Kachowka Dam already blown up by Soviet Union and Germans

Destroyed barrier
The Kakhovka Dam has already been blown up twice: by the Soviet Union and the Germans

What Ukraine feared back in the fall has now happened: the huge Kakhovka dam has been destroyed. It is not the first time that the barrage has fallen victim to a war. It was already blown up in 1941 and 1943.

Concern about the collapse of the dam was already high last fall. Rumors spread on Russian television in October that Ukrainian soldiers and collaborators would soon blow up the Kakhovka dam near Kherson. Ukrainians, in turn, feared that Russia might carry out the same false flag operation. “Unfortunately, it is very likely that Russia will destroy the dam,” said Yuri Sobolevskyj of the Kherson regional council at the time.

18 cubic kilometers of water flow from Kachowka dam

He should have been right. Now, nine months later, the dam has been destroyed and 18 cubic kilometers of water are leaking out. The exact consequences are not yet foreseeable.

Yuri Sobolevskyj’s fears could have been fueled by the fact that the dam had already been blown up by the Russians: on August 18, 1941 – at that time it was the Soviet secret service NKDW who had flooded the area because of the advancing German Wehrmacht. With thousands upon thousands of flood victims and massive damage to towns and industrial plants. Under Stalin’s terror regime, no one was interested in the exact number of dead, it was probably at least 20,000.

Almost exactly two months earlier, Adolf Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union and extended World War II further east. The leadership in Moscow was completely surprised because they believed that the non-aggression pact would put the Germans in peace for the time being. The attack hit the Soviet army unprepared and the Wehrmacht made correspondingly rapid progress in the first few weeks.

20 tons of explosives at the dam

Even then, a gigantic wall dammed the river Dnipro between Zaporizhia and Cherson. The idea for this dates back to the end of the 19th century and was completed in 1932 – also with the help of the USA. The dam provided power for the vital metal industry, so it was clear to the defenders that this type of infrastructure should not fall into the hands of the German Panzer Corps coming from the north.

The dam wall was equipped with an estimated 20 tons of explosives and blown up on August 18 at around eight in the evening. The explosion tore a hole almost 200 meters long and 20 meters wide in the barrier. The masses of water then gushed down the Dnipro for hours, taking countless people with them. Nobody had warned them about the planned demolition. Many businesses on the river, such as a shipyard, were also destroyed.

Stalin’s “scorched earth” course could only delay the advance of the Wehrmacht. It took around six weeks for the Germans to gain control of the dam. By the end of 1942 they had patched up the gigantic hole and boosted electricity production. Barely a year later, the Red Army struck back and the occupiers had to retreat. And what did they do? They also blew up parts of the structure.

But by the early 1950s, the power station at the dam was already supplying electricity again. Until the morning of June 6, 2023.

Sources: DPA, AFP, Radio FreeEurope, Diorama – conflict scenes in Eastern Europe, Lexicon of Ukraine“The time“