Leningrad

Saw a You Tube documentary about the siege.

Hitler's order was to refuse to accept the city's surrender, to besiege it and annihilate all its inhabitants, and then physically destroy it as the Romans had destroyed Carthage.

It was genocide.

It is instructive to compare Hitler's plans for slavdom with Mussolini's comparatively banal African colonialism.

Hitler's Nazi ideology was based only partly on the fascism of Mussolini, whom he greatly admired.

His own contribution that differentiated Nazism from the original, Italian Fascism, was the murderous racism that encompassed his plan to wipe out the Jews of Europe and his plan to reduce the slavs, after murdering most of them, and especially the Poles and Russians, to Helotry.

Hence Leningrad.

The Italian intended nothing so cruel or so mad for his African natives.

Not even remotely.

Hence the Russians had much better reason to hope for the native tyrant's, Stalin's, victory than the German's.