Leningrad-Novgorod offensive, 1944: the end of the siege

For two and a half years the German Eighteenth Army had held Leningrad under siege. The offensive that opened on 14 January 1944 ended it in less than two weeks, and by early March brought Soviet troops to the approaches of Pskov and the Latvian border. Our story of the siege of Leningrad tells what those 872 days meant inside the city; this is the story of how they ended.²

A front like the First World War

Earl Ziemke's official US Army history describes the German line from the Volkhov River to the Gulf of Finland as a front reminiscent of the First World War: a lacework of trenches and shell holes, two and a half years of fighting measured in yards. The heavy siege guns brought north from Sevastopol in 1942 could still shell almost all of the city. West of Leningrad, the Soviets still held a pocket on the coast around Oranienbaum.³

The Germans had prepared a fallback, the Panther position far to the west, and had planned a withdrawal to it under the code name Blau. But Hitler would not order it. At a conference on 30 December he listened to Field Marshal Georg von Küchler, commander of Army Group North, and ended the meeting without a decision. The Eighteenth Army's intelligence officers expected an offensive in January, but convinced themselves it would be as modest as the three earlier attacks around Leningrad.⁴

14 January

They were wrong. The Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts outnumbered the Eighteenth Army by at least three to one in divisions and artillery, Ziemke writes, and by six to one in tanks, self-propelled guns and aircraft: 55 rifle divisions, 9 rifle brigades and 8 tank brigades against 20 German divisions.⁵

On 14 January the Leningrad Front under General L. A. Govorov opened the main effort. The 2nd Shock Army drove east out of the Oranienbaum pocket while the 42nd Army pushed west from the city's southwestern edge. On the same day the Volkhov Front of General K. A. Meretskov attacked north and south of Novgorod. The Soviets had chosen the two places where the Germans had least room: the loop of front between Oranienbaum and Leningrad was only twenty miles wide at its base.⁶

On the second and third days the battle seemed to go as the Germans hoped. On 17 January Küchler's optimism began to fade. On 18 January the 42nd Army reached Krasnoye Selo, the old summer residence of the tsars, and the front east of Oranienbaum and west of Leningrad began to collapse. On 19 January the two Soviet armies met in the area of Russko-Vysotskoye, trapping or destroying the German units left on the coast. At Novgorod eight Soviet divisions encircled five German battalions, and Hitler, after insisting all day that the city had extraordinary symbolic significance, finally allowed them to try to escape through the swamps.⁷

27 January: the siege is lifted

On 21 January the 67th Army attacked from Kolpino toward Pushkin and Pavlovsk, and other Soviet armies took Lyuban, Tosno and Chudovo. On 27 January a salute was fired in Leningrad and the end of the siege was declared.⁸

That same day Küchler was at a Nazi leadership conference in Königsberg, where Hitler spoke to his generals about faith as a guarantee of victory. When Küchler told him that the Eighteenth Army had lost 40,000 men and had fought as hard as could be expected, Hitler replied that this was not quite true. On 29 January the army group reported that the Eighteenth Army had lost 35,000 wounded and 14,000 killed since 10 January, and that its infantry strength had fallen from nearly 58,000 to 17,000. Küchler was relieved, and Field Marshal Walter Model took over.⁹

To the Panther line

Model banned all mention of the Panther position, to cure what he called the Panther psychosis, and tried to fight a mobile defense he called shield and sword. But the Soviets kept up the pressure, toward Narva in the west and around Luga and Pskov in the south. On 1 March Army Group North took its last step back into the Panther position, and the spring thaw, which left Soviet tanks sinking to their turrets in mud, helped the line hold.¹⁰

When did it end?

The dates depend on how the operation is counted. The Encyclopaedia of Saint Petersburg dates the Leningrad-Novgorod operation itself to 14 to 20 January and treats what followed as its continuation, with offensive action lasting until the beginning of March. Ziemke follows the fighting through to 1 March and beyond. Either way, the encyclopaedia gives 27 January 1944, the day of the salute, as the date the siege was declared lifted.¹¹