Leningrad only had a month’s food reserves. Supplies were blocked – except for the “Road of Life”, an unreliable transport route across the frozen Lake Ladoga. The siege’s slow torture began as the Nazis cut off the last road to Leningrad on September 8. As the Wehrmacht advanced, the city “had time to set up barricades and prepare itself to resist the occupiers, so Hitler ordered the military to destroy it by either sea or land, without entering it”, Vallaud explained. The Nazis besieged Leningrad because capturing it would be more difficult. > Hitler’s ‘war of annihilation’: Operation Barbarossa, 80 years on German troops pictured during their advance on Leningrad in September 1941. The Wehrmacht surged through Soviet territory after the start of Operation Barbarossa – taking two and a half months to arrive at the gates of Leningrad, with their Finnish allies cutting the city off from the north (Finland backed Nazi Germany against the USSR after successfully repulsing Joseph Stalin’s invasion in the 1939-40 Winter War). “It was a very important strategic location for Hitler as he tried to conquer the Soviet Union and carve out Lebensraum (living space) for Germany there,” he said. “Besieging Leningrad also cut the USSR off from the Baltic,” Vallaud continued.

“The city was first and foremost a symbol,” noted French historian Pierre Vallaud, author of L’Étau, le siège de Leningrad (“The Vice: The Siege of Leningrad”). Peter the Great founded the city as St Petersburg (the original name returned in 1991 after the collapse of the USSR) in 1703 – as a “Window to the West”, where the Neva River’s swampy bank meets the Gulf of Finland.Īs the capital of Tsarist Russia, the site of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and as an incarnation of the Russian nation in the eyes of many, Leningrad carried clear significance for Adolf Hitler as he attempted to destroy the Soviet Union. Leningrad was a major target when Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. A portrait of Tania Savitcheva with notes from her wartime diary.

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