This must not be forgotten!
(Photo infosperber)
On 27 January 1944 – 79 years ago – the Red Army was able to break through the German siege of Leningrad with a million people starved to death
by Christian Müller,* 27 January 2023
(7 February 2023) (Edit.) With its complete submission to the Anglo-American forces on the other side of the Atlantic, Germany can but lose: its freedoms, its prosperity, its standing in the world. In addition, there is the loss of the economic advantage of receiving cheap gas from Russia (which has contributed significantly to the economic boom) and the national honour of having become a decent and peaceful country – after a lost war that claimed 27 million victims in the Soviet Union alone. All polls show that a majority of the German population does not want a war against Russia.
The country’s own war crimes, at a time when many Germans living today were already born, that is, not at primeval times! – must not be forgotten. Leningrad is an example.
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mass death, October 1942. (Picture Ria Novosti Archive, picture 216,
Boris Kudoyarov)
The city of Leningrad, today’s St. Petersburg, was already a city of millions in the early 1940s. Located on the Baltic Sea, it was the second largest Russian city. According to Hitler, both cities [Leningrad and Stalingrad, edit.] were to be “wiped out”, i.e. brought under his own control, as a letter from the Nazi cadre Reinhard Heydrich1 indicates! To be “wiped out”! So it was clearly about the planned and partially realised murder of millions of Russian civilians!
Between July 1942 and August 1943, in the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland, the Nazis murdered over 700,000 people, almost all of them Jews. Estimates go as high as one million. Because it was targeted against Jews and because the Jews all over the world made sure that this went down in history as genocide without comparison after the end of the Second World War, almost every child today, at least in Germany, knows what war crime Germany committed back then. And what about the deliberate starvation of millions of Russians?
The total military siege of the Russian city of Leningrad, with its millions of inhabitants, began on 8 September 1941. It was not until 872 days later, on 27 January 1944, that the Red Army was able to break through this siege by force of arms and was able to bring food supplies into the city again. Since the deliberate famine for the total annihilation of the Leningrad population did not begin on the first day of the siege, but gradually grew dramatically, it must be assumed that in January 1944, i.e. after more than two years without any food supplies whatsoever, on each and every day up to 3,000 people or even more were dying of starvation. The Jews in Treblinka were gassed, the Russians in Leningrad were condemned to starvation: Are there any more atrocious methods of killing people “en masse”?
Today Germany supplies weapons against Russia
But today, Germany is supplying battle tanks – the best in the world – against Russia! And it is covering up this decision with the explanation of it being a “joint decision” with the USA.
As a reminder: after the end of the Cold War, Russia voluntarily allowed the reunification of the two Germanys. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved. The military stationed in the GDR were all withdrawn by 1995 and their weapons and infrastructure, everything was cleared. But NATO remained – against which enemy?
And contrary to all assurances, it expanded eastwards – against Russia! – by 14 countries! To this day, the USA left its military bases in Germany and stores ready-to-use nuclear bombs in Germany and Italy.
One must know: in Russia there are still millions of elderly Russians who only had a grandmother, but no grandfather. At a young age, their grandfather was one of the 27 million military and civilian Soviet war victims of the German-initiated Second World War. In Russia, its own history is present, among young and old. And this time, too, Russians would rather fight and, if necessary, starve than passively watch their homeland being destroyed with the help of German tanks.
At least lovers of classical music know about the genocide of Leningrad
Leo Ensel, the history-conscious German essayist, is such a lover of classical music. On the Seventh Symphony by composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who himself narrowly escaped from Leningrad at the time, he provided us with the following addition for today’s Remembrance Day:
“As early as September 1941, Shostakovich began to report in the press about the work on his Seventh Symphony op. 60. The Germans were moving ever closer to Leningrad. He had completed the first movement of the symphony on 3 September, even before the siege began on 8 September, which was to completely seal off the city for 870 days. The constantly bombed city could only be supplied by air; in winter, the ice of Lake Ladoga provided a connection.
On 14 September, Shostakovich gave a concert in the Leningrad Philharmonic, the proceeds of which went into the defence fund. In his ‘Address from Leningrad’ he reported: ‘My dear friends! I am speaking to you from Leningrad while fierce fighting against the enemy is going on right outside the gates of the city. I am speaking from the front. Yesterday morning I finished the score of the second movement of my new, great symphony. If I manage to finish this work well, if I can complete the third and fourth movements, then we will be able to call this work the Seventh Symphony. I am telling this so that everyone knows: despite the apparent danger, Leningrad’s pulsating life has not been silenced.’
Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony became a legend even before it was finished. Requests for first performance rights came from America: from Toscanini and others. The third movement was finished in Leningrad on 29 September, and then Shostakovich was also evacuated. He came to Kuibyshev (Samara). The finale was written there in December, and it was there that the symphony was premiered by the orchestra of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre on 5 March 1942. As a recognised artist, Shostakovich was accommodated comparably comfortable. In spring 1942 he wrote: ‘we live in a flat with two rooms. My mother, my sister and my nephew as well as my wife’s relatives have stayed in Leningrad. Only rarely, letters arrive from there. They are unusually grievous to read. For example, my dog was eaten; some cats were also eaten.’
commemorates the struggle for existence, the sacrifices and the heroes who
died defending the city. (Picture gk)
The success of the ‘Leningrad Symphony’ was sensational, both in the Soviet Union and abroad, where it was first performed in London as early as 22 June 1942 and by Toscanini in New York on 19 July.
Shostakovich had ensured through numerous comments that the listener knew which programme to base his feelings on. And the music suggested programmatic interpretations not only through the circumstances of its
creation, but also through an effective episode in the first movement, which contributed most to the symphony’s fame: there, a banal melody intensifies through ever stronger instrumen-
tation into a brutal march of aggressive volume.
This section went down in music history as the episode of the ‘Invasion’, a hit melody that begins quietly and ends savagely: it was intended, Shostakovich wrote to a German communist in the spring of 1970, to symbolise the invasion of Nazi troops: ‘The march theme from my symphony embodies the invasion of aggressive German fascism’.
In the course of the finale of the symphony, military signals sound from the farthest distance. Slowly, the music rises in pitch, into militant stamping – which drowns and leads into a sombre funeral march, a dramatic lamentation of death. From this lament over the spilled blood, accompanied by distant military signals, the ending develops. The music begs for redemption, cries out for revenge, builds up to the ferocious climax until it changes and a ray of hope touches the gloomy scenery.”
| * Christian Müller, born in 1944, studied history and constitutional law at the University of Zurich and graduated with a DPhil. He studied business administration at the (then) Handelshochschule St. Gallen. This was followed by 28 years of active journalism at various Swiss daily and weekly newspapers in various positions (editorial office and editor-in-chief) as well as 20 years of publishing management (management, CEO, board of directors in various media). For many years he has been running his consulting company Commwork AG on a full-time or part-time basis and has been editor of the online platform https://globalbridge.ch. |
Shostakovich’s “Leningrad Symphony” can be heard here.
Source: https://globalbridge.ch/heute-vor-79-jahren-hat-die-rote-armee-die-deutsche-blockade-leningrads-mit-einer-million-verhungerten-oeffnen-koennen-das-darf-nicht-in-vergessenheit-geraten, 27 January 2023
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)