German forces cut the last land route into Leningrad on 8 September 1941 and held the city under blockade for 872 days, until 27 January 1944. German planning documents envisaged that the city would be starved rather than stormed, and its population fed at no cost to the Reich. Rations fell in November 1941 to 125 grams of adulterated bread a day for dependants, and in the winter of 1941-42 the city lost people at a rate of thousands a day to starvation, cold and disease, compounded by artillery and air bombardment. A supply and evacuation route was improvised across the ice and water of Lake Ladoga, carrying about 1.4 million people out of the city over the course of the siege. Soviet-era figures put civilian deaths at about 632,000; postwar and post-Soviet scholarship generally places the toll between 800,000 and 1.1 million, including deaths among evacuees.
German Army Group North, with Finnish forces to the north, encircled and starved the population of Leningrad
Soviet city records give about 2.5 million people in Leningrad proper when the ring closed on 8 September 1941, plus roughly 300,000-340,000 in the encircled suburbs, after some 400,000 had already been evacuated. The figures include refugees who had fled into the city from the Baltic and the surrounding oblast.
The lower figure is the Soviet count of civilian deaths presented to the Nuremberg tribunal; Britannica notes 650,000 deaths in 1942 alone. Bidlack and Lomagin and most current scholarship place total civilian deaths from starvation, cold, disease and bombardment at roughly 800,000 to 1.1 million, the higher end including those who died during or shortly after evacuation. Military deaths on the Leningrad fronts are counted separately and were far higher.
German operational orders that the city was to be sealed and starved rather than accepted in surrender, and the effects of the blockade and bombardment, are documented in the German army records cited at Nuremberg and in the Soviet archival documents published by Bidlack and Lomagin.
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