Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 by Anna Reid Read Free Book Online Page A

cinema on the corner of First of May Street – on 4 October. Several hundred, mostly women, children and old people, did so. From there they were marched to the Catherine Palace and imprisoned in its basement for several days without food or water, before being taken out in groups and shot, either at the aerodrome or in one of the palace parks. Their clothes were thrown to a waiting crowd from a second-floor window of the Lyceum, the court school where Pushkin had studied. The round-ups continued for several weeks. On 20 October another fifteen adults and twenty-three children were shot outside the Catherine Palace. Having been left lying in the open for twelve days, some of the corpses were thrown into a bomb crater in the palace courtyard, and the rest buried in the gardens. There are examples of Jews being sheltered by non-Jewish neighbours, but examples, too, of denunciation – often motivated, as during the Terror, by desire for the victims’ living space. The Catherine Palace’s bookkeeper and her husband, for example, were denounced by one of its carpenters, who took over their apartment in the palace’s right wing and subsequently worked as an informer for the SS. Though the Leningrad area’s Jewish population was relatively small (it lay outside the tsarist Pale of Settlement), altogether the German authorities murdered about 3,600 Jews in the region, nearly all in the first few weeks of occupation. 11
    At the same time that it lost Pushkin and Pavlovsk the Red Army was also driven out of Alexandrovsk, a small suburban town at the end of Leningrad’s south-western tramline, and Pulkovo, defended to the last by the opolcheniye ’s Fifth Guards Division, whose bones still lie, amid rampant shrub roses and philadelphus, in a benignly neglected mass grave next to the rebuilt observatory. Along the Gulf, Reinhardt’s motorised divisions took Strelna and Peterhof, confirming the Soviet Eighth Army’s isolation in the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’. His attempts at counter-offensive having failed, Zhukov ordered the establishment of a new defence line, running from Leningrad’s south-western outer suburbs through Pulkovo round to the Neva where it jinks northwards halfway between Ladoga and the Gulf. This time, he stated in a characteristically brutal Combat Order of 17 September, there would be no retreat:
    Â 
    1. Considering the exceptional importance [of the Pulkovo–Kolpino line], the Military Council of the Leningrad Front announces to all commanders and political and line cadres defending the designated line that any commander, politruk or soldier who abandons the line without a written order from the Army Group or army military council will be shot immediately.
    Â 
    2. Announce the order to command and political cadres upon receipt. Disseminate widely among the rank and file.
    Â 
    Three days later Stalin chipped in with orders that the troops around Leningrad should not hesitate, on pain of execution, to fire on Russian civilians approaching them from the German lines:
    Â 
    To Zhukov, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov and Merkulov,
    Â 
    It is rumoured that the German scoundrels advancing on Leningrad have sent forward individuals – old men and women, mothers and children – from the occupied regions, with requests to our Bolshevik forces that they surrender Leningrad and restore peace.
    It is also said that amongst Leningrad’s Bolsheviks people can be found who do not consider it possible to use force against such individuals . . .
    My answer is – No sentimentality. Instead smash the enemy and his accomplices, sick or healthy, in the teeth. War is inexorable, and those who show weakness and allow wavering are the first to suffer defeat. Whoever in our ranks permits wavering, will be responsible for the fall of Leningrad.
    Beat the Germans and their creatures, whoever they are . . . It makes no difference whether they are willing or unwilling enemies.