The concern to spare the German infantry was real. Street-fighting in Smolensk had cost Army Group Centre dear, and newly captured Kiev had just been thrown into chaos by the NKVD’s detonation, by remote control, of dozens of large bombs. (Laid in major buildings and hotels, they killed several senior German officers.) A note of frustration was also starting to creep into Hitler’s mealtime ‘table talk’. His usual fantasising — ‘In the East, the Germans will all be required to travel first or second class, so as to distinguish themselves from the natives. First class will have three seats on each side, second class four’; man-of-the-world travelogues — ‘The dome of the Invalides made a deep impression. The Pantheon I found a horrible disappointment’; and ragbag opinion-mongering — on Roman versus Inca roads, the design and pricing of washbasins and typewriters, the health-giving properties of polenta — was now interspersed with complaints about the stubbornness of the Soviet defence. ‘Every [Soviet] unit commander who fails to fulfil his orders’, he grumbled over lunch on 25 September, ‘risks having his head chopped off. So they prefer to be wiped out by us. . We have forgotten the bitter tenacity with which the Russians fought us during the First World War.’20
The decision not to storm Leningrad also reflected the Nazi leaders’ broader uncertainty about what to do with the twin Russian capitals once they fell into their hands — an uncertainty subconsciously driven, perhaps, by the memory of Napoleon’s debacle at Moscow.* The initial conception was simply to raze both cities to the ground, in accordance with Hitler’s millennial vision of a shining, new-built Eastern Reich. ‘It is the Führer’s firm decision’, Halder had noted after a meeting in early July, ‘to level Moscow and Leningrad, and make them uninhabitable.’ This would not only ‘relieve us of the necessity of feeding their populations through the winter’ but also deal Russia a devastating psychological blow, ‘depriving not only Bolshevism but also Muscovite nationalism of their wellsprings’.21 Now, as Army Group North closed the ring around Leningrad, staffers at High Command began to weigh up — with extraordinary sketchiness as well as inhumanity — what in practice should be the fate of its civilians. A planning session of 21 September ran through the options:
1. Occupy the city; in other words proceed as we have done in regards to other large Russian cities.
Rejected, because it would make us responsible for food supply.
2. Seal off city tightly, if possible with an electrified fence guarded by machine guns.
Disadvantages: . . The weak will starve within a foreseeable time; the strong will secure all food supplies and survive. Danger of epidemics spreading to our front. It’s also questionable whether our soldiers can be asked to fire on women and children trying to break out.
3. Women, children and old people to be taken out through gaps in the encirclement ring. The rest to be allowed to starve:
a. Removal across the Volkhov behind the enemy front theoretically a good solution, but in practice hardly feasible. Who is to keep hundreds of thousands of people together and drive them on? Where is the Russian front?
b. Instead of marching them to the rear of the Russian front, let them spread across the land [i.e. German-occupied territory].
In either case there remains the disadvantage that the remaining starving population of Leningrad becomes a source of epidemics, and that the strongest hold out in the city for a long time.
4. After the Finnish advance and the complete sealing off of the city, we retreat behind the Neva and leave the area to the north of this sector to the Finns. The Finns have unofficially made it clear that they would like to have the Neva as their country’s border, but that Leningrad has to go. Good as a political solution. The question of Leningrad’s population, however, can’t be solved by the Finns. We have to do it.
In conclusion, the meeting came up with a three-stage scenario. First, the German government would ‘clearly establish before the world’ that since Stalin was treating Leningrad as a military objective, Germany was forced to do the same. It would also announce that once Leningrad had surrendered it would ‘allow the humanitarian Roosevelt, under the supervision of the Red Cross’ to transport civilians ‘to his own continent, under a guarantee of free shipping movement. (Such an offer cannot, self-evidently, be accepted — this is just for propaganda.)’ Meanwhile the city would be weakened by bombardment, then gaps opened in the siege lines to let civilians out. The remaining Leningraders would be ‘left to themselves over the winter. Early next year we enter the city (if the Finns do it first we do not object), lead those still alive into inner Russia or into captivity, wipe Leningrad from the face of the earth through demolitions, and hand the area north of the Neva to the Finns.’ This was not, the planners admitted, very satisfactory, and Army Group North still needed orders that could ‘actually be carried out when the time comes’.22
German naval chiefs had similar misgivings — again, on practical and propagandistic rather than humanitarian grounds. Writing to his admiral on 22 September, the day after High Command’s broad-brush planning meeting, a liaison officer attached to Army Group North said that he personally doubted that Leningrad could be destroyed without a single German soldier setting foot in it:
Four or five million people [sic] don’t let themselves get killed so easily. I saw this for myself in Kovno, where the Latvians shot 6,000 Jews, among them women and children. Even a people as brutal as the Latvians could no longer bear the sight of these murders by the end. The whole action then ran into the sand. How much harder this will be with a city of millions.
Besides, this would in my opinion let loose a worldwide storm of indignation, which we can’t afford politically.
Razing Leningrad, he also pointed out, meant denying the Kriegsmarine the use of its naval dockyards, which might come in useful given that the final fight with Britain and America was still to come. ‘After all, Leningrad can disappear at a later stage, when we have won the war at sea.’ Like the army planners, he came up with the surreal suggestion of inviting the Allies to take off civilians in ships. ‘If England and the USA refuse, world opinion will blame them for these people’s demise. If they accept, we’re rid of the problem and it will cost them considerable freight capacity.’23
Hitler — ‘the hardest man in Europe’ as he liked to call himself — was only irritated by this ‘sentimentality’. ‘I suppose’, he declared over supper on 25 September, ‘that some people are clutching their heads trying to answer the question — How can the Führer destroy a city like St Petersburg? Plainly I belong by nature to quite another species!’24 He reiterated his determination not to waver in a notorious directive to Army Group North four days later:
Subject: the future of the City of Petersburg
The Führer is determined to erase the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth. After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban centre. Finland has likewise shown no interest in the maintenance of the city immediately on its new border.
It is intended to encircle the city and level it to the ground by means of artillery bombardment using every calibre of shell, and continual bombing from the air.