Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (43 page)

Fritz Hockenjos’s bicycle unit – now retraining as a ski unit – had been posted to the hamlet of Zvanka, on the west bank of the Volkhov River. Their quarters were an abandoned monastery, on what had once been the estate of Catherine the Great’s court poet Gavriil Derzhavin. From the observation point at the top of its bell tower snow-covered heath and forest stretched to the horizon in every direction, broken only by the broad highway of the frozen river, a line of telegraph poles marking the Moscow–Leningrad railway line, and by the coming and going of planes to a distant Russian landing strip. In front, on the river’s opposite bank, lay the Russians’ newly formed Second Shock Army, expected to attack any day. Behind, in the frost-struck, crystalline woods, wandered the remnants of units destroyed in recent fighting. ‘Daily’, Hockenjos wrote,

we are spectators and actors in a gruesome drama that has been playing out in the white woods for the past few weeks – that of a Russian regiment reaching bottom . . . The forest battle of 30 December seems to have been their last desperate throw, and the dead included the regiment’s commander. The survivors have long since dropped their weapons and eaten their last pieces of dried bread. Now they wander aimlessly here and there through the woods, like animals cut off from their herd. Blind, apathetic animals. They no longer even think of breaking out, though our line is more than thin enough. Nor do they think of giving themselves up – they just walk and walk so as to still hunger and beat off the cold. The forest is full of their tracks; not a day goes by without one of our patrols meeting and shooting a few. One icy moonlit night a patrol suddenly spotted them right there, thirty paces to the side of the path – a long row of shadows trotting silently along. They fired off everything they’d got; some fell in the snow, the others continued to trot on in silence, just veering off slightly towards the depths of the forest . . . Those that avoid the bullet fall prey to hunger and cold, one after another. They crawl into the undergrowth, curl up and that’s the end. Some stray mindlessly out into daylight at the edge of the forest, others blunder in front of the sentry at our command post as if they didn’t see him. They can hardly lift their frozen black hands, or move their lips. Blood seeps from their cracked faces. The bullet is a mercy for them.

Sometimes this happens: the sentry, in his Swabian dialect, yells down into the bunker, ‘Here’s another one!’ In reply Obergefreite K. asks everyone, ‘Which of you new boys hasn’t got any felt boots yet?’ A few hands go up and K. says, ‘Karle, go and get them!’ Karle swings himself down from his wooden bunk, picks up a rifle and goes outside. A shot is heard and Karle comes back with a pair of felt boots under his arm.

The unit also stripped frozen Russian corpses: ‘Their felt boots, unfortunately, we have to cut from their feet, but they can be sewn back together again. We’re not yet as bad as the 2nd Battalion, who chop the dead Russians’ legs off and thaw them out on top of the stove in their bunker.’ By February, Hockenjos noted with a certain pride, he and his men had turned into proper
Frontschweine
. Dirty and bearded, they had learned to wear their padded cotton trousers outside their boots so as to keep the snow out, and their coats unbuttoned at the collar, so as to be able to reach inside quickly for hand grenades. Under their helmets their heads were wrapped in woollen shawls, and their noses with sticky medical gauze, to protect against frostbite. Armbands prevented confusion with the enemy. Hockenjos was touched to find, in a comfort parcel from the home front, an old-fashioned velvet muff. ‘We definitely’, he admitted, ‘don’t look like German soldiers at all any more.’
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The privations suffered by Leningrad’s besiegers, though, were as nothing to those borne by its defenders. One of the archives’ least-known revelations is the existence of starvation within the Red Army. Throughout the Red Army rations were poor: the bread ‘similar to asphalt in colour and density’, the
kasha
nicknamed ‘shrapnel’.
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But within Leningrad’s blockade ring soldiers not only deserted, shot themselves in the hands or feet or committed suicide in substantial numbers, but actually died of hunger. To blame – aside from the blockade itself – were disorganisation, theft and corruption. Though the military ration – at its lowest 500 grams of bread and 125 grams of meat per day for a front-line soldier, 300 grams of bread and 50 grams of meat in the rear
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– was theoretically enough to survive on, in practice many men received far less.
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One such was Semen Putyakov, a thirty-six-year-old infantryman stationed at an aerodrome on a quiet sector of the Finnish front, just to the north-west of Leningrad. From call-up onwards he confided to his diary a long series of grumbles – lack of training, ‘museum exhibit’ rifles, his lieutenant (‘so dim that even the least educated soldiers are surprised at his orders’), senior officers’ rudeness and use of military vehicles to transport their girlfriends. In early December he noticed for the first time that the officers were stealing the men’s food, ordering cookhouse staff to divide rations for six among eight and taking the surplus for themselves. By the end of the month he was permanently consumed by hunger, and getting into trouble for making complaints:

Yesterday, while collecting lunch, I asked one of the political workers why we weren’t getting our full portions. I thought he was a fair man, and would want the full norm to reach our stomachs. But he began to shout that it wasn’t in the regulations for us to check the norms. So I asked where in the regulations it says that they can give us less than we’re supposed to get. After that he went berserk. I must find out his surname. And his ugly mug looks healthier than it should.
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Putyakov celebrated New Year’s Eve by shaving, looking at a photograph of his wife and children, and remembering meals from family gatherings past. By 8 January he had difficulty walking: ‘Gnawed on horse-bones during wood-chopping. Hunger, hunger. My swollen face isn’t going down. They say there’ll be ration increases, but I don’t believe it . . . The devil knows what I’m writing, or what for.’ Furiously, he raved against his platoon’s corrupt sergeant and junior lieutenant – ‘They’re not men, they’re beasts in human form.’ Other soldiers in the unit had already died of hunger – ‘disgusting starvation deaths . . . it would be better to die in battle with the fascists’. A few days after he tried to make an official complaint to an army doctor he was arrested. Accused of ‘expressing disappointment at the food supply of the Red Army’, he was executed on 13 March 1942.

Total mortality from starvation within the Leningrad armies is impossible to estimate, but Putyakov’s experience was no isolated instance. Soldiers told similar stories in their letters home: ‘We’re horribly hungry’, wrote one. ‘We don’t want to perish from hunger. Some comrades have already been sent to hospital. Some have died. What’s going to happen? What good are deaths like these to the Motherland?’ ‘We get weaker every day’, wrote another. ‘We don’t get any meat or fat, and 300 grams of bread. There’s not a single grain in the soup, no potato, no cabbage – it’s just muddy saltwater  . . . We’ve lost a lot of weight – we look like shadows. We gnaw on oilseed cake, which is being fed to the horses in place of oats. We fill ourselves up with water.’ A third had had ‘enough of life. Either I’m going to die of hunger or shoot myself. I can’t bear it any more.’
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Vasili Churkin, on the front line just south of Ladoga with his artillery battery, complained that although his fellow soldiers were in some cases almost too weak to stand, a lazy
politruk
made them build him an extra-comfortable bunker at each new stop, while they slept outside on the snow. The man was ‘good for nothing – just pointless extra weight’.
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Inside the city, Leningraders were shocked at the extreme emaciation of the soldiers they saw in the hospitals or marching along the streets.
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Like Leningrad’s starving civilians, some soldiers resorted to cannibalism. Hockenjos came across what he called a ‘man-eaters’ camp’ in the woods behind Zvanka, the stripped limbs confirming the statements of two young Red Army nurses who had been taken prisoner and given jobs in his battalion’s field hospital. Vasili Yershov (the same man who claimed to have seen children handing out anti-government leaflets at a checkpoint) was senior supply officer to the 56th Rifle Division of the 55th Army, stationed at Kolpino, just to Leningrad’s south. Among his responsibilities was provisioning an army hospital. Housed in the former Izhorsky Works, its two to three thousand sick and wounded lay on straw in glass-roofed, cement-floored workshops, and the two hundred or more who died each day were buried in the factory yard. Medical personnel were numerous but unqualified and painfully thin, despite in theory receiving the military ‘rear norm’. ‘One day’, Yershov relates,

Sergeant Lagun noticed that an army doctor, Captain Chepurniy, was digging in the snow in the yard. Covertly watching, the sergeant saw him cut a piece of flesh from an amputated leg, put it in his pocket, re-bury the leg in the snow and walk away. Half an hour later Lagun walked into Chepurniy’s room as if he had something to ask him, and saw that he was eating meat out of a frying pan. The sergeant was convinced that it was human flesh . . . So he raised the alarm and in the course of the ensuing investigation it became clear that not only were the hospital’s sick and wounded eating human flesh, but so too were about twenty medical personnel, from doctors and nurses to outdoor workers – systematically feeding on dead bodies and amputated legs. They were all shot on a special order of the Military Council.

Their executioner was a jolly, vulgar Captain Borisov of the Special Department, the army wing of the NKVD, to whom Yershov issued the special vodka ration handed out to firing squads (600 grams, a third before and two-thirds afterwards). ‘I have to point out’, Yershov adds, ‘that Captain Borisov shot 50–60 per cent of people personally . . . He couldn’t live without alcohol every day and so tried to carry out as many executions as possible himself.’
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Yershov also recorded the murder, by starving soldiers, of the carriers who twice daily toted insulated canisters of soup, strapped on to their backs with leather harnesses, from the field kitchens up to the front line:

In early January 1942 the divisional commander started getting urgent calls from regimental and battalion commanders, saying that this or that group of soldiers hadn’t been fed, that the carrier hadn’t appeared with his canteen, having apparently been killed by German snipers. Thorough checks revealed that something unbelievable was happening: soldiers were leaving their trenches early in the morning to meet the carriers, stabbing them to death, and taking the food. They would eat as much as they could, then bury the murdered carrier in the snow and hide the canteen before returning to their trenches. The murderer would go back to the place twice a day, first finishing off the contents of the canteen and then cutting off pieces of human flesh and eating those too. To give you some idea of the numbers I can tell you that in my division in the winter of 1941–2, on the front line alone – taking no account of units in the rear – there were about twenty such cases.
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Despite his Leningrad armies’ dreadful state, Stalin included them in a general late winter offensive, planned while still in the midst of November and December’s battle for Moscow. Vastly overambitious, it was designed to recapture Smolensk, the Ukrainian Donbass and the Crimea as well as to liberate Leningrad, and more broadly to deny the Germans breathing space in which to prepare for new assaults in the spring.
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Responsibility for breaking the German lines around Leningrad was to lie chiefly with General Meretskov’s Volkhov Front, which faced Army Group North’s Eighteenth Army along a line running south-east from Lake Ladoga, then south along the Volkhov River to Novgorod. While the armies within the siege ring did what they could to push south and east, those of the Volkhov front were to break westwards across the river, cutting off the German forces around Lyuban, Tosno and Mga. Altogether, 326,000 troops were initially to be committed to the operation, giving a theoretical 50 per cent advantage in manpower, 60 per cent in guns and mortars and 30 per cent in aircraft.

Ignoring Meretskov’s pleas for more artillery, reserves and time in which to concentrate his troops and arrange his logistics, Stalin insisted that the offensive be launched in the first week of January. To keep (presumably terrified) Meretskov up to the mark, he despatched to Leningrad the loathsome Lev Mekhlis, head of the Red Army’s Political Directorate and one of the organisers of the 1937–8 army purges.
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Things went badly from the outset: on the 4th and 5th forty-eight hours of heavy fighting near Kirishi won a mere five kilometres of ground; on the 6th an assault across the Volkhov ice in the face of machine guns lost over three thousand men in its first thirty minutes. ‘Continued enemy attacks’, General Halder wrote dismissively in his diary, ‘but nothing on a major scale.’
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Uncoordinated and intermittent, the offensive continued in piecemeal fashion on into February. Hockenjos, returning to Zvanka on the twentieth, found the monastery half destroyed by shelling from the opposite bank of the Volkhov – the cloister full of craters, the chapel vaulting stove in, and the pines and oaks on the slopes leading down to the river reduced to ‘miserable broomsticks’. A week later a second Soviet attack was beaten off with ease: