Re: interesting article regarding the seige of leningrad 2

R U hungry cap?

What's with the Leningrad posts? Cannibals can go down to the grocery store
and buy a nice pot roast. No need to sit around thinking about eating
humans. Forget about L-grad.


"Captain!" <SpammersMustDie@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:LR4Re.220209$HI.217972@xxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.times.spb.ru/story/15365
>
> New Book: Hitler Didn't Want to Take Leningrad
>
> By Manuela Muhm
>
> Special to St. Petersburg Times
>
> Hitler did not want to capture besieged Leningrad during World War
> II, but intended to starve its citizens to death, a new book by a German
> historian says.
>
> St. Petersburg was known as Leningrad during the war.
>
> Released in Germany this summer, the book "Das Belagerte Leningrad"
> by JÚrg Ganzenmßller challenges the Soviet view of the Siege of Leningrad
> that the city was not taken because of heroic resistance by citizens and
> the Red Army. That view still dominates in Russia today.
>
> Ganzenmßller set out to provide an unbiased and balanced picture of
> the genocide committed against the people of Leningrad, saying that German
> silence over the horrors committed in its name and Soviet propaganda have
> distorted the reality about the siege.
>
> On Sept. 8, 1941, Leningrad seemed about to fall. German troops
> captured Schlßsselburg and closed their ring around Leningrad.
>
> The city was cut off from all land access. German armies had advanced
> toward Leningrad from the south while their Finnish allies approached from
> the north. In the east and west Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland formed
> natural obstacles.
>
> Yet, at that point Hitler issued the command to stop short. What
> followed was one of the cruelest chapters in the history of the World War
> II: German troops laid siege to Leningrad, at that time with 3.2 million
> inhabitants the second-largest city of the Soviet Union. Almost 900 days,
> from Sept. 8 1941 to Jan. 27, 1944, Leningrad was in the grip of Nazi
> Germany. Hundreds of thousands of citizens - some say 1 million people -
> fell victim to starvation, disease exposure and enemy action.
>
> Why did Hitler hold the German troops back to take Leningrad? Why did
> Hitler turn down the military and political triumph of conquering the city
> of the October revolution?
>
> Ganzenmßller looked into these and other questions.
>
> As early as in April 1941, two months before Germany invaded the
> Soviet Union, the Third Reich's Food Ministry reported that "the problem
> of supplying Leningrad with an appropriate amount of food cannot be
> solved, should it fall into our hands."
>
> Two months later, Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels wrote in
> his war diary: "It is impossible to say what will happen to these people
> in the near future. I am anticipating a catastrophe the dimensions of
> which are entirely unpredictable".
>
> Ganzenmßller makes the case that Hitler and his generals were not
> interested in capturing Leningrad. The Nazi policy of expansion was
> directed toward capturing territory, but made no considerations about the
> people living there.
>
> The Nazis' Generalplan Ost of 1942 envisaged the massive relocation
> and extermination of peoples west of the Urals and the Germanization of
> these territories with "Aryan" settlers. It was assumed that Leningrad, or
> Ingermanland as it was then be called, would be the residence for 200,000
> German settlers in 1942. It made no mention of the fate of the 3 million
> Leningraders.
>
> However, Hitler's invasion of Soviet Russia did not go according to
> plan. In the fall of 1941, Operation Barbarossa - the code name for Nazi
> German's invasion of Russia - had stalled and the food supply for the
> German troops was getting short as winter approached. For Nazi Germany,
> Leningrad's civilian population presented a concrete problem that needed
> to be solved.
>
> On Sept. 29, 1941, Hitler announced his solution: "Requests from the
> city to surrender will be rejected because the problem of the remaining
> presence and nourishment of the population cannot and should not be solved
> by us. We have no interest in caring for even part of the population in
> this struggle for existence." He later added that "a capitulation of
> Leningrad or later Moscow is not to be accepted, even if offered by the
> opposite side. ... No German soldier should enter these cities."
>
>
> ARMY WAS MORE IMPORTANT
>
> Stalin was determined to hold the city at all costs. Though he first
> had inwardly written off the city, he regained hope after the Soviet front
> stabilized. Leningrad had too great a strategic significance to be
> sacrificed easily.
>
> "[Stalin] regarded the situation as disastrous," leading Soviet
> military strategist Georgy Zhukov said after a meeting with the dictator
> in September 1941. "He said that Leningrad would obviously fall within the
> next days. If Leningrad fell, however, the Germans would unite with the
> Finns and there would emerge a highly dangerous arrangement, creating a
> menace even to Moscow."
>
> Zhukov, who would in 1945 deliver the deathblow to the Nazi beast in
> its lair in Berlin, was dispatched to galvanize Leningrad's demoralized
> defenders. The Red Army made several unsuccessful counterattacks.
>
> The Soviet leadership assumed that the German troops would attempt to
> storm Leningrad as soon as possible. Therefore, when the ring closed
> around the city, the Soviets continued evacuating industrial plants and
> factories.
>
> The priorities during the evacuation reflected clearly the maxim of
> Soviet valuation: machinery and raw materials were more important than
> human beings.
>
> In order to avert the impending humanitarian catastrophe, the Soviets
> changed their strategy.
>
> On Jan. 17, 1942, the decision was made to start evacuating large
> numbers of people quickly. This meant that skilled workers and their
> families were taken out of the besieged city first; refugees and wounded
> soldiers were the last to be evacuated.
>
> Contrary to the heroic descriptions of Soviet propaganda, the
> evacuation went off in a highly chaotic and disorganized way.
>
> As the Soviet leadership had failed to work out a strategy for
> evacuating the population of Leningrad, improvisations led to fatal
> mistakes that Soviet historians were eager to cover up after the war.
>
> The first children moved out of Leningrad were sent in the wrong
> direction, toward the advancing German troops.
>
> Ganzenmßller estimates that between 1.3 million and 1.75 million
> people were evacuated during the siege. Those remaining in the besieged
> city had to endure the nightmare conditions of a daily fight against
> famine and death.
>
>
> Trapped in Leningrad
>
> After the German troops had closed their ring around Leningrad, the
> only access to the city was across the Lake Ladoga, later dubbed the Road
> of Life. Yet in the early stages of the siege the Red Army had neither
> sufficient transport capacities nor logistic know-how to supply enough
> food to the starving inhabitants of Leningrad. What is more, the winter of
> 1941-42 was the harshest in decades. People were dying in appalling
> numbers.
>
> "Whenever we walked somewhere we just stepped over corpses on our way
> and by this time we were numb to this," Ganzenmßller quotes Nina Volodina,
> who was 10 years old in 1941, as saying.
>
> The distribution of food rations was based on the same system as in
> the Soviet urban centers in the 1930s. In other words, workers got higher
> portions than white-collar staff and workers of significant factories more
> than workers of less significant ones. In addition, workers had access to
> canteens and special shops and often received additional food cards.
>
> The food rations provided by the city were barely enough for
> survival, especially for people not employed at a local factory. Thus,
> individual strategies for survival were developed, often with fatal
> consequences. "They boiled leather belts, made soup from joiner's glue or
> scratched glue from wallpapers ... . Pancakes made of mustard seeds were
> so extremely hot that they ate away your bowels," Ganzenmßller writes.
>
> People also used semi-illegal and illegal methods to obtain something
> edible. During the first war winter, 818 people were arrested for theft,
> 586 of whom were soldiers. Some factories registered "dead souls" to get
> more food. At the Stalin Factories, for example, 729 workers were
> registered - but 124 of these were dead, another 107 had been evacuated
> from Leningrad, 70 served in the army and 21 were in police custody.
>
> The loss or theft of the daily bread ration was a tragedy because the
> city council would not make good the losses.
>
> "At 6 a.m. we were all running for bread. I arrived at the bakery and
> what should I see? - a fight. ... . They were kicking a boy who had
> snatched away someone's bread. And I started kicking him, too - 'how could
> you?' we had not had bread for three days! And guess what, I do not know
> how but I got hold of his bread, I put it into my mouth and - it is beyond
> comprehension - I kept kicking him," one boy recalled.
>
> Unbearable hunger drove some people to eat cats, dogs and even human
> beings. During the 900-day siege, 1,500 people were convicted of
> cannibalism - a fact often covered up by Soviet propaganda.
>
> The then 16-year-old Yura Ryabinkin remembered the days of the great
> famine in Leningrad in his diary. "I ate a cat, stole food out of Anfisa
> Nikolayevna's pots, stole every spare bread crumb from Mom and Irina - I
> cheated both of them - cursed and fought at the entrances to shops to get
> in and buy 100 grams of butter."
>
>
> EVERYTHING FOR THE FRONT
>
> After the war, Soviet propaganda never tired of depicting the heroic
> defensive battle of the besieged city in the brightest colors. According
> to Soviet historiography, the people of Leningrad did everything possible
> to support the front and arms production never ceased. Yet the reality
> diverged to a great extent from the myth created by the Soviet leadership.
>
> In the winter of 1941/42, there was no electricity and the
> productivity of the city fell almost to zero. "We wanted to work but there
> was no electricity. Our boss said: 'Sit down and wait.' At first, we sat
> there for several hours [each day], but the electricity was not on ... .
> We went more and more rarely to work; we were working only
> intermittently," Ganzenmßller quotes one worker as saying.
>
> Due to the constant shortage of food many people were too weak to
> show up at their work places. "Nobody was running, everyone was walking
> slowly and could barely lift their legs. Someone with a healthy and young
> body can hardly imagine such debility," a young man wrote in his diary.
>
> Another diary entry by a worker at the Izhora factories said:
> "21.1.42. We are sitting here and are starving. 22.1.42. the same ... .
> 1.2.42. I have recovered some strength and started working though I am
> only able to walk slowly and with a stick."
>
> As men had to serve in the army and skilled workers had been
> evacuated, factories soon faced a labor shortage. Most workers were
> adolescents and women. The lack of qualified and trained workers led to
> great losses and the army's needs were barely fulfilled.
>
>
> Lifting the siege
>
> After the disastrous winter of 1941/42 Hitler and his supporters
> planned to draw the ring tighter around the besieged city, which would
> have killed many more civilians. But they failed and the Red Army forced
> the German troops more and more onto the defensive.
>
> Finally, in January 1943, the Red Army forced open a small corridor
> at Schluesselburg. From then on, the inhabitants could be supplied with
> food and everyday goods. Soon, food rations were raised to above survival
> level and life in the city normalized.
>
> The siege would drag on for another year until on Jan. 27, 1944, when
> Leningrad celebrated the lifting with artillery salutes.
>
> Ganzenmßller writes that while in Germany the 900-day siege remained
> a chapter hardly ever opened by historians and politicians, the Soviet
> Union transformed the siege into a glorified myth of heroism and
> patriotism.
>
> While survivors remember the siege as a time of famine, plight and
> struggle for survival, the Soviet leadership depicted it as a heroic epic.
> Under Brezhnev, the siege was promoted as a cult and monumental memorials
> to the heroes of the siege were erected all over the country.
>
> In post-communist Russia, little has changed. In historical
> interpretations the Soviet version of a Red Army forcing the German troops
> to a halt in front of the city and their heroic defense battles prevail.
>
> These interpretations, however, are blind to the fact that Hitler and
> his generals were not eager to capture Leningrad but intended to starve
> the city.
>
> A glorified myth on the one side and an ignored chapter on the other
> side: in neither version is the 900-day Siege of Leningrad depicted as
> what it actually was: a cruel genocide against hundreds of thousands of
> people, Ganzenmßller concludes.
>
>
>
>


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