On September 8, 1941, during WWII, the siege of Leningrad began. The battle lasted over 28 months with nearly a million civilian live lost. An excerpt from the article:
"On September 8, 1941, German forces closed in around the Soviet city of Leningrad, initiating a siege that would last nearly 900 days and claim the lives of 800,000 civilians.
World War II’s most infamous siege began a little over two months after the launch of “Operation Barbarossa,” Adolf Hitler’s surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. On June 22, 1941, in defiance of a nonaggression pact signed two years earlier, some 3 million German soldiers streamed across the Soviet frontier and commenced a three-pronged attack. While the center and southern elements struck at Moscow and Ukraine, the Wehrmacht’s Army Group North sped through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and moved on Leningrad, a city of over 3 million situated on the Neva River near the Baltic Sea. Hitler had long considered Leningrad a key objective in the invasion. It served as the home base of Russia’s Baltic Fleet, and its more than 600 factories made it second only to Moscow in industrial output."