by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
The battle of Stalingrad marked a turning point in World War II. For six months, two massive army groups, each under orders not to cede an inch to the enemy, fought for control of the city that bore the Soviet dictator’s name.14 The battle ended with the encirclement and destruction of an entire German field army. At the time it was the worst military defeat in Germany’s history—and, in the immediate aftershock, the writing was on the wall for clear-eyed German observers.15 For the Soviet Union, Stalingrad represented its greatest victory to date over the German invaders. It shifted the war’s momentum in favor of the Red Army; after Stalingrad, its divisions would push steadily westward, their sights set on Berlin.
After German advances on Leningrad, Moscow, and Sevastopol had ground to a halt in the fall of 1941 and the Soviets launched their winter counterattack, Hitler started planning a sweeping offensive for the following summer code-named Operation Blue. It began on June 28, 1942, with a major assault along the Russian-Ukrainian front to take control of the region’s strategically important natural resources—the coal mines of the Donets basin and the oil fields outside Maykop, Grozny, and Baku. The German panzer and motorized infantry divisions gained ground quickly, but the pincer tactics they employed often missed their mark: whenever faced with encirclement, the Red Army divisions broke into rapid retreat. Hitler, assuming that the enemy troops had already dispersed, divided Army Group South into two parts: Army Group A, which was ordered to push toward the Caucasus, and Army Group B, which was to head northeast and secure the flanks. The spearhead of Army Group B was the 6th Army, under the command of General Friedrich Paulus. Its mission was to capture the city of Stalingrad, a key center for industry and weapons manufacturing on the Volga River.
By July 1942, the gravity of the situation—as even a cursory glance at a map made plain—had become apparent to many Soviet citizens. The writer Vasily Grossman noted in his diary, “The war in the south, on the lower reaches of the Volga, feels like a knife driven deep into the body.”16 The regime responded to the crisis with severe measures. After Rostov-on-Don fell into German hands with little resistance, Stalin issued Order no. 227, notorious for the line “Not one step back!”17 Henceforth, anyone who retreated from the enemy without an express order to do so would be branded a traitor to the fatherland and subjected to a military tribunal. This draconian edict was enforced at the battle of Stalingrad. The city extended like a ribbon twenty-five miles along the western bank of the Volga. Here “Not one step back!” meant that the river was the farthest point of retreat for the city’s defenders.
From the outset of the battle, Soviet leaders impressed on soldiers the symbolic significance of Stalingrad. It was the place where Stalin had staved off the enemies of the Soviet system during the Russian Civil War. Losing Stalingrad to the Germans would damage the myth of the city and its eponymous hero, and had to be prevented by all means. For the same reasons the city was crucially important to Hitler. Banking on the psychological blow that a Soviet defeat would deliver to Stalin, he framed it early on as a battle between two opposing worldviews. On August 20, 1942, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Führer “has made the city a special priority. [ . . . ] Not one stone will be left on another.”18
At the western bend of the Don curve, some distance from Stalingrad, German forces encountered heavy resistance from the Soviet 62nd Army. The Germans took 57,000 prisoners, however, and crossed the Don on August 21. By the twenty-third, the first German panzers reached the Volga, some forty miles away, and barred access to Stalingrad from the north. The news set off alarms in Moscow. Three days later, Stalin appointed General Georgy Zhukov deputy supreme commander of the Red Army and put him in charge of the city’s defense.
At the beginning of the war, the population of Stalingrad was just under half a million, and the city was considered a safe haven far behind the front lines; by the summer of 1942 it was teeming with refugees. The city’s administrators implored Stalin to permit the evacuation of factories and civilians—to no avail. Lazar Brontman, a Pravda correspondent present during these discussions, recorded in his diary “how the boss [Stalin] declared with a glum expression: ‘Where should they be evacuated? The city must be held. That’s final!’ he shouted, and pounded his fist on the table.”19 Only after German bombers had laid waste to the city did Stalin allow women and children to leave.
After two weeks of bombing, Stalingrad was stormed by German troops. On September 14, a regiment broke through the inner city and reached the Volga.20 In the heavy street fighting that ensued over the following weeks, the Germans managed to push the soldiers of the 62nd Army back to the riverbank. Once the Wehrmacht’s shock troops had cleared a path, the German occupation authority set up headquarters, began executing communists and Jews, and prepared to deport the civilian population. On the other side, the Soviet defenders, dug in on the Volga’s steep western bank, held no more than a few bridgeheads. They received supplies, soldiers, and weapons by boat and cover from artillery positions on the east bank of the Volga. The 62nd Army in Stalingrad was part of the Southeastern Front,21 commanded by General Andrei Yeryomenko,22 which consisted of the 64th, 57th, and 51st Armies, the 8th Air Army, and the ships and sailors of the Volga Military Flotilla, all stationed south of the city; it also included the 1st Guards Army and the 25th and 66th Armies, located to the north and northwest. In September the latter cluster tried repeatedly to break through Germany’s northern barricade and meet up with the city’s defenders but never succeeded.
The Soviet plan for a comprehensive counteroffensive took shape in mid-September during the critical phase of the defense of Stalingrad. Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky, the chief of the general staff of the Soviet armed forces, proposed to Stalin an operation adopting the German Blitzkrieg method—a combined application of massive force, speed, and surprise—to envelop and rout the enemy. Over the next two months the Soviets prepared for the offensive: another formation (the Southwestern Front), under the command of General Nikolai Vatutin, secretly moved to a position on the upper Don; meanwhile, the armies in Stalingrad (divided since the end of September into two fronts: the Don Front, under the command of Lieutenant General Konstantin Rokossovsky,23 and the Stalingrad Front, under the command of Yeryomenko) received reinforcements of soldiers and equipment. These maneuvers did not go undetected by the Germans, but intelligence officers, believing that the Soviet Union’s reserves of materials and soldiers had been exhausted, assigned them no special importance.24
After a number of concerted drives in October, the 6th Army still had not taken complete control of Stalingrad. German observers strained to explain the enemy’s unexpectedly bitter resistance. The lead article in the October 29, 1942, edition of the official SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps began with an assessment of Soviet morale: “The Bolshevists attack until total exhaustion, and defend themselves until the physical extermination of the last man and weapon. [ . . . ] Sometimes the individual will fight beyond the point considered humanly possible.” Everything the soldiers of the Wehrmacht had experienced in their campaigns in Europe and North Africa was like “a child’s game compared with the elementary event of war in the East.” The article accounted for this difference by evoking German racial biology. The Soviet soldiers originated from a “baser, dim-witted humanity” unable “to recognize the meaning and value of life.” Owing to their purported absence of human qualities, the soldiers of the Red Army were thought to fight with a disregard for death that was foreign to culturally superior Europeans. The article concluded by depicting the threat for Europe contained in the “power of this unleashed inferior race,” and turned the battle of Stalingrad into a question of world historical destiny. “It is up to us to decide whether we remain human beings at all.”25
On November 19, 1942, the Red Army finally began its counteroffensive, known as Operation Uranus, with a contingent of over 1 million soldiers. Motorized divisions advanced through the Romanian-controlled Don heights 150 kilometers west of Stalingrad. On No
vember 24, the Soviet tank vanguard joined forces with Yeryomenko’s tank divisions, which four days earlier had begun to push west from the area south of Stalingrad. The Germans and their allies were surrounded, trapped in what they referred to as a Kessel, or cauldron.
The 6th Army command deliberated whether to attempt a breakout, but Hitler ordered “Fortress Stalingrad” to be held at all costs. He called for an air bridge to supply the soldiers in the Kessel with food and munitions. This was not the first time Hitler had taken this route. In December 1941, when the Red Army began its counteroffensive outside Moscow, Hitler, who had recently named himself supreme commander of the army, issued an order forbidding retreat under the threat of severe punishment. Shrouding himself in the mystique of the strong-willed military leader whose job was to embolden his generals whenever they succumbed to “neurasthenia” and “pessimism,” Hitler credited his decision with preventing the collapse of the Eastern Front despite strong attacks from the Red Army in the ensuing weeks.26 In January 1942, Soviet forces nevertheless managed to encircle six German divisions—almost 100,000 soldiers—farther north near Demyansk at Lake Ilmen. Hitler responded by sending in planes to drop supplies. This continued for two months until a relief force broke through the Demyansk pocket from the outside at the end of March. It was this successful precedent that General Paulus thought of when he sought to reassure the trapped men of the 6th Army, concluding his November 27 communiqué with the line, “Hold on! The Führer will get us out!”27
But severe weather and heavy shelling hampered the Stalingrad airlift; the 300,000 encircled soldiers began to suffer from shortages of food and munitions. General Erich von Manstein launched Operation Winter Storm (December 12–23, 1942) in an effort to break through the encirclement with a panzer advance from the southwest,28 but it became bogged down midway in the face of strong Soviet resistance. In the meantime the Red Army had initiated an offensive on the Don farther west known as Little Saturn. Its objective was to break through to Rostov in the south, stymieing the German relief force and cutting off the entire army group, along with the 400,000 troops stationed in the Caucasus. The offensive succeeded in part: although it forced Manstein to abort Operation Winter Storm, he was able to protect the army in the Caucasus from imminent strangulation.
At the end of November Soviet leaders began a massive propaganda campaign to persuade the Germans and their allies to surrender. Soviet aircraft dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets written in German, Romanian, and Italian, describing the hopelessness of the situation. A delegation of German communist exiles in Moscow traveled to Stalingrad and broadcast political messages by loudspeaker, but their efforts to prevail on their countrymen on the other side of the front line were for naught. On January 6, two weeks after Manstein aborted his relief operation, General Rokossovsky offered Paulus terms for an honorable surrender. Under intense pressure from Hitler, the 6th Army commander ignored the deal.
Operation Ring. Soviet military drawing.
The Soviets’ final push to crush the encircled German troops, code-named Operation Ring, began on January 10. From the west, soldiers on the Don Front gradually drove the enemy back into the city. At the same time, the 62nd Army intensified its attacks from the banks of the Volga, and on January 26 it joined the Don Front at Mamayev Kurgan,29 a strategic elevation south of the city’s industrial district and for months the scene of fierce fighting. The Soviets cut the Germans into two pockets, one in the north, the other in the south. General Paulus, repeatedly forced to give up his quarters as the Red Army closed in, sought refuge for himself and his staff on January 26 with the 71st Infantry Division, the first unit to reach the Volga at Stalingrad; its commanders were now headquartered beneath a department store on the Square of the Fallen Heroes. On January 30, the tenth anniversary to the day when the Nazis assumed power, Hermann Göring gave a radio address that reached the soldiers in Stalingrad. Göring compared the Germans in Stalingrad to the heroes in the Song of the Nibelungs. Like those who “fought to the last man” during an “unmatched battle in a hall of fire and flame,” the Germans in Stalingrad would fight—would have to fight—“for a people who can fight like this must win.” On the night of January 31, Paulus received a signal from Hitler’s headquarters saying that he had been promoted to field marshal. Everyone involved understood the message: never before had a German field marshal been taken prisoner; to avoid ignominy, Paulus would have to kill himself. Instead, he chose to defy his Führer.
In the morning hours of January 31, Soviet soldiers of the 64th Army surrounded the Square of the Fallen Heroes. A German officer emerged with a white flag and offered terms of surrender. A group of Red Army soldiers were escorted into the basement below the department store, where Paulus’s army staff was assembled. (Chapter 2 contains a detailed eyewitness account of this encounter.) Several hours later, the German soldiers in the southern pocket threw down their weapons. In the northern pocket, intense fighting continued for two more days. It died down after the Red Army showered the German soldiers with photographs telling them of Paulus’s surrender.30 After the Soviet counteroffensive started but before the battle ended, 60,000 German soldiers died and 113,000 German and Romanian survivors were taken prisoner, many of them injured or exhausted. All in all, the battle and the subsequent imprisonment cost 295,000 German lives (190,000 on the battlefield, 105,000 in captivity). On the Soviet side, conservative estimates place the number of dead at 479,000, though one scholar has put the death toll at over a million.31
Nazi leaders responded to the defeat of the 6th Army by ramping up their propaganda and mass mobilization efforts. The sacrifice in Stalingrad, they believed, would motivate German soldiers in the fight to stem the “red tide” now moving west. No sooner had the three-day period of national mourning ended than Joseph Goebbels delivered his total war speech, met with frenzied applause from an audience of party loyalists. With the Red Army threatening to cross into Europe, the specter of “Bolshevik hordes” from “Asia,” long invoked by Nazi propagandists, had become a real possibility; for the terrified population, fighting on seemed to be the only way out—and that’s what happened, with greater intensity than before, as the war raged for two more years.
The Soviet side also ramped up the political pressure. The captured German generals and officers were held in a special camp and called on to publicly renounce Hitler. Their Soviet captors foresaw for them a role as leaders of a Soviet-friendly postwar German state. Most other prisoners were kept in work camps, where they received little to eat and poor medical care. By July 1943, three-quarters of all German prisoners in Soviet captivity had died.
When Red Army soldiers recaptured the city, they counted 7,655 civilian survivors.32 As the cleanup began, the Soviets discovered mass graves filled with civilians the German occupiers had shot or hanged. Several thousand captured Germans were put to work in February 1943, clearing bodies and defusing bombs and mines. Eventually they would help rebuild the city.33
By the end of the battle, the scolding Stalin gave commanders in July 1942 had turned to praise, and he bestowed numerous honors on the Soviet military for its achievements. He complimented the Red Army as a “cadre army” and granted four field armies—the 62nd, the 64th, the 24th, and the 66th—the coveted Guards status. Stalin also rewarded himself, assuming the title Marshal of the Soviet Union on February 6, 1943.
INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BATTLE
Though widely researched and recounted, the battle of Stalingrad in most western depictions is a story of Germany’s demise.34 This narrative usually doesn’t start until November 19, 1942, the day the Soviets encircled the 6th Army. This chronological framework transforms the aggressors into desperate victims—cold, hungry, fighting to defend themselves35—and omits the German attack on Stalingrad and the long trail of blood the soldiers of the 6th Army left behind as they forced their way through the Ukrainian cities of Berdichev, Kiev, and Kharkov.36 Even the more comprehensive accounts, which start in June 1941 and include
Soviet eyewitness reports, follow a German script, perfectly exemplified by the three-part TV documentary Stalingrad: The Attack—The Kessel—The Doom (2003).37 The human drama of Stalingrad is often reduced to four numbers: the 300,000 German soldiers trapped in the Kessel, the 110,000 survivors taken into Soviet captivity, the 6,000 who eventually returned home, and the twelve years it took them to get there. The extent of Soviet losses, by contrast, is rarely reported in the west. Unlike the overall portrayal of the Wehrmacht’s activities on the Eastern Front, which in the past two decades has received significant critical reexamination (though not without some blanket simplifications), views on Stalingrad remain to this day strikingly complacent and insular, emphasizing the suffering of German soldiers and seldom bothering to mention their adversary.
Stalingrad, 1943. Photographer: Natalya Bode
Over the years, scholarly and public opinion in the west has offered a number of different narratives of Stalingrad. In the 1950s and 1960s, attention was focused on the figure of the battlefield soldier who upheld martial values to his dying breath. The former field marshal Erich von Manstein wrote in 1955 that the memory of the “unparalleled heroism, fidelity, and devotion to duty” of the soldiers who “starved, froze, and died” in Stalingrad will “live on long after the victors’ cries of triumph have died away and the bereaved, the disillusioned, and the bitter at heart have fallen silent.”38 Their memory would not endure nearly as long as Manstein predicted. As society underwent changes—best symbolized by the student movements of the late 1960s—and as the field of Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history) emerged, the image of the valiant soldier was replaced by that of the antihero. The soldiers of Stalingrad became simple, clueless young men, who sometimes expressed themselves awkwardly in their letters, who were hurled into war, who seemed to share nothing of the Nazis’ grand ambitions.39