Wehrmacht troops captured the town of Shlisselburg, cutting off the last road into Leningrad and sealing roughly three million people inside a blockade that Hitler intended to starve into submission rather than storm. The siege became one of the deadliest in history, with citizens reduced to eating wallpaper paste and burning furniture for warmth while Soviet forces used frozen Lake Ladoga as a lifeline.
Hitler's directive was explicit and chilling: Leningrad was not to be captured but erased, its population left to starve rather than absorbed as prisoners the Reich would have to feed. German artillery and Luftwaffe bombers targeted the city's food warehouses within days, destroying the Badayev stores and their sugar and flour reserves, a loss that haunted survivors for decades.
By the deadliest winter of 1941-42, daily bread rations for ordinary citizens fell to 125 grams, adulterated with sawdust and cellulose. People died in the streets, in unheated apartments, in bread lines. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 800,000 to 1.5 million, dwarfing the military and civilian toll of many entire wars.
Yet the city never fell. Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Seventh Symphony amid the siege, and its 1942 performance by a starved, skeletal orchestra broadcast over loudspeakers toward German lines became a defiant act of cultural resistance. The Road of Life, an ice route across Lake Ladoga, kept a trickle of supplies and evacuees moving. The siege finally lifted in January 1944.