Waffen-SS: Retreat from Leningrad, 1944

Background

Army Group North fought a long, attritional war in its efforts to take Leningrad between 1941 and 1944. The Waffen-SS contribution to the siege was at first small, but grew steadily to become III SS Panzer Corps. By mid-1944, the corps, along with the whole of the army group, was fighting for its life in the face of massive Soviet offensives. It ended the war trapped in the Courland Pocket.

The German siege

Hitler's ambitions to capture Leningrad, the birthplace of the Bolshevik revolution, had been thwarted in the autumn of 1941 by the city's heroic resistance and the need to divert vital panzer divisions for the assault on Moscow. By the summer of 1942 the siege of the city had been a bloody sideshow, as the fate of the war on the Eastern Front was decided in the south during the battle for Stalingrad.

If he could not take Leningrad, then Hitler was determined to make sure its residents paid for their defiance of the Third Reich. He ordered German troops to press the siege of Leningrad mercilessly. Waffen-SS involvement in the battles around Leningrad was initially small, but it grew during 1942 and by the winter of 1943 III SS Panzer Corps was committed to holding a key sector of the siege lines around the city.

Historic Leningrad was built on a 80km- (50-mile-) wide isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga. To besiege the city, German troops had surged north to Lake Ladoga in November 1941 to cut its road and rail routes to the south and east. Finnish troops had taken their revenge for the 1939 invasion of their country by the Soviets, and had joined forces with the Germans in June 1941 to close off Leningrad from the north. The only way into the city was by air or by boat across Lake Ladoga, until it froze. Truck convoys could then be sent across the famous "Road of Ice" to ease the plight of its desperate citizens and to arm its defenders. The first winter of the siege was the worst, with hundreds of thousands of civilians dying from German shelling and bombing or simply starving to death.

The Totenkopf and Polizei Divisions

For the German troops manning the siege lines around the city, conditions were equally primitive as they tried to survive the horrendous Russian winter and fight off almost constant Soviet attacks. Unlike the German forces in the central and southern sectors, the troops of Army Group North were at the back of the line when replacement weapons, equipment and clothing were distributed. Army Group North's status as a secondary theatre of operations meant few panzer divisions were deployed to support it.

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