Under heavy pressure on its flanks, the German army (Heer) evacuated the salient by 8 September 1941, leaving behind a devastated and depopulated region.

The town of Yelnya was located 82 km south-east of Smolensk situated near heights deemed strategic by General Heinz Guderian, commander of the 2nd Panzer Group, as the springboard for further offensive operations towards Moscow.

The two formations were to destroy the German forces at Yelnya and advance across the Desna River to retake Roslavl, which had been lost to the 2nd Panzer Group in early August.

[6] The first phase of the operation began at the end of the first week in August; the initial attack was a failure and was called off within 48 hours.

[6] On September 3, under the threat of an encirclement, the German forces started retreating from the salient while maintaining resistance on the flanks.

The town of the 15,000 inhabitants had been completely destroyed, and nearly all able bodied men and women had been formed into forced labor battalions and driven to the German rear.

The witnesses described to Werth how, on the night before the Wehrmacht pulled out of the town, they had been locked into the church and observed German soldiers looting houses and systematically setting each on fire.

[7] Werth described the countryside of the "Yelnya salient" (territory that had been held by the Wehrmacht) as "completely devastated", with "every village and every town destroyed, and the few surviving civilians living in cellars and dugouts".

In a lecture to the US Army Heritage and Education Center, Glantz asserted that in the run up to the Battle of Moscow, the Wehrmacht would not have made nearly as much progress as they did if the Stavka had not suffered losses in unsuccessful counter-offensives east of Smolensk.

[9] At the same time, in the 2015 edition of When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (co-written by Glantz and Jonathan House), the authors state that while "Western Front's losses undermined its ability to contain a future German offensive (...), the damage it did to Bock's army group [contributed to the later] German collapse at the gates of Moscow".

He nonetheless highlights the operation's impact on the Soviet morale, noting (emphasis in the original):[12] Here was not only, as it were, the first victory of the Red Army over the Germans; here was also the first piece of territory —perhaps only 100 to 150 square miles [260 to 390 km2]— in the whole of Europe reconquered from Hitler's Wehrmacht.