Russians who survived the blockade of Leningrad by German troops during the Second World War are demanding compensation from the German government and an “end of discriminatory policy” towards them, TASS reports.

In an open letter, they argue that such payments should be extended to all victims, without differentiation on ethnic grounds, given that the German government agreed two years ago to compensate an additional 4,500 Jews who survived the Battle of Leningrad, the longest blockade in the modern army. stories.

“Dear members of the government of the Federal Republic of Germany! Those who survived the unprecedented brutality of the blockade of Leningrad appeal to you,” the survivors say in the opening of an open letter published by TASS, recalling that they had to undergo “bombings, shelling, cold and hunger” because of “fascist troops and their servants in several European countries “.

“Thanks to those who ruled Germany at that time, our city, where representatives of more than a hundred nationalities lived, lost more than a million civilians in 1941-1944 alone, as well as at least 500 thousand people during three evacuations. The facts of the inhumane crimes of the German-fascist invaders remain vividly in our memory, confirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and numerous documents,” the letter also states.

It also recalls that a court in St. Petersburg, by which the city is now known, declared in 2022 that the blockade of Leningrad was “a war crime, a crime against humanity and genocide of the peoples of the Soviet Union.” “

Russians who survived the blockade of Leningrad claim discrimination by the German government

The letter states that fewer than 60,000 blockade survivors are alive today and that they “strongly condemn the double standards of the German authorities, which have for a long time remitted humanitarian payments to Jewish survivors of the blockade, but flatly refuse, under exaggerated pretexts , to extend them to all living survivors of the blockade, without dividing them by ethnicity.”

Germany is paying compensation to Jewish survivors of the Leningrad blockade as part of its Holocaust reparations program.

“We call on the German government to immediately take the only correct decision – to expand humanitarian payments to all, without exception, those who survived the blockade of Leningrad, of whom there are fewer and fewer,” – the Russians demand.

The letter states that payments are requested on behalf of both civilians who survived the blockade and Soviet servicemen who fought here.

The siege lasted 872 days, between 8 September 1941 and 27 January 1944, as both the Berlin and Moscow military commands considered other theaters of war more important and allocated what resources they had to them.

The letter they published came just 3 days after Vladimir Putin said the West had “installed” President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is of Jewish descent, in Kyiv “to cover up the heroization of Nazism in Ukraine.”

Putin referred to the need to “denazify” Ukraine in a declaration of war that he read on the morning of February 24, 2022, but after the failures suffered by Russian forces during the war, Moscow’s propaganda began to focus more on such so-called war with the collective West”.

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