Effect of the Siege of Leningrad on the city
| the Siege of Leningrad | |
 Russian map of the operations around Leningrad in 1943 The German and allied Finnish troops are in blue. The Soviet troops are in red. |
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Russian map of the lifting of the siege on Leningrad The German and allied Finnish troops are in blue. The Soviet troops are in red. |
The 872-day Siege of Leningrad, Russia, resulted from the failure of the German Army Group North to capture Leningrad in the Eastern Front of World War II. The siege lasted from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944 and was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history, causing considerable devastation to the city of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg).
The timeline of events is as follows.
Because the Soviet records during the war were incomplete, the ultimate number of casualties during the siege is disputed.
About 1.4 million people were rescued by military evacuation from the besieged city in two years between September 1941 and November 1943.
Another 1.2 million civilians perished in the city. After the war, the Soviet government reported about 670,000 registered deaths from 1941 to January 1944, explained as resulting mostly from starvation, stress and exposure. Some independent studies suggest a much higher death toll of between 700,000 and 1.5 million, with most estimates putting civilian losses at around 1.1 to 1.3 million. Many of these victims, estimated at being at least half a million, were buried in the Piskarevskoye Cemetery.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians who were unregistered with the city authorities and lived in the city before the war, or had become refugees there, perished in the siege without any record at all. About half a million people, both military and civilians from Latvia, Estonia, Pskov and Novgorod fled from the advancing Nazis and came to Leningrad at the beginning of the war. The flow of refugees to the city stopped with the beginning of the siege. During the siege, part of the civilian population was evacuated from Leningrad, although many died in the process. Unregistered people died in numerous air-raids and from starvation and cold while trying to escape from the city. Their bodies were never buried or counted under the severe circumstances of constant bombing and other attacks by the Nazi forces.
The total number of human losses during the 29 months of the siege of Leningrad is estimated as 1.5 million, both civilian and military.
Only 700,000 people were left alive of a 3.5 million pre-war population. Among them were soldiers, workers, surviving children and women. Of the 700,000 survivors, about 300,000 were soldiers who came from other parts of the country to help in the besieged city.
By the end of the siege, Leningrad had become an empty "ghost-city" with thousands of ruined and abandoned homes.
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Wikipedia