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
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
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.7
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.’8 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
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.
