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The Führer came perilously close to carrying out that objective. Beyond all reason, Stalin had rejected overwhelming evidence that the Nazis were preparing an attack; not even the movement of 4,200,000 troops to Russia's borders convinced him. As a result, Nazi infantry and panzer divisions smashed to the outskirts of Leningrad. The unprepared, disorganized Russians sustained unimaginable losses; 28 of their front-line divisions were obliterated. By the time the Germans were finally stopped, the city was surrounded. Its only open access lay to the northeast, across Lake Ladoga, toward Finland.
Metallic Ring. When the blockade began, scant food reserves were swiftly consumed. Luftwaffe raids on warehouses sent tons of sugar, meat and flour up in smoke. Rations were cut again and again, finally falling to half a pound of bread per day for workers and only two slices (about 150 calories) for children. Citizens grew accustomed to eating library paste, boiled leather, and bread baked with cottonseed cake, even sawdust and cellulose. Cats and dogs swiftly disappeared. Any stray horse was likely to be set upon and butchered on the hoof by starving citizens. In the final stages of the famine, parents kept a close eye on their children lest they be kidnaped; the "meat patties" that were sold in the Haymarket, Leningrad's slum quarter, sometimes contained human flesh. Salisbury describes how Red Army soldiers, after gunning down two suspected cannibals, found the hocks of five human beings hanging from hooks in their apartment.
The winter of 1941-42 was one of the coldest ever endured. Temperatures averaged 4° below zero in January. People died in their apartments, and weakened relatives left them wherever they were—in a bed, at a table, in a chair near a cold stove. Men and women dropped in the streets, dead of hunger and exhaustion, and sometimes their bodies lay untouched for weeks. When they were finally hoisted onto trucks, one observer recalls, they were so frozen that "they gave a metallic ring." The silence of the city was broken only by bouts of German shellfire and, in winter, by the squeak of children's sleds bearing corpses to cemeteries.
"Hell Machine." For a time, Stalin thought of abandoning the city. Then, rather than let the Germans occupy it whole, he ordered that Leningrad's giant Kirov works, its railroad viaducts, its bridges, its ports, and all its historic buildings be mined for pushbutton destruction. But the button on what Leningraders referred to as Stalin's "hell machine" was never pushed. Nazi troops were drained off to other fronts, and enough Red Army units and citizen volunteers remained to keep the besiegers out. The Germans settled in, hoping to starve and shell the city to death. That they did not succeed, as logic suggested they would, was due largely to Leningrad's astonishing capacity to take punishment.
It was also due to expedients like "the Road of Life" across Lake Ladoga. Frozen solid in winter, it supported occasional food trucks and even the great 60-ton KV tanks that eventually began to roll in to the city's defense. At the end of 1943, the Russian buildup—some 1,200,000 men—was big enough for a successful counteroffensive. On Jan. 27, 1944, the siege was lifted.