Leningrad encircled: where to keep the bread?
In Leningrad, a Soviet food-supply official keeps the figures the population never sees: how many days of provisions remain for nearly 3 million inhabitants. The city, ill-prepared for a siege, let its reserves dwindle through the summer, counting on a swift victory that never came.
On this 8 September 1941, the troops of reach Lake Ladoga and cut the last rail line: the land encirclement closes. From now on nothing enters except across the lake or by air, and winter is coming.
Much of the foodstuff is concentrated in a single set of old wooden storehouses, the Badayev warehouses, plainly visible from above as the Luftwaffe steps up its raids. The real figures remain a closely guarded secret: to reveal them would stoke panic.
The official must decide quickly: keep the provisions together to control distribution better, scatter them across the city to reduce the risk from bombs, or ship part of them east across Ladoga while the lake remains passable.
Leningrad, September 1941, you manage food supply for a city soon besieged: what to do with the reserves?
The choice fell on keeping the stocks concentrated. On the evening of 8 September 1941, a Luftwaffe raid set the Badayev warehouses ablaze: roughly 3,000 tons of flour and 2,500 tons of sugar went up in smoke. The image of the flames and of molten sugar running through the cellars became the symbol of the famine that followed. Rationing collapsed to the bread ration of 125 grams (often cut with substitutes) from November 1941 to February 1942. The famine killed, by estimates, between 600,000 and more than a million civilians, the peak exceeding 100,000 deaths per month during the winter. Historiography has nonetheless qualified the myth: the Badayev foodstuffs represented only one to 3 days of consumption. The blockade organized by Hitler, and not the fire alone, was the true cause of the catastrophe.
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