THE SLAVIC HOLOCAUST

The Nazi Party’s first priority was the eradication of Jews. Not far behind was the elimination of most of the Slavic peoples, who were seen as an inferior race, and subjugate the rest, or deport them from territory controlled by, and designated for, Aryans.27 One of the best examples of the Slavic Holocaust was exemplified by the siege of the Soviet city of Leningrad (now called by its original Christian name, St. Petersburg) that occurred from 1941 to 1944, just short of 900 days long.28

The purpose was not just to level the city, but to murder all of its over 3 million inhabitants by starvation. The Germans surrounded the city, then destroyed most of the food supplies and waited for the residents to starve to death.29 This clear example of genocide was based squarely on race. As one Jewish writer wrote about the ordeal,

That Social Darwinistic language (“struggle for survival”) showed how theory justified murder. T he goal of a typical siege is to make the enemy surrender, but in Leningrad giving up and getting bread wasn’t even an option: Germans set up a minefield outside one area of the city to keep civilians from leaving and stationed artillery at other points with orders to fire on groups trying to surrender. The goal was extermination.30

In this, the “most murderous siege in world history,” surviving by cannibalism became the “last refuge of the starving.”31 The “racially motivated starvation policy” became an integral part of German plans to exterminate those whom German scientists determined belonged to an inferior race.32

One of the next groups the Nazis wanted to exterminate was the Asiatic peoples. Longerich notes that the “murder of ‘Asiatic’ people in the Soviet Union is one of the chapters in the history of the Nazi regime’s policies of racial annihilation that have yet to be written.”33 The Nazis had just begun to work on achieving this goal and managed to begin the systematic murder of those people whose “external appearance made them appear to be ‘elements of inferior value with a predominantly Asiatic look.’