Mius position
The Mius position was a heavily fortified German line of defense during World War II on the Mius River in the Soviet Union . It was built by the German Wehrmacht in October 1941 under the direction of General Ewald von Kleist .
The Soviet troops tried twice to break through this position, first from December 1941 to July 1942 and from February to August 1943. In the summer of 1943, the Mius position consisted of three different depths of defense lines with a total depth of 40 to 50 kilometers. The Red Army made the breakthrough as part of the Donets-Mius offensive in August 1943 near the village of Kuybyshevo.
Course and structure
The main position began on the coast of the Sea of Azov east of the city of Taganrog and then ran along the Mius River , which gave the position its name. The depth of the fortification line reached up to eleven kilometers in some places. The entire defense zone comprised around 800 settlements. Rails from local pits and wood from local houses and buildings were used to build the fortifications. The Wehrmacht and the Todt Organization often used local forced laborers to build the defenses. The position system contained shelters and bunkers , machine gun nests and mobile artillery positions, as well as mine fields , trenches , tank obstacles and barbed wire barriers . The minefields were at least 200 meters deep and secured by 20 to 30 shelters and bunkers per square kilometer.
literature
- Erich von Manstein : lost victories. Bernard & Graefe publishing house, 1958. (1987, ISBN 3-7637-5253-6 )
- Walter Hubatsch, Percy Ernst Schramm (ed.): War diary of the OKW. Volume 3, Bechtermünz, Augsburg 2002, ISBN 3-8289-0525-0 .
- Bernd Wegner : The aporia of war. In: Karl-Heinz Frieser (Ed.): The German Reich and the Second World War . Volume 8: The Eastern Front 1943/44. The war in the east and on the secondary fronts. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-421-06235-2 .