Hitler was so certain Leningrad would fall in 1941 that invitations were printed for a victory banquet at the Hotel Astoria. Instead, the city endured an 872-day siege that killed an estimated 1.5 million civilians. This episode explains why Leningrad mattered as an ideological, naval, and industrial prize, how Finland's limited war aims stalled the pincer movement, and why German doctrine shifted to deliberate starvation with orders to refuse any surrender.

It describes civilians building 300 kilometers of barricades and 700 kilometers of anti-tank ditches, the 125-gram bread ration padded with sawdust and wallpaper paste, 100,000 deaths a month at the peak, and the rumors and police records around cannibalism. The conversation covers the Road of Life across frozen Lake Ladoga, the August 1942 performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony ...