For 872 days, Germany didn't try to capture Leningrad — they tried to starve it. Over a million civilians died. The city never surrendered.
German forces encircled Leningrad — the Soviet Union's second-largest city and the birthplace of the Russian Revolution — on September 8, 1941. Hitler had no intention of taking the city by storm. His plan was to starve it into submission and then raze it to the ground. For the next 872 days, the city of 3.2 million people was cut off from the outside world.
The winter of 1941-42 was the worst. Rations fell to 125 grams of bread per day for workers — barely a slice — and less for everyone else. The bread itself was partly sawdust and cellulose. Leningraders burned furniture for heat, melted snow for water, and ate anything available: leather belts, wallpaper paste, pets. Starvation deaths peaked at 100,000 per month in January and February 1942.
The only supply route was a narrow ice road across frozen Lake Ladoga, which the Soviets called the 'Road of Life.' In winter, trucks drove across the ice under air attack, bringing in food and evacuating civilians. In summer, barges crossed the lake. It was barely enough — never enough — but it kept the city alive when nothing else could.
Despite the starvation, bombardment, and cold, the city's cultural and intellectual life never completely stopped. Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Seventh Symphony during the siege. When it was performed in besieged Leningrad on August 9, 1942, the orchestra was so weakened by hunger that some musicians had to be brought from the front. The broadcast was deliberately pointed at German lines.
Cannibalism was documented during the worst months — 2,105 people were arrested for it by December 1942. Soviet authorities classified it into two categories: eating corpses and killing for food, treating the latter as murder. Some historians and legal scholars have since argued the siege itself constituted genocide under international law.
Soviet forces broke through the German encirclement on January 27, 1944 — 872 days after the siege began. The total death toll is estimated at 1 to 1.5 million civilians, more than all American and British military deaths combined in all of World War II. Leningrad was awarded the title 'Hero City' in 1945. It had endured the most lethal siege in recorded history.