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)