Battles of the Courland Bridgehead | |||||||
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Part of the Eastern Front of World War II | |||||||
![]() Soviet advances from 1 September 1943 – 31 December 1944, the Courland Pocket is the white area west of the Gulf of Riga | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
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Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Ferdinand Schörner Lothar Rendulic Heinrich von Vietinghoff Carl Hilpert Walter Krüger |
Ivan Bagramyan Andrey Yeryomenko Leonid Govorov | ||||||
Units involved | |||||||
Army Group Courland |
1st Baltic Front 2nd Baltic Front | ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
October 1944–8 May 1945 117,871 combat casualties (39,537 in February–March 1945)[1] 189,112 captured on 9 May 1945[1] |
16 Feb – 8 May 1945 30,501 killed, 130,447 wounded or sick[2] Total: 160,948 | ||||||
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The Courland Pocket[a] was an area of the Courland Peninsula where Army Group North of Nazi Germany and the Reichskommissariat Ostland were cut off and surrounded by the Red Army for almost a year, lasting from July 1944 until 10 May 1945.
The pocket was created during the Red Army's Baltic Offensive, when forces of the 1st Baltic Front reached the Baltic Sea near Memel (Klaipėda) during its lesser Memel Offensive Operation phases in October 1944. This action isolated the German Army Group North from the rest of the German forces, having been pushed from the south by the Red Army, standing in a front between Tukums and Libau in Latvia, with the Baltic Sea in the West, the Irbe Strait in the North and the Gulf of Riga in the East behind the Germans. Renamed Army Group Courland on 25 January, the Army Group in the Courland Pocket remained isolated until the end of the war. When they were ordered to surrender to the Soviet command on 8 May, they were in "blackout" and did not get the official order before 10 May, two days after the capitulation of Germany. It was one of the last German groups to surrender in Europe.
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