The Battle of Leningrad was the longest besieged, most destructive, and second deadly siege in recent history (after the Battle of Stalingrad).
At the end of 1940, German politicians began to mobilize upwards for the war against the Soviet Union and incited downward hatred of the German people against Soviet Russia. Some far-sighted German militarists believed that it was a military taboo to rush into Russia before the war with Britain. Guderian, germany's "father of the armored corps," said in his memoirs that even when war broke out in June 1941, he still thought it was a military error, and that a significant number of Germans at the time agreed with him.
In order to change their thinking, the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels once said this in the process of brainwashing Germany:
The Soviet people were not happy, and as soon as the Germans entered, the Russians would rise up and overthrow the tyranny.
This man also has a famous saying that "a lie is said a thousand times and becomes the truth."
The German Fuehrer, who was at ease with the pattern, listened to Goebbels's lies and gradually believed in the truth. In a speech to build confidence in the officers, he shouted enthusiastically:
All I had to do was kick the broken door panel and the whole house would collapse.
Then the war broke out, and millions of Soviet troops collapsed, deepening the German soldiers' contempt for the Soviet Union. Two months later, they besieged Leningrad, and on September 8, the Germans carried out a massive air raid on Leningrad, burning almost all of the city's grain. The German army was ordered not only to make a quick decision, but also not to accept surrender, to wipe the city off the face of the earth.
In the early days, Germany had an overwhelming military advantage
In Memories and Reflections, Zhukov writes: "In the case of blockade, organizing the army to fight against the enemy who had absolute superiority in troops and equipment later on ... It has very important implications. "Many people always mistakenly believe that the Soviet army won by a large number of people, but in fact, the Soviet army was in a comprehensive disadvantage in the first year of the war.
Throughout the defense of Leningrad, the Germans invested 750,000 troops and the Soviet Union invested more than 900,000 troops, but the Soviet reinforcements of Leningrad began to appear after the second half of 1942. At the time of initial contact, the German army encircling Leningrad had 1 army group (hundreds of thousands of people), while the Soviet side had only three army groups (hundreds of thousands of people). With 6,000 cannons, 4,500 mortars and more than 1,000 aircraft, the Germans had an overall advantage in quantity and quality of weapons; the Soviet army consisted mainly of infantry and cavalry, the air force was difficult to support, and the generation gap in weapons and ideas was very obvious.
After Leningrad's main food reserves were destroyed in airstrikes, food supply standards continued to be lowered and many people starved to death. In the scorching heat of the war in early 1942, nearly 7,000 to 10,000 people died every day in Leningrad.
The Soviets sent Zhukov, chief of the general staff, into Leningrad at a critical juncture to command the operation, and since Leningrad was already surrounded, he had to take a plane into the city. However, the air was blocked by German fighters, and the Soviet pilots had to risk flying at ultra-low altitudes, and died nine times.
When Zhukov arrived at the leningrad army headquarters, the First Marshal of the Soviet Army, Voroshilov, and others were holding a meeting, and in view of the current dangerous form of Leningrad and the huge gap between the enemy and our forces, they had begun to discuss how to abandon Leningrad, and some factories had been blown up. Manstein's memoirs record that the Soviet army blew up the Peter's Palace, the Tsar's Palace, and the Lekaterina Palace, which symbolized the history of Russia," which shows that Leningrad, or St. Petersburg, was the capital of Russia in the Tsarist era), which shows that the Soviet army initially lost almost complete confidence in the leningrad war.
The inferior Soviet army eventually defended successfully, experienced more than 900 days of difficult fighting, and won the war
Zhukov's visit to Leningrad did bring great improvements to the defense here, he divided the city into 6 defensive zones, commanded the construction of strong fortifications, including 200 kilometers of barbed wire, more than 7,000 squad-based infantry trenches, 140 artillery bunkers, etc., which made Leningrad's defense very strong. But just a month later, Zhukov left because the Soviet capital, Moscow, was also threatened. Zhukov's departure, not his own, also represented the beginning of the Soviet Union's defensive center of gravity and resources in the direction of Moscow.
However, the Muscovite military and civilians still held out for 2 and a half years, and only after the other fronts entered the counter-offensive did the Soviet army begin to rescue and lift the siege of Leningrad. Before the war, there were 3 million people here, and the war consumed 1.5 million. The liberation of Leningrad on January 27, 1944, and therefore January 27, was also designated as "Russian Soldiers' Day of Honor", which reflected the fact that the Russians themselves expressed their admiration for victory.
From September 9, 1942 to January 27, 1944, the German army gradually lost its mind, and it was difficult for them to understand why they could not take such a ruin, and the German army also launched a charge after charge, eventually losing 90,000 elites.
How does the reversal work?
It turns out that a lie does not become true no matter how many times it is told. Whether the Soviet Union was unsatisfactory or not was debatable, but when the Germans invaded, the Soviet people did not fight back against their homeland, as Goebbels said, but shared the same hatred with their own troops.
From August 1941 onwards, 500,000 people were digging trenches every day in Leningrad; after September it was common to see people suddenly starving to death, people walking on the streets, some people at home, some people at work, because of the lack of food, everyone could fall at any time, some even while burying their compatriots; the winter in this subarctic city was particularly long, and for a long time people could only eat 125 grams of coarse bread a day. Those who barely survived continued to make steel, shells, bullets, tanks, people would rather starve themselves to help others survive, and the only requirement before death was to ----- the living to continue to produce the goods they needed for the front.
Whether soldiers, peasants, workers or scholars, no one doubts that the ultimate victory belongs to them. An architect prepares to build a triumphal arch to welcome Soviet troops, but he nearly starves to death while consulting the materials.
How precious life is, how cruel war is. There are two sentences in front of the Kremlin commemorating the unknown victims of the Great Patriotic War:
Your name is unknown, and your exploits are immortal.