Gatchina and occupied Leningrad region. 1941-42

Gatchina and occupied Leningrad region. 1941-42

This unknown German officer's archive consists of 73 negatives of various sizes. Most of the negatives were taken on German black and white Perutz film with a frame size of 3x4 cm. The name of the photographer is unknown. The most interesting part of the archive was taken on the Eastern Front during the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941-42, in particular during the occupation of the Leningrad region, including the town of Krasnogvardeysk (Gatchina), and the creation of the blockade ring around Leningrad.

In the first days of September 1941 the troops of the Northern Army Group approached the suburbs of Leningrad. Of the three armies that attacked the Soviet Union, the Northern Army Group was the weakest. It had fewer troops and weapons than Army Group Centre, which was to attack Moscow. It became clear that the planned blitzkrieg would not be realized for several weeks, and the Red Army still had enough reserves to give the Wehrmacht a fight, despite the huge losses. By this time, most of the Leningrad region had been captured and the blockade ring around the city had been closed.

Krasnogvardeysk (Gatchina) was occupied on 13 September 1941. The town had a military airfield which was used by the Luftwaffe for fighter escorts of heavy bombers flying to attack Leningrad. In 1942 the occupation authorities renamed Krasnogvardeysk Lindemannstadt. The city also housed a huge apparatus of German reconnaissance and repressive units and organisations. It was these units that were to bring about a "new order" after the imminent capture of Leningrad.

Photographs taken at this time by an unknown German officer show a platoon of soldiers in winter uniforms on the street of occupied Krasnogvardeysk (Gatchina), near the former police headquarters. This historic building is the Convention House, built by Adrian Kokorev, the chief architect of Gatchina. Behind the former police headquarters, you can barely see the dome of the Cathedral of the Protection of the Holy Mary, which, like most churches and cathedrals in the Soviet Union, was closed before the war in the 1930s and turned into a warehouse. The photo next to it, taken at the same place and time, but from the opposite side, shows the destruction of the city and its buildings.

From Krasnogvardeysk the German soldiers, together with a photographer, moved to one of the occupied settlements in the Leningrad region, where the headquarters of the unit was located (the exact location could not be established). The German military unit was surrounded by a fence with barbed wire and watchtowers to protect it from partisan and Red Army attacks. The pictures taken by an unknown photographer show how the German soldiers lived and worked: they set up firing positions for the German 150mm heavy field howitzer sFH 18 near the occupied village, sawed down trees and cleared the forest for the army, built defensive structures such as a line of anti-tank fortifications with barbed wire and steel hedgehogs. All this suggests that the officer may have served in an engineering unit.

In addition to war photographs, the archive also contains photographs of civilian life in a German-occupied village. The pictures show how in winter the locals, mostly women and old people, helped the German soldiers to unload equipment and food for the newly arrived German army; how the locals carried their own belongings or pulled their sledges across the frozen lake; how women, probably against their will, had to watch a film in the German headquarters while being photographed with German officers embracing them.

This small archive shows a short but very important period of the war and is a unique historical record of life in the occupied Leningrad region in 1941-42.