Women in particular are predisposed to serious throat infections, by reason of the insufficiency or complete absence of heating in domestic apartments, and breakage of window glass. The mortality rate amongst children is quite high. There have been cases of abdominal and spotted typhus, although one cannot yet speak of an epidemic. Numerous cases of dysentery have also been noted.18

A fortnight later another intelligence report, from von Küchler’s Eighteenth Army, boasted successful artillery hits on a hospital, a House of Culture, the Mariinsky Theatre, a food warehouse, tram sidings and the offices of Leningradskaya Pravda. Casualties, it noted, were no longer being picked up by buses, but by horse-drawn carts — themselves often out of commission thanks to a shortage of forage. What German intelligence devoted most space to, though, was the onset of famine. The civilian ration, it was correctly noted, had been cut five times since the beginning of September, and ‘bad organisation of food distribution’ meant that card holders often got less than their allotment or nothing at all. ‘There have been cases of increasingly weak workers falling unconscious in the workplace. The first starvation deaths have also been recorded. It can be concluded that in the coming weeks we will see further significant deterioration in the food situation of the civilian population of Petersburg.’19

The art historian Nikolai Punin made his last siege-winter diary entry on 13 December, sitting in his dark room overlooking the Sheremetyev Palace. Earlier, he had written of his longing that the churches be opened and filled with prayers and tears and candles, making ‘less palpable this cold iron matter in which we live’. Now, he likened Stalin to the jealous Old Testament God:

De profundis clamavi: Lord save us. . We are perishing. But his Greatness is as implacable as Soviet power is unbending. It is not important to it, having 150 million [people], to lose three million of them. His Greatness, resting in the heavens, does not value earthly life as we do. . We are living in the frozen and starving city, ourselves abandoned and starving. I can’t remember the snow ever falling in such abundance. The city is covered in snowdrifts like a shroud. It is clean, because the factories aren’t working, and it is rare that smoke rises from the chimneys over the apartment buildings. The days are clear, and travel might be easy, but the city is buried like the provinces, white and crackling. .

And everything is simple; no one says anything in particular. They don’t talk about anything except ration cards or evacuation. They simply suffer and probably think, like I do, that maybe it’s not their turn yet.

I feel the loneliness most of all at night, and the senselessness of petitions and prayers, and sometimes I cry quietly. . And there is no salvation. And one can’t even be imagined, unless you give in to daydreams. ‘We turned our backs on Him,’ I think, ‘and He on us.’ Miserere I mumble, and add — there it is, dies irae. Lord, save us.20

Part 3. Mass Death: Winter 1941–2

Dmitri Likhachev

Death certificate, December 1941. The cause of death is given as ‘dystrophy’, a euphemism for starvation.

10. The Ice Road

Lieutenant Fritz Hockenjos was thirty-two years old and commander of a Radfahrzug, or bicycle reconnaissance unit, within the 215th Infantry Division of General Busch’s Sixteenth Army.1 A forestry manager in civilian life, he came, like most of his men, from Lahr, a picture-perfect medieval town set amid rolling vineyards between the Rhine valley and the western edge of the Black Forest. He had a wife, Elsa, and two young sons, and his hobbies were hunting, birdwatching, photography and singing in the local church choir.