Nor was the army made fully to atone after the war. Jodl, signatory of the formal order to besiege Leningrad, went before the international tribunal at Nuremberg, was convicted of war crimes and hanged. Von Leeb, in contrast, got off extraordinarily lightly. Having retired pleading illness in December 1941, he was sentenced to a mere three years’ imprisonment at Nuremberg. His replacement as leader of Army Group North, Georg von Küchler, though sentenced to twenty years, was released on compassionate grounds after only eight. Oddest were the fates of Halder and Erich Hoepner, commander of Army Group North’s Panzer Group Four. Hoepner, though a fanatical racist — praised by the SS for his ‘particularly close and cordial’ cooperation in the murder of tens of thousands of Baltic Jews29 — was persuaded by the prospect of defeat to join the July Plot to assassinate Hitler. When it failed he was arrested and executed, alongside the brave and decent von Stauffenberg and von Trott. Halder, though not involved in the plot, was imprisoned by Hitler in its wake, then freed by the Americans and spared prosecution at Nuremberg in exchange for giving evidence against his former colleagues. He went on to spend fourteen comfortable and respected years as head of the German section of the US Army’s historical research unit, in which role he helped to establish the Cold War myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’, ignorant of the Holocaust and bullied into war by a crazed dictator. In 1961, when the unit was wound up, President Kennedy awarded him the ‘Meritorious Civilian Service’ medal — the highest honour a non-American can earn in US government service. The editor’s foreword to the standard American translation of Halder’s diary, published in the late 1980s, concludes with the remarkable words ‘He was a distinguished soldier’.30

*Interviewed after the war, General Blumentritt recalled that he and his colleagues were gripped by the French general Armand de Caulaincourt’s account of 1812: ‘I can still see von Kluge trudging through the mud from his sleeping-quarters to his office, and standing in front of the map with Caulaincourt’s book in his hand.’

7. ‘To Our Last Heartbeat’

At five minutes to seven on the evening of 8 September the optical engineer Dmitri Lazarev was walking along Sadovaya when the usual cacophony of sirens, factory hooters and ships’ foghorns sounded an air-raid warning. Standing under an archway with other passers-by, he heard the drone of engines overhead. He was already used to the silver specks, high in the sky, of German reconnaissance aircraft, but these were different: snub-nosed grey bombers, twenty or more, swimming low over the rooftops in strict, purposeful formation. Somewhere nearby, an anti-aircraft gun started to bark. Suddenly the avenue of sky between the rooftops was full of sparkling tracer bullets, and quickly dissolving puffs of white smoke. When the alarm was over Lazarev continued on his way to a cousin’s flat on the Fontanka. There he found his relatives gathered on the balcony, gazing to the south. Beyond the curve of the canal a vast, spherical cloud was rising, black in places and blindingly white in others. Gradually it expanded to fill the sky, itself turned bronze by the setting sun. ‘It was so unlike smoke that for a long time I could not comprehend that it was a fire. . It was an immense spectacle of stunning beauty.’1

Vera Inber and her husband had gone, despite the day’s endless alerts, to the Musical Comedy Theatre on Arts Square, to see Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. They had also invited her husband’s deputy at the Erisman — a shrewd, clever man, Inber thought, with an amusing rural accent. During the interval there was yet another alert. ‘The manager came out to the foyer to say a few words, his manner as casual as if he were announcing a change in the cast. He requested that we stand as close to the walls as possible, since — here he pointed to the domed ceiling — there was little protection overhead.’ After forty minutes the all-clear sounded, and the operetta continued, though at a faster pace and omitting the less important numbers. Leaving the theatre, Inber and her husband still did not realise that the alert had been anything more than the usual false alarm. To their surprise they were met by their driver, though they had not asked him to wait. ‘The car rounded the square and suddenly we saw black, swirling mountains of smoke, illuminated from below by flames. All hell had been let loose in the sky. Kovrov turned and said quietly “The Germans dropped bombs and set the food stores on fire.”’ Burning were oil storage tanks, a creamery, and thirty-eight wooden warehouses — known as the ‘Badayev warehouses’ after a pre-revolutionary owner — next to the Warsaw railway station, in which was stored a substantial proportion of the city’s food.2