The third or terminal phase of starvation is often characterized by a complete collapse of anything resembling social order. Efforts at cooperation also fall off, even within families. The rate of physical activity also decreases to near zero as the exhausted and starving individuals remain motionless for hours, basically doing nothing. Some victims of starvation do not fall into these broad patterns. These individuals are capable of heroic gestures. They are also capable of murder and cannibalism—and sometimes both.
In his book The Cannibal Within, Lewis Petrinovich argues convincingly that survival cannibalism is an evolved human trait that functions to optimize the chances of survival (and thus, reproductive success) for the cannibal. “It is not advantageous to be a member of another species, of a different race, or even to be a stranger when people are driven by starvation. The best thing to be is a member of a family group, and not be too young or too old.”
Only three years before the Minnesota University study, which came to be called the Minnesota Experiment, starvation was taking place on a massive scale in a major European city. For the inhabitants of Leningrad, the horror extended beyond the limits of a supervised research project.
Today known as St. Petersburg, Leningrad was a major industrial city and the birthplace of the Russian Revolution. In June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa—a massive, three-pronged assault against the Soviet Union. By September, the nearly three million Leningraders were completely surrounded by German and Finnish forces. With little advance preparation by the local authorities, food shortages and dwindling fuel supplies had become grave concerns. The city’s zoo animals were killed and consumed, and soon after, people began butchering and eating their pets. In a textbook example of shortsightedness, most of the city’s food reserves were housed in a series of closely spaced wooden structures that were destroyed after a single bombing raid by the Luftwaffe.
On September 29, 1941, Adolf Hitler wrote, “All offers of surrender from Leningrad must be rejected. In this struggle for survival, we have no interest in keeping even a proportion of the city’s population alive.” German commanders were forbidden from accepting any type of surrender from the city’s inhabitants. “Leningrad must die of starvation,” Hitler declared.
With essential supplies all but cut off, living conditions within the embattled city plummeted along with the temperatures, which routinely reached -30 degrees Fahrenheit, in what became a winter of record-breaking cold. Although daily artillery and aerial bombardments claimed citizens at random, far more Leningraders died of exposure, sickness, and especially starvation. As a result, by December 1941, the unburied dead were accumulating by the tens of thousands.
As conditions worsened, social order began to unravel and violent criminals took to the streets. Leningrad’s citizens were robbed or murdered for the food they carried home from the market or for the ration cards that allotted them as little as 75 grams of bread per day.22
According to historian David Glantz, 50,000 Leningraders starved to death in December 1941 and 120,000 died in January 1942. Archivist Nadezhda Cherepenina reported that during the month of February 1942, “the registry offices recorded 108,029 deaths (roughly 5 percent of the total population)—the highest figure in the entire siege.”23
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote that once the harsh winter took hold, most of Leningrad’s population was reduced to eating bark, carpenter’s glue, and the leather belt drives found in motors. But there were exceptions. “These were the cannibals and their allies—fat, oily, steely-eyed, calculating, the most terrible men and women of their day.”
As rumors of cannibalism swept the city, so too did reports of kidnappings. It was said that children were being seized off the streets “because their flesh was so much more tender.” Women were apparently a popular second choice because of the extra fat they carried.
“In the worst period of the siege,” a survivor noted, “Leningrad was in the power of the cannibals.”
Just as ominous, perhaps, was the sudden availability of suspicious-looking meat in Leningrad’s central market. The traders were new as well, selling their grisly wares (which they claimed to be horse, dog, or cat flesh) to those shoppers with enough money to buy them. According to numerous survivor accounts, meat patties made from ground-up human flesh were being sold as early as November 1941.