Siege of Leningrad
The German army surrounded Leningrad in September 1941 and held the siege for 872 days, in which about a million civilians died. The intention was not to take the city. Directives issued that autumn state that its capitulation was not to be accepted, that the population was to be starved, and that feeding it through the winter was not a German responsibility — the object was to erase it and hand the site to Finland. The encirclement closed on 8 September, and the food warehouses burned in an air raid the same week. Rations fell to 125 grams of bread a day for dependants by November, adulterated with cellulose and sawdust. People ate wallpaper paste, leather, pets and, in documented cases, each other; some 2,000 people were arrested for cannibalism. The winter of 1941 and 1942 reached minus thirty with no heating, no water and no electricity, and roughly 100,000 people died a month at the worst of it. The only route in was the Road of Life across the ice of Lake Ladoga, driven by truck convoys under shellfire, which brought in supplies and took out about a million evacuees. The city kept working. Factories produced tanks, the Hermitage staff moved the collection, and Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony was performed by an orchestra of survivors in August 1942 and broadcast at the German lines through loudspeakers. The siege was lifted in January 1944. Most of the dead are in mass graves at Piskaryovskoye. The official Soviet figure was long given as 600,000, which was politically convenient and far too low. Leningrad's ordeal was also downplayed under Stalin, and several of the men who had organised the defence were shot in the purge of the city's leadership in 1950.
- Year: 1941 CE
- Category: Military
