Leningrad besieged: hunger as a weapon

In the autumn of 1941, the Wehrmacht's Army Group North and the Finnish forces have sealed off Leningrad. Hitler does not want to take the city by storm: he intends to starve it and wipe it out. On 8 September 1941, the day the land encirclement is completed, incendiary bombs destroy the Badayev warehouses, where several thousand tonnes of flour and sugar burn. Nearly three million civilians, including hundreds of thousands of children, are trapped before winter.

The leadership of the city rests on Andrei Zhdanov, First Secretary of the Party for the region, and the Military Council of the front. With no preparation for a winter siege, supplies run out and the bread ration is lowered in stages. On 20 November 1941, it falls to its lowest: bread becomes almost the only food, cut with 50 to 60% cellulose, bran and pine sawdust. The bread card decides, literally, who lives and who dies.

The card system ranks the population into categories. It remains to settle the logic of this hierarchy: reserve the largest share for the armaments workers and the soldiers at the front, at the risk of sacrificing the unproductive mouths? Protect the children first? Or impose an equal ration for all, even at the cost of weakening those on whom the city's military survival depends?