On this day, 81 years ago on August 12th 1943, Adolf Hitler ordered the southern portion of the defensive Panther-Wotan Line (Ostwall) to be set up along the Dnieper River in Ukraine, and that the city of Kharkov in Ukraine was to be held at all costs.
The confidence in the effectiveness of the line was poor in Army Group North, with its commander, Generalfeldmarschall Georg von Küchler, refusing to refer to the line by the “Panther Line” name for fear that it would instill false hope by his troops in its strength.
The ‘Panther-Stellung’ was a German strategic defense line in the Eastern Front, planned to run from Narva on the Gulf of Finland in the north to the Sea of Azov near Melitopol in the south via Lake Peipus, the Sozh River, Gomel, the Dnieper River and Zaporozhye (1943/1944).
Otherwise known as the ‘Ostwall’, and thus the counterpart to the ‘Westwall’ in western Germany, this major strategic defense line was associated with the ‘Panther-Wotan-Stellung’, and was proposed in the middle of 1943 by Generaloberst Kurt Zeitzler, Chief of the General Staff of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), in the aftermath of ‘Zitadelle’, whose failure clearly signaled that Germany had lost the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front.
Adolf Hitler was at first opposed to the construction of such a line, on the grounds that the materials and construction manpower were needed for the ‘Westwall’, and that the availability of defense works in their rear would induce German commanders on the Eastern Front to fall back rather than hold strategic grounds. Then as something of the reality of the reality of the campaign on the Eastern Front impinged on him, the Führer saw the possibility of repeating the success in the the Great War of the Hindenburg Line on the Western Front, which allowed the Germans to shorten their front and release many formations for operations elsewhere.
In the current situation, the German Army was no longer able to launch any strategic, and therefore decisive, offensive against the Red Army, so instead, the Führer veered toward the concept of a forced, but conclusive draw with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R) before the Allied armies in the west became a major threat.
In the north, centre, and south, responsibility for the task was entrusted respectively to Generalfeldmarschall Georg von Küchler’s Heeresgruppe Nord, Generalfeldmarschall Hans-Günther von Kluge’s Heeresgruppe Mitte, and a combination of Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Manstein’s Heeresgruppe Süd and Generalfeldmarschall Ewald von Kleist’s Heeresgruppe A.
All of these formations continued to use very significant numbers of compulsory laborers as a supplement to the German armies’ own engineers and rear-echelon troops.
