CITY UNDER SIEGE LENINGRAD
In September 1941, a nearly 900-day siege of the secondlargest Soviet city began as Hitler sought to “wipe it from the face of the Earth”
On 22 June 1941, Sepp de Giampietro was waiting in the darkness of an East Prussian forest: “We checked our weapons and ammunition, one last warm meal was being dished out… we ate it without really tasting it, our throats were so tight… then all of a sudden fire erupted everywhere… the clock read 0305hrs.” Barbarossa – the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – had begun.
In the south the Germans aimed to capture Ukraine – the breadbasket of the Soviet
Union – in the centre the targets were Belarus and then Moscow, and it was Army Group North’s objective to take Leningrad. The man tasked with capturing the city was a devout Bavarian Catholic, Wilhelm von Leeb, and to do it he commanded the infantrymen of 16th and 18th Armies and the Panzers of Erich
Hoepner’s Panzergruppe 4. Charging forward at breathtaking pace, the Panzers surged through the Soviet-occupied Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They were helped at every turn by de Giampietro and his fellow Brandenburger commandos, who would don
Red Army uniforms to hoodwink the Soviets and seize key bridges intact for the armour to drive
“AFTER THE DEFEAT OF SOVIET RUSSIA THERE WILL NOT BE THE SLIGHTEST REASON FOR THE FUTURE EXISTENCE OF THIS LARGE CITY”
over. In a little over a fortnight the Germans had breached the Stalin Line fortifications at Pskov, and a week later they vaulted over the River Luga to establish a bridgehead. Astonishingly, the Germans had advanced nearly 1,000km since the start of the invasion and Leningrad was just 97km away.
With panic in the air the Communist authorities acted. Over half-a-million of Leningrad’s almost four million civilian inhabitants – men, women and children – were marched out of the city to build defensive rings around it. In an astonishing feat of mass labour they dug nearly 1,000km of earthworks and 640km of anti-tank ditches, laid almost as much barbed wire and built 5,000 pillboxes.
On Monday 8 September the Germans captured Schlisselburg – Leningrad was now cut off. With the Panzers diverted south to
support the drive on Moscow, Dr Werner Koeppen – a top Nazi official – wrote that: “Leningrad is to be shut in, shot to pieces, and starved out.” That same Monday, the Luftwaffe bombed the warehouse district of Badaev, destroying the city’s food reserves – molten sugar poured into the river like lava.
Three days later General Georgi Zhukov flew into the city to take charge, and the surrounding Germans began to build a warren of trenches, bunkers and observation posts as they settled down to a siege in First World War conditions. Inside the city Vera Inber tried to use her phone only for the operator to tell her: “The telephone is disconnected until the end of the war.” At the same time the daily bread ration was reduced to 500 grams a day for factory workers, 300 for office staff and 250 for dependents. Elena Skrjabina, a young mother, confided to her diary that: “Life had been reduced to one thing – the hunt for food.”
The shelling began in earnest on 17 September with an opening barrage that lasted 18 hours and 33 minutes. From then onwards it settled into a routine: 8am to 9am, then 11am to 12 noon, then from 5pm to 6pm, and from 8pm to 10pm. A German POW later testified at the Nuremberg tribunal: “This way the shelling would kill as many people as possible.” The Luftwaffe took a hand as well with frequent bombing raids. One such attack wrecked 74 Marat Street. “Vera Potekhina was found under the wreckage,” said a witness. “Screaming for help and her father – [who was] at the scene