The judges at the High Command trial – a United States military court convened to judge German war crimes – ruled that the siege of Leningrad was not criminal: "the cutting off every source of sustenance from without is deemed legitimate. ... We might wish the law were otherwise, but we must administer it as we find it". Even such actions as killing civilians fleeing the siege was ruled to be legal during the trial. The Soviet Union was not successful at banning the use of starvation in the 1949 Geneva Convention; though imposing some limits, it "accepted the legality of starvation as a weapon of war in principle".Starvation was criminalized later in the twentieth century.bombsaway wrote: ↑Mon Mar 10, 2025 11:25 pm
No surrender allowed, meaning those inside are condemned to starve due to the encirclement. This document was presented at Nuremberg and it sounds pretty bad to me, worse than any public (or even private) statements made by Churchill or Roosevelt. This is just the beginning really. Are you seriously arguing that within the orthodox understanding of Nazi intentions and how they conducted the war, particularly in the east, that is ethically superior or even on the same level as what the western allies were doing?
No demand for surrender reached the Germans, so is it not certain that they would not accept? Much of what the Germans initially thought was later revoked as the order of the commissars.