Just finished a very good book: Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944, by Anna Reid.
It began 9/08/41. Seventy years ago. Over half a million died.
Bookworm ping.
Half a million? I thought it was even more than that.
"The mortuary itself is full. Not only are there too few trucks to go to the cemetery, but, more important, not enough gasoline to put in the trucks and the main thing is - there is not enough strength left in the living to bury the dead." - Very Inber, Leningrad diary, 26 December 1941
As far as the exact numbers of dead in Leningrad, no one is really certain but the number is certainly high. In my monthly notes for this month I mentioned that the Soviet troops on the Leningrad Front will total up over 116,000 casualties between 23 August and 30 September alone. Now please note that casualties, does not mean deaths, but statistically the casualty to death rate in World War II is around 50 percent (Japan casualties are an outlier in this case for obvious reasons). That puts the Soviet deaths at around 55,000 just as the siege started.
By January, the system of registration of deaths broke down under the sheer strain of numbers. By this point, four to five thousand people were dying each day in the city. The Library of Congress estimates that in the 900 days of the siege of Leningrad, over 600,000 people had died from starvation alone. Combat death added in, we could easily be approaching a million.