Not Stalingrad, Leningrad was the human catastrophe of the Second world war in the East. Here, German soldiers sent hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Hunger and Cold.
First, dogs and cats disappeared. Birds there were no more. They have been eaten. Out of sheer Need to survive, in order not to be insane. Wallpaper, window putty, and soup from ausgekochtem leather were also part of the war-the dining plan of Leningrad. The Russian writer Daniil Granin, a Survivor, reported five years ago in the German Bundestag on the 70. The anniversary of the Blockade is to commence, almost Unimaginable: “A child dies, at just three years old. The mother lays the corpse in the double window and cut every day a little piece of him to feed her second child, a daughter. And she brought it by.”
Cannibalism was not uncommon in the nearly 900 days of the siege. The Figures fluctuate between 1000 and 2000 cases. Man-eating was punished with immediate execution. Vocations there was not.
Starvation as a strategy
The fate of Leningrad between 1941 and 1944, the former and present St. Petersburg, in his Grey fortitude unique. The city at the mouth of the Neva was one of the beginning of the German Blockade, a good 2.5 million inhabitants. Including around 400,000 children. In 871 days of the siege, approximately 1.1 million civilians died. Most by Starvation. Historians of the Leningrad fate as the largest ever demographic disaster of a city.
The Blockade lasted from 8. September 1941 to 27. In January of 1944. When it was over, the people crowded on the streets, or listened to the Radio. It is the longest siege of a city in the 20th century. Century. In the summer of 1941, the army group “Nord advanced” under the command of General field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, with 500,000 man on the city. His order: The Red army in the Baltic States to destroy all naval bases on the Baltic sea to take the place of up to 21. July Leningrad conquer. In fact, the last railway line fell, the Leningrad with the outside world Federation on 30. August in German hands. 8. September was circled the city to the country. The Lenin were not furnished to graders.
13. January 1942: everyday life in the besieged city. Water pick up for the leather soups
Hitler orders the Wehrmacht to stop
However, Hitler, and conquer the city originally, and razed to the ground wanted to do, stopped its divisions. Instead of the loss of rich street fights he ordered the siege of the second largest city of Soviet city. To the Annoyance of the German soldiers. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda Minister, recorded in his diary: “The band shouts in the chorus, ‘we want more!’”
The Jena historian Jörg Ganzenmüller evaluated the Starvation of Leningrad, under the aspect of security of Supply for the German army. The supply of the German soldiers was only possible by leaving the civilian population to starve. Because beginning in the summer of 1941, there were supply problems for the Wehrmacht. The troops should be fed by the occupied territories. Large cities should no longer be fed. From the original intention to destroy, in whole müller, was a siege strategy, the delivery ultimately to the destruction of the entire population.
Last rescue: “road of life”
Especially the first winter of the war met unprepared for the population. There was only a hole in the siege ring: over the frozen lake Ladoga. The legendary ice road received the official name “Military road No. 101,”. Popularly it was called simply the road of life. Only on this dangerous Route, which lay under fire of the Germans, could people be evacuated, and especially food in the city. However, far too few.
The only lifeline to the outside which they call the “road of life”: The Lagodasee
To began already at the beginning of October, 1941, the great Hunger. The bread was stretched with bran and cellulose mixed. Food cards were issued. Those who worked got 250 grams of bread per day, all of the other half. In the cold-water flats, the broken people lived together with their dead. First of all, the furniture has been burned, in the end, the books. Until 1943, the great hunger was over suffering. Bread was unlimited.
However, even in the bare struggle for Survival, Lenin showed grader attitude. In the first blockade winter, around 2500 students completed their studies. There were theatre performances, the museums were open, and in the summer of 1942, Dmitri Shostakovich’s experienced seventh Symphony here, your performance. The composer had brought the work only one year before, under fire of the German in the middle of the city paper.
The Silence of posterity
Long the Blockade of Leningrad in the historiography as a “normal military Operation”, the editor-in-chief of the magazine Eastern Europe, Manfred Sapper. The extent of the suffering of the civilian population was weigh-in for decades, explained to the British historian Anna Reid, because the perpetrators were the fathers and grandfathers on the Eastern front. “It is easier to remember,” she writes in her book about the siege, “that these Relatives of the frost damage suffered, that they were starving and trapped in forced labor camps had to do, than to imagine that they robbed villages burnt, peasants of winter clothing and food and helped Jews to drive up and shoot them.”
Soldiers of the Soviet air defense to anti-aircraft guns on the Neva river
Leningrad was in German consciousness for a long time in the shadow of the memory of Stalingrad. Because there were many German victims, said Jörg Ganzenmüller. Until the 1980s, the crimes of the Wehrmacht were hidden almost completely, the historian. “It is Displacing a large”, the former head of the German-Russian Museum in Berlin-Karlshorst, Peter Jahn: “to even one of these great the crime of the Century in our collective memory.”
Daniil Granin, a writer and Survivor of the 871 blockade days of Leningrad, said in 2014 on the anniversary of the end of the siege in the German Bundestag, he could not forgive the Germans for a long time that they had been waiting for the surrender of the city. He considered it as dishonourable, to have, instead of soldiers, the hungry sent.