Starving as a Weapon of War
The blockade of Gaza and a historical precursor
While I’m enjoying the picture-perfect scenery at Flathead Lake in Montana, I watch horror scenarios from around the world on YouTube. The images of the starving population in Gaza remind me of a horrendous war crime during World War II. Committed by Germans against Russian civilians.
Siege of Leningrad
Estimates of the number of civilian casualties in the Soviet city of Leningrad (since 1991 St. Petersburg again) vary: 700,000 to 1,500,000 people are said to have died between the beginning of 1941 and January 1944. Most sources put the figure at 1,100,000 people. 90 percent of whom starved to death miserably during the so-called siege of Leningrad. Encircled by the Axis powers of the German Wehrmacht's Army Group North and Spanish troops (Blue Division), Finnish troops sealed off the city in the north. The siege lasted from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944, i.e. 872 days (approx. 28 months or two years and four months).
The encirclement of the city with the aim of systematically starving the Leningrad population is considered one of the most blatant war crimes committed by the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War against the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation, as the legal successor to the Soviet Union, classifies the blockade as genocide. On the 75th anniversary of its end, the German government pledged around twelve million euros in compensation to the surviving victims.
The blockade ring was closed on September 8, 1941. This cut off all supply lines to the city of millions. The only possible route, via Lake Ladoga, was not developed for the needs of the city, as there was no landing stage and no access roads. The German Luftwaffe bombed the food stores, the water and electricity works, while schools, hospitals and maternity homes came under fire from artillery. 3,000 tons of flour and 2,500 tons of sugar were burned. The sweet earth into which the melted sugar had seeped was sold for weeks at high prices on the black market.
Wikipedia gives a drastic description of how the situation of the inhabitants deteriorated hopelessly. Initially, the universities and cultural institutions remained open. In August 1942, Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony had its world premiere in the Leningrad Philharmonic. The concert was broadcast throughout the Soviet Union and also to the rest of Europe and the USA via short-wave radio. At the same time, the performance was accompanied by an artillery duel. The Wehrmacht attempted to disrupt the performance, but the Soviet artillery prevented this.
Instead of the required 2000 tons of food per day, a maximum of 172 tons reached the siege ring. Bread was rationed several times and substitutes such as bran, grain husks and cellulose were added. The famine began. In the winter of 1941/1942, people lost up to 45 percent of their body weight. As a result, they lost muscle tissue and their hearts and livers became smaller. This was the beginning of mass deaths. Soon there were no more horses, cats, dogs, rats or crows in the city. Everything of organic origin was eaten. Even glue, grease, wallpaper paste and window putty. The first cases of cannibalism were reported. A total of 1,025 cases were reported by February 1942. Bodies lay in the streets, as many collapsed and simply lay there. In the freezing cold apartments, people lived together with their dead relatives, who were not buried because transportation to the cemetery was too difficult for the exhausted people.
Russian author Evgeny Schwartz wrote the fairytale play “The Dragon” in 1943 under the influence of the blockade. After a preliminary performance in Moscow in 1944, further performances were banned. Even in literature, the suffering of the Leningrad population was only allowed to be depicted without embellishment in the years immediately following the blockade. Thereafter, as part of leadership battles between the central government in Moscow and party functionaries in Leningrad, books that supposedly portrayed the fate of the Leningraders too “sincere and cruel” or their behavior too ‘unpatriotic’ and “lacking in ideology” were destroyed. In the late 1950s, the siege was commemorated with a “Green Belt of Glory” - a ribbon of trees and monuments along the former front line. Leningrad was given the title “Hero City”.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was an ideological opening, but only for a short time. In January 2014, the TV station Dozhd launched a survey to mark the 70th anniversary of the lifting of the Leningrad blockade. Couldn't the city have been left to the attacking Wehrmacht “to protect thousands of lives”? As a result, the “last independent television station in Russia”, according to Wikipedia, lost its nationwide broadcasting. The “Blockadebuch” (Blockade Book) by Daniil Granin and Ales Adamowitsch, a documentary chronicle of eyewitness accounts, memories and letters, which first appeared in 1970 and which the authors described as “an epic of human suffering”, was also censored. In 2013, it was included in the list of “100 books for schoolchildren” recommended by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation for schoolchildren to read independently.
When it comes to the role of politics, however, coming to terms with the past is still written in small letters. In 2019, the privately financed feature film “Feiertag” (Holiday) by director Alexei Krasovsky was branded “blasphemous” because it deals with the privileged treatment of state functionaries during the blockade. In the same year, Yelena Chizhova was attacked for her essay “Das doppelte Gedächtnis” (The Double Memory) published in Switzerland. In it, the wrter argues that the “truth about the blockade” had been concealed during the Soviet era, which included wrong decisions by the authorities and privileges for officials.
In a lecture in 2014, international German law expert Christoph Safferling argued that in the early 1940s, there was no explicit provision in international law against the use of hunger as a weapon against the civilian population. It was only introduced in 1977 with an additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions. For this reason, the siege of Leningrad was not described as a war crime in the Nuremberg trials against leading representatives of the Nazi state.
And Gaza?
In 2025, when the Israeli government blocks food supplies to Gaza or only allows them to pass through in homeopathic doses, the use of hunger as a weapon of war against civilians is outlawed under international law. Of course, the Middle East conflict is not a declared war between two officially recognized sovereign nation states, as was the case in the Second World War. However, the Second Additional Protocol of 1977 supplements Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which is also applicable in non-international armed conflicts. And this includes the Middle East conflict. So what will become of Gaza?
At least two people were crushed to death and two others fatally injured on Wednesday, May 28, 2025, when thousands of starving Palestinians stormed a UN humanitarian aid camp after 80 days of a food blockade. This was reported by the US political magazine Democracy Now. Furthermore, international doctors and medical personnel are increasingly being denied entry to Gaza. Critics speak of an “undeclared medical siege”.
Unconfirmed videos are circulating on Platform X according to which Hamas is allegedly preventing civilians in Gaza from reaching the UN camps with relief supplies, in some cases by force of arms. Hamas is also said to steal food supplies and selling them on to the population at inflated prices. Allegedly in order to pay its fighters and recruit new ones.
What is truth, what is propaganda? It is virtually impossible to verify the information - on both sides. What is verifiable is this: Israeli ministers have approved 22 new West Bank settlements - which is illegal under international law. The settlements include twelve existing outposts that were built without state approval and are now to be legalized. It would be the largest settlement expansion in Israel's history. This comes amid reports of a surge of attacks on Palestinian communities. Residents of Qaryout reported Israeli settlers descended on their village without warning, setting fire to homes and property. Members of a family claim Israeli soldiers burst into their home without warning early Wednesday before shooting 20-year-old Jassem al-Sadda as he slept. He was reportedly left to bleed to death with no one allowed to approach and help him. No reason for the action is given in the news.
Another new law in Israel stipulates that children as young as 12 years old can be sentenced to life imprisonment. According to UN experts, the law is aimed at punishing Palestinian families and probably violates international law, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Will Benjamin Netanyahu's government go so far as to starve the civilian population of Gaza - as the German Wehrmacht once did in Leningrad?
What about the German government? Should it continue to adhere unconditionally to the “raison d'état Israel” - regardless of any violations of international law and human rights? More and more critics are questioning this self-imposed commitment, which is based on the country's National Socialist past, and are calling for it to be abolished. Or does Germany so urgently need Israeli weapons systems for its military umbrella?
This text was first published in German on my website.
Middle East: Looking back on my own experiences
I lived in Egypt for almost seven years and worked, among other things, for the Agency for Technical Cooperation (now: GIZ) as a consultant for the advancement of women. I condemn the terror of Hamas just as I condemn the migration policy of the German government, which ignores the Jew-hatred of Muslim migrants. And I also see Israel having its share of…