Leningrad

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.

2. Announce the order to command and political cadres upon receipt. Disseminate widely among the rank and file.

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:

To Zhukov, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov and Merkulov,

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. No mercy to the German scoundrels or their accomplices. .

Request you inform commanders and division and regimental commissars, also the military council of the Baltic Fleet and the commanders and commissars of ships.

[Signed] I. Stalin12

Finally the line held. On 24 September, when his forward units were only fifteen kilometres from the Hermitage — as far as the London suburb of Richmond is from Piccadilly Circus, or the Jersey turnpike from the Empire State Building — von Leeb finally acknowledged that his now exhausted and overextended armies could advance no further, and requested permission to move on to the defensive. Fighting petered out as the two sides retired to count their staggering losses. Within Germany’s Army Group North, 190,000 men had been killed or wounded since the start of the invasion, and 500 guns and 700 tanks lost.13 Soviet casualties were even heavier. In the same period the Baltic Fleet and Northwestern Army Group had together lost 214,078 men killed, missing or taken prisoner (POWs probably comprising 70–80 per cent of the total), and another 130,848 wounded — two-thirds of their original troop numbers. They had also lost 4,000 tanks, about 5,400 guns, and 2,700 aircraft.14

In traditional siege histories, these days in mid- to late September, with their exhausting battles and ruthless displays of military will, were when the tide turned in the defence of Leningrad. But newer interpretations put the emphasis less on Zhukov’s (still undoubted) tactical brilliance, more on an earlier change of strategy on the German side. In this version, the Red Army did not so much beat off the Germans, as the Germans decide to focus elsewhere.

Since Barbarossa’s inception, Hitler and his generals had nursed a simmering disagreement over whether Moscow or Leningrad was the more important strategic objective. Hitler’s original directive of December 1940, which laid out the broad scheme for Barbarossa, had been clear: only once the Baltics, Leningrad and Kronshtadt had been taken, knocking out the Baltic Red Fleet and securing Leningrad’s arms manufacturers, was the advance to begin on Moscow. The service chiefs, led by Chief of General Staff Franz Halder, disagreed. Russia’s capital and biggest city should come first, they argued, and Leningrad second.