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 Führer’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.
