Battlefield - The Siege of Leningrad

This is the story of one of Second World War's most harrowing episodes. The 890 day siege of the Soviet Union's second city has come to epitomise the misery, suffering and savagery of the war on the Eastern Front. During this horrible period, the Germans hold the city in hand while the Russians isolate the city from the outside world. The conditions inside the city are hard to imagine. After Army Group North had surrounded the city, Leningrad's most important supply lines were cut off. This and constant bombardments, combined with running out of food supplies, meant that people were forced to ration hard. Those who did not obey this were shot.
Day after day, the city is bombed, but the city is finally liberated by Soviet troops in 19th January 1944 - by that time 600,000 of its citizens had starved to death and 200,000 more had perished in the bombing.
In this feature, we look back on those events and ask how on earth this was possible. How could the population last so long when supplies are hardly available? And how could the Germans resist for so long? We look at this pitch-black page in history, the struggle for Leningrad, including the battles for Luga, Narva, Pskov, and Ostrov, and how Germans were eventually forced into their long and costly retreat back toward Berlin.