Vilnius Offensive Operation
| Vilnius Offensive | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of Operation Bagration / Eastern Front | ||||||||
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| Belligerents | ||||||||
 Soviet Union
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 Germany
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 Polish Home Army
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| Commanders and leaders | ||||||||
|
Ivan Chernyakhovsky Pavel Rotmistrov
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Walter Model Dietrich von Saucken Rainer Stahel Theodor Tolsdorff
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Aleksander Krzyżanowski Antoni Olechnowicz
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| Strength | ||||||||
| ~100,000 | 7,700 | ? | ||||||
| Casualties and losses | ||||||||
|
50-70 tanks ? |
8,000 killed; 5,000 captured in Vilnius alone (Soviet est) | ? | ||||||
50-70 tanks
The Vilnius Offensive (Russian: Вильнюсская наступательная операция) occurred as part of the third phase of Operation Bagration, the great summer offensive by the Red Army against the Wehrmacht in June and July, 1944. The Vilnius Offensive lasted from 5 July to 13 July 1944, and ended with a Soviet victory.
During the offensive, Soviet forces encircled and captured the city of Vilnius; this phase is sometimes referred to as the Battle of Vilnius. Some three thousand German soldiers of the encircled garrison managed to break out, including their commander, Rainer Stahel. After the offensive, the capital of the Polish Wilno voivodeship (now: Vilnius, Lithuania) was liberated from Nazi occupation.
From 23 June 1944, the Red Army conducted a major offensive operation under the code-name Operation Bagration, liberating Belarus, and driving towards the Polish border and the Baltic Sea coast. By the beginning of July the front line had been torn open at the seam of German Army Group Centre and Army Group North, roughly on a line from Vitebsk to Vilnius. While a large part of the Soviet force was employed to reduce the German pocket east of Minsk, following the Minsk Offensive Operation, the Soviet high command decided to exploit the situation along the breach to the north, by turning mobile formations towards the major traffic centre of Vilnius, in eastern Lithuania. For the German high command, it became imperative to hold Vilnius, because without it would become almost impossible to re-establish a sustainable connection between the two German army groups, and to hold the Red Army off outside East Prussia and away from the Baltic Sea shores.
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