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In September 1943, by which time the Wehrmacht was in general retreat along its whole central and southern front, Hitler’s generals began to argue for withdrawal from Leningrad. With armour and guns committed to defending Smolensk and Kiev, they no longer had any hope of reinstating a full blockade, and the retreat in the south left the northern armies dangerously exposed, especially since swelling numbers of partisans now regularly blew up railway lines and supply convoys that ventured off the major roads. (The head of the regional partisan organisation claimed, in a memo to Stalin of 25 September, that his five thousand-odd men had blown up 673 road and railway bridges, destroyed 7,992 freight wagons and flatbeds and burned 220 warehouses, 2,307 lorries and cars, 91 planes and 152 tanks. ‘The partisans let me through again’, Hockenjos wrote sarcastically in his diary on his return from a brief spell in hospital in Narva.21) Soviet intelligence recorded the doubts spreading among the lower ranks: ‘We shouldn’t be bothering with these marshes’, one captured German soldier told his interrogators, ‘they should send us to defend Ukraine.’22 Another, a deserter from the German garrison at Novgorod, claimed that his officers spent all their time drinking and gambling, while the rank and file put their faith in ‘some destructive weapon that has so far been kept a great secret’. He himself had decided to swap sides before he got killed.23 A third explained that he had always got his news from the cook in his field kitchen, ‘but now he knows no more than we do. If we’re being kept out of the picture on events at the front it’s because things aren’t going so well. Russia is too big for us to defeat her.’24

Though unwilling to give the Finns (now putting out diplomatic feelers to America) an excuse to drop out of the war by abandoning Leningrad, Hitler allowed himself to be partially persuaded, giving von Küchler permission to build a new defensive ‘Panther Line’ behind the River Narva and lakes Peipus and Pskov. Fifty thousand labourers, mostly drafted from the local population, constructed 6,000 bunkers, laid 125 miles of barbed wire and dug 25 miles of trenches and tank traps. Army Group North’s lines were shortened by a quarter, the retreat including at least a quarter of a million Soviet civilians — some willing, others rounded up so as to prevent their recruitment into the advancing Red Army. (A peasant woman with whom Hockenjos was briefly quartered was busy packing — less, he thought, in compliment to the Germans, more because she feared the Bolsheviks even more.) The ring round Leningrad, however, remained as tight as ever. From Pushkin and the Pulkovo hills, the bombardment of the city continued with futile malice — the deaths caused (like those of two girl students at the Erisman in December) all the crueller since the end of the siege was now so obviously near.

At the end of September the Red Army recaptured Smolensk; on 6 November, having made a brilliant unobserved crossing of the Dnieper, it liberated Kiev, just in time for Revolution Day. In the north, General Govorov’s planning for the final liberation of Leningrad was now almost complete. The offensive was to be three-pronged — east from the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’, into which 52,000 troops had secretly been moved, towards Peterhof and Uritsk; south from the city itself towards Pushkin and Pulkovo; and west from the Volkhov towards Novgorod. Pleading by Zhdanov secured an extra 21,600 guns, 1,475 tanks, 1,500 of the multiple rocket launchers called ‘Katyushas’ and 1,500 aircraft. With nearly twice as many men as Army Group North (1.24 million compared to von Küchler’s 741,000), more than twice as many guns, and more than four times as many tanks and planes, Govorov now had overwhelming superiority of numbers, and controlled the air so thoroughly that Red Army lorries no longer bothered to shade their headlights at night.

The attack itself began on the morning of 14 January 1944, with a massive bombardment from Oranienbaum. In thick fog, 104,000 shells were fired in an hour and five minutes. ‘We can forget about my leave’, a German officer wrote to his wife that evening. ‘Here a battle is boiling which outdoes everything we’ve seen up to now. The Russians are advancing on three sides. We’re living through hell. I can’t describe it. If I survive, I’ll tell you about it when we see each other. At the moment all I can say is one thing — wish me luck.’25 The bombardment was followed the next morning by an hour-and-forty-minute, 220,000-shell onslaught on Pulkovo. Barrage and counter-barrage stunned Leningraders, shivering plaster from ceilings, setting light fittings swaying and shaking one of the workshops at Chekrizov’s shipyard to the ground. Huddled in shelters and stairwells, they prayed that this really was the end. ‘I sat on the edge of Mama’s bed’, wrote Olga Fridenberg on the 17th: