be taken with the forces already at [von Leeb’s] disposal. We need not and must not divert to the Leningrad front anything that we might need for Moscow. Von Leeb’s flank is not threatened in any way. . Von Bock must drive with all his forces on Moscow. (Ask the Fuhrer: Can he afford not to reduce Moscow before winter sets in?)’15
Increasingly irritated by von Leeb’s pleas for more resources — ‘Wild requests by Army Group North for engineers, artillery, anti-aircraft guns’ — Halder was driven to consider resignation by a Fuhrer Directive of 21 August, which flatly contradicted Army High Command. ‘OKH’s [High Command’s] proposals’, Hitler declared, ‘do not conform with my intentions. . The principal object still to be achieved before the onset of winter is not the capture of Moscow, but rather, in the South, the occupation of the Crimea and the Donets coal basin. . and in the North, the encirclement of Leningrad and junction with the Finns.’ Not until these objectives were met would forces be freed up to advance on the capital.
Halder was furious. Hitler’s interference was unendurable, and the Fuhrer had only himself to blame for ‘the zigzag course caused by his successive orders’. High Command, now in its fourth victorious campaign, should not ‘tarnish its reputation’ with his latest demands, and Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief, was being treated ‘absolutely outrageously’. He suggested to Brauchitsch that they both tender their resignations, but Brauchitsch refused ‘on the grounds that the resignations would not be accepted, so nothing would change’.16 The row was patched up (‘Bliss and harmony’, Halder noted sarcastically on 30 August, ‘Everything just lovely again’) but not resolved until 5 September, when Hitler finally agreed that if von Leeb had not captured Leningrad within ten days, Hoepner’s Panzer Group Four would be transferred south to join von Bock’s push for Moscow.17 In the event, von Leeb’s protests and promises of imminent victory meant that the transfer started three days late, but Halder’s point was won. ‘The ring around Leningrad’, he wrote on the day the panzers swung south, ‘has not yet been drawn as closely as might be desired, and further progress after the departure of the 1st Armoured and 36th Motorised Divisions is doubtful. . The situation will remain tight until such time as hunger takes effect as our ally.’18
The redeployment did not seem overwhelmingly significant at the time. On the German side it was seen as a temporary compromise; on the Russian, the sense of looming catastrophe only intensified. In retrospect, however, it was the point at which Germany missed her best chance of taking Leningrad. Never again, despite more than two years of near-continuous fighting, did Army Group North amass the mobility and firepower for a full-scale frontal assault on the city. Instead, it became the Eastern Front’s poor relation, starved of reinforcements and unable to move troops into reserve for fear that they would immediately be redeployed elsewhere. While in the south and centre armies swept back and forth across the map, round Leningrad the front congealed — exactly as Hitler had planned that Barbarossa should not — into the mud and blood of positional trench warfare, during which neither side, despite repeated offensives, ever mustered the strength decisively to beat the other.
The Wehrmacht’s change of strategy — from ground assault to starvation and air raids — was made official in a memo circulated to Army Group North under Halder’s name on 28 September:
According to the directive of the High Command it is ordered that:
1. The city of Leningrad is to be sealed off, the ring being drawn as tightly as possible so as to spare our forces unnecessary effort. Surrender terms will not be offered.
2. So as to eliminate the city as a last centre of Red resistance on the Ostsee [the Baltic] as quickly as possible, without major sacrifice of our own blood, it will not be subjected to infantry assault . . Destruction of waterworks, warehouses and power stations will strip it of its vital services and defence capability. All military objects and enemy defence forces are to be destroyed by firebombing and bombardment. Civilians are to be prevented from bypassing the besieging troops, if necessary by force of arms.19
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 Fuhrer’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
