The siege of Leningrad begins

On 8 September 1941 the German 20th Motorised Division entered Shlisselburg (Schlüsselburg), an old town where the Neva flows out of Lake Ladoga. The narrow strip of land between the Neva and the lake, Leningrad’s last overland route into the interior of the country, was now in German hands. The second-largest city of the Soviet Union, with more than two and a half million civilians, had been surrounded: from the south and east by Army Group North under Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb, and from the north by the Finnish army on the Karelian Isthmus. From then on it was linked to the rest of the country only by the lake and by air. That same evening German bombers set fire to the Badayev warehouses, where part of the city’s food reserves was stored. Russian and Soviet historiography dates the blockade of Leningrad from this day; it lasted until 27 January 1944, or 872 days. The popular phrase “900 days” is a round figure.

Popular chronologies record this event twice. Under 8 September they rightly state that the siege began, from which “it is reasonable to count 900 days”. Earlier, however, under 1 September, they write that “with the help of the Finnish armies in the north, Leningrad is now completely cut off”. That is premature. On 30 August the Germans cut the last railway line at Mga, but until 8 September the city could still be reached by roads along the Neva. The Finns did not attack Leningrad itself. On 31 August Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim halted them on the Karelian Isthmus close to the old frontier of 1939. The Finnish front closed off the city from the north, but it was the Germans, not the Finns, who closed the ring.

The last corridor

By the beginning of September Leningrad’s situation was already desperate. After breaking through the Luga Line in August, German troops stood a few dozen kilometres from the city, at Krasnogvardeysk, as Gatchina was then called, and at Kolpino, while to the east, on the Neva, they had taken Mga and cut the last railway line. On 4 September the first shells of German long-range artillery, firing from the Tosno area, fell on the city. To the west, along the Gulf of Finland, the Soviet 8th Army, driven out of Estonia, was holding out around Oranienbaum, covered by the guns of the warships and the forts of Kronstadt. After its bloody evacuation from Tallinn, the Baltic Fleet lay crowded together at Kronstadt and on the Neva.

The Soviet command was changing at a feverish pace. On 23 August the Leningrad Front was split off from the Northern Front, and at the end of the month the High Command of the North-Western Direction was abolished. On 5 September Marshal Kliment Voroshilov took over command of the Leningrad Front from General Markian Popov, and a member of the front’s military council was the head of the Leningrad party organisation, Andrei Zhdanov. Stalin was increasingly dissatisfied with both. In August he had sharply rebuked them for setting up a separate military council for the defence of Leningrad without his consent, and at the end of the month he sent a commission with Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov to the city to assess the situation on the spot. From 2 September the fresh 54th Army of Marshal Grigory Kulik, directly subordinate to the Stavka, was concentrating on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, east of Mga. It was to retake Mga and keep open the link with the city, but its attack, set for 6 September, never got under way in time.

On the German side, too, there was debate. Since the summer Hitler had been wavering over what to do with Leningrad. In July he had said that the city mattered more to him than Moscow, but in August he turned the tanks of Army Group Centre towards Ukraine, and at the beginning of September he decided to return to the offensive against Moscow. On 5 September the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, noted after a conference with the Führer: “Leningrad. Objective achieved. From now on a secondary theatre of operations.” He underlined at the same time “the exceptional importance of Shlisselburg”. Directive No. 35 of 6 September ordered Army Group North, together with the Finns, to encircle the Soviet forces at Leningrad and take Shlisselburg, so as to hand over most of its mobile troops and air units to Army Group Centre by 15 September at the latest. Leningrad was to be sealed off “at least from the east” and, weather permitting, subjected to a great air attack. The destruction of the waterworks was of particular importance.

Shlisselburg, 8 September

The task of closing the ring fell to XXXIX Motorised Corps under General Rudolf Schmidt, sent in August from Army Group Centre. After taking Mga, its 20th Motorised Division formed two assault groups and on 6 September set off northwards, between the Neva and the marshes south of Lake Ladoga. The 1st NKVD Rifle Division, defending this sector, was thrown back across the Neva. On 7 September the Germans took Sinyavino, and on 8 September, with strong air support, they reached Lake Ladoga and seized Shlisselburg. East of this “corridor” the German 12th Panzer Division and 8th Panzer Division took up positions facing east, against the approaching 54th Army.

They did not take everything, however. On an island at the mouth of the Neva, a few hundred metres from the town, stood the medieval Shlisselburg Fortress, known as Oreshek, for two centuries a political prison of the tsars. A Soviet garrison a few hundred strong held it for some five hundred days, until the blockade was broken in January 1943, under constant shellfire that ruined most of the buildings. Thanks to the fortress the Germans did not cross to the right bank of the Neva, and Soviet vessels could still sail on the western part of the lake. An attempt to retake the town itself with a landing from Lake Ladoga on 25–26 September ended in the destruction of the landing force.

The ring, which together with the suburbs enclosed some 5,000 square kilometres, held four armies of the Leningrad Front (the 8th, 23rd, 42nd and 55th) and almost the entire Baltic Fleet, more than half a million soldiers and sailors in all. According to Russian studies, the city also contained about 2.5 million inhabitants, among them some 400,000 children, with about 340,000 people in the surrounding localities, as well as refugees from the Baltic states and the Leningrad region. Evacuation by rail had been interrupted at the end of August. All rail, road and river links had been severed, as had the telephone and telegraph lines running along the roads. The last link that remained was a short stretch of the western shore of Lake Ladoga, reached from the city by the suburban railway line to Ladozhskoye Ozero station.

The fire at the Badayev warehouses

On the evening of 8 September the Luftwaffe carried out its first large raid on Leningrad itself. According to Russian studies, at around 6.55 p.m. a group of German bombers dropped thousands of incendiary bombs on the southern districts of the city, especially the Moskovsky district. According to Russian tallies, some 180 fires broke out in the city that evening. A second raid, late in the evening, damaged among other things the Moscow Station and the main waterworks.

The best known turned out to be the fire at the Badayev warehouses, a large complex of wooden storehouses beside a railway siding beyond the Novodevichy Cemetery. They burned for several hours, and the column of smoke could be seen across the whole city. According to archival data published later, some 3,000 tonnes of flour and about 2,500 tonnes of sugar were burned there. Some of the stocks were recovered: several hundred tonnes of scorched and soaked flour and melted sugar were collected from the ruins and later processed by the city’s food plants. In the winter hungry inhabitants dug up the sugar-soaked earth and sold it at the market.

In the memory of Leningraders, the fire became the cause of the famine that came a few weeks later. Dmitry Pavlov, the State Defence Committee’s plenipotentiary for Leningrad’s food supply, who flew into the city at the beginning of September, argued after the war, however, that the loss had not been decisive. At the then daily consumption of flour for baking bread, about 2,100 tonnes, the burned stock would have lasted less than a day and a half. An inventory carried out on 10–12 September showed that grain and flour, including the stocks of the army and the fleet, would last about 35 days, cereals 30, meat 33, fats 45 and sugar 60 days. Other researchers note that the stocks burned on 8 September could have given every inhabitant extra bread rations for a couple of weeks during the worst weeks of December 1941, and blame the city authorities for not dispersing the stocks among smaller warehouses. The real cause of the famine, however, was the blockade itself: a city that before the war had received food from the whole country had been cut off from its supplies.

The assault on the suburbs

Leeb did not intend to stop at encirclement. Before his tanks left for Moscow, he wanted to break through the last defence belts and close in on the city so as to have it within artillery range, and perhaps even to take it. He threw into the attack XLI Motorised Corps under General Georg-Hans Reinhardt from General Erich Hoepner’s 4th Panzer Group, the infantry corps of General Georg von Küchler’s 18th Army and the strongest concentration of air power Army Group North ever had at its disposal. Operations on the western flank began on 8 September at Ropsha, and on 9 September the main thrust was launched towards Krasnoye Selo and around Krasnogvardeysk.

The Soviet lines, held by people’s militia divisions and hastily replenished rifle divisions, began to crack. On 11 September the German 1st Panzer Division took the heights at Duderhof, on 12 September the infantry occupied Krasnoye Selo, and on 13 September Krasnogvardeysk. By 15 September the German spearheads had reached the heights at Pulkovo (PL), from which the city could be seen. On 16 September the German 1st Infantry Division reached the Gulf of Finland near Strelna, cutting off the Soviet 8th Army in the west. This created the so-called Oranienbaum bridgehead, which held out until 1944. In the south, on 17 September, the Germans drove the Soviet troops out of Slutsk (today Pavlovsk), and on 18 September they took Pushkin, the former Tsarskoye Selo, with the palaces of the tsars. In the suburb of Uritsk German soldiers reached the terminus of the Leningrad tram line. The front ran a few kilometres from the Kirov Works and a dozen or so from the Winter Palace.

There the offensive ended. In accordance with Directive No. 35, from 15 September the 4th Panzer Group began to withdraw towards Moscow, with its last tanks still supporting the capture of Pushkin. According to the history of the German 6th Panzer Division, which on 14 September stood before Pulkovo, the soldiers were convinced that resistance on the outer ring of fortifications had been broken and could not understand the order to halt the attack. Without tanks and without reserves, Küchler’s infantry could no longer advance. On 18–19 September the front on the southern approaches settled on the line Ligovo–Pulkovo–Kolpino, and until the end of the month there was only local fighting there. To the east, Kulik’s 54th Army attacked towards Mga and Sinyavino from 10 September, but advanced only a few kilometres and failed to break the ring.

Meanwhile the Luftwaffe tried to destroy the Baltic Fleet. On 21–23 September hundreds of German aircraft attacked the ships at Kronstadt and on the Neva. On 23 September bombs from German dive-bombers hit the battleship Marat (formerly the Petropavlovsk) in the harbour at Kronstadt. The explosion of the ammunition in her forward magazine tore off the ship’s bow and she settled on the bottom; more than 300 sailors were killed. A second battleship, the Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya, was damaged, as were cruisers and destroyers. The ships nonetheless survived as floating batteries, and their guns supported the defence of the city until 1944.

Zhukov instead of Voroshilov

In the worst days of September Stalin lost confidence in Voroshilov. According to the memoirs of Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, Voroshilov himself asked in a telephone conversation to be relieved and for the front to be handed to someone younger. On the evening of 11 September General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, who had just completed the counter-offensive at Yelnya, was appointed commander of the Leningrad Front. Different sources give different dates for his arrival by air, from 9 to 13 September. It is most commonly accepted that he flew in on 13 September together with Generals Ivan Fedyuninsky and Mikhail Khozin and took over command on 14 September. Voroshilov returned to Moscow; he was never again given command of a front.

Zhukov arrived in a city prepared for the worst. The more important factories had been mined, and in the People’s Commissariat of the Navy a plan had been drawn up, approved by Stalin by 13 September at the latest, to scuttle the ships of Admiral Vladimir Tributs’s Baltic Fleet should the Germans break into Leningrad. The new commander replaced army and division commanders, brought up anti-aircraft guns to fire over open sights at tanks, ordered the anti-tank defences on the Pulkovo axis to be strengthened, and counter-attacked incessantly. The defence was also sustained by terror: unauthorised withdrawal from the line of defence was punishable by shooting. According to documents published years later, in a cipher telegram of 28 September Zhukov ordered the troops to be warned that the families of those who surrendered would be shot. The front held, although Soviet propaganda later attributed this almost exclusively to Zhukov. The German offensive had lost momentum largely because Hitler had taken Leeb’s tanks and aircraft away from him.

Starve rather than storm

The most sinister part of the events of September was the decisions taken at Hitler’s headquarters. The intention to raze Leningrad to the ground predated the blockade itself. On 8 July 1941 Halder recorded in his diary “the Führer’s firm decision to level Moscow and Leningrad to the ground, so that no people remain in them whom we would then have to feed in winter”. This fitted in with the Hunger Plan, drawn up before the war, which assumed that millions of inhabitants of Soviet cities would starve to death so that food from the occupied lands could go to the Reich and the Wehrmacht.

In September this intention was turned into orders. Until the middle of the month the staff of Army Group North was preparing to occupy the city: it had already designated occupation units and a commandant, and on 15 September it approved instructions on the treatment of the population of “Petersburg”. It received a clear position from the high command only around 20 September. A Wehrmacht staff memorandum of 21 September weighed various options and rejected occupying the city, because that would make the Germans responsible for feeding its population. Leningrad was to be tightly sealed off and destroyed by artillery and aircraft, and in the spring whatever remained was to be razed, with the area north of the Neva handed over to the Finns. A directive of the Naval War Staff (Seekriegsleitung), “The Future of the City of Petersburg”, dated 22 September, or in some of the literature 29 September, when it was circulated to the commands, stated bluntly: “The Führer has decided to have the city of Petersburg wiped off the face of the earth.” Requests for surrender were to be rejected, because “in this war for existence we have no interest in preserving even part of the population of this great city”. On 7 October an OKW order signed by General Alfred Jodl reiterated that the surrender of Leningrad was not to be accepted, even if it were offered.

The Finns had their own part in this plan, although the extent of their responsibility remains a matter of dispute to this day, discussed in connection with the Continuation War. At the beginning of September Jodl came to Mannerheim’s headquarters at Mikkeli to persuade the Finns to attack Leningrad or to link up with the Germans east of Lake Ladoga. Mannerheim, with the backing of President Risto Ryti, refused to storm the city. His army nevertheless reached the Svir river east of Lake Ladoga on 7 September and closed off the blockade from the north. According to a report by the German envoy in Helsinki, Ryti told him on 11 September that if Petersburg ceased to exist as a great city, the Neva would be the best frontier on the Karelian Isthmus.

Significance

8 September marked the beginning of the longest and deadliest blockade of a great city in modern times. Its effects were felt immediately: food rationing had been in force since July, on 2 September the bread ration was cut to 600 grams for workers and 300 grams for children and dependants, and on 12 September, after the inventory of stocks, to 500 and 250–300 grams. Supplies could now reach the city only across Lake Ladoga. On 12 September a tug brought the first two barges of grain into Osinovets Bay on the western shore of the lake; one of them was sunk in a storm. Throughout September some 20,000 tonnes of cargo were carried across the lake, a fraction of the city’s needs, and transport aircraft could bring in at most a hundred and some tonnes a day.

The Germans did not take Leningrad, but they decided to starve it and shell it. In the autumn the bread rations were cut three more times, until from 20 November workers received 250 grams and the rest of the population 125 grams of adulterated bread. The winter of 1941–1942, an exceptionally harsh one, brought mass deaths from hunger and cold. An attempt to link up with the Finns on the Svir via Tikhvin ended in a German defeat in December, and from November the ice Road of Life operated across the frozen Lake Ladoga. The number of victims of the blockade remains disputed: Soviet figures presented at Nuremberg spoke of 632,000 dead, while modern estimates by historians range from about 700,000–800,000 to more than a million civilians. The Red Army broke through a land corridor to the city along the shore of Lake Ladoga only on 18 January 1943, retaking Shlisselburg in Operation Iskra, and the blockade was finally lifted on 27 January 1944. The city that Hitler wanted to wipe off the map survived, and its siege became one of the greatest criminal acts of Germany’s war against the population of the Soviet Union and, for Russians, a symbol of the whole war.