Jewish victims of the 900-day-long siege of Leningrad by German troops during World War II are to receive compensation payments, the representative of the Claims Conference in Germany, Georg Heuberger, has announced. Victims will receive a lump sum payment of € 2,556 (US$ 4,050) from a hardship fund set up by the German government in 1980 for Jewish immigrants from the then Soviet Union. The accord is expected to affect about 6,000 people. Non-Jewish survivors of the siege are eligible for benefits under a separate agreement. Until a 2001 agreement with Germany to compensate slave and forced laborers, Nazi victims living in the former communist bloc were excluded from receiving compensation payments and pensions from Germany.
In 1941, the Jewish population of Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) retreated to the city center when German troops encircled and besieged the city and cut off food and energy supplies. The Nazis disseminated anti-Semitic flyers throughout the city during the siege, telling residents that the Jews were responsible for their misery and that the Germans were going to liberate the country from the rule of Bolsheviks and Jews.
An estimated one million of Leningrad's 2.5 million citizens died from starvation and from the constant bombardments by Nazi bombers until January 1944, when the siege was lifted. Hitler had ordered the destruction of Leningrad, which he regarded as the center of the 'Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia.'