Officers also continued to worry about the practicability of asking their men to fire on fleeing civilians. Returning from a tour of the front line on 24 October, von Leeb’s head of staff passed on a divisional commander’s opinion that his men would carry out such an order once, but that in case of repeated breakouts ‘he doubted whether they would hold their nerve so as to shoot again and again on women, children and defenceless old men’. Though it was ‘fully understood that the millions of people encircled in Leningrad could not be fed by us without this having a negative impact on our own country’, such orders might cause ‘the German soldier to lose his inner balance, so that even after the war he will not be able to hold back from acts of violence’. The sight of thousands of refugees streaming south through Gatchina and Pleskau, he noted, had already demoralised German troops repairing roads in the area, since ‘where they are going and how they feed themselves cannot be established. One has the impression that sooner or later they will die of hunger.’ Commander-in-chief Brauchitsch’s response was to suggest that soldiers be spared the psychological strain of killing women and children close to by doing so from further away, with minefields and long-distance artillery. Once the Red Army units around Leningrad had surrendered, German units could even temporarily be transferred to quarters. ‘Even then a large part of the civilian population will perish, but at least not right in front of our eyes.’27
In the event, the problems remained hypothetical. Leningrad’s leadership never tried to negotiate surrender, nor did ordinary Leningraders ever attempt mass breakout. Germany did not follow her own, muddled, policy either. No gaps were ever left open in the German lines so as to allow disease-bearing starvation survivors to flee into unoccupied Russia; on the contrary, barges and lorries carrying evacuees across Lake Ladoga were repeatedly attacked. For the next three winters, the Wehrmacht prosecuted a classical siege, preventing, so far as possible, all movement of people and goods in and out of the city, and using air and ground bombardment to destroy food stocks, utilities, factories, hospitals, schools and housing. (‘It is particularly important’, a Führer Directive issued just before the first air raids explained, ‘to destroy the water supply.’28) Mass starvation, it should be stressed, was not an unforeseen, or regrettable but necessary, by-product of this strategy, but its central plank, routinely referred to with approval in planning documents, and followed, once it set in, with eager interest by military intelligence.
It was a crime, as Germans have only recently begun uncomfortably to acknowledge, not of the Nazis, but of the army. Goebbels and Himmler were enthusiastic cheerleaders for exterminating Slavs, but had no major input to the decisions on Leningrad, which were the work of Hitler, Halder, Brauchitsch, Jodl and von Leeb. Though members of High Command began sharply to disagree with Hitler within weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union, they did so only on narrow grounds of military expediency. Ethical considerations do not seem to have prompted a single senior officer to question a policy that directly led, not only foreseeably but deliberately, to the slow and painful death by starvation of about three-quarters of a million non-combatants, a large proportion of them women and children.
