One mother killed her baby to feed her other children as rats ate bodies in the streets... by the end of siege, Leningrad had lost two million citizens
Ahuman body lies disregarded on the frozen ground as two starving women scavenge meat from a horse’s carcass during the Siege of Leningrad.
Up to two million people died in the longest and deadliest military blockade in recent history as the city was cut off for more than two years.
One of the most shocking examples of Adolf Hitler’s brutality and sadism, it claimed 10 times as many lives in the Second World War as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
When the Nazi siege ended only 700,000 remained of the city’s previous population of three million.
Some had been evacuated but most had starved to death as the city was cut off from all supplies for 872 days. Others, however, had fallen prey to the most desperate act of the starving – cannibalism.
Today, the city now known as Saint Petersburg is a bustling metropolis where England played its third-place World Cup match against Belgium last year, with few signs of the horror that ended only 75 years ago. When German troops surrounded the city on September 8, 1941, its citizens found themselves trapped, hungry and under constant bombardment.
Taken by surprise by the Nazi blockade, Leningrad only had enough food supplies for less than two months. Within weeks people were already going hungry.
As the weeks became months and winter temperatures dropped to minus 40C, the population was too weak to dig graves for their dead in the hard, frozen ground.
Corpses began to litter the streets – and many of those still alive started to do the unthinkable, and eat the bodies of the dead.
During the siege a special police force was created to combat cannibalism but officers struggled to prevent people eating the dead – or even killing the living for their flesh.
Reports described how one desperate mother smothered her 18-month-old baby to feed her three older children, and a plumber killed his wife to feed his sons and nieces.
About 1,500 people were report- edly arrested for cannibalism. After the siege ended, those believed to have engaged in cannibalism faced criminal charges, and some were sentenced to death.
Starving the city was Hitler’s plan all along, though he had no idea the people would hold out for so long. According to the diaries of his generals and others, Hitler knew the city would be difficult to take in a normal battle and was unwilling to divert manpower and artillery.
So he decided to starve its people until they were too few, and weak, to resist. Experts were asked to calculate how long the city would last. They assured the Fuhrer it would be on its knees in a matter of weeks.
The city’s food stores were destroyed during the first bombings, and supply trucks trying to bring food in were also targeted.
Five Wehrmacht divisions of more 10,000 men each, with 50 tanks and 700 guns and supported by 250 combat planes, bombarded the city and made sure no one and nothing went in or came out.
By November 1941, food rations were 250 grams per day for manual workers and 150 grams for all other civilians – about the weight of three-and-ahalf slices of bread. Bread was mixed with sawdust to make it seem more filling. When a bomb destroyed one food store and sugar melted into the ground, desperate citizens dug up the sweetened earth, mixed it with flour and cooked it.
The Red Army tried to take supplies to the city, sending trucks of food across the frozen lake Ladoga. But they faced aerial bombings by the Germans, and were often blown to pieces before they could make it across.
Recently unearthed diaries kept Cat statue in city by residents describe how the people were soon reduced to skeletons.
Aleksandra Liubovskaia described how men and women had become “so identical”. He wrote: “Everyone is shrivelled, their breasts sunken in, their stomachs enormous, and instead of arms and legs just bones poke out through wrinkles.”
Teenager Berta Zlotnikova wrote: “I am becoming an animal. There is no worse feeling than when all your thoughts are on food.”
There were also accounts of people being murdered for their ration card, and families taking a dead relative to the ration station and pretending he or she was still alive so they did not lose the extra rations.
Those in charge of food supplies, and dishing out the meagre rations, often stole food for themselves – or exchanged it for sexual favours.
Food was not the only basic provision that was in short supply during the devastating siege.
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