Part 4. Waiting for Liberation: January 1942–January 1944
Today I went to the clinic. Two topical notices had been posted up. The first — ‘Report children left without care due to death of parents to room no. 4’. The second — ‘The polyclinic does not issue exemption notes for labour duty’. And on the way home a notice pinned to a fence: ‘Light coffin for sale’. .
Dmitri Lazarev, April 1942
‘Will trade for food’, February 1942. On offer are gold cufflinks, a length of navy blue skirt material, patent leather boots, a samovar, a camera and a hand-drill.
18. Meat Wood
For the rest of the world, Leningrad’s agony took place out of sight and largely out of mind. Once the immediate threat to the city had receded, Allied eyes turned first to the battle for Moscow, then to an avalanche of losses in the Far East and elsewhere. The first month of Leningrad’s mass death — December 1941 — coincided with the fall of Hong Kong; the second with heavy losses of Atlantic shipping to German U-boats; the third with Japan’s capture of Singapore, together with 70,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen. As regards the Soviet Union, Britain and America’s aim was simply to keep her from collapsing altogether or making a separate peace, while resisting Stalin’s — and the British left’s — increasingly importunate calls for a second front. The first of the Arctic convoys carrying tanks, Hurricanes and other military supplies diverted from Britain’s Lend-Lease programme arrived in Archangel at the end of August, the prelude to four long years of acrimonious diplomacy. ‘Surly, snarly and grasping’, Churchill wrote later, ‘the Soviet Government had the impression that they were conferring a great favour on us by fighting in their own country for their own lives.’1
All along the Eastern Front, in January 1942, the Wehrmacht ground to a halt. Analysts have made fun of the Nazi generals’ post-war tendency to lay the blame for ultimate defeat in the East on the weather, the roads and Hitler’s bullying — on anything, in fact, except for their own mistakes or superior Russian skill in the field. This is unfair: even by Russian standards, the winter of 1941–2 was punishingly cold, and hit the German armies hard, most of all those of Army Group North. The sudden plunge in temperature, Hitler stormed over dinner at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ on 12 January, was an ‘unforeseen catastrophe, paralysing everything. On the Leningrad front, with a temperature of 42 degrees below zero, not a rifle, not a machine-gun nor a field-gun has been working on our side.’2 Aircraft were grounded, tank and truck engines refused to start and horses waded in snow up to their bellies, so that to move from place to place troops had to shovel a path by day along the route their transports were to take at night. Soldiers stole clothes and bedding from local peasants (Soviet cartoons guyed them as comical ‘Winter Fritzes’, dressed in headscarves and frilly bloomers), or fell prey to frostbite and exposure. The Spanish ‘Blue Division’, despatched by Franco to aid the war on Communism, were so named, the press jeered, for the colour not of their shirts but of their faces.
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.’3
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’.4 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 rear5 — was theoretically enough to survive on, in practice many men received far less.6