At the beginning of September a determined German assault was mounted against Leningrad. Geography posed problems in encircling a city protected to its rear by the enormous expanse of Lake Ladoga. It would not be possible to close the northern side of the ring effectively. Extensive and concentric defence lines faced the direction of German attack. These were thrown around the city by the Leningrad command, which mobilised the city population to construct 1,000km of earthworks, 645km of anti-tank ditches and 600km of barbed wire entanglement linked by 5,000 pillboxes. Over 300,000 members of the Young Communist League and 200,000 civilian inhabitants, including as many women as men, achieved this extraordinary effort of labour.(3) Stalin’s ‘Mother Russia’ appeal to elicit the population’s help in stemming the ‘Fascist horde’ was bearing fruit.
Von Leeb ordered an all-out assault on the city preceded by a triple-wave Luftwaffe bombing attack. Nine days of savage fighting followed, during which the attacking German divisions closed onto the three lines of the city’s defence. The 1st Panzer Division followed the left bank of the River Neva south-west into the city while 6th Panzer, straddling the main railway to Leningrad, pushed up from the south. Tank commanders suffered considerable casualties because, after weeks of mobile operations, they were slow to adapt tactics to unfamiliar wooded and urban terrain. Four successive commanders of the 6th Panzer Division became casualties during the first day of the assault.(4) On 8 September Schlüsselburg was taken and the outer suburbs to the south of Leningrad occupied. With this, the city of nearly three million inhabitants, with its vital rail link to Tikhvin lost, was completely encircled and cut off.
The 1st Panzer Division reached and penetrated the Dudergof height defences 10km south-east of Leningrad. Only one of its battalions remained at over 50% effective strength. By 16.00 hours on 10 September Height 167 – the 140m topmost point of the ridge south-east of the city – had been scaled by the attackers. Daniel Granin, a Soviet volunteer, described how:
‘On the heights above Leningrad we came under air attack which caused heavy casualties. The rest of the soldiers in my unit scattered and I was left alone – without an army. So I boarded a tram car and drove back home, with my machine gun and hand-grenades. As far as I was concerned, and I had no doubts, the German army was going to be in Leningrad in a few hours.’(5)
On the left flank of the XXXXIst Panzer Corps, Eighteenth Army infantry edged their way across the valley. Once the Russian guns and observers were cleared from Height 167, entry into the suburban districts of Slutsk and Pushkin could be attempted. Krasnoye Seloe, south-west of the city, fell on 11 September. Hans Mauermann, an artillery observer moving forward with one of the assaulting infantry divisions, recalled:
‘Our company had in fact stopped a tram car that had driven out of Leningrad, and ordered the passengers to get out. We considered whether or not to hang on to the driver, so they could drive into Leningrad the following day.’(6)
Russian Lieutenant Jewtuchewitsch despaired. Soldiers in his unit had recently arrived from the reserve and were untrained.
‘We march from place to place the whole time. Can one still label them a Regiment? People had only rifles and pathetically few machine guns. No medics! What is that supposed to be? We haven’t any grenades either! In reality that is no military unit, it’s “cannon-fodder”.’
His experience was typical of the many untrained and disintegrating Russian units caught up in the maelstrom of the German advance. ‘Our company has been rubbed out once again,’ he wrote, ‘and we have landed in the rear of the enemy and are being hunted through the wood like animals, trying to get across the German-occupied road to break out and join the others.’ They were separated from their Commissar Jermakow in the trees and had been unable to regain contact. That night Lieutenant Jewtuche-witsch wrote his last diary entry.
‘Shooting and Panzers everywhere. We are now faced with a serious dilemma – what is going to happen? Will I be able to write again tomorrow in this book? If not, would the person who finds this diary pass it with a loving kiss and my last word “Mama!” to: Leningrad, Prospect 25. October, House 114, Flat No 7. To Jewtuchewitsch, Anna Nikolajewna…’
Jewtuchewitsch had said goodbye to his mother barely two months before.
‘With a sad feeling I looked at my poor Mother’s ever-loving face and thought: what a difficult life she has had, what had life ever given to her that was ever any good? Here she sits beside me, my old mother, keeping back her concern, hardly able to keep back the tears. She made the sign of the cross over me.’
After a final sad meal his mother and sisters had accompanied him to the barrack gates before he left. ‘I said a quick goodbye and with a lump in my throat, holding back the tears, I kissed them all.’
German soldiers searching among the bodies decided the small book taken from the dead Soviet lieutenant might be of military significance. It was passed on to company headquarters.(7)
By the fourth day of the all-out German assault on Leningrad it became clear that further progress was not possible without substantial reinforcements. A limit of exploitation was declared on the Peterfog-Pushkin road. Street-fighting was slowing the tempo of the advance and continued for a further five days before it began to abate. The arrival of Soviet General Zhukov, previously dismissed as Chief of Staff by Stalin because of his frank advice on the developing Kiev crisis, energised the defence. Zhukov was well practised in the value of combined operations and ordered the saturation of the enemy with jointly interacting artillery, mortar and air support. This and the depth of the defence lines soaked up the impetus of the Panzer advances. Large numbers of medium and heavy mortars proved as lethal as artillery inside the close ranges over which the battle was fought.
Other factors also diluted the German effort. The bulk of Generaloberst Hoepner’s Panzergruppe 4 was ordered to transfer once again to Army Group Centre and prepare for the assault on Moscow. Likewise, the Finnish advance along the Karelian Isthmus had halted. Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, the Finnish leader, resolved to reconquer only that land he believed justifiably belonged to Finland. Despite the apparent nadir of Soviet fortunes, he did not wish to be held hostage to any future resurgence. The impact at the front from these developments was dramatic in some sections. Rolf Dahm, forward with an infantry division, recalled:
‘Suddenly there was this stop. We’re not going on further. I naturally thought, “Why not?” Then later the Führer Befehl [Directive] came. Our command probably considered the problem we would have taking over a city of a million inhabitants that would have to be fed throughout the winter. Better to stay in front of it and try and starve the inhabitants into submission.’(8)
German soldiers ensconced on the Dudergof heights were treated to the panoramic sight of the city of Leningrad only 12km away with its golden cupolas and towers bathed in sunlight. Warships could be seen in the port, shelling targets to their rear. It was a tantalising, and at the same time confusing, experience for officers and soldiers alike, unaware of what was impeding the final assault. Realists such as Walter Broschei correctly guessed why:
‘In the middle of September we reached a chain of hills 8km from the Gulf of Finland and 20km south-west of Leningrad town centre. In the distance the city pulsed with life. It was bewildering – trains ran, chimneys smoked and a busy maritime traffic ran on the Neva river. We had 28 soldiers left from 120 normally in the company and had now been gathered into so-called “combat” battalions – unsuitable to attack Leningrad.’(9)
Artillery Forward Observer Hans Mauermann likewise had few illusions about the likely outcome of any further costly attacks. He breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Then suddenly it was – halt, which, actually, was met with some satisfaction. Every day it had been attack, with all its uncertainties and not knowing what might happen. From the perspective of even further hardship this was very much welcome. The emotion swung between a shame we had not pulled it off to thank God we did not have to go in there.’(10)
Generalfeldmarschall von Leeb mounted this spoiling attack despite the order to transfer his Panzer strength back to the Central Front. But it had not succeeded. There was now no alternative to the Führer’s original intent articulated during the euphoric and successful early phase of‘Barbarossa’. Halder had stated on 8 July:
‘It is the Führer’s firm decision to level Moscow and Leningrad, and make them uninhabitable, so as to relieve us of the necessity of having to feed the populations through the winter. The cities will be razed by the Luftwaffe. Panzers must not be used for the purpose.’(11)
Even before von Leeb’s final attempt to ‘bounce’ the city on 6 September, Halder had already declared the previous day our objective has been achieved’. The area, as promulgated by Hitler, ‘will now become a subsidiary theatre of operations’. Von Leeb was denied his victorious entry into the city. He was, in any case, aware of approaching operational limitations which would be to support a main drive against Moscow from mid-September. ‘True, it will be a hard job for the Northern wing,’ explained Halder, responding to von Leeb’s request to retain Reinhardt’s Panzer Corps and VIIIth, ‘but the scheme underlying our directive remains the only possible solution.’(12) Hitler’s aim to encircle the city and reduce it by bombardment and starvation was as consistent as it was calculated.
Once the envelopment of the city was complete, various strategies were discussed at army command level as to how best to reduce its fabric and annihilate the inhabitants. The speed and success of the German advance left the city ill-prepared to withstand a siege. Even before the final German assault, the Leningrad State Defence Committee had identified the city’s available reserves on 27 August as 17 days’-worth of meals; vegetables for 29 days, fish for 16, meat for 25 and butter for 28 days.(13) The decision was taken to increase supplies, but the rail link was cut by the German advance before it could be actioned. Meanwhile, a series of chilling secret measures had been identified by the Land Defence Department of the Supreme Wehrmacht Staff at OKW on 21 September.(14) Assessments ranged from treating the city like those already taken, to erecting an electrified fence around it to form a huge concentration camp. Women, old people and children would be allowed to evacuate. Another solution was to present the city to the Finns. Workable scenarios were stymied by the sheer scale of the problem combined with the imperative to avoid epidemics being passed on to German troops. Enormous reserves of manpower would further be needed to enforce the proposed measures.
The eventual solution was to suggest to the world that Stalin had declared the city a fortress. It could then be hermetically sealed and reduced by artillery and air attack. When the city, ripe from hunger and terror, was about to collapse, certain ‘gates’ would be opened and the masses within released to burden the administration of the Soviet hinterland. Once the remaining fortress defenders had been weakened, probably in the spring, the city could be stormed. The survivors would be imprisoned and Leningrad razed to the ground. Subsequently the land area north of the Neva might be handed over to the Finns. This modern ‘Carthaginian’ solution was delivered to Adolf Hitler. He, in turn, directed Generaloberst Jodl, Chief of the Wehrmachtführungs Staff, and von Brauchitsch on 7 October that:
‘Any capitulation of Leningrad or later Moscow is not to be accepted, even if offered from the other side.’(15)
Johannes Haferkamp, an infantry soldier who served on the Leningrad front, succinctly expressed the resulting dilemma after the war:
‘You have to imagine, the Russians knew the Germans had erected an impenetrable ring around Leningrad. All its inhabitants had been sentenced to death through hunger and disease. What efforts could the Russian Army now take on to free the city? What other measures might they take to provide the population with provisions? The population was inevitably going to starve to death and that was the real intent of our higher command.’(16)
Leningrad’s intended fate mirrored those pitiless ideological measures that were planned for prisoners of war and the populations of occupied areas even before the campaign started. Extracts from the Diary of the Quartermaster Department of Twenty-seventh Army laying siege to the city reflect the same intent. In responding to a question in early October over what measures were foreseen to feed the population should this be required, it cited shortages in the Reich and the bland justification, ‘it is better our people have something and the Russians go hungry.’ Two days later the Army Quartermaster was requested to feed 20,000 mainly factory workers in the German-occupied suburb of Pushkin.
‘It can only be recommended that work-capable males be interned in prison comps. The provision of rations from army sources for the civilian population is out of the question.’(17)
Official documents clearly confirm the uncompromising intentions of the German High Command. They were articulated with a degree of logic that would appeal to the self-preservation interests of soldiers. Starving the inhabitants of Leningrad into surrender made perverse tactical and operational sense. ‘That Leningrad has been mined and will be defended to the last man has already been announced by Soviet radio,’ stated Army Group North in its war diary in early October. ‘Serious epidemics are anticipated. No German soldier need place a step inside the place.’ If the population can be forced to flee into the Russian hinterland through artillery and bombing, ‘the chaos in Russia would be even greater, the burden on our administration and the exploitation of the occupied eastern provinces made even lighter’.(18)
The opinions of German soldiers surveying the city from the Dudergof heights for artillery bombardment were not so starkly objective. Front-line soldiers invariably present simple interpretations of events, untroubled by later academic debates.
When an Obergefreiter who served with the 9th Luftwaffe Field Division manning the line near Schlüsselburg visited Leningrad as a tourist 40 years later, he was asked if his conscience was troubled by later events. He responded:
‘I do not feel guilty. It was war then. We had to fight just like every Russian soldier, and the Russians fought as heroically as we did.’
He accepted the subsequent long siege had been ‘senseless’, but pointed out the imperative was to win and finish the war.
‘The city burned every day and every night. We observed the fires all the time. The capture of Leningrad could not be abandoned because this was a symbolic city for us as well. The city’s fall was important because then practically the whole of the northern sector would have been in our hands. But it was already getting difficult for us. I was a volunteer then and had signed up for 12 years. We fought for our system in just the same way the Russians fought for theirs.’(19)
The official documents portray an unemotional perspective, exposing the analysis and clear intent of the German High Command. The perceptions governing the soldiers enacting that intent are equally important. Difficult questions were asked. The commander of the 58th Infantry Division accepted he would have to order his troops to fire upon any mass break-out attempt by the city’s inhabitants, but felt certain realities could not be ignored. Troops would obey orders, but whether they would retain the nerve to fire upon repeated outbreaks by women, children and harmless old men, he had his doubts. Every man has his own interpretation of what constitutes human decency. German soldiers were under immense political, ideological and military duty pressures to compromise previously held values. The commander’s view, courageously expressed, was that his soldiers were clearly aware of the need to intern Leningrad’s millions where they were. But the danger was, ‘the German soldier may thereby lose his inner morality, and after the war they would not wish to worry about legal proceedings as a result of their actions.’
It was not only the commander of the 58th Division who had misgivings. Civilians were being forcibly evacuated from the areas occupied by German soldiers encircling the city, and from the army rear area security zone, then dispersed into outlying villages. Several thousand refugees were moved along the Krasnogwardeisk-Pleskau road. They were mainly women,
children and old men. Nobody knew where they were to go. The Official Army Group North Diary admitted:
‘Everybody had the impression that these people would sooner or later die from starvation. The scene had a particularly negative impact upon German soldiers employed working on the same road.’(20)
It had not been like this in France the year before.
Chapter 10
A war without garlands
‘If some people say that most Germans were innocent, I would say they were accomplices. As a soldier I was an “accomplice”.’
German soldier
‘Better three French campaigns than one Russian’
Fritz Köhler, a 20-year-old veteran of the French campaign, entered the town of Roslavl south-east of Smolensk on 3 August following a successful attack. Oil and petrol supplies had been torched by the Russians prior to leaving. ‘Unfortunately,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘there is practically nothing in this city to “liberate”.’ Gazing at the inferno of fire and smoke around him he declared, ‘it was a lot better in France.’(1)
War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 Page 29