It is ridiculous to single out Churchill as being responsible for the blockade of Germany in WW1. Its imposition was a collective decision of the cabinet. Moreover, your figure of "at least 750,000 German civilian deaths" is questionable. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany, the figure is in dispute, and the number you've quoted is at the upper end of the range and it includes the about 200,000 deaths due to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which ravaged the populations of many countries, including countries experiencing no food shortage. Canada, for example, had 50,000 dead, from a population of about 8,000,000 people. You should have said "at least 424,000 German civilian deaths", since this is the figure at the lower end of the range.Klaus1943 wrote:As I pointed out in my posting "Winston Churchill The War Criminal," WC learned in the Boer War that making war on civilians paid handsome dividends when he saw 25,000 Boer old men, women and children die in the British concentration camps and he carried out the policy in WW1 in depriving Germans of food as long as the middle of 1919 to force them to sign the Versailles Treaty, resulting in at least 750,000 German civilian deaths. WC was no stranger to killing civilians.
According to the same article, it is inaccurate to imply that the blockade continued until July 1919 without change. The article comments that:
In any case, the blockade of a coast or the besieging of a city is not a war crime. I would remind you of the siege of Paris from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War. The besiegers prevented any food getting into the city, their aim being to starve Paris in to surrendering, and 47,000 of the civilian inhabitants died. That's a much larger proportion of the population than in the 1914-1918 siege of Germany. Neither the German blockade of Paris nor the Allied blockade of Germany were illegal.According to the New Cambridge Modern History food imports into Germany were controlled by the Allies after the Armistice with Germany until Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.[16] The total blockade was lifted on 17 January 1919 when the Allies allowed the importation of food under their supervision. The Allies requested that the German government send German merchant ships to Allied ports to transport food supplies. However the Germans considered the armistice a temporary cessation of the war and refused, believing that should fighting break out again the ships would be confiscated.[17] The German government notified an American representative in Berlin that the shortage of food would not become critical until late spring. Food deliveries were delayed until March 1919 when the German government agreed to the restrictions imposed by the Allies. From March food imported from America in American ships arrived in Germany.[18] The restrictions on food imports were finally lifted on 12 July 1919 after Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles.[16]