In the event, the problems remained hypothetical. Leningrad’s leadership never tried to negotiate surrender, nor did ordinary Leningraders ever attempt mass breakout. Germany did not follow her own, muddled, policy either. No gaps were ever left open in the German lines so as to allow disease-bearing starvation survivors to flee into unoccupied Russia; on the contrary, barges and lorries carrying evacuees across Lake Ladoga were repeatedly attacked. For the next three winters, the Wehrmacht prosecuted a classical siege, preventing, so far as possible, all movement of people and goods in and out of the city, and using air and ground bombardment to destroy food stocks, utilities, factories, hospitals, schools and housing. (‘It is particularly important’, a Führer Directive issued just before the first air raids explained, ‘to destroy the water supply.’{28}) Mass starvation, it should be stressed, was not an unforeseen, or regrettable but necessary, by-product of this strategy, but its central plank, routinely referred to with approval in planning documents, and followed, once it set in, with eager interest by military intelligence.
It was a crime, as Germans have only recently begun uncomfortably to acknowledge, not of the Nazis, but of the army. Goebbels and Himmler were enthusiastic cheerleaders for exterminating Slavs, but had no major input to the decisions on Leningrad, which were the work of Hitler, Halder, Brauchitsch, Jodl and von Leeb. Though members of High Command began sharply to disagree with Hitler within weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union, they did so only on narrow grounds of military expediency. Ethical considerations do not seem to have prompted a single senior officer to question a policy that directly led, not only foreseeably but deliberately, to the slow and painful death by starvation of about three-quarters of a million non-combatants, a large proportion of them women and children.
Nor was the army made fully to atone after the war. Jodl, signatory of the formal order to besiege Leningrad, went before the international tribunal at Nuremberg, was convicted of war crimes and hanged. Von Leeb, in contrast, got off extraordinarily lightly. Having retired pleading illness in December 1941, he was sentenced to a mere three years’ imprisonment at Nuremberg. His replacement as leader of Army Group North, Georg von Küchler, though sentenced to twenty years, was released on compassionate grounds after only eight. Oddest were the fates of Halder and Erich Hoepner, commander of Army Group North’s Panzer Group Four. Hoepner, though a fanatical racist—praised by the SS for his ‘particularly close and cordial’ cooperation in the murder of tens of thousands of Baltic Jews{29}—was persuaded by the prospect of defeat to join the July Plot to assassinate Hitler. When it failed he was arrested and executed, alongside the brave and decent von Stauffenberg and von Trott. Halder, though not involved in the plot, was imprisoned by Hitler in its wake, then freed by the Americans and spared prosecution at Nuremberg in exchange for giving evidence against his former colleagues. He went on to spend fourteen comfortable and respected years as head of the German section of the US Army’s historical research unit, in which role he helped to establish the Cold War myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’, ignorant of the Holocaust and bullied into war by a crazed dictator. In 1961, when the unit was wound up, President Kennedy awarded him the ‘Meritorious Civilian Service’ medal—the highest honour a non-American can earn in US government service. The editor’s foreword to the standard American translation of Halder’s diary, published in the late 1980s, concludes with the remarkable words ‘He was a distinguished soldier’.{30}
7. ‘To Our Last Heartbeat’
At five minutes to seven on the evening of 8 September the optical engineer Dmitri Lazarev was walking along Sadovaya when the usual cacophony of sirens, factory hooters and ships’ foghorns sounded an air-raid warning. Standing under an archway with other passers-by, he heard the drone of engines overhead. He was already used to the silver specks, high in the sky, of German reconnaissance aircraft, but these were different: snub-nosed grey bombers, twenty or more, swimming low over the rooftops in strict, purposeful formation. Somewhere nearby, an anti-aircraft gun started to bark. Suddenly the avenue of sky between the rooftops was full of sparkling tracer bullets, and quickly dissolving puffs of white smoke. When the alarm was over Lazarev continued on his way to a cousin’s flat on the Fontanka. There he found his relatives gathered on the balcony, gazing to the south. Beyond the curve of the canal a vast, spherical cloud was rising, black in places and blindingly white in others. Gradually it expanded to fill the sky, itself turned bronze by the setting sun. ‘It was so unlike smoke that for a long time I could not comprehend that it was a fire… It was an immense spectacle of stunning beauty.’{1}
Vera Inber and her husband had gone, despite the day’s endless alerts, to the Musical Comedy Theatre on Arts Square, to see Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. They had also invited her husband’s deputy at the Erisman—a shrewd, clever man, Inber thought, with an amusing rural accent. During the interval there was yet another alert. ‘The manager came out to the foyer to say a few words, his manner as casual as if he were announcing a change in the cast. He requested that we stand as close to the walls as possible, since—here he pointed to the domed ceiling—there was little protection overhead.’ After forty minutes the all-clear sounded, and the operetta continued, though at a faster pace and omitting the less important numbers. Leaving the theatre, Inber and her husband still did not realise that the alert had been anything more than the usual false alarm. To their surprise they were met by their driver, though they had not asked him to wait. ‘The car rounded the square and suddenly we saw black, swirling mountains of smoke, illuminated from below by flames. All hell had been let loose in the sky. Kovrov turned and said quietly “The Germans dropped bombs and set the food stores on fire.”’ Burning were oil storage tanks, a creamery, and thirty-eight wooden warehouses—known as the ‘Badayev warehouses’ after a pre-revolutionary owner—next to the Warsaw railway station, in which was stored a substantial proportion of the city’s food.{2}
This first major raid was of incendiaries—narrow, flanged cylinders which began to smoulder on impact unless doused with sand by the civil defence teams standing guard on the city’s roofs.{3} A second raid, at 10.34 on the same evening, nobody could mistake for a drilclass="underline" it was of forty-eight high-explosive bombs, ranging from 250 to 500 kilograms in weight, and killed twenty-four people, mostly around the Smolniy and Finland railway station. Also hit was the city zoo, next to the Peter and Paul Fortress. A staff member, a child and seventy animals were killed, including the zoo’s famous elephant, Betty, who had come to Petersburg from Hamburg six years before the Revolution. The monkeys were so traumatised, a zoologist noted, that ‘for a few days afterwards they sat silently, in a sort of stupor, not even reacting to the shells falling all around’.{4}
Olga Berggolts sat out the raid in the hallway of her flat. ‘For two whole hours my legs shook and my heart thumped, though outwardly I remained calm. I wasn’t consciously frightened, but how my legs trembled—ugh!’ As soon as it was over she ran to the Radio House to meet her colleague and lover Yuri Makogonenko. She loved her invalid husband, she confided to her diary, and knew that her affair with Yuri was ‘a whim’, but wanted ‘one more triumph… Let me see him thirsty, frenzied, happy… before the whistling death.’ She also wanted, despite the endless tension between loving her country and hating its government, to keep on working: ‘Tomorrow I have to write a good editorial. I have to write it from the heart, with what remains of my faith… Nowadays I find it hard to put pen to paper, yet my pen moves, though my thoughts knock about in my head.’{5}