School of War - Ep 111: Prit Buttar on the Siege of Leningrad and War in the East

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Prit Buttar, historian and author of To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941–42, joins the show to talk about the siege of Leningrad and about the nature of war on the Eastern Front.  ▪️  Times      •      01:56 Introduction      •      02:10 A familiar story     •      06:09 Themes of the Eastern Front      •      13:19 From Tsar to Stalin to Putin     •      11:10 Barbarosa      •      19:45 An immense scale      •      27:29 Doctrinal failure     •      33:17 Inside the Russian mindset       •      37:21 The myth of the “Clean Wehrmacht”     •      40:20 The siege      •      49:15 Who stays?     •      51:18 How did the Germans fail?      •      01:03:25 Staying vigilant Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack Buy the book here - To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941–42

War on the Eastern Front, whether in World War I or World War II, had qualities of savagery and inhumanity that surpassed the already rather uncomfortably high standard set for such things in the West of Europe in both wars. Today's conversation circles around a famously brutal siege that is part of that legacy, World War II's Siege of Leningrad. But my guest and I spend some time talking about and trying to understand just why the East-West distinction held in those two wars and what that means for us today. Let's go. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran.

We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Prit Batar,

who studied medicine at Oxford and London before joining the British Army, where he was a doctor. He worked as a physician after leaving the army and eventually turned to the writing of books. on military history, he is an expert on the history of the Eastern Front, Europe's Eastern Front in the 20th century. He's the author of numerous books on that theme to include a four-volume history of the Eastern Front in the First World War. His most recent book is to besiege a city. It's about the siege of Leningrad in 1941 and 1942, so obviously about the Eastern Front in World War II.

And, Doctor, we're delighted to welcome to the show. Thank you so much for making the time. It's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me. Tell us a bit about yourself before we get to the book. How'd you grow up? Why'd you join the Army? And how'd you start working as a historian? Sure. I think my story of ending up in the armed services is probably familiar to many people on your side of the Atlantic 2. My father was in the Air Force. So I grew up surrounded by uniform and by the sense of serving in the military or whatever. I was always going to be a doctor, and again, a familiar theme, really, of hard, what can I say, of very focused Indian parents who expect the very, very highest performance of their kids, and medicine was, you know, an obvious target for me. And therefore, you know, medicine and the military, well, you know, there were things pushing me towards both of them.

And I started off as a trauma and orthopedic surgeon, but very early on in that, decided that really wasn't for me and switched to family medicine, which proved to be a great career move. And I have a very successful year as a family physician in the years that followed me leaving the army. Got it. We have these, of course, very high-performing immigrant communities here in the United States. Of course. The example that's always stuck with me is this youngish guy. This is true. He is a Navy seal, an astronaut. and a physician. His name is Johnny Kim. And when I think the latest of his accomplishments was astronaut and when that happened, this became an internet thing. And many members of the Korean American community essentially lamented that now they'll never, they'll never please mom and dad.

Yeah, I was about to say the bar has just been raised to a completely different level. Yeah. So how did you, how did you become a writer and a historian and why the Eastern Front? Did that connect? I didn't ask what years you were in the service, but presumably it didn't connect to anything you did in the service, maybe it did tell us how that came to be a fascination. Yeah, my service straddled at the end of the Cold War. So when I went into the army, we were still training for a mechanized war in North Germany. When I came out, the Soviet Union no longer existed. I met a patient in 2000 who was an elderly German lady. This is after my time in the army. and she was beginning to suffer from dementia

and that every now and then in a consultation slip into German and my German was just about good enough to keep up with this. So one day I just asked her about her background and where she had come from and she told me at great length this extraordinary story of growing up in what was East Prussia and is now the Kalinandrad enclave. She told me about leaving this enclave

as a nurse under Soviet artillery fire, with mortar shells landing in the water around her. She met her future husband in North Germany and moved to England. And as I started researching various things she had said, I realized that actually this was a part of the Second World War that nobody had really written about at all, well, certainly not written about in English. and the accumulation of material led to my first book. So I ended up writing a book almost by accident, and on each occasion there has been sufficient material left over to serve as a seed for the next book.

And so it has continued. 13 books now published, two more with Osprey and several more on the slipway being built, so plenty more to come here. I want to ask you a very general question, and as we proceed, I'll sort of start big, here and we'll zoom in on our ultimate quarry, which is Leningrad. Speak for a minute, if you would, about generalizations we might make about war in the East in the 20th century. I mean, you've now

looked extensively at both the first and second world wars. What are the themes? What are the, what are the characteristics of warfare in this part of Europe as opposed to Western Europe or other forms of conflict throughout the crises of the 20th century? That's something. actually a really complicated question, and I'm just gathering my thoughts while you were talking about, while you were saying it. I think that the ideology, the cultures, the politics of the states involved in the wars on the Eastern Front in both world wars was considerably removed from the ideology, the politics and the culture that you and I would be familiar with in Western countries. As a result, the whole concept of the value of human life,

the adherence to norms of behavior, to legal codes, etc., is rather different than was seen on the Western Front in both World Wars and in other conflicts that certainly Western nations have been involved in. Even the Germans made this very, very clear distinction between the way they were going to conduct the war against the Soviet Union in the Second World War and the way they were fighting on other fronts. For them, the war on the Eastern Front was always very much an existential struggle. This was a zero-sum conflict. Either German Nazism will prevail or Soviet communism will prevail. There is not room within Europe or indeed the whole world for both to coexist.

Therefore, the victory of one required the complete destruction of the other. Now, I'm well aware that after the Casablanca conference, Roosevelt and Churchill had declared they would prosecute the war to the ultimate goal of unconditional surrender. But there's a difference between that and the manner in which the war was being fought in the east, where it wasn't just a matter of, I want the other side to surrender. It was a question of utterly destroying the ideology and in the case of the German occupation of the Soviet Union, the aim of the war. of destroying the very people who lived there and replacing them with a completely different population. What continuities, I take what you just said to largely apply to the Second World War, if we talk about the First World War, presumably it's a little bit less extreme,

ideologically, but I've been under the impression. We've done a couple of episodes, at least one episode on the show about the Eastern Front in the First World War, that there's also continuity in the savagery. and if not maximalist goals, those are more extreme goals in the East. Is that the case? I think it is. And I think there are some very interesting trends that you can pick up on that follow through from the Tsarist era, actually not only to the Second World War, but even through

to the modern day. So, for example, if we just look at the Russian side of this, during the Tsarist years, there was this extreme reluctance to speak truth to power. The influence of the Tsar was so great that you really had to be very, very confident of your standing if you were prepared to say something to the Tsar that you knew the Tsar was not going to approve of. And we see that in the way that the Soviet generals in the Second World War behaved towards Stalin. We see that in the way that Soviet figures behaved during the Cold War, and we certainly see it today with the people around Putin,

and how there is this, from a Western point of view, this extraordinary ability just to massage the facts to fit whatever you think the boss wants to hear. There were also all sorts of doctrinal issues that the Tsarist armies handed on first to the Red Army, then to the Soviet Army and to the modern Russian army. Compared to the West, the relative neglect of logistics, the lack of any, the modern Russian army, much like the Zaris army, of 1914 doesn't have that professional call of NCOs, the gunnery sergeants, the staff sergeants, if you like. These are guys who have 20, 30 years of military experience, they've grown up in the system. They remember everything that's worked and, more to the point, not work, and they're the glue that holds a whole thing together. This is completely alien to the Russian way of thinking, And in many respects, it cripples the performance of Russian, Soviet, whatever, armies.

They don't have this glue that holds them together in the way that the American and British and French and German armed forces do. Well, let's turn to the Second World War. The siege of Leningrad begins not very long after Barbarossa's launch. But maybe speak for a moment about Barbarossa, about Hitler's switch. I was going to say betrayal of Stalin, but it seems, I don't know, it seems to imply a positive light for Hitler's, strange phrase, but in any event, give us a bit of context about how the fighting begins in the summer of 41 and how Leningrad fits into the scheme for the German.

Yes, I think you've touched on a very important point. So actually, we have to start the story in August 1939 with the non-aggression pact that was agreed between Germany and the Soviet Union, much to the amazement of pretty much everybody else. And there was this extraordinary thing where these were two powers that were ideologically completely at odds with each other. They had made many public announcements of how much they disliked each other and the politics of each other. And yet suddenly here they were agreeing a non-aggression pact and secretly agreeing to divide up most of Eastern Europe between them. Even as the ink was drying on the treaty, Hitler was telling his generals, everything that I

do is directed against the Soviet Union. And if the Western powers do not see this, then we will have to wage war against them purely so that we can have a free hand in the East. And Stalin was telling his inner circle, Hitler thinks he's pulled the wool over my eyes, but in fact it's me who has the upper hand. Neither regarded this as a genuine treaty. They were both using this as an expedient way to avoid an immediate conflict while they built up their forces. So Hitler then unleashes his war in the West in 1940, defeats France, occupies much of Western Europe, fails in the Battle of Britain.

But even when the Battle of Britain is at its height, he's already drawing up plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union. And if you have ever plowed through the very turgid and dreadful writing of Mein Kampf, you would see that actually a war against the Soviet Union was always Hitler's intention. He saw this as a means of securing a large land empire that would prevent the sort of naval blockade that brought Germany to starvation at the end of the First World War. So by having this huge hinterland stretching all the way to the Urals, Germany would make itself immune to any naval power that attempted to seal it off from the Atlantic and would be able to dominate Europe for the foreseeable future. The additional nuances, of course, were the whole racial ideology of Nazi.

the belief in the Germans as the superior race, the complete denigration of Jews and Slavs, who were, in the case of the Slavs, they would be literally slaves, no more, and the Jews, of course, weren't even going to be afforded that. And the intention always was to destroy large parts of the Soviet population. The intention was to siphon off huge amounts of grain and other agricultural produce from particularly the southern parts of the Soviet Union, so what is now Ukraine and the Caucasus region, and use those to provide additional food for the German-occupied parts of Europe. In order for this to happen, a significant number of Soviet citizens would have to starve because there wouldn't be food left for them. And as the calculations in their run-up to Barbarossa

about how much tonnage of grain was going to be seized, as these calculations grew, So the arithmetic dictated, an ever larger death toll would be required. So by the time you actually get to the invasion in June 1941, the intention was that pretty much the entire urban population of the Soviet Union was going to die. It was the only way that that food could be released. And they dressed it up with all sorts of euphemisms like, you know, when we take Leningrad and Moscow, we will expel the population to fend for themselves in the east. well, you know, if you turn two and a half million people out of Leningrad and dispatch them across the steps to, across the forests to the Ural's and then push them beyond the Ural's into Siberia, they're going to die. There's, you know, however you dress this up. In the case of Leningrad, this was one of the primary objectives of Barbarossa.

The intention was to destroy it because it was a second biggest industrial hub of the Soviet Union. and by destroying it would deprive the Soviet Union of an enormous amount of industry. And of course, it was an enormously political objective. This was the cradle of the revolution. This was the city named after Lenin. This was where the October Revolution had taken place in the Bolsheviks had seized power. So seizing it and literally destroying it, which was the German intention, would strike an enormous blow against the morale of the enemy

and was seen very much as part of the war. Hitler's dream of the future of what is European Russia. And so how do we end up then in a siege rather than in the swift capture of the city and displacement of its population? Astonishingly, the exact course of events that was to occur when the German forces reached Leningrad had not been finalized when they crossed the border. It seems amazing that you can give an army group, you can give an army group consisting of two armies, the objective of reaching and knocking out Leningrad, without actually specifying

what that means. So as the troops are advancing across the Baltic states and then on into Soviet territory, into Russian territory, the soldiers themselves all the way up to general level, so division and core commanders, in their minds, they are marching to capture Petersburg, Leningrad, whatever they chose to name it. But at a higher level, by the time they had reached, let's say, Estonia, there was a growing awareness that actually getting caught up in urban warfare in such a large urban area was going to be problematic, to say the least. There was also the question of if the Soviets actually withdrew through the city, you know, we may find ourselves with

the responsibility for a population of 2 million people. So as they approached Leningrad, Hitler issued orders saying, we will not actually physically capture the city this year. We will seal it off from the rest of the Soviet Union. We will allow winter and starvation to take their toll. And then in the spring, we will simply march into a dead or dying city, a drive out whoever's left, and that's the end of it. And there were very, very cold-blooded calculations done with the aid of German nutritionists to discuss if we make an estimate of how much food is stockpiled in Leningrad, how bad do things have to get in order to guarantee that the population and the garrison will starve. So there were all sorts of, you know, very, very callous

and brutal calculations done on just how tight and determined the siege would have to be. in order to achieve this. And I think it's important to bear in mind that this makes it distinct from, if you like, historic sieges. If you think of the siege of Constantinople or the siege of the various crusader fortresses in the Middle Ages, etc. Yes, of course, starvation played a part in all of those sieges, but the purpose of starvation was to weaken the garrisons so that the besieging force could then storm the city, sack the city, and then impose its own government upon the city. In the case of Leningrad, the purpose of the starvation was to kill everybody in the city. It was very much in the context of the Holocaust and the entire German plan for the East,

rather than in the context of the traditional concept of a siege. The scale of the thing is so horrifying and mind-boggling. And I guess to your point about themes in the East, I mean, this is in general true of the East. The scale of things in the East is just vast in a way that it's hard for those of us. like me, you spend more time thinking about the war in Italy and France, for example, when it comes to World War II, throughout my mind or at it. I've been reading, I'm about two-thirds of the way through Vasili Grossman, Stalingrad, obviously different part of the war in the East.

But that's my best insight into the nature of the conflict and the scale of the maneuvers that are sort of described in that volume, not to mention your own books on the subject and the envelopment tactics, you know, occurring across, you know, provincial distances, essentially is stunning. You have a line in your book, the death toll, correct me if I get this wrong, the death toll in Leningrad is something, it's greater than the death toll of the British Empire in both world wars? Is that true? That is correct. So if you add up British Empire war dead from both World Wars and you add up Soviet civilian and military casualties both in Leningrad and in the various attempts to lift the siege, they lost more. more people in the 900 day, or 870 days of the siege than the British Empire lost in both world wars.

So in the Second World War, British casualties numbered about, I think, 385,000 total dead. In the First World War, of course, with the slaughter in Flanders, it was much greater. But one city in, on the Eastern Front accounted for more than all of that put together. The scale of killing and of slaughter on the east is just. It just defies your thinking. There is a particular area of high ground to the southeast of Leningrad called the Sinevino Heights. We call them the Sinevino Heights.

They're only the heights in the context of a generally very, very flat landscape. Living here in Scotland, I don't think they'd even get a name because, you know, we tend to do hills rather bigger than that. And these heights were maybe, what, four, five miles from east to west and slightly less than that north to south. My estimate is that well over half a million Soviet soldiers died just in the attempts to take those heights at various points during the siege. Just unbelievable to think of the sheer carpet of corpses that must have been left there. I want to come back to the question of human suffering here in a minute that before we do, you've given us a good overview of the German concept for the siege.

What was the Russian defensive concept? How did they start to organize themselves? and how did they end up defending against the besiegers? Of course, the Red Army had extensive plans for how to defend itself against an attack. They fully expected at some point that there was a high risk of a German attack upon them. Their military doctrine, like so much of the military doctrine of the era, was built around the concept of offensive operations. It was generally believed through the 20s and 30s that the advent of mechanized warfell. was, if you like, the antidote to the trench warfare of the First World War, that this was the way around it.

Marshall Tukashievsky, one of the great figures of the interwar years, came up with a concept of what he called deep battle, which was to engage the enemy through the full depth of their position, you know, effectively extending over 100 kilometers of depth, in order to break through comprehensively and to defeat them. And he envisaged the use of mechanized forces, airborne forces, air power, etc., in order to achieve this. But, of course, if you're being attacked, the first thing is you have to soak up the enemy attack, bring it to a halt, and then you can launch your own counter-offensive. We'll drive you into enemy territory, and in the case of the Red Army, there was an absolute expectation that as they advanced into German-held territory,

the proletariat of those regions would rise up and would support them in overthrowing the the fascist capitalist overlords, etc. They drew up extensive plans for how they were going to defend this, but the general feeling was that any German invasion would be halted some way short of Leningrad. The intention was to bring the German advance to a standstill somewhere in the Baltic states, and then with mobilization complete, the Red Army would have sufficient numbers to be able to launch an unstoppable counter-offensive. There were problems with this, though. the Baltic states were incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940, on the one hand, it moved the frontier several hundred kilometers further to the west and therefore created this big buffer

zone. But on the other hand, the old fortifications that have been built along the Russian frontier with Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania were now obsolete. So they were disarmed and the guns and ammunition and other equipment from them was moved into the Baltic states in preparation for fortifying those areas, but those fortifications were in no way complete when the Germans attack. And in any event, in almost every respect, Soviet military doctrine, much like the doctrine of most nations in the Second World War, proved to be completely inappropriate for the realities of mechanized warfare. You can make a very strong case for saying that it was the German flexibility due to the very high standard of its officers, of its staff system.

and its culture of delegated decision-making, as much as its organizational ability to put pancer divisions in the field. You know, it was doctrinal as well as equipment level that gave them this enormous advantage in the early years of the war. So the Red Army found itself falling back much, much further than it had ever expected. And it then ran into a very, very serious problem, which is largely around railroads. This is an era where particularly,

in Eastern Europe, railways were still pretty much the only way of moving really substantial amounts of stuff around. The roads, particularly in Northern Soviet Union, were not good. They still aren't particularly good even today, not least because for part of the year, the weather is so awful and it'll destroy anything but very, very expensive tarmac roads. So when you have limited railway capacity and it's being constantly attacked and degraded by the enemy air power, you have competing demands upon that limited capacity. You can try to ship supplies to your armies to keep them alive, reinforcements, ammunition, replacement tanks, etc.

You can use that railway capacity to move food and supplies into cities like Leningrad in anticipation of a siege, or you can use that railway capacity to evacuate civilians out of the path of the enemy. Now, to an extent you can combine these. these things, and the trains running into the area, dumping supplies, can then pick up civilians on the way out. But nonetheless, there was not sufficient capacity to do all of these effectively. And the Soviets understandably decided that the priority was for keeping the Red Army as

highly operational as possible on the grounds that, well, if we get this right, the Red Army will stop the Germans sufficiently far from Leningrad, that building up the city for a siege or evacuating the population will be unnecessary anyway, so we don't need to waste capacity on there. But the fact was that the Red Army had suffered such catastrophic losses in the opening weeks of the war, by the time it was driven back into the approaches around Leningrad, it really wasn't strong enough to hold back the Germans, and the Germans were thus able to surround a city that had not really been evacuated, hadn't really built up its supplies for a prolonged siege.

I'm really interested in your point about doctrinal failures on the Soviet side of things. I'm curious if you wouldn't mind saying more about that. Perhaps in the context of Soviet failure initially more broadly, obviously there's a political dimension, Stalin's purges, things like that. There's the element of surprise itself. But the way you characterize this concept of deep battle, the way you put it just now, you know, knowing nothing else about it, you could say, well, actually in certain respects, the sort of Blitzkrieg tactics that the Germans use are not, I mean,

you could describe them as a kind of deep battle in a way. So what is it that's so wrong in their thinking that harms them? I think it was more to do with, the concept was fine. I think it was the manner in which they attempted to implement it was so inadequate for the trouble, for the problems that they faced. So like many air forces, for example, Soviet aviates. was built around all sorts of misconceptions about how air power could be used. This concept of, if you like, heavy fighters that would proceed before bomber formations literally to sweep enemy air power from the sky so that the bombers could then move in without being attacked. The Germans, of course, tried this in the West in 1940 with disastrous

consequences. And they had, you know, the German single-engine fighters were easily able to evade these initial German Soviet fighter sweeps and then attack any bombers behind them. They had also inflicted crippling losses on Soviet aviation in the opening days of Barbaros and destroying hundreds and hundreds of aircraft on the ground before they could get airborne. And you can't overlook the political side of this, the enormously damaging effect of Stalin's purges on the military. So many officers have been killed or imprisoned or demoted. So many others have been promoted way above their level of training or experience or expertise. And there was this enormous fear that if I do not execute the orders that have been given

to me, literally down to the last letter, then I'm going to get arrested, I'm going to disappear. If I'm lucky, I'll end up in Siberia. And if I'm not, I'll die against a wall somewhere. So during the run-up to the German invasion, for example, Soviet aviation commanders, limited training missions, knowing that training flights with young recruits were much more likely to result in accidents, in crashes or whatever, because they had been told that unless it was categorically proved otherwise, any aircraft loss due to a training accident would be treated

as sabotage, and the officers involved will be prosecuted for carrying out sabotage. So what's the solution to this? Well, you know what? We'll just do fewer training flights, because why carry the risk? So there was this slavish following of orders, even when you knew the orders were wrong. And this accounts very much for the massive casualties that the Red Army suffered in those opening phases, where they would slavishly attack a position which, you know, the orders are out of date by the time they reached the front line. And yet these guys just said, well, orders are orders. If we don't do it, we're going to get arrested, it, so we will do it anyway. There were also all sorts of problems with the equipment and the

way that it was used, but this was also true in the West. So one thing, for example, people will say is that only a minority of Soviet tanks in 1941 had radios, and the intention was that it was only the tank commanders who would have radios. They would communicate with their subordinates by waving colored flags out of the turret. Of course, that didn't work, but people kind of forget that actually the British had thought about doing that in the 1932. So it wasn't such an outlandish idea. Soviet aviators, for example, often didn't have radios. They would be given their orders when they took off.

And if they had radios, quite often, it was only a receiver. So they could receive orders, but they could not communicate back with base or even with each other. So the purpose of the radio was purely to direct them in order to get them to do their superior officer required. The structure of the armed forces was something that evolved constantly as the war progressed. So many of the initial formations were very unwieldy and difficult to handle. The armor was often without adequate infantry support. The infantry often went into action without any adequate artillery or armoured support. The reconnaissance was very disjointed.

And when you find yourself in a war of survival, it's about the the worst possible situation in which you have to put all of this right. And as I've said in other talks, the Red Army found itself in the position of somebody who is suddenly plunged into a fight where they're armed with a cudgel when everyone else is carrying swords. It's no good looking at the other guy's swords and thinking, Dan, well, I wish we had got one of those before this fight started. You're just going to have to swing that cudgel and hope for the best. And yes, as the war progressed. The Red Army became better at swinging its cudgel.

The cudgel itself became rather better than it had been originally. But in the end, compared to the way that the Germans fought, and particularly the way that the Americans and British fought, it was always going to be a cudgel. And the only solution was to bludgeon the Germans into defeat. Yeah, not to keep going back to Grossman, which is not the subject of our conversation today, but I'm haunted by what I've read.

And Stalingrad is such a strange book because he's writing under censorship. And as a as a socialist, my understanding is the sequel, life and fate is substantially looser in its ideological commitments. But in Stalingrad, you know, there's a central character who's a commissar and the commissar is a good guy. And we have chapters that explore his thinking about why you might want to execute people who are talking in defeatist ways, sort of making the case for summary execution. And you, Grossman's kind of straining against it. there are these hints and flashes of irony, but it's more on side than it's not through most of the book, and it's this horrifying journey into vast, mass, mental slavishness.

Yes. portrayed as art. Yes. I think it's something that is so alien to the way that Americans and British and French and German people in the modern world think, that it's very hard to put ourselves in this mindset of a single-party state with such rigid control of the media, of the way you think of even what you're allowed to think, and how you then police that, and how you handle that in the military. And you see this very curious, if you were to draw a graph of this, you get these lines that cross. As the war progresses, Stalin realizes that this top-down dictator of running the Red Army is really not going to

to win the war. So as the war progresses, army commanders, core commanders who have earned the right to show a bit more initiative are generally given a freer hand. The role of commissars at every level is downgraded and they become purely advisory as opposed to feared figures that they were in 1941. In the German army, you have completely the obverse happening. You have this beautifully decentralized decision-making system with staff officers who are highly trained to think two or even three levels above their current position to assess the intentions of their superiors and then to modify what they do accordingly. So, you know, if you're told to take a bridge in the town because I need to get the division across that river and you look at that bridge and you think

I'm not going to be able to take it, but look, there's a railway bridge just downstream of this town and I can capture that, that's fine. You can innovate and do that because you've still delivered your superior's overall mission, you know. And the Germans go in completely the opposite direction. So while Stalin is relaxing the reins and allowing people to show this initiative and to innovate, Hitler is assuming a more and more dictatorial role in the military to the point where by the time you get to 1943, 44, any Panzer unit

cannot move without his explicit permission, and in 44, 45, he's even dictating down to regimental level. In 1945 he issues instructions effectively outlawing any innovative thinking or any

improvised thinking, stating that unless it is directly in accordance with instructions already issued, you have to seek clearance from him before you can do it. And even if he had been the most capable and competent military commander to micromanage such a vast theater of war as the Second World War in Europe was by then, would have been physically beyond the resources of absolutely anybody, let alone somebody with as little higher training as Adolf Hitler.

Just a question about the German commanders, you know, post-war, as you know, better than I do, in books and films in the West, there was this, you one could get this sense. Many of the German commanders were happy to have this sense widely propagated, that all the awful, the really awful stuff that happened, the Holocaust, you know, the massacre and enslavement of large portions of the population, Jews at the top of the list, but many others besides. Well, that was the SS. That was the Einstein's Group, and that was the Nazi party mechanisms that did all that. We, Panzer commanders and, you know, army group leaders and so forth, we're just military men doing our job. The way you described the planning for Leningrad and the war planning for the East in general suggests that the situation was not quite so simple. What is your take on the complicity of your run-of-the-mill German commander? in the mass atrocities that were just part of the experience in the East.

The myth of the clean Wehrmacht is very much a myth. It was propagated by the Germans who wrote their memoirs during the Cold War when the Soviet Union was now the enemy. And such was the need to rehabilitate West Germany into the new structures developing in Europe and in the world that the West accepted their version. of events, almost without any question. So this whole notion of, you know, we were just good soldiers doing our job. Even one of the senior SS figures, Paul Hauser wrote a book entitled soldiers like any other, trying to betray the Vaffin SS as no more than just elite soldiers

and we were just doing our job. The bottom line is they were all absolutely complicit in it from top to bottom. And it is inconceivable that they wouldn't have been. The, the infamous brutality and commissar orders instructing units exactly how to behave in the Soviet Union were passed down all the way down the chain of command, and at each level, the subordinate officers were required to reword it in their own words. So it wasn't even as if an army commander could say, well, you know, this thing came down from above and I just passed it on. They were required to sign a copy of that and pass it on under their own name. So they all knew absolutely what was happening. And this is problematic because, for example, people like Manstein,

who became these great figures of these strategic geniuses of the German war machine, you know, Manstein says in his memoirs how he didn't pass on the Commissar Order, well, even at the time that he wrote those memoirs, he had been released after a lengthy jail sentence, where he had been successfully prosecuted for war crimes, where the written orders that he had signed had been produced. He knew full well what was going on. For example, he did a deal with Otto Olendorff, who was commander of the Einzatskrupa operating behind his 11th army in Crimea, where he arranged for several truckloads of rifle ammunition to be given to Olandorf, in return for fur coats taken from civilians.

You know, are you telling me that he didn't know where those fur coats came from? He never asked. Are you telling me that he didn't ask why an Einzatzgrupper, which numbered what, about 3,000 men required so many truckloads of rifle ammunition? There's no conceivable way that these people didn't know what was going on. And in many cases, they were actively complicit. And they wrapped it up in all sorts of euphemisms, which, you know, it's one of the most shocking aspects of researching the German side of this war. You find the way that they find, they find phrases

to dress up what they're doing in a way that makes it sound not quite as appalling as it is. So, for example, in the approach to Leningrad at one point, they overran a town where there was a very large mental health hospital with a large number of psychiatric patients in the the hospital and there are written documents from army group headquarters talking about how they arranged with the Einzatzgruppa commander for the residents of this hospital hospital to be removed. And are you telling me that they never thought to ask, where are the SS going to take these people? So of course they knew. And certainly when you get to Leningrad, you have Leip and his successor, Kuchre, the army group

commanders who are writing about how they are concerned about the effect it would have upon German soldiers if large numbers of Soviet civilians who are starving to death attempted to cross the front line in order to escape, and therefore the need to ensure that there was sufficient artillery to crush any breakout attempt by civilians. So they cannot deny that they were absolutely complicit in a war of extermination. They knew fully what their role in the overall scheme of things was. Talk about what it was like to be a Soviet civilian in Leningrad as a subject of this campaign of extermination and of the siege specifically. Yeah.

So there were several factors that combined to make that first winter, 1941, to 42, particularly terrible. It was, by the standards of those decades, a particularly cold and bitter winter, which didn't help. There hadn't been adequate provision of food supplies to build up enormous stockpiles in the city, as I say, because understandably a priority was given to trying to hold the Germans away from the city rather than preparing for a siege. nor was there adequate consideration for civilian evacuation. In fact, some trainloads of children were taken out of the city, but unfortunately they were only evacuated to areas that were then overrun by the Germans anyway.

Very few of them were actually evacuated off to the east. So you end up with the city cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union. There is a small neck of land immediately to the east of Leningrad before you reach the shores of Lake Ladoga. and the Germans have established themselves on about an eight-mile strip of the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. Until the lake froze, it was possible to ship supplies across the lake and barges that were towed by various ships. But as the lake began to freeze and as the winter storms began to break, that shipping was badly disrupted. And the limited stockpiles of food in the city very, very rapidly began to run low.

There was a rationing scheme which was introduced run by the Communist Party, But there was a difference between what your ration card said you were entitled to get and what you might actually get. You could turn up at one of the stores with your coupons. And if there was no food, well, that's how it was. You know, you would just have to, you know, take whatever was on offer. There was a thriving black market, of course, with people selling whatever they could find in order to get food. But it wasn't just food. There was, you know, the power stations were badly disrupted by German shelling and bombing.

the water supplies were damaged after pumping stations were hit. So getting simple things like firewood to keep yourself warm became a problem. Getting clean water became a problem. People would laboriously break the ice on the canals and rivers in order to get water. But then you had problems with contamination because of the increasing death toll. And of course, starvation then started to take an effect with thousands of people perishing from starvation during that winter. eventually the lake froze to the point where it was possible to run traffic across the lake. And in fact, the Soviet Union and Russia before it had long experience of using frozen

waterways as roads. They had built roads and even railways across rivers and lakes in the past. So they knew how to do this. So, for example, they knew that if you were going to run a road convoy across a frozen body of water, but you kept the gaps between trucks at irregular intervals. because if you had regular intervals between the trucks, you would get resonance, and that would crack the ice. So, you know, things like this where they already knew this. But nonetheless, the truck drivers who ran those convoys, if you Google images of this, you will see them driving across the ice with their cab doors open

because the ice was still prone to breaking, and they had to have some chance of leaping them in order to survive. People in North America are probably rather more familiar than those of us in Britain with large frozen bodies of water in winter. And those of you who are aware of this will know that quite often these waters, these frozen lakes and rivers are covered in mist, which of course protected these roads from German air attack and artillery observers. But nonetheless, there was a constant threat of attack. At first, the amount of food that was being brought in was not even sufficient to supply the rations of the people in the city. There were all sorts of improvisations around, you know, where they could get food from. It was adulterated with sawdust, with animal feed, with absolutely anything they could.

Eventually, by the time you get into early 42, probably by about the end of January, you're just about getting enough supplies running across Lake Ladigan to satisfy. the ration requirement, but this is still nowhere near enough to sustain body mass. The rations were broken into three different levels. People who were working in the factories, producing munitions, etc., had the highest level. And even these people would be getting the equivalent of maybe, I don't know, 1,200,200 calories a day. Now, people who have tried losing weight will know that actually you can lose weight quite satisfactorily on about 1,500 calories a So working in a factory, doing hard labor with such a low energy intake, particularly in the absence of any heating where you're having to burn a lot of body fat, to keep yourself warm.

This is disastrous. The second category was other adults. So this will be, for example, women who had children at home, they got fewer calories. And the lowest of all was anybody under the age of 18. The problem with the last category was that it didn't matter whether you. you were aged 18 months or 17 years, you were allocated the same number of ration coupons. So whilst that was probably okay for a small child, for a young teenager, particularly as they were then conscripted into labour squads to help clear rubble, to help keep roads open,

etc. These people were doing hard labour, and yet they were getting less by way of calories ban women who were staying at home, trying to look after their kids, etc. So the death toll, particularly amongst adolescents, was shockingly high in excess of 90% in that first winter. Inevitably, after a while, people resorted to desperate measures. And in some of the markets in Leningrad, people noticed in about late January, early February the appearance of meat that had been for a long time. And the NKVD, which was responsible for internal security, recognized two specific crimes. The first was cutting flesh from dead bodies and turning that into meat.

And the greater crime was actually killing people in order to then use them as a source of meat. And several thousand Leningraders were executed for one or other of these crimes until the Russians reached a level where it was possible to feed the population. And all of those trucks that were running across the lake, bringing in supplies, bringing in ammunition to keep the garrison going to, on the return leg, they were taking out civilians. So all the way through the first winter, the population of Leningrad was falling,

partly through death, partly through evacuation, to a level where eventually, by the time you get to the end of the winter, the numbers compared to the amount of supplies being brought in, are now much more in balance than they were at the beginning of the winter. Who stays, and what is the decision-making process behind who stays? Yeah, so the decision-making process was very much dependent upon what people were doing in the city. And remember, this is a highly organized society with pretty much all concerns being run by the state. Throughout the war, incredibly Leningrad remained a production center for munitions.

And even during the siege, munitions were being exported from Leningrad to other parts of the Soviet. you were remarkable to relate. So anyone involved in the munitions industry, of course, stayed. The people who would then be needed to look after those workers also stayed. But others, you know, academics, other workers, etc., they were given priority for evacuation and were shipped out. But of course, there was, as inevitably would be the case, there was an enormous amount of corruption for those who were Communist Party members or were family of Communist, party members, the amount of rations available was substantially greater. And Andrei Jdanov, who was the chair of the local Communist Party committee, on the one hand, he goes down as a great hero because he oversaw

the rationing system, he rationalized it, he insisted on more supplies being brought in, and he did a great deal to keep the city alive during that first winter. He also insisted on daily flights into the city bringing fresh peaches for him and for his personal consumption. I guess this is how human beings often behave in these conditions. The conditions will bring out both the best and the worst in the same individual at the same time. You talk about the mist on the lake and elements or contributing factors to why the Germans were never able to complete the isolation of Leningrad. It is sort of shocking in retrospect.

retrospect that they failed to do so. They failed to completely isolate the city. In addition to the, why were they not successful in a more aggressive maneuver component to isolate the city? Why did they fail? There are several reasons here. The first is an absolute failure of intelligence at several levels. The Germans massively underestimated the overall military might of the Soviet Union. They had concluded. that by the time they reached the outskirts of Leningrad, in order to do that, they would have had to destroy so much of the Red Army that there wouldn't really be very much left. And in fact, they had destroyed pretty much the same sort of number of divisions as they had anticipated they would destroy.

The problem was that the Red Army had at least 50% more divisions than they had realized. So that's the first thing, they kind of assumed that by the time they reached and established a siege perimeter, the enemy would be pretty much defeated anyway, so that they could then dictate how the siege was conducted with greater ease. The second thing is that they had very poor maps of the interior of the Soviet Union. Many of the maps were based upon Soviet maps inevitably. And during my research, I had been very fortunate to make use of the map collection in the library in Oxford University, where they have several additions of the German maps of this area. and one of the things that brings a wry smile to my face is when you compare the maps from 1940 and 41

with the maps of 1943-44, a whole load of roads that were marked on the early maps have disappeared because when the Germans reached the Soviet Union, they realized these roads didn't actually exist at all or if they did exist, they were tracks and they weren't roads at all. And even today, if you venture out of what is there in St. Petersburg, once you get more than about 40 or 50 miles away, from the city, you really are in the middle of nowhere. These are forests, swamps, unimproved areas with gravel roads. So actually, even if the Red Army had been pretty ineffectual by the state of the war, to conduct a greater operation to cut off more of the lake, to cut off Lillingrad from the lake, would actually have been very difficult. It was very, very difficult terrain

in which to operate. And also, the Germans were operating on a whole series of divergent, axes, if you look at the length of the eastern front in 1941 when they cross them, to where it is the winter of 1941, the frontage is nearly doubled because in the north you're advancing more or less due north to get to Leningrad. In the centre you're advancing, I guess, northeast towards Moscow, and in the south, you're advancing first east and then southeast towards the Caucasus region. The result is the frontage expands enormously, which is okay if the inner endermost. Army has ceased to exist. But if it hasn't, your own troops have spread so thinly that it becomes

really difficult then to concentrate sufficient force at anything other than one primary objective area in order to conduct a major offensive. So it was all built on, if you like, an overly optimistic assessment of German strength versus Soviet strength, how easy it would be to destroy the Red Army before it could retreat into the interior. And how, how And therefore, how easy you would then be to advance into places like Leningrad, Moscow, et cetera. Talk a bit about the end of the siege. I know this is strictly speaking beyond the scope of the current volume, but the end of the siege and then it's legacy. Well, today, I'm curious about today, but especially within the Soviet Union, how is it understood in the longer run?

Yes. In fact, volume two of my Leningrad saga is out later on this year. It's a little hero city, and I think it's just begun to appear on sites like Amazon. so please do have a look. In January 43, so around the same time as the fighting around Stalingrad is reaching its peak, the Red Army finally succeeded in breaking the ring around Leningrad. That narrow strip of the southern shore of Lake Ladoga that the Germans had seized was taken back by the Red Army. So this restored land contact between the city and the interior. But this corridor was no more than three or four miles wide.

So the Germans could shell it at will. It was very difficult to move significant supplies across there. Symbolically, though, the siege ring had been broken. However, the city itself remained under sporadical constant artillery and aerial bombardment. There were several more attempts through 1940. There had been several attempts in 42 that had failed to make any impression upon the siege ring. In 43, having broken this ring, there were a couple of those. attempts first to widen that corridor and then to establish other links, all of which failed.

But they did have the successful outcome of degrading the fighting capability of the German Army Group North. These divisions were becoming more and more bled out. They were becoming weaker. They had lost more and more of their experienced core of officers and NCOs, and therefore their fighting ability was greatly reduced. In early 1944, so, pretty much exactly 80 years ago, just a couple of weeks more than 80 years ago, the Red Army proposed two possible operations, and these were codenamed Nieva 1 and Neuver 2. Neuver 1 was in anticipation of the Germans pulling back from Leningrad towards the Estonian frontier, with the intention of trying to pin down Army Group North before it could retreat

in order to destroy it. The Ova, too, was what would be carried out if the Germans didn't withdraw and remained in front of Leningrad. In fact, the Germans were considering a withdrawal. They had started constructing what became known as the panther line along what is now, roughly the Estonian-Russian border. And Kukla, the commander of army group North, had requested permission to carry out a phased withdrawal to this line, but Hitler refused permission. When it became clear that the Germans were not going to withdraw voluntarily, the Red Army implemented Nieva 2. And this was a multi-phase operation where they effectively broke the siege ring on a wide front and then drove the Germans to the Estonian frontier. And they did so at great cost.

This is not good terrain for mobile operations. It's very forested. It's very swampy. There are very, very few good roads, even with the swamps being frozen in winter. you can't really maneuver with ease in this sector. So it was relatively straightforward for the Germans to predict the axes of advance and concentrate their forces. But on the other hand, their forces were fairly weak by now,

and the Red Army definitely had the upper hand. So in this very bloody series of battles in January 44, the Germans were pushed back from Leningrad on the 22nd of January 1944, a little over 80 years ago. there occurred an event whose significance was really not noticed at the time. That was the last day that German artillery was able to fire on Leningrad. Thereafter, the guns were too far away. Gradually, the city began to return to normal.

Many, many of its people, well over three-quarters of its population, had either left or died during the siege. And many of these people settled in other parts of the Soviet Union, but some did return. And, of course, as the industry in the area recovered, it drew in workers from all over the Soviet Union. So there was this curious sort of two-way transfer of population. First of all, many who had survived the original winter,

these were known as the Blakardnicks, became ceded all across the Soviet Union. But on the other hand, also large numbers of non-Leningraders moved to the area. And such is the nature of this curious city in northern Europe, that people became Leningraders by adoption almost, and identified very strongly with this city, even if they haven't been originally from that area. The problem for Leningrad after the war was orthodox Stalinist historiography was that the victory over Nazi Germany was a victory of the Soviet people as a whole, led by the Communist Party,

led in turn by the infallible Comrade Stalin, and shining a light upon the siege of would have involved shining a light on the failures to break the siege on the terrible suffering of First Winter, which would have made him look rather less than infallible. And if any one city was to be associated with the defeat of Nazi Germany, it was going to be Stalingrad because it had Stalin's name, of course. There was no memorial to any of the siege until he had died. So in 1956 to 1958, the Piskarevskoy Cemetery where there were mass graves from the siege was turned into its current memorial. It's a very, very moving place to visit. You pass these sites where there are stones saying several thousand Soviet soldiers are buried here,

several thousand Soviet citizens are buried over here. To a large extent, this is fiction. These were mass graves. People were thrown into holes in the ground and buried. But it's important for people to have a place where they can go to grieve. Whether you're the parents of a soldier who died in the front line or whether it was your mother who died in the siege, you have to have a symbolic place where you can pay homage. The actual Leningrad Memorial, which is about three metro stops south of the city centre,

was not built until 1971. But various aspects of the siege remained taboo subjects. it was very hard to talk about starvation. The subject of cannibalism was absolutely taboo. Nobody would ever talk about that. There was a young woman who was an artist in, she was a 17-year-old artist in the city during the siege. And in that first winter, she kept a sketchbook diary

of what she saw and what she experienced. Those pictures she was not allowed to exhibit during the Soviet era because they were deemed to be too negative, too dangerous, two defeatist, pictures of emaciated people, of starved people, of depressed people. The very first time all of her works were displayed in a single exhibition was 1991, and ironically, it was in Berlin. And when it was displayed, a group of elderly Germans came to see the exhibition, and as she showed them around, she rapidly realized who these people were from the questions they were asking. and they were veterans of the Van Gogh who had been in the siege perimeter.

At the end of the tour, one of them came up to her and said, on behalf of my comrades, I want to apologize to you for what we did. We came into the Soviet Union to destroy your city. We ended up destroying our own humanity. And she replied, and remember this is 1991, she replied, our war was not against you as individual Germans. It was against fascism. And there is fascism within us all. And one of the things that I always bear in mind now is that Vladimir Putin's mother was a Blokhardnik. She was in the city during the siege. She would have witnessed

people being killed in that city. And yet, pretty much every night her son directs bombs and rockets to be fired at Ukrainian cities where civilians are killed indiscriminately. Just going to show how true it is that there is fascism within us all. There's an element to your work and just the project of writing about the Eastern Front that has a quality of bearing witness to it. And I want to thank you for your time today, but also for this book and the work in general. I think we in Britain and the United States, we get complacent. about politics, geopolitics, war, our post-9-11 wars between both of our countries have obviously

been costly in terms of money and human life and have not worked out the way that we, that, that it seemed like it was going to at the outset. And yet, and yet purely on a question of scale, the depths of depravity and human suffering that you're depicting, it hardly even compares with the Western front in the same war, which was obviously. Obviously, I'm still, again, much a greater scale than anything in recent American or British experience. And there's just something, you know, animals are not capable of the evils. You know, I was inclined to say something like, you know, there's a sort of animalistic quality to the fighting in the East where there's just the, there is no concept of the good. It's just a grim struggle for survival.

But that's unfair to animals. It takes humans to achieve the levels of evil. I think it does. I think we in the West, because we are so immersed in a culture where to a greater or lesser extent, we feel we have a say and that our opinion counts and that our leaders are mindful of keeping the people on their side and that we are well-informed, more or less, that we underestimate the power of ideology in a state where everything is so tightly controlled. And for me, one of the great tragedies of writing about Leningrad is when I talk to, I have a

good friend in the city at the moment, who's, of course, a Russian, and we talk from time to time, he's opposed to Putin's war, but he tells me that most people within Russia who are opposed to Putin's war oppose it because of the country. casualties that the Russian army is suffering. They don't oppose it because it is wrong to go and invade Ukraine. And I think that that sort of highlights for me the difference between the way even in more recent conflicts, for example, in the United States all the way through the Vietnam era, there was enormous public outcry against the war during the various conflicts in the Middle East. There have been protest marches all over the Western world against what

is being done there, etc. In the Soviet Union, there really wasn't anything like this, and even in modern Russia, although there have been some protests, they have been relatively small, and they are much more focused on why are our sons dying there rather than this is just a morally wrong thing to do. We have a very different system of morals and ethics than modern Russia than the Soviet Union and indeed very, very large parts of the planet. And the good intentions with which the North Atlantic powers went into the Middle East and into Afghanistan with the intention of establishing model states completely underestimates the utterly alien thinking in those people's minds and how they find our views of

normality just completely incomprehensible. Pritbatar, author of To Besiege a City, Leningrad, 1941. 42 and a forthcoming volume continuing the story, Hero City. Thank you so much. This is genuinely fascinating conversation. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.