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
