Leningrad 1941-1944; Gaza 2023-2025. Hitler, Netanyahu … Names With Stench.

“A Book of the Blockade” by Ales Adamovich and Daniel Granin (Raduga Publishers, Moscow. 1982)

A few days ago, on January 27, 2025, marks the 81st anniversary of the lifting of the Nazi blockade of Leningrad. “The siege was the most destructive in history and possibly the most deadly, causing an estimated 1.5 million deaths. It was not classified as a war crime at the time,^[12] but some historians have since classified it as a genocide due to the intentional destruction of the city and the systematic starvation of its civilian population.^[“

What to do with Hitler after the war? This question was asked by Leningrader, Georgi Knyazev, in the midst of the 900 day Nazi siege on the city where he lived and worked as an archivist.

Similar questions are being asked about the fate of Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu.

Diaries from the Siege and Blockade of Leningrad during World War II have been collected, along with commentary in a volume,  “A Book of the Blockade” by Ales Adamovich and Daniel Granin (Raduga Publishers, Moscow. 1982). Here is one selection (pp 242-3) by archivist, Georgi Knyazev, whose diary remained after its author was killed during the war.

I am reminded of similar contemporary discussions concerning the ultimate fate of Binyamin Netanyahu, main architect with his U.S. backers of the current Gaza genocide. Replace Hitler’s name with that of Netanyahu, both “names with stench”…

He writes in May of 1941 when the Leningrad siege by the Nazis was in its early days.

“… What do I, a humanist, dream of now? About this (an illustration in a newspaper of Nazi devastation in the Soviet Union in the early days of Operation Barbarossa). `In response to the threat of a German invasion the people of London have erected a gallows by the ruins of a bombed house, with a notice saying: “Ready for Hitler”.’

“We shouldn’t hang him straightaway, but first put him on trial. Summon representatives of every country ravaged by Hitler – men and women from places that have suffered particularly – as members of the jury. Gather documents and examples from the abundant “material evidence’ of the savage cruelty of Hitler and his henchmen. Use these relics' to create a museum of horrors and suffering’ for the edification of posterity, to show people of the future the terrifying atrocities perpetrated by the bestial invaders. Bring together in this museum Hitler’s forerunners, too – international murders and plunderers, successful and unsuccessful, such as Napoleon, Wilhelm, Tamerlane and Attila, and many other notorious figures in the so-called world history of mankind, or rather the history of pre-human society… Or, perhaps, not even among the gang of `greats’, but simply in the ranks of such filthy wretches ans Cain, Herod and Judas there’s a place for Hitler, who is held in contempt by the whole world.

A name with stench.

In preparing their now 18 year siege of Gaza, did the Israelis study – down to the last detail – how the Nazis hoped to destroy Leningrad? I am convinced there is a historic connection between the two.

The parallels are striking between the Nazi (and Finnish) blockade of Leningrad – the 900 days as Harrison Salisbury called it – with Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza. Both were efforts of mass extermination using a combination of intense bombing and starvation as a way exterminate the civilian populations of Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg) an the Gaza Strip. The German high command had calculated down to the last calorie, what it would take to starve the city into complete collapse. The Israeli government whose blockade of Gaza is now 18 years old have done likewise. In some ways I would argue, the siege of Gaza is even more obscene, more vicious than that of Leningrad.