The German Wehrmacht conquered Estonia from July to October of 1941, fighting retreating Red Army troops. Battles in Estonia in 1941 lasted far longer than in Lithuania and Latvia and casualties were numerous on both sides. The archives of Wehrmacht units are preserved in the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv). Estonian historians have had access to these materials for decades, but it is still possible to make plenty of interesting discoveries of unknown details connected to Estonian history . Many documents from Red Army archives were digitized about 15 years ago and are available on the Internet. That makes it possible to research specific war events relying on contemporary reports and other documents from both sides, which is always added value in military history. Nowadays, military history enthusiasts can juxtapose battle events with topographic maps of Estonia from the 1930s and current maps to see that in most cases, the landscapes are unrecognisable compared to those of 1941.
Two reports that have been translated into Estonian are published in this article: one is of the 272nd Infantry Regiment of the 93rd Infantry Division from July of 1941 and the other is of the 3rd Battalion of the 162nd Infantry Regiment of the 61st Infantry Division from August of 1941.
Venetossu was a farm in the woods close to the western shore of Lake Peipus. A battle was fought in its vicinity on 28 July 1941. The Wehrmacht 272nd Infantry Regiment was tasked with defeating a part of the besieged troops of the Red Army 11th Rifle Corps. Despite their hopeless situation, the Red Army soldiers resisted fiercely and German losses were significant. Regular German infantry was not yet familiar with the Red Army’s forest battle tactics and the Venetossu battle report had to be used as an appendix for training materials as well.
The Kiviloo battle was fought on 22 August 1941 at Kiviloo hamlet 40 km southeast of Tallinn. The so-called Estonian rifle regiment, a unit formed ad hoc out of members of paramilitary NKVD destruction battalions and Tallinn workers’ defence squads, was deployed at Kiviloo to cover the withdrawal of Red Army regular troops towards Tallinn. With artillery support, the 3rd Battalion of the 162nd Infantry Regiment defeated the inexperienced enemy with only minor losses. The surviving Red soldiers dispersed in the woods. 25 years later, Soviet propaganda expanded the memory of that small battle into a heroic story of the selfless bravery of voluntary ‘Estonian communist and Soviet activists’, who defended their socialist homeland against German-Fascist invaders and killed many of them at Kiviloo. A monument was solemnly opened there in August of 1966 and wreaths were placed there on anniversaries of the battle until the end of the Soviet era. The monument was finally removed in 2022.