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8 September 1941 - 27 January 1944Reputable source · 2 sourcesEstimated

The city Hitler ordered starved rather than stormed

On the timeline · around 8 September 1941 - 27 January 1944 · Allied VictoryThe Tide TurnsAllied VictoryThe city Hitler ordered starved rather than stormed1944

What happened

German forces closed the last land route into Leningrad on 8 September 1941, beginning a blockade that lasted 872 days. Rather than fight through the city, Hitler issued a directive ordering that Leningrad and its entire population be obliterated by bombing, shelling, starvation, and disease, and forbade accepting a surrender even if one were offered. Inside the ring, the winter of 1941 to 1942 was the worst period: there are documented cases of residents eating wood dust and wallpaper glue, and there were confirmed incidents of cannibalism. The city survived on supplies trucked and shipped across frozen Lake Ladoga, a route that also carried out roughly 850,000 evacuees. By the time the blockade ended on 27 January 1944, an estimated 1.5 million soldiers and civilians had died.

Why it matters

Leningrad is the clearest case in the entire war of starvation used as deliberate state policy rather than as a mere byproduct of combat, part of what historians call the German Hunger Plan, an explicit strategy to starve the cities of northern and central Russia. The Piskaryovskoe Memorial Cemetery alone holds half a million bodies in mass graves, physical evidence still visible today. And the weapon failed: fed across the Ladoga ice road, Leningrad never surrendered, and it outlasted the army that had been ordered to erase it.

How we know

Hitler's own directive ordering the city obliterated survives and is quoted directly in Mark Cartwright's account for the World History Encyclopedia; conditions inside the siege, including the wood dust, wallpaper glue, and cannibalism, are documented by historian Keith Huxen, PhD, of the National WWII Museum, whose account gives the death toll as an estimate of approximately 1.5 million, a reconstruction rather than a count, since death registration itself collapsed at the height of the starvation.

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The city Hitler ordered starved rather than stormed · World War II · SourcedStory