these cowards of yours who don’t want to fight?’ On 16 January, the key position of Shlisselburg was recaptured, and two days later it was formally announced that the blockade was broken. In the city, its famous poet Olga Bergholz wrote, ‘This happiness, the happiness of liberated Leningrad, we will never forget. The cursed circle is broken.’ On 3 March another citizen, Igor Chaiko, wrote, ‘A thought is forming in fiery letters in my mind: I can overcome anything…Spring is a symbol of life. The Germans are shelling us again, but the menace is shrinking in the sunlight.’
Cats, almost of all which had been eaten, suddenly became useful again, to dispel a plague of rats: an entire trainload of feline warriors was dispatched to the city. German shelling, now inspired by mere malice rather than military purpose, continued throughout 1943 – July witnessed the worst bombardment of the siege. Only in January 1944 did the Red Army launch the assault that finally pushed back the Germans beyond artillery range of the city. But Leningrad’s fate was decided in the spring of 1942, when it became plain that its surviving inhabitants could be fed. It was officially stated that 632,253 people died in the course of the siege, but the true figure is assumed to be at least a million. Soviet propaganda suppressed reporting of much that happened during the city’s agony. When Olga Bergholz visited Moscow to broadcast at the end of 1942, she was warned to say nothing about the siege’s horrors: ‘They said that the Leningraders are heroes, but they don’t know what that heroism consists of. They didn’t know that we starved, they didn’t know that people were dying of hunger.’
Strategically, the northern struggle was much less important than the battle for Stalingrad. Nonetheless, Leningrad’s experience was at least as significant in showing why the Soviet Union prevailed in the Second World War. It is unthinkable that British people would have eaten each other rather than surrender London or Birmingham – or would have been obliged by their generals and politicians to hold out at such a cost. Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad’s survival, as in that of Stalin’s nation. If the city’s inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given up. But in the Soviet Union no such choice was available, and those who attempted to make it were shot. Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.
Even as the defenders of Leningrad were experiencing a fragile revival of life and hope, further east and south the Stavka launched its strategic counterstrokes. Operation Mars, which began on 25 November 1942, is almost forgotten, because it failed. Some 667,000 men and 1,900 tanks attempted an envelopment of the German Ninth Army which cost 100,000 Russian lives, and was repulsed. A battle that elsewhere in the world would have been deemed immense was scarcely noticed amid the eastern slaughter. Some men found any alternative preferable to fighting on. ‘Just as I lay down to rest before breakfast,’ wrote Captain Nikolai Belov, ‘a runner came from the Commissar, summoning me to HQ. It turned out that soldier Sharonov had shot himself. What a scoundrel! He left the drill parade pleading sickness and ran into me on the way to his quarters, all doubled up. I ordered him to stay in my dugout under guard, but finding it momentarily empty he took the opportunity to shoot himself.’
Fortunately for Stalin, Zhukov and the Allied cause in the Second World War, the other great Soviet operation of the winter, Uranus, was vastly more successful than Mars. The Germans lacked strength adequately to man their enormous front. There was a three-hundred-mile gap between Second Army at Voronezh on the upper Don, and Fourth and Sixth Panzer Armies south-eastwards at Stalingrad. Short of manpower, von Weichs, the army group commander, deployed Hungarian, Italian and Romanian formations to cover the flanks of Sixth Army. German intelligence failed to identify powerful Soviet forces massing against the Romanians. On 19 November Zhukov opened his offensive, hurling six armies against the northern Axis perimeter, followed by a thrust westward next day by the Stalingrad Front south of the city.
The Russians Encircle Hitler’s Sixth Army
A German anti-tank gunner, Henry Metelmann, was supporting the Romanians when the Russian offensive struck. ‘The whole place trembled, bits of earth fell on us and the noise was deafening. We were sleep-drunk, and kept bumping into each other, mixing up our boots, uniforms and other equipment, and shouting out loudly to relieve our tension. We went out from one bedlam into another, an inferno of noise and explosions…Everything was in utter turmoil and I heard much shouting and crying from the Romanian forward line…Then we heard the heavy clanging of tracks. Someone further along quite unnecessarily shouted: “They are coming!” And then we saw the first of them, crawling out of the greyness.’ The Russian armour rolled over Metelmann’s gun, all of its crew save himself, and two Romanian armies, whose soldiers surrendered in tens of thousands. Many were shot down, while survivors in their distinctive white hats were transported downriver by barge to prison camps. A Russian sailor, gazing upon a crowd of POWs staring listlessly at the ice floes, observed that the captives had been eager to glimpse the Volga: ‘Well, they’ve seen the Volga now.’ Romania paid dearly for its adherence to the Axis, suffering 600,000 casualties in the course of the eastern campaigns.
On 16 December the river froze, and the ice quickly became thick enough to bear trucks and guns. In the ruins of Stalingrad, fighting ebbed – the critical battles were now taking place south and westwards. Five days later, Soviet tanks completed a perfect double envelopment behind Paulus’s Sixth Army: Zhukov’s spearheads met east of the Don crossing at Kalach. Many times in the course of the war the Russians achieved such encirclements. Many times also, the Germans broke out of them. What was different here was that Hitler rejected the pleas of Sixth Army’s commander for such a retreat. Paulus was ordered to continue his assault on Stalingrad, while Manstein began an attack from the west, to restore contact with Sixth Army. By the 23rd, his spearheads had battered a passage to within thirty miles of Stalingrad. Then they stuck. The field marshal urged Paulus to defy Hitler and break out to join him, as was still feasible. He refused, condemning 200,000 men to death or captivity. Manstein’s forces were spent, and he ordered a general retreat.
Along the entire German front in the east, the approach of Christmas prompted a surge of sentimentality. Every Sunday afternoon, most men within reach of a radio listened to the request programme Wunschkonzert für die Wehrmacht, broadcast from Berlin to provide a link between soldiers and families at home. Relentlessly patriotic, it highlighted such numbers as ‘Glocken der Heimat’ (‘Bells of the Homeland’) and ‘Panzer rollen in Afrika vor’ (‘Panzers Roll in Africa’). Soldiers loved to hear Zarah Leander sing ‘Ich weiss es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’, a special favourite of German civilians: ‘I know, one day a miracle will happen/And then a thousand fairy tales will come true/I know that a love cannot die/That is so great and wonderful.’
Many Germans, especially the young, were gripped by a paranoia no less real for being rooted in Nazi fantasies. Luftwaffe pilot Heinz Knoke succumbed to emotion on Christmas Eve, listening to ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’ – ‘Silent Night’: ‘This is the most beautiful of all German carols. Even the British, the French and the Americans are singing it tonight. Do they know that it is a German song? And do they fully appreciate its true significance? Why do people all over the world hate us Germans, and yet still sing German songs, play music by such German composers as Beethoven and Bach, and recite the works of the great German poets? Why?’ Paratrooper Martin Poppel wrote in the same spirit from Russia:
Our thoughts and conversations turn towards home, to our loved ones, our Führer and our Fatherland. We’re not afraid to cry as we stand to remember our Führer and our fallen comrades. It’s like an oath binding us together, making us grit our teeth and carry on until victory…At home, they’ll
