Leningrad siege

Moscow wants recognition of German “genocide”

Residents of Leningrad flee after their homes were bombed.(Bild: wikipedia.org/RIA Novosti Archive Image #2153/Boris Kudoyarov)

Russia wants to clear up what it sees as a "historical injustice" and is now demanding that the siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) by German troops during the Second World War be recognized not only as a war crime, but as genocide.

The German side is accused of an allegedly "contradictory handling" of the past: German crimes from the colonial era are recognized as genocide, but the National Socialist crimes against the peoples of the Soviet Union during the Second World War are not. "The Russian side insists on official recognition of such atrocities of the Third Reich as genocide," it says in a diplomatic note to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.

During the almost 900-day siege of the northern Russian city by the Wehrmacht and its allies between 1941 and 1944, around 1.1 million people lost their lives. Countless civilians starved to death or froze to death.

Russians see "ethnic discrimination"
"The Leningrad Blockade was a terrible war crime that the German Wehrmacht inflicted on Leningrad and its population," according to the Federal Foreign Office. The Federal Government has emphasized this several times and adheres to this legal opinion. On the 80th anniversary of the end of the blockade this January, the German embassy in Moscow commemorated the victims with several events.

Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin at the memorial for the victims of the siege(Bild: APA/AFP/SPUTNIK/Mikhail Klimentyev)

The Russian Foreign Ministry once again takes issue with the fact that Germany only paid individual compensation to Jewish victims of the blockade. "The Russian side sees such a practice by the German side as ethnic discrimination," TASS quotes from the note. Victims of all nationalities should be compensated - so the demand. 

Germany refers to paid war reparations
Germany justifies the difference in treatment with the fact that Soviet Jews were subjected to particular persecution due to Nazi racial policy. Compensation for other victims was covered by the war reparations paid by Germany after 1945.