Battle of Kiev (1941)
| First Battle of Kiev | |||||||||
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| Part of Operation Barbarossa on the Eastern Front of World War II | |||||||||
 The eastern front at the time of the Battle of Kiev |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Germany
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 Soviet Union
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
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Fedor von Bock Gerd von Rundstedt Heinz Guderian
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Semyon Budyonny (Removed from duty on 13 September.) Semyon Timoshenko Mikhail Kirponos †
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| Strength | |||||||||
| 500,000 | 627,000 | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
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Total: 128,670 Killed: 26,856 Wounded: 96,796 Prisoners or Missing: 5,008 |
Total: 700,544 Killed, captured or missing: 616,304 Wounded: 84,240 Destroyed: 411 tanks and SPGs, 343 aircraft |
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The First Battle of Kiev was the German name for the operation that resulted in a very large encirclement of Soviet troops in the vicinity of Kiev during World War II. This encirclement is considered the largest encirclement in the history of warfare (by number of troops). The operation ran from 7 August to 26 September 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. In Soviet military history, it is referred to as the Kiev Strategic Defensive Operation, with somewhat different dating of 7 July – 26 September 1941.
Much of the Southwestern Front of the Red Army (Mikhail Kirponos) was encircled but small groups of Red Army troops managed to escape the cauldron, days after the German pincers met east of the city, including the headquarters of Marshal Semyon Budyonny, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and Commissar Nikita Khrushchev. Kirponos was trapped behind German lines and killed while trying to break out.
The battle was an unprecedented defeat for the Red Army, exceeding even the Battle of Białystok–Minsk of June–July 1941. The encirclement trapped 452,700 soldiers, 2,642 guns and mortars and 64 tanks, of which scarcely 15,000 escaped from the encirclement by 2 October. The Southwestern Front suffered 700,544 casualties, including 616,304 killed, captured or missing during the battle. The 5th, 37th, 26th, 21st and the 38th armies, consisting of 43 divisions, were almost annihilated and the 40th Army suffered many losses. Like the Western Front before it, the Southwestern Front had to be recreated almost from scratch.
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