The Germans before Leningrad

In the second half of August 1941 the war arrived at the gates of Leningrad. Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North, which in July had been held up for several weeks on the Luga river, resumed its offensive on 8 August and within two weeks shattered the defensive line that tens of thousands of the city’s inhabitants had been building since June. On 16 August the Germans took Novgorod, on 17 August Kingisepp and Narva, and on 20 August Chudovo on the Moscow–Leningrad main railway line. By around 22 August their spearheads stood a few dozen kilometres from the city, on the approaches to Krasnogvardeysk, as Gatchina was then called. In Leningrad itself the inhabitants were still digging anti-tank ditches and building shelters, while the city authorities and the military command feverishly prepared its defence. On 23 August the Leningrad Front was created.

For the end of the month, war chronologies record “the first signs of the siege”. And indeed, on 30–31 August a German motorised division took Mga railway station south-east of Leningrad and cut the last railway line linking the city with the rest of the country. The city was not completely cut off by land, however, until 8 September, when the Germans reached Lake Ladoga. Under 22 August the same chronologies say that the Germans were “approaching” Leningrad and that its inhabitants were “still improvising fortifications”. This description is accurate; it need only be added that the Luga Line was broken on 8–20 August and that on 22 August the Red Army began withdrawing from the town of Luga itself, which the Germans had been unable to take by frontal assault for a whole month.

Plans for a new offensive

After the counter-stroke at Soltsy in mid-July, Leeb halted the advance of his armoured forces until the infantry of the 16th and 18th Armies arrived. The date for resuming the offensive was postponed several times, because the infantry moved slowly and part of the force was still fighting in Estonia. In Directive No. 34 of 30 July Adolf Hitler confirmed that the main task in the north was to encircle Leningrad and link up with the Finns. Leeb reckoned that he needed some 35 divisions for all his tasks; he had 26.

Army Group North divided its forces into three groupings. On the left wing General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s XLI Motorised Corps, with three panzer divisions, was to strike from the July bridgeheads on the lower Luga near Kingisepp towards Krasnogvardeysk and Leningrad, bypassing the heavily fortified area around Luga itself. In the centre Erich von Manstein’s LVI Corps, with the SS Polizei Division, was to pin down the defenders on the Pskov–Luga–Leningrad highway. On the right wing Group Shimsk – I and XXVIII Army Corps – was to attack north of Lake Ilmen towards Novgorod and Chudovo in order to cut Leningrad off from Moscow. South of Lake Ilmen General Ernst Busch’s 16th Army was advancing on Staraya Russa, while in Estonia General Georg von Küchler’s 18th Army was to take Tallinn and the coast.

On the Soviet side the approaches to the city were covered by the troops of General Markian Popov’s Northern Front and General Pyotr Sobennikov’s North-Western Front, both subordinated to the High Command of the North-Western Direction under Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. In July the Luga Line had been divided into three sectors – Kingisepp, Luga and Eastern – the last of which became the 48th Army at the beginning of August. It was held by divisions that had been shattered in the Baltic states and hastily brought back up to strength, by military school cadets, Baltic Fleet sailors and Leningrad people’s militia (opolchenie) divisions made up of workers, students and office clerks, often without training or enough weapons.

The breaking of the Luga Line

The offensive began on 8 August from the bridgeheads near Kingisepp, in torrential rain that made air support impossible. On the first day the defenders, among them the 2nd People’s Militia Division and cadets of the Leningrad infantry school, held the Germans. On 9 August, however, the 1st Panzer Division broke through the front and emerged in the rear of the Soviet forces, and Reinhardt’s corps turned east. On 14 August it cut the Krasnogvardeysk–Kingisepp railway, and around 21 August it halted south-west of Krasnogvardeysk, facing north for fear of a counter-attack from the direction of the city. On the left wing the German infantry took Kingisepp on 17 August, and the same day the Red Army finally abandoned Narva, whose fate had already been sealed when the 18th Army reached the Gulf of Finland on 7 August. The Soviet 8th Army, cut off from the main forces, fell back along the coast towards Kronstadt, where in September it held on to the Oranienbaum bridgehead.

The right wing advanced fastest. On 10 August, when the rain stopped, Group Shimsk, supported by the dive-bombers of VIII Air Corps, broke through the defences of the 48th Army, and on 11 August it took Shimsk on Lake Ilmen. On 13 August the 48th Army’s front collapsed. On 15 August the German infantry reached the outskirts of Novgorod, and early on the morning of 16 August a regiment of the 126th Infantry Division occupied the medieval kremlin. Fighting for the eastern part of the city, across the Volkhov, went on for several more days. After taking Novgorod, I Corps turned north, and on 20 August the 21st Infantry Division captured Chudovo, cutting the Leningrad–Moscow main line, the city’s most important link with the capital.

In the centre Manstein’s corps failed to break through the fortifications in front of the town of Luga. On 15 August it broke off its attack, and its headquarters, together with its best division, the 3rd Motorised, was hurriedly transferred to Staraya Russa. There, on 12 August, the fresh Soviet 34th Army had struck the exposed flank of X Army Corps, advanced several dozen kilometres and cut the Staraya Russa–Dno railway. It was a counter-stroke similar to the one at Soltsy, and it ended similarly for the Red Army: on 19 August Manstein, reinforced by the SS Totenkopf Division, struck the flank of the 34th Army, which by 25 August had fallen back behind the Lovat river, losing, according to German figures, more than 18,000 prisoners. For several days, however, it drew part of the German mobile forces away from Leningrad.

The defenders of Luga held out longer than they had any chance of surviving. When the Germans had bypassed them on both sides, the withdrawal from the town began on 22 August, and on 24 August the SS Polizei Division took Luga after heavy fighting with Soviet rearguards. Several Soviet divisions, including two people’s militia divisions, were trapped in a pocket in the forests north of the town. Some of the men broke out to their own lines in small groups; the rest had been killed or captured by mid-September.

Leningrad prepares to defend itself

In the city, whose pre-war population exceeded three million, preparations had been under way since the first days of the war. From 29 June there was a general obligation to work on the fortifications: men aged 16 to 50 and women aged 16 to 45 who were employed dug for three hours after work, and those without work for eight hours a day. According to Soviet figures, some 570 pillboxes and more than 90 kilometres of anti-tank ditches were built along the Luga Line, on a front of about 175 kilometres. In August, as that line was falling, women, young people and older men were already digging further belts of fortifications, from Peterhof through Krasnogvardeysk to Kolpino, and then directly on the outskirts and in the city itself. By various estimates, more than a million people in all worked on the fortifications in the summer of 1941. Some groups of diggers came under fire from German artillery and aircraft, and in the first days after the front was broken it sometimes happened that German spearheads reached places where ditches were still being dug.

On 20 August Voroshilov and Andrei Zhdanov, First Secretary of the Party in Leningrad and a member of the military council of the North-Western Direction, assembled the city’s party activists and announced that the enemy was at the gates. That day the local authorities set up a Military Council for the Defence of Leningrad, which was to direct the building of fortifications, the military training of the population and the production of weapons, and to form some 150 workers’ battalions of 600 men each. On 21 August the newspapers published an appeal to all inhabitants from Voroshilov, Zhdanov and the chairman of the city council, Pyotr Popkov, calling on them to defend the city. Joseph Stalin reacted to these initiatives with anger. In a teleprinter conversation with Leningrad on 22 August he reproached the two leaders for having set up the council without the consent of the State Defence Committee and for not having joined it themselves. According to some accounts, he also criticised the idea of having the volunteers themselves elect the commanders of the workers’ battalions. On 24 August Voroshilov took over as chairman of the council, and Zhdanov became a member. The council was short-lived, and its tasks were taken over by the front’s military council.

Moscow reorganised the command structure. On 23 August a directive of the Headquarters (the Stavka) split the Northern Front, which stretched from the Barents Sea to Leningrad, into the Karelian Front and the Leningrad Front. General Popov became commander of the latter, with the 8th, 23rd and 48th Armies, and Zhdanov a member of its military council. Sobennikov was replaced at the head of the North-Western Front by General Pavel Kurochkin. On 26 August a State Defence Committee commission consisting of Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov and Alexei Kosygin arrived in the city to assess the situation and speed up the evacuation. On 27 August the High Command of the North-Western Direction was abolished and the fronts were placed directly under the Stavka. Voroshilov, whom Stalin trusted less and less, remained in Leningrad and at the beginning of September took command of the Leningrad Front.

The evacuation of the population went slowly. Many families did not want to leave their homes, and some children had been sent in June and July to villages in the Leningrad region – straight into the path of the German advance – from where they had to be brought back. According to Russian figures, between 29 June and 27 August just under 490,000 Leningraders left the city, including about 220,000 children, along with some 150,000 refugees from the Baltic states and Karelia. On 27 August evacuation by rail became impossible. According to the most frequently cited estimates, more than two and a half million civilians remained in the city, including some 400,000 children.

The last railway: Mga

After taking Chudovo the Germans moved north-west along the main line, straight towards Leningrad. Hitler, who on 12 August had decided to strengthen the drive on Leningrad at the expense of the Moscow axis, handed Leeb General Rudolf Schmidt’s XXXIX Motorised Corps from Army Group Centre. Its divisions began entering the fighting from 24 August. On 25 August the German 20th Motorised Division took Lyuban station, on 28 August the infantry entered Tosno, and near Sluditsa station the troops of Panzer Group 4 linked up with the 16th Army to form a continuous front south of Leningrad. At Krasnogvardeysk and Kolpino the Red Army managed to halt the advance.

On 30 August German units reached the Neva near the villages of Ivanovskoye and Otradnoye, and the 20th Motorised Division, throwing back a Soviet mountain rifle brigade, took Mga station on the railway running east from Leningrad via Volkhovstroy. Russian studies give 30 or 31 August as the date Mga fell. It was the last railway linking Leningrad with the rest of the country. Heavy fighting for Mga continued, involving the hastily transferred 1st NKVD Division, and the station changed hands, but at the beginning of September it finally remained in German hands. On the same day, 30 August, power supplies from the hydroelectric stations on the Volkhov and the Svir ceased. From then on Leningrad could be reached only by road and across the narrow strip of land between the Neva and Lake Ladoga.

The Finns on the Karelian Isthmus

From the north came the Finns, who since the end of June had been waging a war against the USSR that they called the Continuation War. On the Karelian Isthmus II Corps attacked on 31 July, and on 22 August IV Corps advanced on Viipuri. The weakened Soviet 23rd Army, some of whose divisions had been handed over to the German front, was unable to hold its line, and on 29 August the Finns entered Viipuri (Vyborg). On 31 August Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim halted the advance on the Isthmus close to the old 1939 border – in places beyond it – some 30 kilometres from the centre of Leningrad. He refused to take part in the assault on the city that the Germans were pressing for, but the Finns’ approach to the old border tied down considerable Soviet forces on the northern approaches.

Significance

The August offensive brought Army Group North a great success. In three weeks the Germans broke through a line on which hundreds of thousands of people had been working since June, took Novgorod, cut both main railway lines linking Leningrad with the rest of the country and stood a few dozen kilometres from the city. At the beginning of September Leeb and the Army High Command expected the Red Army to abandon Leningrad. According to figures compiled by the Russian historian Grigori Krivosheev, in the whole defence of the approaches to Leningrad between 10 July and 30 September 1941 the Red Army and the Baltic Fleet lost some 214,000 killed, missing and captured, and some 131,000 wounded and sick.

The breakthrough came at a price, however. Army Group North was stretched along an enormous front from the Gulf of Finland to Lake Seliger, the counter-strokes at Soltsy and Staraya Russa had cost it weeks, and the defenders of Luga and Krasnogvardeysk had given Leningrad time to fortify its nearer approaches. On 8 September 1941 the German 20th Motorised Division took Shlisselburg on Lake Ladoga and cut the city off from the rest of the country by land. The siege of Leningrad began; it lasted until January 1944 and, according to various estimates, cost the lives of between some 650,000 and more than a million inhabitants. The assault on the city itself stalled in mid-September on the Pulkovo Heights, Voroshilov was replaced by General Georgy Zhukov, and Hitler, instead of storming Leningrad, decided to starve it into submission by blockade and bombardment. Leeb’s armoured formations soon left for the Moscow axis, and the autumn attempt to link up with the Finns on the Svir via Tikhvin ended in failure in December.