The Vilnius offensive () occurred as part of the third phase of Operation Bagration, the strategic summer offensive by the Soviet Red Army against the German Wehrmacht in June and July 1944. It lasted from 5 July to 13 July 1944 and ended with a Soviet victory. During the offensive, Soviet forces encircled and captured the city of Vilnius; this phase is sometimes referred to as the Battle of Vilnius. However, some three thousand German soldiers of the encircled garrison managed to break out, including their commander, Reiner Stahel. Prelude During the interwar, the Vilnius Region was disputed between the Second Polish Republic and Lithuania. During the invasion of Poland, the city was seized by the Soviet Union and later transferred to Lithuania under the terms of the Soviet–Lithuanian Mutual Assistance Treaty. It was captured by the Germans in June 1941. From 23 June 1944, the Red Army conducted a strategic offensive operation under the code-name Operation Bagration, expelling the Wehrmacht's Army Group Centre from Belarus, and driving towards the Polish border and the Baltic Sea coast. By the beginning of July, the front line had been torn open at the seam of German Army Group Centre and Army Group North, roughly on a line from Vitebsk to Vilnius. While a large part of the Soviet force was employed to reduce the German pocket east of Minsk, following the Minsk offensive, the Soviet High Command decided to exploit the situation along the breach to the north, by turning mobile formations towards the major traffic centre of Vilnius, in eastern Lithuania. For the German High Command, it became imperative to hold Vilnius, because without it would become almost impossible to re-establish a sustainable connection between the two German army groups, and to hold the Red Army off outside East Prussia and away from the Baltic Sea shores. Stavka issued Order No. 220126 to the 3rd Belorussian Front on 4 July, which required them to attack towards Maladzyechna and Vilnius, capturing the latter no later than 10 July, and to force crossings of the Neman. The 33rd Army was transferred from the 2nd Belorussian Front to assist these objectives. The German forces were still in comparative disarray after the Minsk offensive. Remnants of the 4th Army that had escaped the encirclement, and units of the 5th Panzer Division (reorganised into an ad hoc Kampfgruppe, later redesignated XXXIX Panzer Corps, under General Dietrich