Inferno - Max Hastings [110]
For weeks, the Russians remained oblivious of the fact that the Germans had no intention of launching a ground attack on Leningrad, nor even of accepting its surrender. Zhukov acquired a prestige in Stalin’s eyes as saviour of the city, rooted in failure to understand that it had not been seriously assaulted. In a moment of fantasy, German staff officers in Berlin discussed the possibility of making a propaganda gesture by inviting the United States to accept the 2.5 million inhabitants of Peter the Great’s capital as refugees. Hitler, instead, set out to starve them to death. Professor Ernst Zigelemeyer of Munich’s Institute of Nutrition—one of many scientists who provided satanic counsel to the Nazis—was consulted about practicalities. He agreed that no battle was necessary; it would be impossible for the Russians to provide their beleaguered citizens with more than 8.8 ounces of bread a day, which could not sustain human life on a protracted basis: “It is not worth risking the lives of our troops. The Leningraders will die anyway. It is essential not to let a single person through our front line. The more of them that stay there, the sooner they will die, and then we will enter the city without trouble, without losing a single German soldier.”
Hitler declared: “Petersburg—the poisonous nest from which, for so long, Asiatic venom has spewed forth into the Baltic—must vanish from the earth’s surface. The city is already cut off. It only remains for us to bomb and bombard it, destroy its sources of water and power and then deny the population everything it needs to survive.” The first major Luftwaffe attack on Leningrad destroyed the waterside Badaev warehouses, holding most of the city’s food stocks; melted sugar ran along a neighbouring road, and fires burned for days. The citizens quickly understood their plight. A woman named Elena Skryabina wrote in her diary: “We are approaching the greatest horror … Everyone is preoccupied with only one thought: where to get something edible so as not to starve to death. We have returned to prehistoric times. Life has been reduced to one thing—the hunt for food.”
Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman described in his diary how citizens made soup and bread with grass. Once such fare was accepted as a norm, he said, “grass cakes found their own price in the market.” A single match cost a rouble, which caused many people to ignite their kindling with magnifying glasses under the sun. One of Brontman’s writer friends was eccentric enough to cling to his household pet, “probably the only surviving dog in Leningrad.” Bicycles provided the sole means of civilian transport. Since water supplies now depended on hydrants, women washed clothes in the street while passing military vehicles weaved between them. Every vestige of vacant soil was tilled for vegetables, each plot marked with its owner’s name. Fuel was desperately short, because the city was invested before the inhabitants could make their annual pilgrimages to collect firewood from outlying forests.
The Germans removed their tanks to reinforce operations farther south. The besiegers, less numerous than the defending Russian troops, dug themselves into bunkers and gun emplacements for the winter. Every movement towards their lines by either attacking soldiers or fleeing civilians was met with annihilating artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire. Capt. Vasily Khoroshavin, a thirty-six-year-old Soviet battery commander, wrote to his wife on 25 October: “I have received a letter from you and I cannot describe the pleasure it gave. Today is the sixth that I am spending in the