Leningrad

by Anna Reid

  At the same time that it lost Pushkin and Pavlovsk the Red Army was also driven out of Alexandrovsk, a small suburban town at the end of Leningrad’s south-western tramline, and Pulkovo, defended to the last by the opolcheniye’s Fifth Guards Division, whose bones still lie, amid rampant shrub roses and philadelphus, in a benignly neglected mass grave next to the rebuilt observatory. Along the Gulf, Reinhardt’s motorised divisions took Strelna and Peterhof, confirming the Soviet Eighth Army’s isolation in the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’. His attempts at counter-offensive having failed, Zhukov ordered the establishment of a new defence line, running from Leningrad’s south-western outer suburbs through Pulkovo round to the Neva where it jinks northwards halfway between Ladoga and the Gulf. This time, he stated in a characteristically brutal Combat Order of 17 September, there would be no retreat:

  1. Considering the exceptional importance [of the Pulkovo–Kolpino line], the Military Council of the Leningrad Front announces to all commanders and political and line cadres defending the designated line that any commander, politruk or soldier who abandons the line without a written order from the Army Group or army military council will be shot immediately.

  2. Announce the order to command and political cadres upon receipt. Disseminate widely among the rank and file.

  Three days later Stalin chipped in with orders that the troops around Leningrad should not hesitate, on pain of execution, to fire on Russian civilians approaching them from the German lines:

  To Zhukov, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov and Merkulov,

  It is rumoured that the German scoundrels advancing on Leningrad have sent forward individuals – old men and women, mothers and children – from the occupied regions, with requests to our Bolshevik forces that they surrender Leningrad and restore peace.

  It is also said that amongst Leningrad’s Bolsheviks people can be found who do not consider it possible to use force against such individuals . . .

  My answer is – No sentimentality. Instead smash the enemy and his accomplices, sick or healthy, in the teeth. War is inexorable, and those who show weakness and allow wavering are the first to suffer defeat. Whoever in our ranks permits wavering, will be responsible for the fall of Leningrad.

  Beat the Germans and their creatures, whoever they are . . . It makes no difference whether they are willing or unwilling enemies. No mercy to the German scoundrels or their accomplices . . .

  Request you inform commanders and division and regimental commissars, also the military council of the Baltic Fleet and the commanders and commissars of ships.

  [Signed] I. Stalin12

  Finally the line held. On 24 September, when his forward units were only fifteen kilometres from the Hermitage – as far as the London suburb of Richmond is from Piccadilly Circus, or the Jersey turnpike from the Empire State Building – von Leeb finally acknowledged that his now exhausted and overextended armies could advance no further, and requested permission to move on to the defensive. Fighting petered out as the two sides retired to count their staggering losses. Within Germany’s Army Group North, 190,000 men had been killed or wounded since the start of the invasion, and 500 guns and 700 tanks lost.13 Soviet casualties were even heavier. In the same period the Baltic Fleet and Northwestern Army Group had together lost 214,078 men killed, missing or taken prisoner (POWs probably comprising 70–80 per cent of the total), and another 130,848 wounded – two-thirds of their original troop numbers. They had also lost 4,000 tanks, about 5,400 guns, and 2,700 aircraft.14

  In traditional siege histories, these days in mid- to late September, with their exhausting battles and ruthless displays of military will, were when the tide turned in the defence of Leningrad. But newer interpretations put the emphasis less on Zhukov’s (still undoubted) tactical brilliance, more on an earlier change of strategy on the German side. In this version, the Red Army did not so much beat off the Germans, as the Germans decide to focus elsewhere.

  Since Barbarossa’s inception, Hitler and his generals had nursed a simmering disagreement over whether Moscow or Leningrad was the more important strategic objective. Hitler’s original directive of December 1940, which laid out the broad scheme for Barbarossa, had been clear: only once the Baltics, Leningrad and Kronshtadt had been taken, knocking out the Baltic Red Fleet and securing Leningrad’s arms manufacturers, was the advance to begin on Moscow. The service chiefs, led by Chief of General Staff Franz Halder, disagreed. Russia’s capital and biggest city should come first, they argued, and Leningrad second.

  Put aside with Barbarossa’s launch, the disagreement broke into the open again in mid-July, as von Leeb asked for more troops and equipment for his Army Group North. A parallel argument over whether to bypass surrounded Russian towns or capture them before advancing further was resolved in the generals’ favour, but on Leningrad Hitler held firm. ‘My representations stressing the importance of Moscow’, Halder grumbled to his diary on 26 July, ‘are brushed aside with no valid counter-evidence.’ Ten days later, as the Wehrmacht approached Novgorod, Halder tried again, this time via General Paulus: ‘At my request the commander of Army Group South raised points of high strategy, emphasising the importance of Moscow. The Führer again showed himself absolutely deaf to these arguments. He still harps on his old themes: 1. Leningrad, with Hoth [commander of Army Group Centre’s 3rd Panzer Group] brought into the picture. 2. Eastern Ukraine . . . 3. Moscow last.’ The following day Halder tried to recruit Chief of Operations Staff General Alfred Jodl to the cause. ‘I put it to him that Leningrad can be taken with the forces already at [von Leeb’s] disposal. We need not and must not divert to the Leningrad front anything that we might need for Moscow. Von Leeb’s flank is not threatened in any way . . . Von Bock must drive with all his forces on Moscow. (Ask the Führer: Can he afford not to reduce Moscow before winter sets in?)’15

  Increasingly irritated by von Leeb’s pleas for more resources – ‘Wild requests by Army Group North for engineers, artillery, anti-aircraft guns’ – Halder was driven to consider resignation by a Führer Directive of 21 August, which flatly contradicted Army High Command. ‘OKH’s [High Command’s] proposals’, Hitler declared, ‘do not conform with my intentions . . . The principal object still to be achieved before the onset of winter is not the capture of Moscow, but rather, in the South, the occupation of the Crimea and the Donets coal basin . . . and in the North, the encirclement of Leningrad and junction with the Finns.’ Not until these objectives were met would forces be freed up to advance on the capital.

  Halder was furious. Hitler’s interference was unendurable, and the Führer had only himself to blame for ‘the zigzag course caused by his successive orders’. High Command, now in its fourth victorious campaign, should not ‘tarnish its reputation’ with his latest demands, and Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief, was being treated ‘absolutely outrageously’. He suggested to Brauchitsch that they both tender their resignations, but Brauchitsch refused ‘on the grounds that the resignations would not be accepted, so nothing would change’.16 The row was patched up (‘Bliss and harmony’, Halder noted sarcastically on 30 August, ‘Everything just lovely again’) but not resolved until 5 September, when Hitler finally agreed that if von Leeb had not captured Leningrad within ten days, Hoepner’s Panzer Group Four would be transferred south to join von Bock’s push for Moscow.17 In the event, von Leeb’s protests and promises of imminent victory meant that the transfer started three days late, but Halder’s point was won. ‘The ring around Leningrad’, he wrote on the day the panzers swung south, ‘has not yet been drawn as closely as might be desired, and further progress after the departure of the 1st Armoured and 36th Motorised Divisions is doubtful . . . The situation will remain tight until such time as hunger takes effect as our ally.’18

  The redeployment did not seem overwhelmingly significant at the time. On the German side it was seen as a temporary compromise; on the Russian, the sense of looming catastrophe only intensified. In retrospect, however, it was the point at which Germany missed her best chance of
taking Leningrad. Never again, despite more than two years of near-continuous fighting, did Army Group North amass the mobility and firepower for a full-scale frontal assault on the city. Instead, it became the Eastern Front’s poor relation, starved of reinforcements and unable to move troops into reserve for fear that they would immediately be redeployed elsewhere. While in the south and centre armies swept back and forth across the map, round Leningrad the front congealed – exactly as Hitler had planned that Barbarossa should not – into the mud and blood of positional trench warfare, during which neither side, despite repeated offensives, ever mustered the strength decisively to beat the other.

  The Wehrmacht’s change of strategy – from ground assault to starvation and air raids – was made official in a memo circulated to Army Group North under Halder’s name on 28 September:

  According to the directive of the High Command it is ordered that:

  1. The city of Leningrad is to be sealed off, the ring being drawn as tightly as possible so as to spare our forces unnecessary effort. Surrender terms will not be offered.

  2. So as to eliminate the city as a last centre of Red resistance on the Ostsee [the Baltic] as quickly as possible, without major sacrifice of our own blood, it will not be subjected to infantry assault . . . Destruction of waterworks, warehouses and power stations will strip it of its vital services and defence capability. All military objects and enemy defence forces are to be destroyed by firebombing and bombardment. Civilians are to be prevented from bypassing the besieging troops, if necessary by force of arms.19

  The concern to spare the German infantry was real. Street-fighting in Smolensk had cost Army Group Centre dear, and newly captured Kiev had just been thrown into chaos by the NKVD’s detonation, by remote control, of dozens of large bombs. (Laid in major buildings and hotels, they killed several senior German officers.) A note of frustration was also starting to creep into Hitler’s mealtime ‘table talk’. His usual fantasising – ‘In the East, the Germans will all be required to travel first or second class, so as to distinguish themselves from the natives. First class will have three seats on each side, second class four’; man-of-the-world travelogues – ‘The dome of the Invalides made a deep impression. The Pantheon I found a horrible disappointment’; and ragbag opinion-mongering – on Roman versus Inca roads, the design and pricing of washbasins and typewriters, the health-giving properties of polenta – was now interspersed with complaints about the stubbornness of the Soviet defence. ‘Every [Soviet] unit commander who fails to fulfil his orders’, he grumbled over lunch on 25 September, ‘risks having his head chopped off. So they prefer to be wiped out by us . . . We have forgotten the bitter tenacity with which the Russians fought us during the First World War.’20

  The decision not to storm Leningrad also reflected the Nazi leaders’ broader uncertainty about what to do with the twin Russian capitals once they fell into their hands – an uncertainty subconsciously driven, perhaps, by the memory of Napoleon’s debacle at Moscow.* The initial conception was simply to raze both cities to the ground, in accordance with Hitler’s millennial vision of a shining, new-built Eastern Reich. ‘It is the Führer’s firm decision’, Halder had noted after a meeting in early July, ‘to level Moscow and Leningrad, and make them uninhabitable.’ This would not only ‘relieve us of the necessity of feeding their populations through the winter’ but also deal Russia a devastating psychological blow, ‘depriving not only Bolshevism but also Muscovite nationalism of their wellsprings’.21 Now, as Army Group North closed the ring around Leningrad, staffers at High Command began to weigh up – with extraordinary sketchiness as well as inhumanity – what in practice should be the fate of its civilians. A planning session of 21 September ran through the options:

  1. Occupy the city; in other words proceed as we have done in regards to other large Russian cities.

  Rejected, because it would make us responsible for food supply.

  2. Seal off city tightly, if possible with an electrified fence guarded by machine guns.

  Disadvantages: . . . The weak will starve within a foreseeable time; the strong will secure all food supplies and survive. Danger of epidemics spreading to our front. It’s also questionable whether our soldiers can be asked to fire on women and children trying to break out.

  3. Women, children and old people to be taken out through gaps in the encirclement ring. The rest to be allowed to starve:

  a. Removal across the Volkhov behind the enemy front theoretically a good solution, but in practice hardly feasible. Who is to keep hundreds of thousands of people together and drive them on? Where is the Russian front?

  b. Instead of marching them to the rear of the Russian front, let them spread across the land [i.e. German-occupied territory].

  In either case there remains the disadvantage that the remaining starving population of Leningrad becomes a source of epidemics, and that the strongest hold out in the city for a long time.

  4. After the Finnish advance and the complete sealing off of the city, we retreat behind the Neva and leave the area to the north of this sector to the Finns. The Finns have unofficially made it clear that they would like to have the Neva as their country’s border, but that Leningrad has to go. Good as a political solution. The question of Leningrad’s population, however, can’t be solved by the Finns. We have to do it.

  In conclusion, the meeting came up with a three-stage scenario. First, the German government would ‘clearly establish before the world’ that since Stalin was treating Leningrad as a military objective, Germany was forced to do the same. It would also announce that once Leningrad had surrendered it would ‘allow the humanitarian Roosevelt, under the supervision of the Red Cross’ to transport civilians ‘to his own continent, under a guarantee of free shipping movement. (Such an offer cannot, self-evidently, be accepted – this is just for propaganda.)’ Meanwhile the city would be weakened by bombardment, then gaps opened in the siege lines to let civilians out. The remaining Leningraders would be ‘left to themselves over the winter. Early next year we enter the city (if the Finns do it first we do not object), lead those still alive into inner Russia or into captivity, wipe Leningrad from the face of the earth through demolitions, and hand the area north of the Neva to the Finns.’ This was not, the planners admitted, very satisfactory, and Army Group North still needed orders that could ‘actually be carried out when the time comes’.22

  German naval chiefs had similar misgivings – again, on practical and propagandistic rather than humanitarian grounds. Writing to his admiral on 22 September, the day after High Command’s broad-brush planning meeting, a liaison officer attached to Army Group North said that he personally doubted that Leningrad could be destroyed without a single German soldier setting foot in it:

  Four or five million people [sic] don’t let themselves get killed so easily. I saw this for myself in Kovno, where the Latvians shot 6,000 Jews, among them women and children. Even a people as brutal as the Latvians could no longer bear the sight of these murders by the end. The whole action then ran into the sand. How much harder this will be with a city of millions.

  Besides, this would in my opinion let loose a worldwide storm of indignation, which we can’t afford politically.

  Razing Leningrad, he also pointed out, meant denying the Kriegsmarine the use of its naval dockyards, which might come in useful given that the final fight with Britain and America was still to come. ‘After all, Leningrad can disappear at a later stage, when we have won the war at sea.’ Like the army planners, he came up with the surreal suggestion of inviting the Allies to take off civilians in ships. ‘If England and the USA refuse, world opinion will blame them for these people’s demise. If they accept, we’re rid of the problem and it will cost them considerable freight capacity.’23

  Hitler – ‘the hardest man in Europe’ as he liked to call himself – was only irritated by this ‘sentimentality’. ‘I suppose’, he declared over supper on 25 September, ‘that some people are clutching their heads trying t
o answer the question – How can the Führer destroy a city like St Petersburg? Plainly I belong by nature to quite another species!’24 He reiterated his determination not to waver in a notorious directive to Army Group North four days later: