Ivan Danilowitsch Tschernjachowski

General Ivan Chernyakhovsky, 1944

Ivan Chernyakhovsky ( Russian Иван Данилович Черняховский , scientific. Transliteration Ivan Danilovic Černjachovskij * June 16 ^{. Jul} / 29. June  1906 ^greg. In Uman , Russian Empire ; † 18th February 1945 in Flour Sack , East Prussia ) was the youngest army general in the history of the Soviet Red Army .

Life

It is uncertain whether his date of birth stated on documents is correct. Chernyachovsky grew up with adoptive parents, his adoptive father was a railroad worker. He died of typhus when the son was 9 years old; the adoptive mother died four years later. At first he worked as a shepherd, completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith on the railroad until 1922 , as well as further training at a school and was the Komsomol secretary there. In 1923/24 he worked as a travel agent , cooper and driver.

Chernyakhovsky joined the Red Army at the age of 18 and first attended the Infantry Officer School in Odessa in 1924/25 and then the Artillery School in Kiev , which he graduated in 1928. He then served in an artillery regiment until 1931 before he was posted to the Military Technical Academy . From 1932 to 1936 he was a listener at the Military Academy for Mechanization , where he was strongly influenced in his studies by the book "Vers l'armée de métier" by General Charles de Gaulle and the teachings of the Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky .

After these years of apprenticeship, Chernyakhovsky took over the first troop commands. From 1936 to 1938 he served as chief of staff of the 2nd tank battalion and as commander of the 1st tank battalion of the 8th mechanized brigade. This was followed in the period from 1938 to 1941 as commander of the 9th mechanized regiment and deputy commander of the 2nd Panzer Division. In March 1941 Chernyakhovsky was appointed commander of the 28th Panzer Division of the 12th Mechanized Corps in the Baltic Military District.

When the war between the German Reich and the Soviet Union broke out, he initially continued to run this association (later renamed the 241st Rifle Division) before being promoted to major general on May 5, 1942 and appointed commander of the 18th Panzer Corps in July 1942. With this he defended Voronezh unsuccessfully in the same year . However, he received a lot of attention when on February 8, 1943, as commander of the 60th Soviet Army, as part of the Voronezh-Kharkov operation, he retook the city of Kursk . Because of this success he was promoted to lieutenant general on February 14th. During the Chernigov-Pripyat operation in August 1943, during which the Red Army advanced as far as the Dnieper, it was the army led by Chernyakhovsky that was the first to break through the German lines.

Thanks to the protection of Army General Nikolai Watutin , commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front and, above all, Marshal Vasilevsky , Chief of the General Staff, Chernyakhovsky was able to advance quickly. General Watutin pushed through his appointment as commander of the 3rd Belarusian Front by the spring of 1944 .

Tschernjachowski (3rd from left) together with Marshal Wassilewski (2nd from left) during the public interrogation of the German generals Alfons Hitter (right) and Friedrich Gollwitzer (2nd from right) who were captured near Vitebsk (June 28, 1944)

During the following major offensive by the Red Army against the German Army Group Center, which was given the code name Operation Bagration , Chernyachovsky's Army Group captured Vitebsk (June 27), Vilnius (July 1) and Kaunas (August 1). After Operation Bagration ended, the 3rd Belarusian Front, led by Chernyakhovsky, was on the border with East Prussia. On June 28, 1944, at the age of 38, he was promoted to army general.

An attempt made by the Red Army from October 16 to October 27, 1944 ( Gumbinnen-Goldaper Operation ) to advance into the territory of East Prussia, was unsuccessful after initial territorial gains, as the Wehrmacht succeeded in retaking the city of Goldap and ultimately only that Rominter Heide forest area remained in Soviet hands. During this advance, Soviet soldiers committed the Nemmersdorf massacre .

In January 1945 the 3rd Byelorussian Front was used in the Battle of East Prussia and advanced to Königsberg . Since Chernyachovsky's troops sealed off the cauldron formed around the German troops in the south and east, he himself was appointed Commander-in-Chief in East Prussia . On February 17, 1945, Chernyakhovsky was in a Willys jeep on the way to a meeting with the commander of the 3rd Army in the front area in East Prussia . A German grenade struck near the vehicle near the town of Mehlsack . While the vehicle was hardly damaged and the other four occupants were uninjured, Chernyakhovsky suffered a splinter wound, to which he succumbed the following day. The previous Chief of the General Staff Marshal Alexander Wassilewski took over his post .

Chernyakhovsky's body was transferred to Vilnius and buried there. After Lithuania gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, he was transferred to Russia and buried there in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow . In the part of East Prussia annexed by Russia ( Kaliningrad Oblast ), the city of Insterburg was renamed Chernyakhovsk in 1946 .

Chernyakhovsky and the crimes of the Red Army

Chernyakhovsky's behavior towards the German population was criticized primarily by the German historian Joachim Hoffmann , who saw him as one of the main culprits for the crimes of the Red Army in East Prussia. In his orders of the day, he himself called for acts of revenge against the German civilian population. As examples, he cited two daily orders from the general to his troops, from October 1944 and January 12, 1945:

“The torments of the murdered, the groans of those buried alive, the insatiable tears of mothers call on you to ruthless vengeance. [...] May the bloodthirsty, hated enemy who has brought us so much suffering and agony tremble and drown in the rivers of his own black blood. " (October 1944)

“There is no grace - for anyone, just as there has been no grace for us. […] It is unnecessary to ask the soldiers of the Red Army to show mercy. They are blazing with hatred and vindictiveness. The land of the fascists must become a desert, just like our land that they devastated. The fascists must die, just as our soldiers died. " (January 12, 1945)

The historian Joachim Hoffmann took both daily orders from the preserved files of the Foreign Armies East department of the German General Staff on the subject of violations of international law. A confirmation or refutation on the basis of equivalent Russian-language files is pending due to poor access to this material, so that Hoffmann's criticism cannot be considered fully historically justified up to this point in time.

Awards

• Chernyakhovsky was named Hero of the Soviet Union twice, on October 17, 1943 and July 29, 1944 .
• On May 29, 1944 he was awarded the Kutuzow Order, First Class.

Individual evidence

1. ^ David M. Glantz: Soviet Military Deception in the Second World War ; Frank Cass Ltd. Oxon 1989; ISBN 0-7146-3347-X .
2. ^ David M. Glantz: The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War . ( army.mil ). The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War ( Memento of the original from December 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Manfred Zeidler : End of the war in the east - The Red Army and the occupation of Germany east of Oder and Neisse 1944/45 . Oldenbourg, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-486-56187-1 , p. 67 to 74 ( google.de ).
4. ↑ Aleksander A. Maslov: Fallen Soviet Generals - Soviet General Officers Killed in Battle, 1941–1945 , London / Portland 1998, p. 177.
5. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Stalin's War of Extermination 1941-1945 . Munich 2003, p. 190 and 315 .
6. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Stalin's War of Extermination 1941-1945 . Munich 2003, p. 285 . : The Bundesarchiv-Military Archive is referenced there : Files OKH - Foreign Army Department East - RH 2/2686 - Violations of international law May 28, 1944 - December 30, 1944. It is therefore a quotation from a German source.
7. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Stalin's War of Extermination 1941-1945 . Munich 2003, p. 287 . : References are there to the files OKH - Foreign Army Department East - RH 2/2686 - Violations of International Law March 1, 1945 - April 14, 1945: This quote is also taken from a German source.
8. ↑ http://www.warheroes.ru/hero/hero.asp?Hero_id=327

literature

• Joachim Hoffmann: Stalin's War of Extermination 1941–1945 . 9th edition. Herbig Verlagbuchhandlung, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2079-X .
• Герои Советского Союза - Краткий биографический словарь , Vol. 2, М. Воениздат, 1988 (German Heroes of the Soviet Union - Short Biographical Dictionary ).
• Акрам Агзамович Шарипов: Черняховский , 1980. (German Akram Agsamowitsch Sharipow: Tschernjachowski ) online version
• Aleksander A. Maslov: Fallen Soviet Generals - Soviet General Officers Killed in Battle, 1941-1945 , Frank Cass, London / Portland 1998, ISBN 0-7146-4346-7 .

Web links

Commons : Iwan Tschernjachowski  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Article Iwan Danilowitsch Tschernjachowski in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE) , 3rd edition 1969–1978 (Russian)http: //vorlage_gse.test/1%3D122088~2a%3D~2b%3DIwan%20Danilowitsch%20Tschernjachowski