Siege of Leningrad: One of the longest and most terrible sieges

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

One of the longest and most terrible sieges in world history claimed the lives of more than a million residents of the second most important city in the Soviet Union.

"The Fuehrer's decision is unshakable to raze Moscow and Leningrad to the ground in order to completely get rid of the population of these cities, which otherwise we will then be forced to feed during the winter …" years, at the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa.

The rapid breakthrough of Army Group North across the Baltic led to the fact that in the summer the enemy came to the approaches to Leningrad. The Finnish army was approaching the city from Karelia.

On September 8, 1941, German troops took the city of Shlisselburg on the shores of Lake Ladoga, thereby closing the blockade ring around Leningrad by land.

In the second largest city of the Soviet Union, blocked on all sides, about half a million Soviet troops, almost all the naval forces of the Baltic Fleet and up to three million civilians were trapped.

However, the attempt to take the city by storm that followed soon failed. Leningrad by mid-September was turned into a real fortress.

On the nearest approaches to it, over 600 km of anti-tank ditches and barbed wire obstacles, 15 thousand pillboxes and bunkers, 22 thousand firing points, 2,300 command and observation posts were created. Directly in Leningrad, 4,600 bomb shelters were organized, capable of accommodating up to 814 thousand people. The entire city center was covered with camouflage nets to protect against enemy aircraft.

The only thread connecting the besieged Leningrad with the "mainland" was the waterway through Lake Ladoga - the so-called "Road of Life". It was along it that the delivery of food and the evacuation of the population went.

Trying to destroy this last communication, the Germans undertook a breakthrough to the Svir River, where they hoped to link up with the Finnish troops. On November 8, Tikhvin was taken and the only railway was cut, along which goods for Leningrad were delivered to the eastern shore of Lake Ladoga. This led to a decrease in the already meager rations for the city's residents. However, thanks to the stubborn resistance of the Red Army, the enemy's plans did not come true - Tikhvin was recaptured a month later.

However, the limited supply by air and through Lake Ladoga could not cover the needs of such a large metropolis. Soldiers on the front line received 500 grams of bread a day, workers - up to 375 grams, and dependents and children - only 125 grams each.

With the onset of the harsh winter of 1941-1942. in Leningrad, a mass famine began. “Everything was eaten: leather belts and soles, not a single cat or dog remained in the city, not to mention pigeons and crows. There was no electricity, hungry, exhausted people went to the Neva to get water, falling and dying on the way. The bodies have already ceased to be removed, they were simply covered with snow. People died at home with whole families, whole apartments,”Yevgeny Aleshin recalled.

Some didn't stop at animals and birds. The NKVD authorities recorded more than 1,700 cases of cannibalism. There were even more unofficial ones.

The corpses were stolen from the morgue, cemeteries, or taken directly from the streets. There were also murders of living people. From the certificate of the Directorate of the NKVD for the Leningrad Region dated December 26, 1941: “December 21 Vorobyov V. F. 18 years old, unemployed, killed his grandmother Maksimova 68 years old with an ax. The corpse was cut into pieces, liver and lungs, boiled and ate. A search of the apartment found parts of the corpse. Vorobyov testified that he had committed a murder motivated by hunger. Vorobyov was recognized as sane by the expert examination."

In the spring of 1942, Leningrad began to gradually come to its senses after the winter nightmare experienced: subsidiary farms were created in the unoccupied suburbs to supply the townspeople with vegetables, food improved, mortality decreased, and public transport partially started working.

An important and inspiring event was the arrival of a partisan convoy from the occupied Novgorod and Pskov regions to the city. Hundreds of kilometers partisans secretly marched through the rear of the German armies in order to break through the front line to Leningrad on March 29. On 223 carts, residents of the city were brought 56 tons of flour, grain, meat, peas, honey and butter.

The Red Army did not stop trying to break through to the city from the very first days of the blockade. However, all four major offensive operations carried out in 1941-1942 ended in failure: there was not enough people, no resources, no combat experience. “We attacked on September 3-4 from the Chernaya Rechka on Kelkolovo,” Chipyshev, deputy commander of the 939th regiment, who took part in the 1942 Sinyavino operation, recalled, “without artillery support.

The shells sent for the divisional guns did not fit our 76-mm guns. There were no pomegranates. The machine guns of the German bunkers remained unsuppressed, and the infantry suffered huge losses. Nevertheless, for the enemy, these attacks did not go unnoticed: the constant pressure of the Soviet troops greatly exhausted the German Army Group North, depriving it of room for maneuver.

After the defeat of the German troops at Stalingrad, the initiative in the war began to gradually pass to the Red Army. On January 12, 1943, the Soviet command launched the Iskra offensive operation, which finally ended in success. Soviet troops liberated the city of Shlisselburg and cleared the southern coast of Lake Ladoga, restoring Leningrad's land communications with the "mainland".

“It seems that on January 19, 1943, I was about to go to bed, at eleven o'clock I heard that the radio seemed to start talking,” nurse Ninel Karpenok recalled: “I came closer, I look, yes, they say:“Listen to the notification”. Let's listen. And suddenly they began to say that they had broken the blockade. Wow! We jumped out here. We had a communal apartment, four rooms. And we all jumped out, screamed, wept. Everyone was so happy: they broke through the blockade!"

A year later, during Operation January Thunder, Soviet troops, having thrown the enemy 100 km away from Leningrad, finally removed any threat to the city. January 27 was officially declared the day of lifting the blockade, which was marked by 24 salvoes from 324 guns. During the 872 days that it lasted, from hunger, cold, artillery shelling and air raids, according to various estimates, from 650 thousand to one and a half million Leningraders died.