Karl Iwanowitsch Oppermann , an outstanding Russian military engineer of German origin. The fortress consists of four main structures, some of which were built on artificial islands. These are:

  • The so-called citadel (core island) is surrounded by an approx. 1.8 km long ring, which is formed by the barracks made of red brick. These barracks were part of the defenses, with their meter-thick walls they looked like a gigantic fortress wall.
  • The North Island (Kobriner Fortification, Kobrinskoe ukreplenie), on which, among other things, two horseshoe-shaped forts (east fort and west fort) are located.
  • The West Island (Terespoler Fortification, Terespol'skoe ukreplenie).
  • The South Island (Volhyn fortification, Volynskoe ukreplenie), on it was a military hospital and a former monastery. The remains of old Brest were discovered and museified on this island .

The facility has a total area of ​​4 km² and a circumference of 6.4 km. Between 1864 and 1888 the fortress was modernized according to a project by Totleben . A ring of nine forts at a distance of three to four kilometers from the actual fortress was built to make it difficult to bypass and fire by the developing artillery, the total circumference was now 32 km. A new St. Nicholas' Church was also built on the site of the citadel - the old one, along with the synagogue, fell victim to the destruction of the old town.

The construction of the second ring of fortifications, the circumference of which was to be 45 km, began in 1913. However, this modernization work was interrupted by the beginning of the First World War. The fortress garrison was preparing to defend itself, but it never came. As part of the general Russian troop withdrawal , the fortress was cleared and partially blown up, and the city of Brest was largely burned down. German and Austro-Hungarian troops advanced on 25/26. August 1915 entered town and fortress without a fight. On March 3, 1918, the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in the White Palace of the Citadel . From 1921 the fortress belonged to the newly founded Poland . In Brest there was a garrison of the Polish army and a prison for political prisoners.

Battle for the fortress 1939

The north gate of the fortress is blocked by Polish FT-17 tanks

The strategically important fortress was captured during the attack on Poland during World War II between September 14 and 17, 1939. After three days of heavy fighting, parts of the Polish fortress garrison were able to withdraw; the rest capitulated to the German XIX. Panzer Corps under General Heinz Guderian .

In accordance with the Secret Additional Protocol to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact , the Germans surrendered the city of Brest and the fortress to the Red Army on September 22nd. A joint German-Soviet military parade took place in the city. The fortress was now, after the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland , directly on the new German-Soviet border.

Battle for the fortress 1941

On the night of June 22nd there were about 9,000 men and 300 families of officers in the fortress. On the opposite bank of the border river Bug, the 45th Infantry Division of the German Wehrmacht (around 17,000 men) under the command of Major General Fritz Schlieper , who had the order to take the fortress in a flash.

"Brest Heroes Fortress" memorial

The battles that followed hardly played a role in Western narratives about World War II. Their strategic importance seems too small. In the Soviet and post-Soviet discourses, on the other hand, the defense of the Brest fortress is taken as an example of heroism and resistance.

The German plan to take the fortress by storm in order to secure " Panzer Rollbahn 1" to the east did not work out. The fortress architecture offered families and soldiers in parts a certain protection, so that many could survive the massive artillery attack that surprised them in their sleep. Under extremely unfavorable conditions, the border guards and Red Army soldiers took up arms and began to defend themselves against the German attack; others managed to leave the fortress to the east, as was intended in the event of an attack. The Germans who stormed deep into the fortress suffered unexpectedly heavy losses; almost 300 of them perished on the first day of the war. Fierce fighting lasted for three days, at the end of the third day there were around 4,000 Red Army soldiers in German captivity. Two more days followed, in which individual resistance sources were fought. On June 27, the fortress was largely quiet, only the eastern fort on the North Island was still defended. The special architecture made it impossible to capture it by purely infantry means. The bombing from the air on June 29th caused the crew of the east fort to give up. About 350 Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner. After the fighting ended, around 6,800 soldiers from the Brest Fortress garrison were in captivity, and at least 2,000 more had died. However, the Germans considered the railway line and the tank runway No. 1 to be secure as early as the evening of June 22nd.

Development of losses in the battles for the Brest fortress.

The quantitative analysis of the available sources also shows that the heavy fighting lasted for three days. During this period around 90% of the German casualties were killed, around 70% injured, and a good 55% of the Soviet casualties were prisoners. The last Wehrmacht soldier to die in combat rather than in a hospital was Oberfeldwebel Erich Mathwig, who died on June 27, 1941.

On the vast and confusing grounds of the fortress with its many building complexes, casemates and cellars, isolated small groups of Soviet soldiers were hiding, who held out to the last even though they had hardly any ammunition, food or water. However, they were apparently no longer perceived as a threat by the Wehrmacht, the first parts of the 45th Infantry Division left Brest on June 29, the bulk of the division followed on July 2, while weaker forces continued until July 8, 1941 Performing guard duties.

In place of this front division, parts of the 221st Security Division moved into Brest. Among other things, the police battalion 307 under the leadership of Major Theodor Stahr , which murdered around 4,000 Jewish men and around 400 non-Jewish communists and Soviet officials during the two weeks of his stay (with the support of Wehrmacht units).

There were occasional exchanges of fire on the fortress grounds. According to the memories of Red Army soldiers, which were collected from the mid-1950s, the last defenders of the fortress held up until the end of July 1941. In fact, Wehrmacht files record the capture of a Soviet officer near the north gate of the fortress on July 24, 1941.

On July 28, 1944, Brest was retaken by the Red Army during the Soviet summer offensive .

consequences

After the Soviet writer Sergei Sergeyevich Smirnov popularized the defense of the fortress in the mid-1950s, events became a central part of official Soviet commemoration of World War II. The defense had lasted for over a month, an entire German division was tied up for this time, practically no one had gone into captivity - these were the central motifs of the myth about the fortress. A small museum was set up as early as 1956, which was expanded to ten halls in 1961.

The official narrative is based on the premise that one can speak of the “defense of the Brest fortress” as long as at least one fighter still offered resistance. Therefore, July 23, 1941, the 32nd day of the war, on which Major Pyotr Gavrilov, the "last defender of the fortress", is said to have been captured, is the end of the fighting, and not June 29, 1941 the last source of resistance in the fortress surrendered and the German troops stopped fighting.

In the case of the Soviet prisoners of war, such interpretations were not enough. Since in the Soviet Union "imprisonment" was considered treason that could not be reconciled with a heroic narrative, the surrender and imprisonment of thousands of Red Army soldiers had to be systematically concealed and denied. The Museum of Defense of the Brest Fortress went so far as to forge a German document by not only omitting key text passages, but also changing the order of sentences.

On May 8, 1965, the Brest Fortress was awarded the honorary title of Heroes ' Fortress . In September 1971 the “Brest Heroes Fortress” memorial was opened. In 1997, the President of the Republic of Belarus, Aljaksandr Lukashenka , granted the memorial the status of a “Center for Patriotic Education of Youth”.

The heroized and idealized interpretation of the events served as a template for books, plays, an opera and several films, most recently the Belarusian-Russian film Storm on Brest Fortress from 2010.

In January 2014, the US television channel CNN published a list of the "eleven ugliest monuments in the world". This list is also the monument was Muschestwo (мужество, "Courage") on the site of the Brest memorial. After protests from Belarus and Russia, the station withdrew the list and apologized.

literature

  • Rostislav Aliev: Šturm Brestskoj kreposti. Moscow 2008. (critical review of the book in Belarusian language)
  • Kristian Gancer [Christian Ganzer], Irina Elenskaja, Elena Paškovič [u. a.] (ed.): Brest. Leto 1941 g. Documenty, materijaly, fotografii. Smolensk: Inbelkul't, 2016. ISBN 978-5-00076-030-7 [1]
  • Christian Ganzer: German and Soviet Losses as an Indicator of the Length and Intensity of the Battle for the Brest Fortress (1941). In: The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Volume 27, Issue 3, pp. 449-466.
  • Christian Ganzer: Soviet prisoners of war in the Soviet and post-Soviet culture of remembrance. The Brest Fortress - A Case Study. In: Frédéric Bonneseur, Philipp Dinkelaker, Sarah Kleinmann [u. a.] (ed.): Occupation, forced labor, extermination. 20th workshop on the history and memory of the Nazi concentration camps. Berlin 2017, pp. 201–218.
  • Christian Ganzer: Remembering and Forgetting: Hero Veneration in the Brest Fortress. In: Siobhan Doucette, Andrej Dynko, Ales Pashkevich (ed.): Returning to Europe. Belarus. Past and Future. Warsaw 2011, pp. 138-145. [2]
  • Christian Ganzer, Alena Paškovič: “Heroism, tragedy, daring.” The Brest Fortress Defense Museum. In: Osteuropa 12/2010, pp. 81–96. [3]
  • VV Gubarenko [and a.]: Brestskaya krepost '... facty, svidetel'stva, otkrytija. Brest 2005. (Russian)

Web links

Commons : Brest-Litovsk fortress  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

References and comments

  1. a b V.V. Bešanov: Brestskaya krepost '. Minsk 2005, p. 20.
  2. In German files from the time of the Second World War , the entire fortress is referred to as a “citadel”, while in Russian it is customary to use this name only for the fortifications on the core island.
  3. VV Gubarenko, LG Bibik, GN Zvarič et al .: Brest krepost '... Fakty, svidetel'stva, otkrytija. 2nd edition, Brest: Izdatelstvo Akademija, 2005. p. 6 f.
  4. Rostislav Aliev: Šturm Brestskoj kreposti. Moscow 2008, pp. 218-238.
  5. Christian Ganzer, Alena Paškovič: "heroism, tragedy, courage." The Museum of the Defense of Brest Fortress. In: Osteuropa 12/2010, pp. 81–96.
  6. Christian Ganzer: Czy "legendarna twierdza" jest legendą? Oborona twierdzy brzeskiej w 1941 r. w świetle niemeckich i austriackich dokumentów archiwalnych. In: Wspólne czy osobne? Miesca pamięci narodów Europy Wschodniej. Białystok / Kraków 2011, pp. 37–47, here: p. 42.
  7. ^ Christian Ganzer: German and Soviet Losses as an Indicator of the Length and Intensity of the Battle for the Brest Fortress (1941). In: The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Volume 27, Issue 3, pp. 449–466, here: p. 463.
  8. Christian Ganzer, Alena Paškovič: "heroism, tragedy, courage." The Museum of the Defense of Brest Fortress. In: Eastern Europe 12/2010, pp. 81–96; here: p. 82 f.
  9. ^ Christian Ganzer: German and Soviet Losses as an Indicator of the Length and Intensity of the Battle for the Brest Fortress (1941). In: The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Volume 27, Issue 3, pp. 449-466.
  10. Christian Ganzer: Czy "legendarna twierdza" jest legendą? Oborona twierdzy brzeskiej w 1941 r. w świetle niemeckich i austriackich dokumentów archiwalnych. In: Wspólne czy osobne? Miesca pamięci narodów Europy Wschodniej. Białystok / Kraków 2011, pp. 37–47, here: p. 40.
  11. Wolfgang Curilla: The German Ordnungspolizei and the Holocaust in the Baltic States and in Belarus 1941-1944. Paderborn 2006, pp. 570-575. Christopher Browning: murder of Jews. Nazi politics, forced labor and the behavior of the perpetrators. Frankfurt 2001, p. 186f. Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburg 1998, p. 546 ff.
  12. Christian Ganzer, Alena Paškovič: "heroism, tragedy, courage." The Museum of the Defense of Brest Fortress. In: Eastern Europe 12/2010, pp. 81–96; here: p. 83.
  13. Christian Ganzer: Soviet prisoners of war in the Soviet and post-Soviet culture of remembrance. The Brest Fortress - A Case Study. In: Frédéric Bonneseur, Philipp Dinkelaker, Sarah Kleinmann [u. a.] (ed.): Occupation, forced labor, extermination. 20th workshop on the history and memory of the Nazi concentration camps. Berlin 2017. pp. 201-218; here: pp. 210–211.
  14. VV Gubarenko [u. a.]: Brestskaya krepost '... facty, svidetel'stva, otkrytija. Brest 2005, p. 77.
  15. CNN deletes list of ugly monuments , Der Tagesspiegel from February 10, 2014.