Led by the Soviet Union’s Red Army, the Moravia–Ostrava offensive was the largest combat operation on the territory of modern-day Czechia. It lasted almost two months, from March 10th to May 6h 1945, and approximately 400,000 soldiers were deployed. In our anniversary series ’80 years ago: How did WWII end in the Czech lands?’, we look at the events and the significance of this brutal chapter of Czech history, with comments from expert historian Jiří Neminář.
Photo: Statutární město Ostrava / Archives of the city of Ostrava
The number of combatants killed or wounded in the Moravia–Ostrava offensive of 1945 are staggering. According to Red Army figures, around 25,000 Soviet soldiers, 1,500 soldiers of the Czechoslovak Army Corps and approximately 100,000 German Wehrmacht soldiers died in total. However, when asked whether it was the toughest and bloodiest clash on Czech territory, historian Jiří Neminář from the Museum of the Hlučín Region reminds us that such fierce battles were not exceptional in Europe in 1945:
“If we are talking purely about the territory of the present-day Czech Republic, then certainly yes. But it is not out of place to put it in context and compare it, for example, with Poland, and appreciate that the intensity of the fighting was not that extraordinary – which is not to belittle or diminish it at all.”
Jiří Neminář|Photo: Tomáš Vodňanský, Czech Radio
On the topic of Poland, since Ostrava is located near the Polish border, part of the fighting of the Moravia–Ostrava offensive in fact took place on Polish territory. The offensive was part of the westward push of the Red Army, which had previously driven the forces of the German Wehrmacht out of the Soviet Union. By March 1945, they had reached what is today eastern Czechia and the region of Moravia-Silesia. Why though is it known as an offensive, and not as the ‘Battle’ of Ostrava? Dr. Neminář again:
“That is a very interesting question. It would be wrong and actually sad to think that it was exclusively the Battle of Ostrava. It was a confluence of various military operations, attacks that took place on a much wider front. The actual Battle of Ostrava was clearly only the last phase, the last part, when the city of Ostrava was directly at stake. In addition, fighting took place from Opava to Osoblaha, of course also to the east. It is difficult to explain when we do not have a map, but we are talking about an operation. This involves a larger army unit, in Soviet terminology a front, which has several armies, and is a truly gigantic force that leads the offensive operation along a wide front line.”
Ostrava operation on a contemporary map. It depicts all its phases.|Photo: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
There is a legend that the battle for Ostrava was also given considerable importance by the German high command, with alleged communications from Berlin telling the Wehrmacht that if Ostrava is lost, the war will be over.
Debris after fighting in Ostrava in spring 1945|Photo: e-Sbírky, National Museum in Prague/ Silesian Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED
“It is a legend that Hitler himself supposedly said that whoever loses Ostrava will lose Germany. I think that some real quotes that were said by other people later began to be attributed to the top of high command, or even to Adolf Hitler himself. Something like that was said there, but I would perceive it more as an effort to motivate the soldiers to defend themselves resiliently. If we take it in the context of war operations at the end of the war, it was a subsidiary front, a side front. The Germans had other priorities, the Soviets had other priorities as well, and most importantly, it was not really about winning Ostrava at all. That is a later Czech mythologising of the battle.”
A large part of industrial Ostrava is located in Dolní Vítkovice|Photo: Štěpánka Budková, Radio Prague International
It is true that Ostrava was, and remains today a major industrial region. Its importance for supplying the German army justified the Germans’ interest in keeping the city under their control. However, contemporary sources state that by April 1945 the railway junctions in Přerov and Olomouc had collapsed, and Ostrava coal, iron and steel were no longer reaching Germany. The Czech lands had other industrial centres supplying the German war effort, such as Plzeň and Prague. Moreover, while the Moravia–Ostrava offensive was underway, divisions of the Red Army elsewhere reached the suburbs of Berlin on April 21st.
Nine days later, on April 30th, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker below the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and further to the east, Ostrava was finally liberated by the Red Army. This is relatively late, considering how Soviet forces advanced through Poland to Germany. Why then did the Red Army’s advance through the Czech lands take this long?
A picture from the repair of the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Tank Brigade in the USSR during the Ostrava operation|Photo: e-Sbírky, National Museum in Prague/ Silesian Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED
“The advance was really slow, but I wouldn’t say that it was specifically through the Czech lands. It was mainly as a part of the Moravia–Ostrava offensive, which, moreover, partly took place outside the Czech lands. It should be emphasised that it started in what is today Poland. … At the same time that the main attack on Berlin was taking place, which was the priority, the effort to reach Moravia was taking place here on a wing of the front.
“The fighting began in Poland, and it began under very unfavourable circumstances. The weather here was bad, which did not allow for the effective use of air support. At the same time, they were also attacking in a place where the Germans expected it. They were attacking exactly from the shortest, easiest direction, and that is where the defence was logically the toughest. So the first attack stopped, and was not successful. That was the first phase of the operation, and [the Soviets] had to re-evaluate their plans, regroup their forces and attack elsewhere.”
Image of the surroundings of Zámecká Street in Ostrava, showing buildings damaged in air raids in 1945|Photo: e-Sbírky, National Museum in Prague/ Silesian Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED
Other factors contributed to the comparatively late arrival of the Red Army in Ostrava; general exhaustion among the Soviet troops met with the hilly Silesian landscape and a strong defence by the occupying German forces. Supplies, equipment and ammunition were also being directed to the priority targets, and so the Red Army in Ostrava had to make do with what was at hand.
Photo: Statutární město Ostrava / Archives of the city of Ostrava
Tanks also played a major role in the Moravia–Ostrava offensive. Back in 2004, Czech Radio recorded the memories of veteran Alexander Zálocký, a Volhynian Czech, who served with the Czechoslovak Tank Brigade and experienced the events firsthand:
“After several days, we reached the Polish city of Wadowice. To give you an idea, it is somewhere north of Ostrava, of course on the Polish side of the border. We were there for several days. The weather was very changeable. Imagine that we washed our tanks twice a day and painted them white. We camouflaged them. It would snow, then it would rain. The Moravia–Ostrava offensive was scheduled to begin on March 10th, and it did. The 38th Army and the 1st Guards Army took part in it.
Soviet pilots near Svinov in Ostrava region in spring 1945|Photo: e-Sbírky, National Museum in Prague/ Silesian Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED
“We were supposed to attack with General Grechko’s 1st Guards Army. We never fought completely alone. We always supported the Soviet infantry. Sometimes we were without infantry, but in principle, tanks always support the infantry. Unfortunately, the weather was such that neither the air force nor the artillery could function, because there were blizzards, rain and snowstorms. The operation simply did not fulfil its task and, following orders from Moscow, it stopped on March 18th. That was called the first period of the offensive.”
Just how significant was the participation of the Czechoslovak Tank Brigade in the Moravia–Ostrava offensive? Historian Jiří Neminář again:
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“It was certainly one of the strongest armoured units that the Soviets had at their disposal. That brigade had sixty-five tanks, so it played a significant role in the offensive ‘wedge’. Most of all, it had symbolic significance that the Czechoslovak unit was directly participating in the liberation of its country. Czechs and Slovaks too laid down their lives here. I would like to note who those people actually were. I feel quite a debt, because they were not primarily ethnic Czechs, but rather they were largely Volhynian Czechs, Ukrainians, Ruthenians and Slovaks. This means people who did not have their homes here at all, or even came from homes that at that time had already been given to the Soviet Union. In terms of Czechs born in Czechoslovakia, they would be part of the officer corps.”
A country cannot quickly recover from military action as devastating as the Moravia–Ostrava offensive. It left behind a ruined landscape in and around the cities of Ostrava and Opava, which were in many places unfit for habitation in the subsequent peacetime.
A picture of a Soviet soldier with two Czech children after the liberation of Ostrava|Photo: e-Sbírky, National Museum in Prague/ Silesian Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED
“Some villages and settlements were 80-90% destroyed. That said, because it affected a relatively small part of our territory, we Czechs did not have the same experience as, for example, the territory of today’s Poland, where cities were completely destroyed, and then completely urbanized. However, Opava, Osoblaha, and Fulnek were severely affected, as were smaller villages in the Hlučín region, where the main attack was. It took a severe toll there, because it wasn’t just houses that were destroyed, but also the economic infrastructure. You have nothing to cultivate the fields with, because your barn burnt down. You have nothing to sow, because the fields are all torn up, full of unexploded ordnance. We usually don’t realise that people were unable to get back into normal life, because there were so many problems that they had to face.”
Upper Square in Opava after the liberation in April 1945|Photo: e-Sbírky, National Museum in Prague/ Silesian Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED
In the decades that followed, the offensive loomed large in the collective memory of Czechoslovakia. It received enormous attention during the communist era, and thousands of books were published on the topic. However, it cannot be said that all questions about what exactly happened have been answered. Debates about the details were shaped by the ideologies of the post-war world. Communist historians knew which narratives were ‘correct’, and wrote their books accordingly.
Miloš Sýkora|Photo: list Československé armády. Praha: Naše vojsko, 24.4.1971 / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
One example is the story of the Miloš Sýkora Bridge in the centre of Ostrava. The story goes that the retreating Wehrmacht was about to blow up the bridge, but twenty-four-year-old Miloš Sýkora, an Ostrava native, cut the wires of the booby-trapped explosive system. He was then shot by a German patrol. After the war, the bridge was named in his honour. Yet the story is not certain, and there were other possible saviours. Later historians may have rallied behind the figure of Sýkora, because he was a communist.
“There are so many versions of the story of saving the bridge that I think we will probably never find out how it happened. In any case, Sýkora existed, and he was a communist resistance fighter, involved in the illegal communist movement. He was imprisoned during the war for his resistance activities, I think for three years. After his release, he was put to work digging trenches, from which he escaped and then lived here in Ostrava. What is certain is that he died in close proximity to the bridge, which was then called the Říšský most.
Miloš Sýkora Bridge with memorial in Ostrava|Photo: František Tichý, Czech Radio
“Yet what really happened there probably depends on how each of us view it. The tank drivers who arrived there have their own version. It is even said that the saviour could have been a German soldier. There was a certain native of Bohumín, Robert Cysarz, who may have deserted from the Wehrmacht, and who claimed that it was him. According to another version, it was the commander of the German engineers who did not detonate it. Alternatively, it was the tank drivers themselves who cut the wires. We could list an awful lot of different stories.”