The Nazi science of mass murder was first put to the test in occupied eastern Europe. Hitler's plan to acquire "living space" for German settlers in Russia required the elimination of entire Slav populations. This was done by gassing, shooting or by a slow death from hunger. Though historians have paid it little attention, Hitler's "hunger plan" was integral to his war against the Jews and other "useless mouths". In this impressive book, Anna Reid turns an appalled eye on the German's two-and-a-half-year-long siege of the city.
With scholarship and narrative verve, Reid makes effective use of diary accounts and other material kept by survivors. Inevitably, hers is a chronicle of human loss; what happened in Russia's pre-revolutionary capital was unspeakable, inhuman. By January 1944, when the Wehrmacht finally began to retreat, around 750,000 civilians had been deliberately starved to death. This amounted to a quarter of Leningrad's population.
At this book's terrible heart is a warning to those who deliver facile judgments or condemnations: only those who survived the siege have the right to judge or condemn. And even they may not be properly fit to do so, for those who fathomed the depths of human degradation in Leningrad did not survive to tell the tale. From KGB files, Reid has uncovered the extent to which Leningraders resorted to cannibalism, for many years a taboo subject in the Soviet Union. The typical Leningrad "cannibal", though, was neither the Sweeney Todd of legend, nor a bestial lowlife, but a housewife seeking protein to save her children. In the agonised hunt for food, sustenance of sorts could be got from the bodies that lay unwept-for and disregarded in the snow. Contrary to the official Soviet narrative, the siege did not sanctify its victims.
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