[ Woman singing ]
[ Ominous music ]
NARRATOR: ln the suburbs of modern Moscow,
the tank traps still stand guard.
Gaunt reminders to Muscovites that Nazi invaders
once menaced the very heart of Mother Russia.
ln the dark days of autumn, 1 94 1 ,
the summer's defeats have decimated the Red Army,
and Hitler's artillery can strike Moscow itself.
The Soviet Union seems on the brink of total defeat.
But Stalin has his back to the wall,
and he will stop at nothing to protect his power base.
General Rokossovsky,
then commanding an army just west of Moscow,
experienced the power of Stalin's resolve at first hand.
[ Man speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: Comrade Stalin called me during the night.
The situation was pretty difficult.
Our units had already fallen back in a number of areas.
We knew that the commander in chief
would probably give us such a dressing down
that we would feel sick,
so l picked up the receiver of the special line
with some trepidation.
He asked me one question:
''Are you aware, Comrade Commander,
that the enemy has occupied Krasnaya Polyana?
And are you aware that if Krasnaya Polyana is occupied,
it means that the Germans can bombard any point
of the city of Moscow?''
NARRATOR: At dawn the next day,
Krasnaya Polyana was liberated in a two-pronged attack
and two 300 mm guns were captured
which had been positioned by the Germans to shell the city.
The Wehrmacht is almost at the gates.
But as Hitler's propaganda proclaims imminent victory,
and citizens prepare to meet a renewed assault,
Stalin is waging his own campaign for Soviet hearts and minds.
Stalin's eve-of-anniversary address will take place as usual,
but from the safety of Mayakovsky subway station.
And on the night of November 6th,
Moscow's military and party elites gather in the marbled metro.
Ushered to Stalin's side,
Marshal Budenny knows he is out of favor.
Melnikov, Beria, Molotov, Kaganovich,
all applauding the man they fear.
[ Speaking Russian ]
He can hardly conceal the extent of Soviet defeats,
but Stalin does claim 4.5 million German casualties.
''Red Army losses,'' he says, ''are only about a third as high.
And Germany is on the point of collapse.''
Alexei Rybin was a member
of the dictator's wartime personal-security team.
Always close to the heart of events in Moscow
and particularly friendly with Moscow District Commander Artemyev,
Rybin has ended decades of silence
to shed light on Stalin's insistence
that anniversary celebrations for the Revolution must go ahead,
no matter what the cost.
[ Man speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: Sir Colonel General Artemyev
told us how it all happened.
On the 3 1st of October, 1 94 1 ,
Stalin called for him and said:
''Are you planning to hold the parade on Red Square?''
And Artemyev answered, ''What parade, Comrade Stalin?
Where are we to get the tanks and troops?''
''You mean to tell me you haven't got any?'' replied Stalin.
Then Artemyev asked him,
''Comrade Stalin, what if they bomb the parade,
if the Germans break through and bomb the parade?''
Stalin replied,
''ln the first place, you won't let a single plane through to Moscow.''
lt's true that the weather was helping.
Sleet was falling in big flakes.
But Artemyev persisted.
[ Air raid sounding ]
''But just supposing they do start bombing?''
And Stalin said, ''Clear away the dead and wounded
and continue with the parade.''
NARRATOR: At the next day's Red Square parade,
listeners hear Stalin invoke the names
of military heroes that served the czars.
Now his very survival requires their patriotic support and sacrifice.
No talk this year of socialist values or revolutionary pride.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: The enemy is not as strong
as some frightened and small-minded intellectuals think.
The devil is not as black as he is painted.
There is no doubt that Germany cannot endure such a strain for long.
A few months more, perhaps half a year or a year,
and Hitler's Germany will collapse under the weight of its crimes.
But do they believe him?
Artillery Cadet lvanikhin didn't.
lNTERPRETER: lt was the parade in '4 1 .
lt was winter, or rather it was November,
but the snow was bitterly cold, and it was dark.
As we paraded across Red Square,
l was somewhere in the fifth line on the right flank
with my eyes facing to the right.
And l was surprised
that Stalin looked so short in his hat and earflaps,
not at all like the man we had seen in the portraits everywhere.
So at the bottom of my heart, l felt a little dubious
when he said that the war would be over in six months to a year.
Despite all this, we understood full-well that this war
would continue for more than six months to a year.
NARRATOR: But Stalin's words impress his worried allies,
and it doesn't matter what the troops think.
Few of them will live that long.
They'll be marching straight from the parade to the front.
Because as the snows deepen,
the new German offensive is almost ready to begin.
The Wehrmacht has reason to be confident in its preparations.
For more than two years of war, it has been invincible.
And most of its commanders believe, like Hitler,
that the Red Army is already as good as beaten.
As they look forward to battle
and to winter quarters in the Soviet capital,
Nazi propaganda shows them cheerful,
accustomed to victory.
Only a few of their commanders have noted worrying signs of exhaustion,
of poor preparation for a winter campaign
that was not supposed to be necessary.
For most, though, the weather is still a source of simple amusement.
Surely nothing can save Moscow now.
Yet Leningrad, almost completely surrounded since the early autumn,
is already facing the deadly wrath of the Wehrmacht,
and it is still holding out.
To preserve his infantry, Hitler has ordered his heaviest artillery
and fleets of Luftwaffe bombers to annihilate Leningrad from afar.
And as its proud avenues crumble before the onslaught,
the old czarist capital becomes a city besieged.
Stalin has no personal commitment to saving Leningrad,
and his eventual order for its defense
is more of a death sentence than a rallying cry
as Leningrad's streets themselves become the front line.
Troops are everywhere,
fighting an endless succession of fires,
desperate to plug gaps in shattered perimeters.
And a downpour of incendiaries
forces civilians to behave like soldiers,
their homes a battlefield,
their lives hanging on quick reflexes. . .
. . .or simple good fortune.
War rages all around them.
Their shattered city is already hell on earth,
but there is much worse to come for the millions trapped in Leningrad
as hell freezes over.
As temperatures plummet, the city's embattled population
is plunged into the full horror of siege conditions.
Now the ice and bitter cold
turn even the simplest, everyday task into an odyssey.
And as water pipes freeze solid and explode,
citizens must scavenge precious supplies
from nature's jealous grasp.
Transport systems grind to a complete halt.
lce penetrates every corner of the city,
chilling its very lifeblood
and trapping everything in its deadly grasp.
Almost no fuel is reaching Leningrad,
and that means death to its citizens.
Soon they will burn their furniture, their books,
their most precious belongings just to stay alive.
The city seems almost dead,
its people, shuffling shadows in a glacial twilight.
They're cold, tired, and afraid.
But above all, they are starving.
Bread -- the Soviet people's staff of life
and their birth right in a nation of grain fields.
But in Leningrad at the very start of winter,
rations are down to 4.5 ounces per day,
and the so-called bread, mixed with sawdust,
tastes foul.
Now even glue has become a delicacy,
stirred and fried as a pancake in engine oil, old paint,
anything they can find that might nourish their children
in this hour, when death seems to have vanquished civilization.
They are dying everywhere, almost casually.
Frozen bodies in the streets unattended, commonplace.
Even death is disorganized.
Historian Dmitri Likhachov was there.
lNTERPRETER: People used to think that those who died during the siege
were all buried in the Piskariovskoye Cemetery.
But that is not true.
They are buried all over the city in all the cemeteries.
You see those fields?
They're all graves.
They're all colossal mass graves,
dug out with machines,
and full of naked people, one on top of the other,
all the way to the trees over there.
My own father is buried here.
So many people died completely unnecessarily,
and it is impossible to say what their numbers were.
There have been attempts to give an exact count,
but we cannot really establish the figures,
even to the nearest thousand.
That is because when the Germans surrounded Leningrad,
people fled to Leningrad from the suburbs in outlying regions
such as Novgorod and Pskov.
Nobody knew who they were.
They had no official passports,
or if they did, they didn't get registered.
So they didn't get ration cards,
and they started to die as early as September.
Leningrad was surrounded by a ring of refugee camps
full of peasants fleeing the enemy.
When the frosts came,
you could see children's hands reaching out of their carts,
begging for bread.
That ring of camps around Leningrad was a horrific sight.
They all died. Every single one of them.
A large slice of the blame
has to be laid at the feet of the authorities of the time,
the regional Party committee
and Leningrad city's Soviet Executive Committee.
We are told that people got 200 grams of bread a day,
but they didn't.
ln order to get that ration,
you literally had to fight your way into the bread shop,
to fight your way in,
having stood in line the whole of the night before.
But at night, there was a curfew, you see,
so the people would hide in stairways and porches.
And as soon as the curfew was over,
people would race for the bread shops
to collect their 50, 1 00, or 200 grams of bread,
depending on how many coupons they had with them.
l and my children survived thanks only to my wife.
The Germans saw only too clearly
what the situation was like in Leningrad
and decided to bomb the Bodaev warehouses.
That was a completely demoralizing sight.
lt meant we would starve.
[ Church bell tolls ]
NARRATOR: Today, at Leningrad's Seraphim Cemetery,
the hunger is not forgotten.
But the wartime Soviet Union was never told the full story.
Yuri Kolosov survived the siege as a schoolboy.
Now he is director of the Leningrad Siege Museum.
lNTERPRETER: From November to December,
when the starvation really began to bite,
and the death rate went up by 1 0 or 1 5 times,
the first proposals for mass burials were made.
And these burials regularly took place in all 22 of the city's cemeteries.
NARRATOR: Archivist Nadezhda Cherepinina
has been studying the siege
from secret documents hidden until the fall of the Soviet Union.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: The cemeteries could no longer cope
with the huge number of burials
because of the severe frost,
the growing weakness of the grave diggers,
and the severe lack of machinery.
So a decision was taken to cremate the corpses.
On the 7th of March, 1 942,
a reduced sitting of the Leningrad City Soviet Executive Committee,
decided to organize the cremation of corpses
at the First City Brick Factory.
lt was reported that 223,000 bodies were burnt at the brick factory.
The ashes were scattered over the whole area of this park.
The brick factory had been here before there was a park,
and they dumped the ashes into the ponds that used to be here.
So you and l are standing on ground
that is made up of those dumped ashes.
The ashes were literally blown away by the wind over this ground.
So, we decided, at the suggestion of the Leningrad Siege Society,
to set up a memorial.
lt is very sad that we don't even know
the names of the people who were cremated here.
NARRATOR: And even now, Dmitri Likhachov can only guess
at the final death toll in Leningrad.
lNTERPRETER: By August, there had been 1 ,200,000
officially registered deaths.
But as l mentioned earlier,
there were huge numbers of unregistered deaths,
and it's impossible to say exactly how many.
People would often hide the deaths of their relatives
from the authorities
in order to use their ration cards.
My own estimate, as a person who was in the siege and witnessed it all,
is that around two million people died.
NARRATOR: Two million deaths.
The ice settles like a veil, mourning the lost souls of Leningrad.
And survivors, chilled to the marrow, can only shuffle around,
fighting death and despair.
And amid tragedy on such a vast scale,
a few angry citizens plum
the very depths of human degradation.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: Starvation was the main reason
for the very high death rate in Leningrad.
lt took a dreadful toll on the minds of some citizens.
Many of them couldn't take the ordeal and sank into cannibalism.
Their numbers were not great, not very great.
ln a city of two or three million people,
there were only a few hundred people.
From archived documents,
we can roughly calculate the number of cannibals,
people who murdered in order to get bodies and who ate people,
and people who ate dead bodies.
Most of them were women,
and you have to understand
that they were doing it to try and save their children.
The total number of these criminals was around 1 ,500.
Until recently, this wasn't normally talked about.
ln general, in most cases,
each incident had a personal tragedy behind it.
We have a document which reflects the state of cemeteries at that time.
Here's a report on the Georgievsky Cemetery.
Up to 3,000 bodies were dumped
and scattered over the area allocated to the communal graves.
Along the road between this area and the cotton depot,
there were decapitated corpses,
and various limbs, and detached body parts --
heads, hands, feet, etc.
NARRATOR: This document has never been seen in public before.
lNTERPRETER: Here we have a special police report.
2 4th of January, an operational unit of the Pargolovo police detachment,
having received secret information, carried out a search of the buildings
of a refugee settlement in Pargolovo School #2.
During the search, the body of a 1 2-year-old boy was found,
without a head, and with the inner parts of his body removed.
Also found were human legs, belonging to both children and adults,
two children's heads and other different body parts.
NARRATOR: But though Leningrad's brutal winter is humanity's enemy,
it is no friend to Hitler.
North of the city, Lake Ladoga freezes solid in late November,
and thick ice forms a land link to the Motherland
through the one area not held by the Wehrmacht.
They call it the Road of Life.
lt carries a precious trickle of food to the starving millions,
brings out helpless women and children,
and offers a slender lifeline
to those that must remain in the beleaguered city,
despite the savage attentions of the Luftwaffe.
But it is never enough.
At best, the Road of Life
can only provide one third of Leningrad's daily food needs.
And those are just the official figures.
At the start of 1 942, Leningrad hovers somewhere between life and death.
They have already been written off by Hitler.
''There is no need to take Leningrad,'' he tells the Bundestag.
''Within a few weeks, the city will devour itself.''
But in these bleakest hours,
Leningrad's survivors seek nourishment of the mind
and of the soul,
through culture.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: You probably know my book,
Defense of Ancient Russian Cities.
Well, l wrote this book together with Madame Tikhanova
during the siege in Leningrad.
How did it come about?
Well, l was summoned to Party headquarters at Smolny.
l wasn't a Party member, but l was summoned there.
And to get there, l had to cross the whole city.
Well, l had so little energy that l could hardly drag my feet along,
but l still went to Smolny.
When l went in, the first thing that struck me
was the smell of the canteen,
which meant that people were eating there.
l was met by a woman, l wouldn't call her fat,
but let's just say she was a healthy, hearty-looking woman,
the head of some department or other.
She told me that a book was needed
to raise the spirits of people in Leningrad.
So l agreed to the commission,
because l didn't think of the commission as coming from her,
but more directly from the people of Leningrad,
who were the ones who really needed it.
So, l went home, barely dragging my feet along.
That woman in Smolny didn't even think of feeding me.
None of them did,
and it took me all day to get there and back.
NARRATOR: Authors, artists, all still working.
Architect Alexander Nikolsky,
his triumphal arch, a gesture of faith in victory.
And the great composer Dmitri Shostakovich,
completing his immortal Leningrad Symphony,
as the city of its inspiration is ripped apart around him.
As a symbol of defiance,
the work's first performance must take place in Leningrad.
Musicians are recalled from the front.
But Conductor Eliasberg faces unique problems during rehearsals.
The orchestra administrator's report is terse, but it tells the story.
''The first violin is dying.
The drum died on the way to work.
The French horn is about to die.
And yet, in the bomb-damaged Philharmonia Hall,
Leningrad's symphony soars above the mayhem,
announcing the triumph of art over death.''
25 years later,
touching proof that mere mortals defy death less easily,
survivors of the original orchestra and of that first-night audience,
gather to commemorate the siege.
Eliasberg leads them once more.
And empty places are reserved for the dead.
lt is a performance of ghosts under the wistful eye of the composer.
And as they pay tribute to the dead,
surely, too, they remember Leningrad's children,
innocent, terrified victims of Hitler's crimes.
[ Woman singing ]
Thousands of children lose their lives in the siege. . .
. . .but so many more are touched by death
before they have discovered life.
Learning to grieve for loved ones, to endure hunger, fear. . .
. . .cold and pain.
But the children will leave behind their own poignant contribution
to Leningrad's siege history.
Little Tanya Savicheva keeps a diary of her family under siege.
Just a small address book,
a friend or relative mentioned under each letter heading.
lt is a stark, heartbreaking testimony.
A simple, unadorned catalogue of calamities.
''Grandmother died, 25 January, 1 942, at 3:00 p.m.
Leka died on 1 7 March at 5:00 in the morning.
Uncle Vasya died on 1 3 April at 2:00 in the morning.
Mama died on 1 3 May, 1 942, at 7:30 in the morning.
The Savichevs have died. . .
. . .all died.
Only Tanya is left.
And though she is evacuated along the Road of Life,
it is too late to reverse the fatal effects of malnutrition.
But like Anne Frank in the West, she will not be forgotten.
Tanya Savicheva's words will be read at the Nuremberg Trials
and will help damn her killers in the eyes of all humanity.
lt has seemed an eternity,
but spring is coming to Leningrad at last.
lt brings survivors a glimpse of better things,
some real hope to fuel their dauntless spirits.
Now the city is a hive of activity again.
There is hard work to be done,
but with most of the men at battle,
the main burden falls, as it has done throughout the siege,
on the indominatable women of Leningrad.
These women are helping to restart the city's tram network.
Yet another stubborn gesture,
and one that will force German observers
to question their faith in Leningrad's downfall.
[ Tram bell sounds ]
Others labor to bring forth spring's bounty,
transforming every patch of soil, anywhere in the city,
into priceless crop land.
As the Road of Life once more becomes a waterway,
the spring's first convoy has forced a passage
through the melting ice on Ladoga.
A new pipeline is laid under the lake,
ensuring at least some regular oil supplies.
Ships and barges arrive laden with relief supplies,
but depart crowded with women and children,
emerging at last from the shadow of death.
These children are almost safe now, but the danger is not quite over.
The Luftwaffe awaits them on their journey across Ladoga.
Nobody will ever know how many innocent children
are lost to air attacks,
but after a winter of grief, unequaled in history,
nothing will force Leningrad to surrender to Hitler now.
On the battlefields outside Moscow,
Red Army troops match the defiance of Leningrad's citizens.
Hitler and the allies expect the fall of Moscow at any moment.
But as ice and exhaustion take their toll
and Soviet resistance stiffens,
German troops discover that the road to Moscow is, after all, a long one,
and their advance staggers to a halt.
ln the capital, an agitated Stalin
entrusts the defense to General Zhukov.
Zhukov, son of a peasant,
and hero of the border wars with Japan,
is a brilliant tactician.
And it is his suggestion at the end of November
of a counterattack against the German pincers
that triggers hurried planning
for a massive Soviet counteroffensive.
lt is a plan made possible
by the seemingly limitless depth of Red Army reserves,
and by Stalin's desperate, uncharacteristic willingness
to take risks.
His agent in Tokyo, Richard Sorge,
has sent word that Japan will not, as feared,
attack the USSR from Manchuria.
And for once, crucially, Stalin trusts the advice of a minion.
He authorizes the transfer west
of more than half the Soviet strength in the Far East --
1 7 fresh divisions,
trained regulars with full-armored and artillery support,
that will form the heart of the counterattack.
And for the first time,
Stalin will not simply hurl these reserves into the fray.
His generals will be given a chance to prepare,
to concentrate their strength.
Now, as every unit Stalin can muster is rushed to the front,
the dictator can hardly wait to exact retribution on the Wehrmacht.
Prowling, impatient, he shackles field commanders
to his simple, unchanging tactical doctrine.
Attack at once. Attack everywhere.
And if you fail, attack again.
The first days of December are an agony of anticipation.
But on the 5th, Zhukov unleashes his armies.
Rokossovsky's forces, just southwest of the city,
and Konev's to their north
opened the Red Army's first major offensive of the Great Patriotic War.
Within 48 hours, the Soviet thrusts are fully underway.
And now the Wehrmacht must taste the bitter fruit
of Hitler's overconfidence.
As he will do time and again in this war,
the Führer has gravely underestimated
the strength of Soviet reserves and of Soviet resolve.
And now comes the reckoning.
A regrouped Red Air Force
wrests control of the skies from a depleted Luftwaffe.
Soviet artillery, fresh and confident,
is close to its ammunition and supply bases.
The Red Army's new T-34 tanks are rugged, powerful fighting machines,
designed to perform unfailingly in the bitter cold of deepest winter,
and swarms of specialist ski troops
are too fast and fit for the ill-clad Wehrmacht.
Hitler's furious order to hold advanced positions is meaningless.
German troops can only fall back in astonished disarray
as Army Group Center,
the juggernaut that was to crush Moscow,
is smashed apart.
After six months of catastrophic defeats,
the Red Army's hard-fought victory is undeniable.
By the 20th of December,
Panzer General Guderian is informing Hitler
that his troops can no longer fight.
And as the year closes,
Soviet towns and villages west of the capital
are being freed from their brief, Nazi occupation.
There will be more sweeping Soviet victories,
but none will burn more brightly
than this first astounding recovery from the brink of defeat.
Each community liberated by their blood and bullets
lights a fire of hope in Soviet hearts.
And every kilometer recovered
pushes the enemy further from Stalin's hearth.
Convinced now that Germany is on the brink of collapse,
Stalin demands attack after attack.
Every remaining reserve is thrown into the fray
as he seeks to drive the invader from Soviet territory.
But it is impossible.
Their super-human effort has taken its toll,
and the armies are exhausted.
But Stalin's profligacy cannot spoil the joy
of civilians rescued from Nazi rule.
These modest scenes of gratitude and celebration
are the very first signal to the world that Germany is not invincible
and that the Soviet Union is not vanquished.
lt is a message to warm the souls
of millions still under the hammer of occupation.
And it brings good cheer to Muscovites
as they celebrate the new year.
Spared the horrors of Leningrad's ghastly hunger,
Moscow can pause a moment from the struggle.
An air of festive bustle fills the streets
as citizens prepare to savor the miracle that has preserved them.
lt might almost be a normal festive season,
except that these trees will be decorating bomb shelters,
and they can expect no luxuries beyond the few wistful moments
relaxing to the strains of a pre-war balladeer.
But while Moscow's children play in the shelters,
the war is still killing their fathers.
These parcels are for frontline troops.
They must be sent quickly,
because the Supreme Commander has ordered new offenses
along the whole of the Eastern Front.
He no longer feels the need
to concentrate everything around Moscow.
He expects total victory on every sector at once,
and he expects it quickly.
Dissipated by Stalin's overreaching ambition,
the offensives make only trivial gains,
and at a dreadful cost.
And by the time its attacks peter out in February,
the Red Army has lost almost a million troops
in the battle for Moscow.
That grim statistic will be hidden from the Soviet people
for half a century.
But the appalling evidence of Nazi occupation
is clear for all to see.
The retreating Germans have savaged everything in their path.
Burning, destroying indiscriminately.
But they take special care to defile any symbol of hated Slav culture.
ln the town of Klin, they've wrecked Tchaikovsky's house
and burned the score of his 6th Symphony.
The composer's house before the invasion.
And this was Leo Tolstoy's estate,
Yasnaya Polyana, before the Germans came.
The room where War and Peace was written
has been converted as a barracks.
But the house is now a smoldering ruin.
And the writer's grave has been desecrated
to make way for dead Germans.
Churches are a favorite target.
Wherever the Wehrmacht has passed by,
shrines of Orthodox worship are reduced to rubble,
their most sacred icons shot to ribbons.
And the ruins of churches become killing grounds
as the Nazis maraud through the western USSR
displaying their special talent for mass murder,
destroying the lives of ordinary men and women.
lnnocent people like Mrs. Nikolayeva's schoolteacher husband
from Mozhaysk, a little town to the west of Moscow.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: l had been living in Mozhaysk
with my husband for 30 years.
We worked together.
He worked in the Secondary School #1
as a teacher of mathematics.
On the third day after the Germans occupied Mozhaysk
he was walking along Leonovskaya street,
when a group of German soldiers and officers arrested him
on suspicion of giving signals to Soviet aircraft.
Despite his explanations,
he was taken to the nearest bomb shelter and cruelly shot.
During the German occupation of our town,
we lived in total fear and humiliation.
We witnessed all kinds of atrocities and abuse.
Scenes like this will become chillingly familiar,
but this is the world's first glimpse of Nazi atrocities.
And as the true nature of Hitler's New Order is revealed,
shock reverberates around the globe.
And these crimes will not be forgotten,
because this film, part of a seven-minute montage,
will be shown by Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials,
where the fates of these innocent victims
will haunt their murderers.
But can any courtroom do justice to such senseless brutality?
For Hitler's soldiers, the first bitter taste of defeat,
and this is the world's first opportunity to witness abject fear
on the faces of German troops
as the columns of prisoners trudge miserably to their camps.
The majority of Wehrmacht units may have escaped encirclement,
but they could not save their equipment.
Now it lies abandoned everywhere,
a gigantic German scrap yard.
lt is a fitting sight to show British Foreign Minister Eden
when he arrives to survey the battlefields,
for neither Britain, nor Stalin's new ally, the United States,
believed that Moscow could survive the German onslaught.
But if the Western allies are amazed,
this one victory has revealed to Stalin
a mirage of complete triumph,
and he is totally committed to further attack.
But he has miscalculated.
The Wehrmacht is not yet beaten,
and a furious Hitler is planning massive new offensives.
His folly will again compel the Red Army
to fight in desperate defense.
And so, the Soviet people must struggle on.
lt will be a long, painful journey,
and many will not survive to its conclusion.
But throughout their dark ordeal, they will carry with them
the shining example of the cities that defied death. �