“Nobody had the energy to bury the dead. Gravediggers were to weak<\/p>\n
to hack holes in the frozen ground. When someone died, the corpse<\/p>\n
was wrapped in a sheet and taken on a child’s sled to the gates<\/p>\n
of the cemetery. Army engineers, summoned from the front,<\/p>\n
dynamited pits for mass burials. And sometimes the authorities<\/p>\n
discovered that the bodies had pieces of flesh carved from them.<\/p>\n
This is the one aspect of the siege not described in Soviet histories<\/p>\n
or memoirs. But there were numerous reports from Russian sources<\/p>\n
indicating that hunger finally drove some Leningraders to cannibalism.<\/p>\n
According to the reports, it was practiced on the dead at first.<\/p>\n
Then there were cases of murder for food by starvation-crazed people.<\/p>\n
Finally, there were\u00a0reports of human flesh being sold. Soldiers, the<\/p>\n
best fed people in the city, reportedly were killed on their way home<\/p>\n
from the front. They started going about armed and in groups.<\/p>\n
One rumor had it that children were beginning to disappear, and<\/p>\n
parents kept their youngsters off the streets. Other stories spread<\/p>\n
that gangs of well-fed cannibals roamed the city; the stories added<\/p>\n
terror to all the other anxieties. Anyone who looked healthy was<\/p>\n
under suspicion–as were the little meat cakes that could still<\/p>\n
be bought for enormous prices in the black market.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“Nobody knows how many people perished that winter in Leningrad.<\/p>\n
The official total is 264,ooo. But this figure was laid down during the<\/p>\n
Stalinist years, when Leningrad’s sufferings were minimized.<\/p>\n
Most Western scholars believe that the number of deaths from<\/p>\n
starvation during the entire siege exceeded one million, and that<\/p>\n
several hundred thousand more were killed by bombs, shells or gunfire.<\/p>\n
By contrast, the United States and Britain together suffered fewer<\/p>\n
than 800,00 deaths during all of World War II.”<\/p>\n
Excerpts from “Russia Besieged\u00a0\u00a0 WWII.” Author Nicholas Bethell,<\/p>\n
Publishers, Time-Life Books Inc.<\/p>\n
The population of Leningrad at that time was around 3 million.<\/p>\n
Islander.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Nobody had the energy to bury the dead. Gravediggers were to weak to hack holes in the frozen ground. When someone died, the corpse was wrapped in a sheet and taken on a child’s sled to the gates of the cemetery. Army engineers, summoned from the front, dynamited pits for mass burials. And sometimes the … Continue reading “The Siege of Leningrad”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1192"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1196,"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions\/1196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}