Siege of Leningrad
The Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days. From September 1941 to January 1944, the Soviet Union's second largest city was encircled by German and Finnish forces, cut off from food, fuel, and rescue. A prewar population of 3.2 million people found themselves trapped inside a ring of steel and artillery. By the time the blockade was fully broken, an estimated 1.5 million people had died. Historians now rank it as the most lethal siege in recorded history, and some have gone further, calling it genocide.
How did a city that size survive for nearly three years? Why did Hitler choose starvation over assault? And what did the people of Leningrad endure in the winter months when bread rations fell to 125 grams a day, more than half of it sawdust?
On the 29th of September 1941, Army Group North received a directive from German High Command that left nothing ambiguous. "After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban center," it read. Requests for surrender were to be rejected. The population's relocation and feeding was declared not Germany's problem. Hitler had already ordered on the 6th of August that Leningrad was his first priority, ahead of the Donetsk Basin and even Moscow.
Leningrad was not simply a military target. In 1939 the city accounted for 11% of all Soviet industrial output. It was the former capital of Russia, the cradle of the Bolshevik revolution, and the main base of the Soviet Baltic Fleet. Hitler reportedly was so confident of a quick victory that he had invitations printed for a celebration dinner at the city's Hotel Astoria. His ultimate plan, according to the source, was to raze the city entirely and hand the territory north of the Neva River to Finland.
On the 21st of September 1941, German High Command set out in writing the logic of what followed. Occupying Leningrad was ruled out because it would make Germany responsible for feeding its population. The resolution was siege and bombardment, with the city to be demolished afterward. On the 7th of October, Hitler sent a further directive, signed by Alfred Jodl, reminding Army Group North not to accept capitulation under any circumstances.
Army Group North, under Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, was already overstretched by early August 1941. Leeb calculated he needed 35 divisions for all his tasks but had only 26. Still, the advance continued. The army group reached Chudovo on the 20th of August, severing the rail link between Leningrad and Moscow. Tallinn fell on the 28th of August. The last rail connection to the city was cut on the 30th of August, when German forces reached the Neva River.
On the 8th of September, German troops reached Lake Ladoga at Shlisselburg, completing the land encirclement. That same day, bombing triggered 178 fires across the city. A narrow corridor between the lake and Leningrad remained the only gap in the ring, but no wheeled vehicle could use it safely under fire. On the 12th of September, a German bomb destroyed the Badajevski General Store, the city's largest food depot.
By the 15th of September, Leningrad's front commander had to give up the 4th Panzer Group, which was transferred west to support the drive toward Moscow. Leeb had to accept that his forces likely could not take the city by storm. He settled for waiting it out. Finnish forces, meanwhile, had advanced to within 20 km of the northern suburbs before their commander, Marshal Mannerheim, halted the advance on the 31st of August at the 1939 border, rejecting German pressure to push further south toward the city.
Lake Ladoga, the largest lake in Europe, became the only thread connecting Leningrad to the outside world. In the warmer months, barges and small craft crossed its southern reaches under near-constant German bombardment. When winter arrived, engineers built a vehicle road directly across the ice, a route the city came to call the Road of Life. Supplies were driven to the village of Osinovets, then transferred over 45 km by a small suburban railway into the city. The route was fully isolated until the 20th of November 1941, when the ice road became operational for the first time.
Drivers risked sinking through ice broken by German shelling. Vehicles stalled in deep snow. Despite all of this, the road brought food and military supplies in and carried out civilians and wounded soldiers. Between the 29th of June 1941 and the 31st of March 1943, a total of 1,743,129 people, including 414,148 children, were evacuated through this corridor and other means, according to Marshal Zhukov. Many were sent to the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Many did not survive the journey.
From November 1941 to February 1942, the civilian ration in Leningrad fell to 125 grams of bread per day. Between 50 and 60 percent of that bread consisted of sawdust and other inedible materials. Temperatures dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius. City transport had stopped running. For many residents, walking even a few kilometres to a food distribution point was physically impossible. Deaths peaked in January and February 1942 at a rate of 100,000 per month, almost entirely from starvation. People died in the streets, and those still living grew used to encountering corpses on their daily routes.
The scale of what followed was unlike anything in modern urban history. Journalist Harrison Salisbury, who studied the siege closely, estimated total deaths from hunger at over one million in Leningrad and its immediate surroundings, with an overall death toll of 1.3 to 1.5 million civilians and soldiers. Military historian David M. Glantz put the combined figure at between 1.6 and two million. He observed that deaths associated with the defence of this single city were six times greater than total American losses across the entire war.
The surrounding satellite cities suffered alongside Leningrad. Pushkin, lying half under German occupation and half along the frontline, experienced mass starvation on the same scale. German authorities there did not introduce bread ration cards until the summer of 1942. Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in Leningrad holds the remains of half a million civilian victims of the siege alone.
NKVD records on cannibalism during the siege were not published until 2004. The files report the first confirmed case of human meat being used as food on the 13th of December 1941. By December 1942, the NKVD had arrested 2,105 people on cannibalism charges and divided them into two legal categories under Soviet criminal code Article 59-3, which covered "special category banditry" because Soviet law had no provision for the act itself. Those who consumed corpses were generally imprisoned. Those who killed for food were usually shot.
The demographic picture that emerged from the arrests was specific. Of those arrested in April 1942-64 percent were female. Forty-four percent were unemployed. Ninety percent had only basic education or none at all. Only 2 percent had prior criminal records. Writer Lisa Kirschenbaum noted that the rates, while horrifying, also showed that the majority of Leningraders held to their moral boundaries under conditions that defied imagination.
Far more common than cannibalism was murder for ration cards. In the first six months of 1942 alone, Leningrad recorded 1,216 such killings. Diarist Dimitri Lazarev recalled his daughter and niece reciting a nursery rhyme adapted from a prewar song to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb, in which children rehearsed their terror of cannibals. The rhyme captures something the statistics cannot: the texture of daily fear inside the siege.
On the 9th of August 1942, the Leningrad Radio Orchestra performed Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, titled "Leningrad." The concert was broadcast over loudspeakers across the city and aimed deliberately toward enemy lines. Hitler had previously designated that same date for a victory banquet at the Hotel Astoria. The concert took its place instead.
Military efforts to break the siege had been running for months, at enormous cost. Operation Iskra, launched on the morning of the 12th of January 1943, finally succeeded. The Volkhov Front's 372nd Rifle Division met troops of the 123rd Rifle Brigade of the Leningrad Front on the 18th of January 1943, opening a land corridor roughly 8 miles wide along the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. It was narrow, exposed to artillery, and barely adequate, but it was a connection.
Full relief did not come until the 27th of January 1944, when the Leningrad-Novgorod offensive drove German forces away from the city's southern outskirts for good. The Baltic Fleet contributed 30 percent of the air power used in the final strike. Before retreating, German forces looted and destroyed the Catherine Palace, the Peterhof Palace, the Gatchina Palace, and other historic landmarks outside the city's defensive perimeter. Many art collections were transported to Germany. During the siege as a whole, some 3,200 residential buildings and 9,000 wooden houses were burned, and 840 factories and plants were destroyed.
The judges at the High Command trial, a United States military court convened after the war to assess German war crimes, ruled that the Siege of Leningrad was not criminal under the laws of war as they then stood. The court found that cutting off food supplies to a besieged city was "deemed legitimate" under existing law. The Soviet Union tried and failed to get starvation banned outright in the 1949 Geneva Convention. Starvation as a war crime was not codified in international law until later in the twentieth century.
In the 21st century, historians including Timo Vihavainen and Nikita Lomagin have classified the siege as genocide. On the 18th of March 2024, the Russian foreign ministry issued a formal statement to the German foreign ministry via TASS asserting the same classification.
Memory of the siege was complicated by Soviet politics almost immediately. After the war, Stalin's apparent jealousy of Leningrad's wartime leaders led to show trials known as the Leningrad Affair, which destroyed another generation of the city's officials. The Leningrad Defence Museum, built during the siege itself to collect and display German wreckage as proof of the city's resistance, was destroyed as part of those purges. It was revived during the glasnost period of the late 1980s. Every year on the 27th of January, the anniversary of the siege's end, close to 3,000 soldiers and cadets parade through Palace Square, some in Red Army uniforms, alongside wartime tanks including the T-34.
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Common questions
How long did the Siege of Leningrad last?
The Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days, from September 1941 to January 1944. The land encirclement began on the 8th of September 1941, and the siege was not fully lifted until the 27th of January 1944.
How many people died during the Siege of Leningrad?
An estimated 1.5 million people died during the Siege of Leningrad. Military historian David M. Glantz placed combined military and civilian deaths at between 1.6 and two million, a figure he noted was six times greater than total American losses across the entirety of World War II.
What was the Road of Life during the Siege of Leningrad?
The Road of Life was a supply route across the southern part of Lake Ladoga that served as Leningrad's only connection to the outside world during the siege. In summer it operated by boat; in winter, vehicles drove directly over the frozen lake. The ice road became operational for the first time on the 20th of November 1941.
Why did Hitler decide to besiege Leningrad rather than capture it?
Hitler intended to destroy Leningrad entirely rather than occupy it. A German High Command directive of the 21st of September 1941 explicitly ruled out occupation because it would make Germany responsible for feeding the population. The plan was to starve the city, demolish it afterward, and hand the territory north of the Neva River to Finland.
Was the Siege of Leningrad classified as a war crime or genocide?
The siege was ruled not criminal by the judges at the postwar High Command trial, which found that cutting off food supplies was legally permissible under the laws of war at the time. In the 21st century, historians including Timo Vihavainen and Nikita Lomagin have classified it as genocide. On the 18th of March 2024, Russia's foreign ministry formally described it as such in a statement to Germany.
What was the bread ration in Leningrad during the worst period of the siege?
From November 1941 to February 1942, civilians received 125 grams of bread per day, of which 50 to 60 percent consisted of sawdust and other inedible additives. Deaths from starvation peaked in January and February 1942 at approximately 100,000 per month.
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