War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942

The longest campaign

The day after Army Group Centre announced it had finally closed the Smolensk pocket, its commander received depressing news in the form of a new Führer directive. Von Bock confided bleakly to his diary: ‘the Army Group is being scattered to the four winds.’⁽¹⁾ Advance notice had been received four days before:

Splitting the effort was anathema to a professional commander conditioned and trained to plan and ruthlessly adhere to a single aim. A disconnect between aim and reality had been evident in ‘Barbarossa’ planning from the start. The loose correlation between operational and logistic planning was based upon Hitler’s ideological premise that a ‘kick in the door’ would be sufficient to collapse the Soviet Union ‘like a house of cards’. ‘Barbarossa’ Directive Number 21 issued in December 1940 gave only a broad outline to the conduct of operations. It aimed to create a barrier against Asiatic Russia on the line between Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea and Archangel in the Arctic. Apart from the need to annihilate the main enemy forces, there was no absolute strategic plan or objective to which all operations were subordinate. Three primary invasion objectives were identified: the coal and iron fields of the Donets Basin in the south, the capital Moscow in the centre and Leningrad to the north. One army group was assigned to each, with Panzergruppen to spearhead the way. Few plans in practice survive their inception on crossing the start line, and focusing the continuation of effort is invariably the next problem.

The decisions faced by the Führer and his High Command at the beginning of August were unprecedented. No German campaign during this war had lasted so long. Obergefreiter Erich Kuby with the 3rd Motorised Division recalled a disgruntled infantry NCO muttering they were not ‘sprinting any longer as in the Polish autumn and French May (campaigns), they had been hard on the go for five weeks now’.⁽³⁾ Blitzkrieg in the West and Scandinavia lasted six weeks, Poland was conquered in 28 days, the Balkans took 24 days and Crete was overwhelmed in 10.

An intangible and unremarked watershed was passed on 2 August. The Wehrmacht was used to success, often against heavy odds and suffering casualties, but quickly. Little attention was therefore paid to the passing of a milestone that was to be superseded by momentous events to follow. Victory in Russia, whatever the propaganda aspirations, was never seriously thought achievable in six weeks by rational planners. But the tempo was beginning to falter. Vacillation and indecision became increasingly apparent at the Führer’s headquarters. The Wehrmacht had indeed ‘kicked in the door’, but there was little prospect of the Soviet edifice collapsing. One German housewife writing to her husband at the front mused, ‘when one hears in the reports what losses the Russians have had already, one can hardly imagine how he has kept up the fight for so long’.⁽⁴⁾

General Halder made no mention in his diary at the six-week point that the campaign had exceeded the duration of the western Blitzkrieg. His only comment was that the logistic situation regarding shoes and clothing was ‘tight’. Winter clothing would require consideration alongside the ‘clamour for lost replacements’ by Panzer and infantry divisions. A considerable deficit had by now emerged between casualties and these replacements. Army Group South received only 10,000 reinforcements to compensate for 63,000 losses while Army Groups Centre and North were short by 51,000 and 28,000 men respectively.⁽⁵⁾

Six weeks into the campaign Generalfeldmarschall von Bock was lamenting the difficulties of holding the Smolensk pocket perimeter. ‘We are at the end of our tether just now trying to prevent Soviet units escaping,’ he wrote. It was a far cry from the euphoric conditions that had existed in France barely one year before. Von Bock observed a perilous situation, commenting on signs of increasing strain. ‘The nerves of those burdened with great responsibility are starting to waiver,’ he said. Victory might be near but a terrible price was already apparent. The VIIth and Vth Corps were ‘proud of their success’ but had ‘suffered considerable casualties, especially in officers’.⁽⁶⁾

The common perception among German soldiers was less that of pending victory, more a dawning realisation that the road ahead was going to be hard. One soldier in the 35th Infantry Division wrote home on 19 August:

The longevity of the campaign was developing a sinister parallel to Napoleon’s 1812 experience. A transport battalion Gefreiter presciently wrote, ‘If we ended up here in the winter, something the Russians would dearly have us do, it would not do us a lot of good either.’⁽⁸⁾ Another infantry soldier with Army Group Centre complained the following day, ‘our losses are immense, more than in France’. His company had been fighting around the Moscow Rollbahn since 23 July. ‘One day we have the road, then the Russians, and so it goes on, day after day.’ Victory did not appear imminent. On the contrary, time and intense combat was corroding the courage of the soldiers, in particular pessimism regarding life expectancy.

Unteroffizier Wilhelm Prüller, in a motorised infantry regiment accompanying the 9th Panzer Division with Army Group South, was dipping deeply into his courage bank at the six-week point. On 4 August his battalion lost four officers among 14 dead, 47 wounded and two missing, all within 24 hours.

At Temovka his captain was shot through the head just after he left his side to cross a street. His close friend Wimmer from another company was killed the same day. ‘I’m so sorry for his wife,’ Prüller wrote in his diary, ‘especially since she’s going to have a baby in October.’ Wimmer he remembered – and this was a ‘funny thing’– had always been ‘quite sure nothing would happen to him’. Next, Prüller’s friend Schober was struck by a grenade splinter which penetrated his head below the left eye. He fell ‘dead on the spot’ at a place Prüller had barely vacated. Two others had already been killed at the same inauspicious place and a third comrade also fell, all within the space of a few hours. Prüller’s diary entry that night encapsulated the lot of the German infantryman in the sixth week of the campaign. 350 men had perished in his battalion over five weeks. At this point the year before in France it had been finished. He wrote :

Von Bock’s fear of being ‘scattered to the four winds’ reflected the unparalleled scale as well as unprecedented length of the new campaign. In Poland in 1939 the front expanded from a 320km-wide start line to an area of operations 550km broad at its widest point. Depth did not become a problem to the 41 infantry and 14 Panzer and motorised divisions that were committed because the campaign was over within 28 days. The spring 1941 Yugoslav and Greek campaign involved 33 divisions, of which 15 were Panzer or motorised, advancing over narrow geographically constricted frontages, but to a depth of 1,200km. It was finished in 24 days. The western Blitzkrieg beginning in May 1940 was the Wehrmacht’s supreme test. Three army groups, totalling 94 divisions including 10 Panzer divisions and 46 in reserve, advanced on a broad 700km front across Belgium, Holland and France. A decisive victory resulted in six weeks (see map on page 119). These examples paled into relative insignificance compared to the scale and ferocity of the Russian campaign. The operation dwarfed its predecessors in terms of time and scale.

The ‘Barbarossa’ invasion front was double that of the Western campaign and expanded a further one third in six weeks from over 1,200km at the start to a breadth of 1,600km. This time 139 divisions were committed. More Panzer and motorised formations were employed than in France, but the 19 Panzer divisions were smaller in size. By late autumn 1941 the front had broadened almost three-fold incorporating the Karelian Peninsula and Baltic states, stretching 2,800km from Murmansk to the Black Sea. Navigation problems dogged the advance from the beginning. Max Kuhnert, a cavalry NCO, said on crossing the border with Army Group South in June:

It seemed as though the invading armies were immediately swallowed up by the vastness of the terrain. ‘I went strictly by compass,’ commented Kuhnert, ‘occasionally checking the divisional insignia on the vehicles going east.’⁽¹¹⁾ To place the scale of the expanding front in relative context, it could be assumed that a widely stretched division might defend a 10km frontage. The new front would therefore require 280 divisions; but only 139 were theoretically available. Geographical hindrances such as the Pripet Marshes and Carpathian Mountains would restrict manoeuvre space. In reality, combat probably only occurred physically over a 1,000km frontage, and then only haphazardly. German divisions moving forward over the difficult roads that formed a primitive network probably advanced sweeping an area about 3km wide. Most combat formations would elect to concentrate in depth, forcing routes on narrow fronts. German progress, in a sense, could be pictured as three arrow shots – the army groups – fired into an empty but expanding funnel. An advance into the depth of the Soviet Union meant also that divisions had to remain behind to guard vital communication and supply routes, and reduce isolated Russian pockets. As a consequence, forces in the advance were constantly diminishing while the land area to be conquered doubled in depth and tripled in width. At the 2,800km-wide point the front was 1,000km deep.

The sheer scale of the objective was becoming part of the problem. If the Russian colossus could not be overwhelmed by the body blows being administered, a rapier coup degrâce might be the solution. In short, the conditions required to achieve victory needed to be reconsidered.

Conditions for victory

As a rapid Russian collapse did not materialise, Adolf Hitler and his army planners were obliged to reconsider uneasily the future focus as the width and depth of the Russian land mass unfolded before them. One German Army photographer wrote in the Ukraine, ‘we have no more maps and can only follow the compass needle to the east’.⁽¹⁾ There were no road signs and few landmarks enabling Germans to calculate their bearings across the limitless steppes of the eastern Ukraine. Patrols and despatch riders simply asked the women and old men in the fields for directions. Poor planning and a degree of unit directional floundering resulted in these vast uncharted territories.

General Halder admitted on 11 August that ‘the whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus’. The enemy’s military and material potential had been grossly miscalculated. ‘At the outset of the war, we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360’. These divisions may be qualitatively inferior to the German and poorly led, ‘but there they are, and if we smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put up another dozen’.⁽²⁾ As a consequence, German staffs had enormous difficulty reconciling their victories against tangible achievements. The Russians were obstinate. They would paradoxically fight bitterly to the death in one instance and surrender en masse at the next. The cumulative impact of such victories thus far, at considerable cost, seemed merely to be the attainment of ‘false crests’. Although the summit might be tantal-isingly ahead, planning fatigue tended to obscure the best means of achieving the most direct route to the objective: that of total victory.

^{A diagrammatic representation of the vast area covered by the eastern campaign compared to previous shorter operations in the West and Balkans. Poland was conquered in 28 days, the Balkans in 24. The campaign in the West ended at the six-week point. Army Group Centre was lamenting its losses and commenting upon the difficulty of holding Russian forces inside the Smolensk pocket six weeks into the Russian campaign. Resistance at the very first pocket six weeks into the Russian campaign. Resistance at the very first pocket to be established, at Brest-Litovsk, ended only one week before.}

Hitler’s controversial change of direction introduced at this stage of the campaign is often discussed with the benefit of a strategic hindsight not available to those executing decisions. It is these contemporary perceptions influencing such deliberations that ought to be considered. One school of thought opined that the Wehrmacht, stretched to its physical limit advancing into an ever-widening land mass, should concentrate its resources against one objective at a time. Generalfeldmarschall von Bock and his Panzer-gruppen and army commanders Kluge, Guderian and Hoth gave united support, to von Brauchitsch, the Wehrmacht and his Chief of Staff Halder in making Moscow the primary target. Hitler, almost perversely it seemed, elected to concentrate operations against Leningrad to the north and the Ukraine in the south. Moscow would fall as a consequence of this pressure directed against the flanks. Political and economic reasons were cited for this diversification of effort. Führer Directive Number 33, issued initially on 19 July, outlined the concept of future operations. Army Group Centre was to be divested of its two Panzergruppen – 3 (Hoth) and 2 (Guderian) – which were to be diverted from Moscow to co-operate with von Leeb and von Rundstedt in advances north to Leningrad and south to Kiev. Vacillation and confusion followed during a subsequent ‘Nineteen-day Interregnum’ (4–24 August) as commanders debated or fought their preferred operational concept at conferences. Führer Directive 34A followed on 7 August when OKW and OKH, after conferring with Jodl and Halder, persuaded Hitler of the need to resume the advance on Moscow. This was, however, rescinded three days later when renewed resistance at Leningrad frightened Hitler into insisting Hoth’s Panzergruppe 3 move north to assist von Leeb. Hitler resolved to strike southward toward Kiev. He was not deflected by a spirited presentation from Guderian, recalled from the front to brief at Rastenburg on 23 August, arguing the Moscow option for von Brauchitsch and Halder. Recriminations among the top commanders exacerbated the already vitriolic debate. Hitler, backed by Feldmarschall Keitel, Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff, and Schmundt, his chief Adjutant, patronisingly stated, ‘my generals know nothing about the economic aspects of war.’ Political, military and economic reasons were given for deflecting the advance southward into the Ukraine. Soviet air force bases in the Crimea could menace the Romanian Ploesti oilfields, economically vital to the German war effort. They had therefore to be neutralised.

Following three weeks of inertia the Ostheer (army of the east) was to resume the attack with a full-blooded offensive to the south. Urgency was provided by the need to conclude the Kiev operation in sufficient time to redirect an assault on Moscow before winter. The Russians, who anticipated an assault on Moscow, were astonished to see instead an attack suddenly directed to the south.

The controversy over the importance of Moscow was bound up in the army staff debate of what to do, now that the Soviet regime was prepared to fight on despite catastrophic reverses. What were the preconditions for victory in this new and not previously considered scenario? Options to circumvent the impasse might be to capture cities to create a political impact or capture ground for economic acquisition. The economic option was not seen as a rapid war-winning strategy. Gaining popular support, a measure that proved particularly effective in 1917–18, was not seriously considered due to its ideological unacceptability to the Führer. In any case it would take too long. Annihilating the Red Army remained an unfulfilled aspiration. None of the proposed strategies appeared to be working. Leningrad, ‘the cradle of Bolshevism’, was an attractive objective to Hitler, a ‘party’ man, who appreciated the ideological fibre the Communist Party conferred on the regime. Communism resided in the cities and built-up areas, not necessarily in the countryside. Panzer Leutnant F. W. Christians remembered, as his unit crossed the Ukrainian border in the middle of summer, ‘we were greeted with real enthusiasm’. It was an emotive appeal never exploited. ‘They did not just bring salt and bread,’ the traditionally hospitable Ukrainian form of greeting, ‘but also fruit and eggs,’ he declared. ‘We were warmly greeted as liberators.’⁽³⁾ Such a psychological undercurrent was irrelevant in the Blitzkrieg context, because it had no immediate significance for military operations. The ideological end-state was, in any case, to enslave these people for the economic benefit of the Reich. A more positive outcome from a change in the direction of attack would be to strike an unexpected blow with potentially damaging consequences for the Soviet southern salient bulging westwards. A Cannae was envisaged.

Hitler’s decision caused real anguish to the High Command at OKH. Halder complained:

But in a number of respects the Army High Command was the victim of its own confidence. There was a gulf opening up between aspiration and reality commensurate with the physical gap developing between the headquarters at the front and rear. Senior staff officers had only a limited perception of the rigours and deprivations endured by officers and men on the new Russian front. Bickering over dwindling reserves of reinforcements and logistic assets to replenish faltering Panzer advances continued; OKW and OKH were becoming complacently spoiled by a seemingly automatic flow of victories. Complaints from spearhead commanders, who repeatedly produced triumphs despite dwindling resources, not surprisingly tended to be shrugged off. Somehow, whatever the declared limitations, the German soldier managed.

Junior officers and soldiers at the front commented on the change in the direction of advance, but theirs was an uncomplicated view. They were concerned less with strategy, rather the imperative to survive or live more comfortably in a harsh environment. German soldiers were used to sudden and unexpected changes in direction. These were generally accepted without much comment because the Führer and ‘higher-ups’ invariably ‘had it in hand’. Rapid changes in the direction of the Schwer-punkt (main point of effort) or in risk-taking had saved the day on many an occasion in France and Crete, for example. The German soldier was conditioned to instant and absolute obedience.

Major Bernd Freytag von Lorringhoven recalled Guderian’s return from the fateful conference at Rastenburg on 23 August, after the General had failed to secure the Führer’s compliance for a continuation of the drive on Moscow. ‘We were all very astonished,’ he said, ‘…when Hitler had convinced him it was more important to push southwards into the Ukraine.’⁽⁵⁾ Hauptmann Alexander Stahlberg was similarly perplexed to learn the 12th Panzer Division was to be redirected against Leningrad.

Within a few days, he explained, ‘the riddle was solved’, so far as the 12th Panzer Division was concerned. ‘Moscow was no longer the priority, Leningrad was to be taken first.’⁽⁶⁾ Major von Lorringhoven remarked after the war that the decision ‘is difficult to comprehend under conditions that would be prevalent today’. One simply did not question orders. He added thoughtfully:

To question the change of direction was incomprehensible;‘for practical purposes that was simply not possible,’⁽⁷⁾ said von Lorring-hoven.

Some soldiers have since remarked on the change, in postwar publications. Artilleryman Werner Adamczyk was informed his unit was to be diverted towards Leningrad.

Leutnant Heinrich Haape, with Infantry Regiment 18 on the Central Front, made similar calculations.

There was then a pause in the normally incessant stream of marching orders. Until ‘on 30 July we received the incredible order to prepare defensive positions’.⁽⁹⁾

Many postwar personal accounts point to this abrupt dispersal of effort ‘to the four winds’ with hindsight as sealing the eventual outcome of the campaign. The ‘nineteen-day interregnum’ between 4 and 24 August, which one eminent historian claims ‘may well have spared Stalin defeat in 1941’, is not a theme in contemporary diary accounts and letters home.⁽¹⁰⁾ Ordinary soldiers may comment on plans after the event, but during conflict it rarely occurs to them. Soldiers did what they were told. Most of their letters reflect a desire to get the campaign finished. If this warranted a change in the direction of attack, then so be it. Survival and conditions at the front are what they wrote about.

Optimism was tempered with an increasing frustration at the way the campaign was being drawn out. ‘If this tempo is maintained,’ wrote a Düsseldorf housewife to the front, ‘then Russia’s collapse will not be long in coming.’⁽¹¹⁾ An Obergefreiter declared on 8 August that ‘since this morning the battle is now raging for the cradle of the Bolshevist revolution. We are now on the march to Leningrad.’ Despite bitter resistance from ‘committed communists’, and facing rain and storms, the advance ‘could not be held up by them’.⁽¹²⁾ Another infantry Gefreiter with Army Group South wrote on 24 August, ‘the enemy fought bitterly at several positions but, nevertheless, had to fall back with heavy losses’. Many of his comrades ‘were left dead or wounded on the battlefield. This war is dreadful,’ he lamented.⁽¹³⁾ There was more frustration at the requirement in the centre to go over to the defensive and engage in static positional warfare than comment about the opening thrust to the south. ‘I’m already fed up to the eye-teeth with the much vaunted Soviet Union,’ declared an Unteroffizier from the 251st Infantry Division.

It might have been 1917. Another infantry Gefreiter from 256th Division complained, ‘it was better last year, by the beginning of July the war with France was already over and the first people were beginning to go on leave’.⁽¹⁵⁾ Common to many letters is recognition of the imperative to finish the campaign quickly in order to survive. Bernhard Ritter, a 24-year-old motorised infantry soldier, attempted to come to terms with the psychological toll the war was exacting by expressing his private innermost thoughts to his diary. He wrote on 19 August:

Ritter, like many front-line soldiers, sought to distance himself from the pain and anguish of losing friends in order to maintain emotional equilibrium. It was not easy. Ritter came across the graves of two former comrades in the rear. They had all ridden in the same vehicle. He subconsciously tried to rationalise his feelings of regret.

The graves would remain behind the advance. ‘One of the simple secrets of life that war teaches us,’ reflected Ritter, was that buried inside those plots ‘was something from our own souls’.⁽¹⁶⁾

Harald Henry, still enduring tortuous forced marches with Army Group Centre, wrote on 18 August:

He wrote another letter four days later, during the static ‘interregnum’ period, as the future strategic direction of the campaign was being discussed. ‘Yesterday was a day so immersed in blood, so full of dead and wounded, so blasted by crackling salvoes and shrapnel from shells and the groans and shrieks of the wounded, that I can no longer write about it.’ Casualties within Henry’s unit were high. ‘Old Unteroffizier Grabke and many other friends are dead,’ he said. ‘It was a miracle I was relieved from this heavy fighting in the afternoon and so far have not been injured.’⁽¹⁷⁾ The strategic implications of a change in the direction of advance were of no consequence to men who sought to survive the next day. Soldiers and families at home simply wanted the fighting to stop. ‘Is the Russian still not finished off?’ wrote a mother to her son at the front:

The Germans had underestimated their Russian opponents. This inability to finish off an apparently reeling foe formed the background to vacillating strategies. Nobody, it seemed, was able to identify a war-winning solution. The soldiers left it to the generals who in turn tended, with failure, to blame Hitler. There had been a misappreciation between the Russian national and ‘Soviet’ identity. Hitler assumed the innate ‘rottenness’ of the Soviet Bolshevik ideology would result in the rapid collapse of the regime. He and his generals preferred to apply the experience of 1917 to the outcome of the campaign. A more meaningful example was Napoleon’s experience of 1812.

German victory over Tsarist Russia during World War 1 and the treaty signed at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 was followed by further German advances into the Baltic states, Poland, Belorussia, the Ukraine and Crimea. The Russian Army buckled under the strain of a two-pronged military and propaganda offensive that exacerbated tensions and disharmony in Imperial Russia. Many Wehr-macht officers and soldiers had served in this war, which presaged the total collapse of the Imperial Russian State. Although the successful methodology of its joint military-propaganda prosecution was not reapplied in 1941, generalisations were nevertheless made on its likely outcome based on World War 1 lessons.

The precedent of 1812 was arguably more significant. The fact that Russia did not surrender to Napoleon even after the capture of Moscow, before winter, had not escaped Adolf Hitler. It is debatable whether Moscow was so crucial to the survival of the regime. Stalin in his 3 July speech harnessed the emotive appeal of nationalist ‘Mother Russia’ to protect the homeland. ‘I see Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land’ against ‘the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of locusts,’ he said.⁽¹⁹⁾ Grigori Tokaty, a refugee White Russian teaching at Moscow Military Academy, recalled at this moment of crisis:

Dismantling Russian factories and relocating them further eastwards beyond the reach of the Luftwaffe suggested surrender was not imminent, whether Moscow fell or not. When the front was only 80km from Vitebsk in early July, 2,000 of 5,000 workers from the ‘Flag of Industrialisation’ textile factory were moved to Saratow, several hundred kilometres further east. During the journey, constantly dogged by air raids, the workers learned their city had been overrun by the German advance.⁽²¹⁾

Russian resistance remained unbowed. The only logical means of achieving victory must be to break her armies. The advance to the south decided by Hitler had the potential to achieve a gigantic encirclement operation that might result in the annihilation of several Russian armies. It was beginning to develop sinister parallels with the crushing victory achieved by Hannibal’s Carthaginians over Rome at Cannae in 216BC.

A city ‘pulsing with life’… Leningrad

Generalfeldmarschall von Leeb’s Army Group North accelerated its rate of advance along the Baltic coast as Army Group Centre completed the destruction of the Smolensk pocket. General Hoepner’s Panzergruppe 4, with three Panzer and three motorised divisions, provided the spearhead, flanked on the Baltic coast by Generaloberst von Kuchler’s Twenty-eighth Army to the left and Generaloberst Busch’s Sixteenth Army to the right. Crossing the River Dvina signalled the piercing of the old ‘Stalin Line’ that had run along the previous Latvian/Russian Border. The 1st Panzer Division reached Ostrov on 4 July. Pskov fell three days later, opening rail and road connections that led to Leningrad. Spectacular encirclements were not a feature of this advance because, unlike Army Group Centre, the Panzer spearheads had to negotiate difficult terrain – lakes, forests and rivers – from the very start. Even so, by mid-July Solzy and Novgorod had been taken, enabling the smallest of the three Army Groups to stand on the River Luga, the last remaining physical obstacle before Leningrad. It had achieved an advance of 750km by the time Army Group Centre occupied Smolensk. On 10 July Field Marshal Mannerheim’s Finnish Karelian Army invaded the USSR from Finland and began to advance south-east down the Karelian isthmus towards Lake Ladoga and Leningrad.

Army Group North battered its opposing forces so effectively and captured Lithuania, Latvia and most of Estonia so quickly that Soviet forces were denied freedom of manoeuvre. With the capture of Leningrad imminent Generalfeldmarschall von Leeb received instructions on 15 July that ‘the immediate mission is not to capture Leningrad but to encircle it’.

Generaloberst Reinhardt’s XXXXIst Panzer Corps broke into open country beyond the River Luga on 8 August in a move which seemed to presage a Soviet collapse. The Luga, 100km from Leningrad, was in effect the outermost ring of the city’s defence. Rolf Dahm, a radio operator in a German infantry division, commented:

^{Von Leeb’s final offensive against Leningrad prior to transferring armour to Army Group Centre for the coming Operation ‘Taifun’ (Typhoon). The impetus was soaked up by three primary lines of defence placed before the city. These had 1,000km of earthworks, 645km of anti-tank ditches, 600km of barbed wire and 5,000 pillboxes. First Panzer division attacked south-west along the line of the River Neva while 6th Panzer Division pushed northwards following the main rail link from the south. Schlüsselburg and the outer southern city suburbs were captured and a vital rail link to Tikhvin cut. The city was completely encircled by land from the middle of September 1941.}

Between 14 and 18 August, however, Russian forces attacked following urgent prompting from Moscow. The counter-offensive was extravagant and poorly co-ordinated. Masses of cavalry, lorried infantry and inexperienced reserves were put into costly frontal attacks that did at least slow some of the momentum of the German advance. General Erich von Manstein’s LVIth Panzer Corps, prevented from reinforcing its sister XXXXIst Corps in the Panzergruppe, marched and counter-marched during three critical weeks of fighting across the dried-out marshes of the upper Ilmen river. Men and machines were exhausted.

The Luftwaffe, ranging far ahead of German mobile units, had been responsible for much of the success. Lieutenant J. Jewtuchewitsch’s Russian 64th Engineer Battalion, operating south of Leningrad, was totally intimidated by repeated air raids. Driven out of a barn by an early morning Messerschmitt Bf110 strafing attack, he saw the surrounding buildings soon enveloped in flames. ‘One tried to make oneself tiny,’ he later wrote, ‘completely invisible’ to escape the attention of the predatory aircraft. Pauses between strafing and bombing runs which continued nearby were occupied ‘with jokes and forced laughter, trying to convince each other we were not frightened’. They were. The platoon commander, Muschtakow, ordered them to run into nearby woods and take cover. Jewtuchewitsch and five men ran the gauntlet of a ‘rain of machine gun fire’ across an open field chased by a Bf110. Even inside the wood they did not feel safe. ‘The edges,’ Jewtuchewitsch described, ‘were raked with methodical persistence by bombs and machine gun fire.’ Having been blown from a depression by the force of a bomb blast, he heard a plaintive cry for help from Lissizyn, one of his soldiers, a few metres away. ‘Come to me, over here, over here,’ he shrieked. Jewtuchewitsch staggered towards the source of the screaming, concussed and disorientated from the explosion. He was confronted with the dreadful sight of his companion with no legs and a gaping stomach wound, ‘something which would remain long in my memory,’ he said. There was no option but to leave him behind. Rallying the survivors, he rejoined the battalion later that night. There was no rest, and at dawn the air attacks started again.⁽²⁾

At the beginning of September a determined German assault was mounted against Leningrad. Geography posed problems in encircling a city protected to its rear by the enormous expanse of Lake Ladoga. It would not be possible to close the northern side of the ring effectively. Extensive and concentric defence lines faced the direction of German attack. These were thrown around the city by the Leningrad command, which mobilised the city population to construct 1,000km of earthworks, 645km of anti-tank ditches and 600km of barbed wire entanglement linked by 5,000 pillboxes. Over 300,000 members of the Young Communist League and 200,000 civilian inhabitants, including as many women as men, achieved this extraordinary effort of labour.⁽³⁾ Stalin’s ‘Mother Russia’ appeal to elicit the population’s help in stemming the ‘Fascist horde’ was bearing fruit.

Von Leeb ordered an all-out assault on the city preceded by a triple-wave Luftwaffe bombing attack. Nine days of savage fighting followed, during which the attacking German divisions closed onto the three lines of the city’s defence. The 1st Panzer Division followed the left bank of the River Neva south-west into the city while 6th Panzer, straddling the main railway to Leningrad, pushed up from the south. Tank commanders suffered considerable casualties because, after weeks of mobile operations, they were slow to adapt tactics to unfamiliar wooded and urban terrain. Four successive commanders of the 6th Panzer Division became casualties during the first day of the assault.⁽⁴⁾ On 8 September Schlüsselburg was taken and the outer suburbs to the south of Leningrad occupied. With this, the city of nearly three million inhabitants, with its vital rail link to Tikhvin lost, was completely encircled and cut off.

The 1st Panzer Division reached and penetrated the Dudergof height defences 10km south-east of Leningrad. Only one of its battalions remained at over 50% effective strength. By 16.00 hours on 10 September Height 167 – the 140m topmost point of the ridge south-east of the city – had been scaled by the attackers. Daniel Granin, a Soviet volunteer, described how:

On the left flank of the XXXXIst Panzer Corps, Eighteenth Army infantry edged their way across the valley. Once the Russian guns and observers were cleared from Height 167, entry into the suburban districts of Slutsk and Pushkin could be attempted. Krasnoye Seloe, south-west of the city, fell on 11 September. Hans Mauermann, an artillery observer moving forward with one of the assaulting infantry divisions, recalled:

Russian Lieutenant Jewtuchewitsch despaired. Soldiers in his unit had recently arrived from the reserve and were untrained.

His experience was typical of the many untrained and disintegrating Russian units caught up in the maelstrom of the German advance. ‘Our company has been rubbed out once again,’ he wrote, ‘and we have landed in the rear of the enemy and are being hunted through the wood like animals, trying to get across the German-occupied road to break out and join the others.’ They were separated from their Commissar Jermakow in the trees and had been unable to regain contact. That night Lieutenant Jewtuche-witsch wrote his last diary entry.

Jewtuchewitsch had said goodbye to his mother barely two months before.

After a final sad meal his mother and sisters had accompanied him to the barrack gates before he left. ‘I said a quick goodbye and with a lump in my throat, holding back the tears, I kissed them all.’

German soldiers searching among the bodies decided the small book taken from the dead Soviet lieutenant might be of military significance. It was passed on to company headquarters.⁽⁷⁾

By the fourth day of the all-out German assault on Leningrad it became clear that further progress was not possible without substantial reinforcements. A limit of exploitation was declared on the Peterfog-Pushkin road. Street-fighting was slowing the tempo of the advance and continued for a further five days before it began to abate. The arrival of Soviet General Zhukov, previously dismissed as Chief of Staff by Stalin because of his frank advice on the developing Kiev crisis, energised the defence. Zhukov was well practised in the value of combined operations and ordered the saturation of the enemy with jointly interacting artillery, mortar and air support. This and the depth of the defence lines soaked up the impetus of the Panzer advances. Large numbers of medium and heavy mortars proved as lethal as artillery inside the close ranges over which the battle was fought.

Other factors also diluted the German effort. The bulk of Generaloberst Hoepner’s Panzergruppe 4 was ordered to transfer once again to Army Group Centre and prepare for the assault on Moscow. Likewise, the Finnish advance along the Karelian Isthmus had halted. Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, the Finnish leader, resolved to reconquer only that land he believed justifiably belonged to Finland. Despite the apparent nadir of Soviet fortunes, he did not wish to be held hostage to any future resurgence. The impact at the front from these developments was dramatic in some sections. Rolf Dahm, forward with an infantry division, recalled:

German soldiers ensconced on the Dudergof heights were treated to the panoramic sight of the city of Leningrad only 12km away with its golden cupolas and towers bathed in sunlight. Warships could be seen in the port, shelling targets to their rear. It was a tantalising, and at the same time confusing, experience for officers and soldiers alike, unaware of what was impeding the final assault. Realists such as Walter Broschei correctly guessed why:

Artillery Forward Observer Hans Mauermann likewise had few illusions about the likely outcome of any further costly attacks. He breathed a sigh of relief.

Generalfeldmarschall von Leeb mounted this spoiling attack despite the order to transfer his Panzer strength back to the Central Front. But it had not succeeded. There was now no alternative to the Führer’s original intent articulated during the euphoric and successful early phase of‘Barbarossa’. Halder had stated on 8 July:

Even before von Leeb’s final attempt to ‘bounce’ the city on 6 September, Halder had already declared the previous day our objective has been achieved’. The area, as promulgated by Hitler, ‘will now become a subsidiary theatre of operations’. Von Leeb was denied his victorious entry into the city. He was, in any case, aware of approaching operational limitations which would be to support a main drive against Moscow from mid-September. ‘True, it will be a hard job for the Northern wing,’ explained Halder, responding to von Leeb’s request to retain Reinhardt’s Panzer Corps and VIIIth, ‘but the scheme underlying our directive remains the only possible solution.’⁽¹²⁾ Hitler’s aim to encircle the city and reduce it by bombardment and starvation was as consistent as it was calculated.

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:

Johannes Haferkamp, an infantry soldier who served on the Leningrad front, succinctly expressed the resulting dilemma after the war:

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.

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:

He accepted the subsequent long siege had been ‘senseless’, but pointed out the imperative was to win and finish the war.

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:

It had not been like this in France the year before.