The Siege of Leningrad

The siege of Leningrad lasted from September 1941 to 1944. By the end of the siege, some
632,000 people are thought to have died with nearly 4,000 people from Leningrad starving to
death on Christmas Day, 1941. The first German artillery shell fell on Leningrad on
September 1st, 1941. The city, one of the primary targets of 'Operation Barbarossa', was
expected "to fall like a leaf"- Hitler.
The Germans, flushed with the initial success of
'Barbarossa', decided that they would not storm
the city. Hitler had stated to his generals that
once Leningrad had been surrounded and
bombarded from the air and by artillery on the
ground, the resolve of the city to continue the
fight would disappear. German bombers also
dropped propaganda leaflets on the city -
claiming that the population would starve to death
if they did not surrender.
Many in Leningrad had expected the Germans to
attack and occupy the city. However, a resolute
Russian defence and inadequate German
manpower, meant that the Germans could not successfully achieve this - hence the
siege. By September 8th, German tanks were just 10 miles from Leningrad and the city was
cut-off from the rest of Russia by any form of land communication. Supply lines existed in the
air and by river - but both were under constant attack. The Germans continually bombarded
the city, putting out of action power stations that supplied Leningrad with electricity. The city
also quickly became short of food.
On September 12th, those in charge of the city estimated that they had the following
supplies:
Flour for 35 days
Cereals for 30 days
Meat for 33 days
Fats for 45 days
Sugar for 60 days
While the city had a rail network of sorts, Stalin ordered that all vital goods in the city that
could help defend Moscow be moved out of Leningrad and to the capital. In November 1941,
while the siege was in its early stages, 11,000 people died of what the authorities called
'alimentary dystrophy' (starvation) - over 350 a day. The siege was only lifted after the
Germans, as part of their general retreat, withdrew in the face of the advance of the Red
Army. Then in one of the great ironies of the war, those who had led the city in its time of
need were arrested by the KGB (presumably on the orders of Stalin). Their crime was that
they had failed to contact Moscow frequently enough during the siege to ask for support and
guidance and that this policy of acting alone like mini-tsars could not be tolerated. Those
arrested, after 900 days of being besieged, now had to face Stalin's gulags.