The Second World War is full of enormous conflicts that have been portrayed on numerous occasions. Whether on the big screen, the small screen or in video games, we know operations such as the Normandy landings, Market Garden, the battle of Stalingrad or the taking of Berlin. There are other smaller stories that are also epic and were decisive in winning the war.
And one of them starred cats: those of the Meow Division.
Operation Barbarossa. To know the history of this peculiar group of feline soldiers we must travel to the eastern front of Europe in World War II. In June 1941, Hitler launched the General plan Osta strategy to conquer the Soviet Union, use Russians as slave labor to rebuild the country, and subsequently repopulate it with Germans. They wanted, in short, to expand the living space of Germany, which was another of the dreams of the Third Reich.
Despite the non-aggression treaties signed between the countries, Hitler and the rest of the German High Command were planning the invasion and it is estimated that Germany sent more than 3.8 million men to the Eastern Front, as well as thousands of tanks, planes and artillery. The Führer wanted to ‘unbolshevist’ the country and, to do so, it was necessary to destroy the two cities named after the two most important figures of communism: Leningrad and Stalingrad.
Leningrad. Stalingrad was a fierce battle, an extremely bloody one. The Nazis and their allies lost more than 880,000 men. The Soviets more than 1.4 million. We have seen this battle in movies and video games, such as ‘Call of Duty 2’. But the one in Leningrad was worse, at least in terms of duration. The conflict in Stalingrad lasted 200 days, but Leningrad was a siege that lasted almost two and a half years.
Due to the snow, the dead could not be buried and were scattered in the streets.
Disaster. Spoiler: Hitler did not take Leningrad thanks to Soviet resistance, but the count was brutal. More than a million Soviet people died during the siege or evacuations. It is a chilling figure and those who did not die from bullets, fell due to illness, cold or… hunger.
The first winter of the siege was one of the worst experienced in the city. Temperatures of -30 degrees Celsius caused numerous deaths from cold, but they were also hungry. The authorities rationed food with 500 grams per day for workers, 300 for children and 250 grams for non-workers. It was a ridiculous amount, but as the siege dragged on, the amount was reduced even further, leading families to hide their dead in the basement so they could use their ration cards and increase their daily food intake.
That is why the population used whatever they could to eat, making soup with elements such as tree remains (not the Christmas ones that Belgians now eat) or decomposing animal guts. The silos had been bombed and the grain was moldy, but it was still mixed with sawdust to make bread. In short, they ate what they could get their hands on.
Pets and neighbors to eat. And that included animals, but also other people. The population of rats, cats and dogs dwindled rapidly because they were becoming the main dish, but there were also those who resorted to cannibalism, to the point that some were discovered killing neighbors to sell fat and human flesh for food.
Psychological warfare. As in any conflict, propaganda was a constant and, despite the aberrant conditions inside the city, the Russians used loudspeakers to simulate that there was life, with music from concerts or sounds of vehicles, as if everything were normal.
The Nazis knew it wasn’t true because they had spies and they knew the supply lines were cut off, so they also played this psychological warfare. As? Setting up kitchens on the perimeter of the city so that the smell of cooked food would drive the inhabitants of Leningrad to despair.
Nazis and rats. In the end, the ecosystem that regulated itself collapsed. There were no cats or dogs because they had been turned into soup (despite some attempts to prevent them from being eaten), so more elusive animals such as rats and mice became, along with the Nazis, another enemy. Apart from the diseases they could transmit to the city’s inhabitants, which was their least concern at that point, the mice could eat the little grain that was left, or any other food. And they weren’t going to go through there.
Comrade Michinov. And now we enter the part of the story that has something of legend and reality. The supply corridor was controlled by the army, since the main thing was not to lose the city, but it is said that the State Health Service found a way to fill a train with Siberian cats and send it to the city. The objective was clear: to eliminate the rodents, which reproduced rapidly, feeding on the frozen corpses in the streets and on the scarce food of the population and the troops.
Thus, in 1944, wagons arrived with about 5,000 cats that were released both in the city and in the Hermitage museum. Popularly, these cats are known as the ‘Meow Division’, who also did not have a very good time during their trip from Yaroslavl to Leningrad: they were kept without food for days so that they arrived voraciously at the besieged city.
Elisey and Vasilisa
Elisey, Vasilisa and many more. The cats quickly controlled the rodent population, which allowed, along with the expulsion of the Nazis, the population to gradually rebuild their lives and rebuild the city. Today, in Russia, there are several statues that commemorate these events. An example is the several columns with 12 sculptures of cats in bronze and gold paint that are found in the Square of Siberian Cats in Tyumen, one of the cities that sent the most cats to Leningrad.
They can be seen on Google Maps, as can the statues of Elisey and Vasilisa that are in the imposing Elisayev building in Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad). Here, you can see them facing each other, with Elisey standing watching the street and Vasilisa strolling along a ledge. Returning to the cats in the museum, the Hermitage had cats in its basement that were in charge of hunting mice so that they would not eat the literary works, but with the famine, they disappeared. With the Meow Division, those cats returned, and the basement maintains a lively colony of felines today.
One of the Hermitage cats
Both the inhabitants of the Hermitage and the statues are a reminder of those dark times, of how they helped save the city and when we said that there was both legend and reality, it is because the official documents of the operation are quite opaque. I guess because they were focused on other things, like defending their land. What there are are stories of people who claim that their cats are descendants of those who landed in Leningrad.
Images | Artem Svetlov, Paul Arps, ewwl, RIA Novosti archive (2)
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