Night Battle of Tehumardi
In the dark of October 8, advanced and retreating German troops met at the village of Tehumardi.
After nightfall on 8 October 1944, retreating German units encountered advancing Red Army troops.
The advance party, led by Major Vladimir Miller, had set up camp on both sides of the road shortly before the arrival of the grenadier battalion from Kuressaare, led by Captain Klaus Ritter, accompanied by antitank units, moving towards Salme.
Captain Ritter recalls:
"I had a hunch that the enemy were ensconced in the section of road up ahead. Taking this into account, I gave the column specific orders and guidance. The goal was to get past them as quietly and invisibly as possible so as to get to the other side of the Salme River. Our own troops were already in defensive positions there. I specified that they were only to open fire if I did so first. So we moved on until, just before reaching the river, we found ourselves right in the middle of an enemy encampment."
Local resident Hermiine Saar recalls:
"At 8 o’clock that night, everyone here in Tehumardi was suddenly deafened by the ringing of gunfire, which was accompanied by loud cries and yelling. White and green flares were being shot up into the air."
Captain Klaus Ritter continues: “Moving through the centre of the encampment, we noticed four enemy T-34 tanks rumbling along on the left-hand side of the road. The tank engineers, having spotted the little American trophy tank in front of our column with the crosses painted on it, began ramming it. The driver immediately put the tank in reverse gear. It drove over and crushed the unit behind it, to terrible cries and shrieks. I opened fire. Then the whole column started shooting at the enemy, left and right. We started running. We just tried to get through the camp as quickly as possible."
Fjodor Paulmann recalls in his memoirs Fire and Manoeuvre that: "Our men rammed the tank at the front of the column. It turned sideways, stalled and then ignited. Military trucks drove straight into the flaming tank. Complete chaos ensued. The road was blocked. Our light tanks and self-propelled artillery fired at the column, their projectiles detonating throughout their formation. A lot of the machinery went up in flames… The battlefield in Tehumardi quaked under the chaotic echoes of inhumane sounds."
Captain Hermann Ulrichs recalls: "Horses were galloping, men were running... Everyone wanted to get out of there and cross the bridge over the channel from Saaremaa to Sõrve Peninsula."
By morning, Tehumardi presented a gruesome sight. Hundreds of dead Soviet and German soldiers were scattered all around. The exact chain of events and the number of casualties are unknown to this day.
It is estimated that the enemy lost up to 500 men.
1. Register of Cultural Monuments of the National Heritage Board. Military heritage. https://www.register.muinas.ee
2. Vendel, Fred. Autumn 1944. Battles on the West Estonian islands and in Sõrve. Tallinn, 2020.
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Monument to the Night Battle of Tehumardi
At 8 o'clock on the evening of 8 October 1944 during World War II, the Red Army clashed with retreating German troops in the village of Tehumardi in Sõrve. The battle took place at the 18 km mark on the Kuressaare-Sääre road.
A monument was unveiled nearby in 1966, when a Red Army cemetery was also opened in memory of the confrontation. The 21-metre monument depicts a concrete sword, its cross-guard adorned with the faces of soldiers. The cross-guard bears an inscription reading: "1941-1945. To the Soviet soldiers and defenders and liberators of Saaremaa" in Estonian and Russian. The cemetery in Tehumardi features 90 dolomite tablets engraved with the names of the Red Army soldiers who fell.
A couple of hundred metres from the cemetery along the road towards Sõrve, a large granite monument appears on the right-hand side of the road. It was unveiled on 15 July 2012 and placed at the approximate site of the battle. The monument bears a tablet reading: "Here, on 8 October 1944, the Night Battle of Tehumardi broke out."
The cemetery in Tehumardi has been removed in 2024, but the memorial pillar remains, albeit with some of the text partially obscured.
In my youth (I am 67 now) I knew a participant of that battle Nikolai (everyone called him Kolya) Rosmann. Sometimes Kolya recalled this massacre (according to Kolya, you can’t call it anything else) when he was drunk. They cut and beat the enemy in pitch darkness, identifying him by touch, by his hair, if he had a bald head, then he was one of us, if he had a haircut, then he was a German, take that! The battlefield was filled with shouts and curses in Estonian and German, groans of the wounded, shooting, but mostly they fought hand-to-hand. The Estonians won. Kolya also recalled such little things as how in the darkness his hand accidentally fell into a German’s coat pocket, and there was a harmonica there, and we grappled with this German, I beat him. Kolya did not specify how exactly he did it.