by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
The historians asked them about the “most memorable period” in their lives (as with Colonel Nikolai Batyuk and Lieutenant Colonel Kolesnik). Sometimes they were disappointed by the responses. Regimental Commander Genrikh Fugenfirov said, “How can I single out a characteristic detail or the particular features of a fight if bombs kept raining on us and the regiment was under aerial bombardment for days on end?” They wanted to know when the battle for the city raged most intensely, and how it differed from combat operations elsewhere (as with Lieutenant Colonel Smirnov and Regimental Commander Fugenfirov). Many questions were about what happened before, during, and after battle: “How did we train the soldiers for combat?” (Battalion Commissar Stepanov); “How did we deal with the fear of tanks?” (Lieutenant Colonel Svirin); “How did we work with snipers?” (Captain Olkhovkin); “What was the significance of the river crossing?” (Captain Semyon Ryvkin); “What did the pioneer battalion do during combat?” (Lieutenant Kolesnik); “What did we do following the attack?” (Colonel Smolyanov); “What are we doing now?” (Junior Lieutenant Ayzenberg). Almost every interview inquired about soldiers whose acts set them apart. For instance: “I don’t exactly remember who distinguished themselves in that fighting. Some were killed, others wounded” (Sergeant Karpushin). Political officers were asked about the effectiveness of their work: “How did we conduct political and party work?” (Divisional Commissar Levykin); “How did the soldiers feel about our events? What kind of people came to join our party?” (Colonel Smolyanov), “How did communists conduct themselves [in battle]?” (division party secretary Alexander Koshkarev). They were also interested in hearing about deficiencies of the Red Army and they questioned commanders about their “own mistakes” (General Chuikov). Toward the end of conversations they often asked about promotions or medals soldiers had received. Infantryman Alexei Pavlov summed up his record: “All in all I killed eleven Germans and destroyed one machine gun.”268
Some soldiers were very communicative, others more reserved. Linguistic hurdles were partly to blame. As one Latvian soldier explained, “Perhaps I could tell more, but my command of Russian is poor. Besides, talking about oneself doesn’t feel right.”269 Rural dialects colored the language of some eyewitnesses, in particular the commanders, who spoke more openly than their subordinates. Soldiers for the most part spoke quickly and to the point. The shortest of the interviews ran two to three pages typed out in long form, but most ranged between eight and fifteen pages, with some reaching twenty or thirty. Some of the soldiers interviewed stuck to the fighting in Stalingrad; others went into great length about their family background and how they came to the Red Army. This variety suited the historians; they wanted to show “living people,” not just lump together various accounts.
The Stalingrad staff worked diligently, completing many more interviews than other delegations of historians on the front. The total output of the commission during the war was nevertheless considerable: more than five thousand interview transcripts with soldiers, partisans, and civilians, covering broad areas of the war, from the front and the countryside to the occupied territories.270
This massive collection of documents is unique in military and social history research. This becomes apparent when it is compared to an ostensibly similar project undertaken by the US armed forces during World War II.271 The chief US Army combat historian, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Marshall, and a staff of workers interviewed groups of soldiers within hours after combat in the Pacific and European theaters.272 Marshall stated that he interviewed a total of four hundred companies, each made up of 125 men. Marshall did not see himself primarily as a documentary historian, however. The project’s purpose was to strengthen the army’s combat effectiveness. From the interviews he concluded that most soldiers—he put the number between 75 and 85 percent—were so overcome by fear in battle that they wouldn’t use their weapons.273 Marshall recommended drilling the soldiers to overcome their instinctive fear of death. Indeed, it was because of Marshall’s influential studies that later generations of US soldiers underwent more live-fire training, increasing the percentage of those who used their weapons in war. But Marshall’s work has drawn much criticism from historians. Roger Spiller believes that Marshall greatly exaggerated the number he claimed to interview and contends that he invented his data on the rate of fire. Spiller and others point out that Marshall was trained as a journalist before being promoted to army historian.274 Instead of having a stenographer transcribe the interviews, he based his work on shorthand notes.
Marshall’s approach stands in contrast to the care exercised by professional Soviet historians, who used stenographers to record all the interviews and then archived the transcripts. But comparing Marshall with Mints reveals more than the difference between simple journalism and scholarly rigor. It underscores the emotion that fueled the Soviet historians as they went about their work, their trust in the universal principles governing history, and their confidence that these laws would inevitably lead to Soviet victory. For instance, the decision to record the interviews in the first person followed a Gorky-esque aim: respondents were meant to see themselves as actors on a world-historical stage. Equipped with a new subjective awareness, they would push the envelope of individual achievement and advance the objective course of history.
THE TRANSCRIPTS
In view of the commission’s enormous efforts, it published astonishingly little. To this day, virtually none of the thousands of interviews transcribed by stenographers have gone to press. The few publications the commission produced appeared during the war and portrayed events mostly from a bird’s-eye view, largely omitting the individual voices. The sparse output was due in part to Mints’s own conviction that as long as the Soviet Union remained at war, interviewing eyewitnesses and collecting other documentary materials ought to take precedence. Another difficulty lay in bringing the views expressed by the respondents into line with the ideals of the historians. Gorky’s earlier projects generated relatively few publications on similar grounds: few of the interviewed factory workers spoke in the heroic categories attributed to them; most accounts were either edited or hidden away in archives. So too in the case of the Mints commission. Internal discussions reveal that the staff argued about whether to show persons with all their frailties or disclose only their heroic deeds. But the outcome of the debate was a foregone conclusion, for it was not the commission staff that ultimately decided the contents but the Communist party, specifically the powerful censorship office known as Glavlit.
The extent of Glavlit’s influence is illustrated by the first large project of the Mints commission—the study of the German occupation of Tolstoy’s estate. Germans controlled the Tolstoy museum at Yasnaya Polyana for six weeks, from October 30 to December 14, 1941. As already noted, Mints traveled there at the end of December with historians from the Academy of the Sciences to assess the damage. The delegation’s report informed the note on German atrocities in occupied Soviet territory issued by foreign affairs minister Vyacheslav Molotov on January 6, 1942. In it Molotov specifically mentions Tolstoy’s estate, a “glorious memorial of Russian culture, wrecked, befouled, and finally set on fire by the Nazi vandals.”275 Joseph Goebbels categorically denied Molotov’s public accusations,276 and Alexandrov gave Mints the task of preparing a response. Mints suggested a book documenting the crimes at Yasnaya Polyana. Though his idea met with Stalin’s approval,277 when the finished book was later submitted to Glavlit for review, it set off alarm bells. The censor took particular offense at diary entries by museum employee Maria Shchegoleva that filled a large portion of the book. Citing Molotov’s description of pillaging vandals, the censor complained that Shchegoleva’s diary did not do justice to the defilement that occurred at Yasnaya Polyana. The author’s “quiet” tone came across as “pedantic” and lacked the outrage befitting a Soviet citizen.278 In the same breath the censor criticized the book’s editors for their “totally irresponsible” work: “They didn’t even bother to separate everything
that was valuable in Shchegoleva’s diary from the obviously useless material which as a result not only fails to increase hatred for the fascist enslavers but actually weakens it.”279 The censor believed that the editors were politically obligated to intervene in the accounts of eyewitnesses, preserving the ideologically compliant views and suppressing everything else. Not surprisingly, the book was rejected. When a revised form later appeared, it did not include Shchegoleva’s diary.
In 1943 the commission published two pieces on the battle for Stalingrad, a short study and a separate brochure containing an interview with sniper Vasily Zaytsev.280 In “Heroic Stalingrad” historian Esfira Genkina portrays Stalingrad as the most important battle of the war, where the heroic spirit of the city’s defenders forced Hitler’s elite forces to their knees. In Genkina’s telling, the valor displayed by Red Army soldiers did not spring from a political education in heroism and cowardice nor from fear of coercive measures—she makes no mention of Order no. 227—but from their very being. Genkina cherry-picks passages from the transcripts that paint the defenders as one-dimensional heroes with deeply held communist convictions, soldiers who without batting an eyelash took on a superior German army. Her narrative sings the unity of Red Army soldiers and ends with an ode to Stalin: “The glory of Stalingrad is the glory of our chief, the leader of the Red Army. To Stalin, to victory!”281 Like “Heroic Stalingrad,” the interview with Zaytsev was also heavily edited, as comparing the stenographic transcripts and the published version shows. The editors omitted from the interview all statements that made Zaytsev seem less than heroic, rewriting his story into an unconditional affirmation of the Communist party.
The editors may well have undertaken these interventions without Glavlit’s insistence. It should not be forgotten that Mints and his colleagues understood their project as aiding Soviet victory. Indeed, one finds in their work the revolutionary sweep of the documentary movement. They wanted to become “operative” by engaging with the raw material and extracting from it the fighting spirit needed to excite their readers. In the same breath, however, they strove toward meticulous scholarship. They handled historical documents with the utmost respect, and the clarity of their methodology impresses scholars to this day. Their rigor suffuses each and every interview as well as the enormous archive the commission assembled during its four-year existence (historians continued to maintain the archive after the commission was dissolved). The raw material for the Stalingrad transcripts, presented seventy years later, ultimately owes its existence to this scholarly ethos.
EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES
The transcripts from the 215 interviews conducted by the Mints commission in Stalingrad fill thousands of typed pages. This book presents only a selection. A unique feature of these transcripts is the historians’ decision to interview numerous members of the same cohort, be it a division, regiment, or factory. Viewed in their entirety, the transcripts offer a detailed illumination of local events from multiple perspectives. But their three-dimensionality does not materialize when individual interviews are read in succession. To recreate it here, I have arranged the interviews in a way that brings out the common experiences of each cohort while exposing the rifts between them. Specifically, I have woven strands of conversation out of the individual responses and grouped them chronologically and by location.
For instance, I present the combat operations of the 308th Rifle Division as described by both commanders and infantry, providing a single picture from several vantage points within the unit. For some operations, such as a September 18, 1942, attempt to take an important hill that resulted in heavy losses, the storytelling becomes more concentrated, with each eyewitness recalling the intense fighting of that day. Another set of individual accounts—a chorus of voices across diverse parts of Soviet society—provides rich descriptions of the fate of Stalingrad and its people from July 1942, when frantic work began to fortify the frontline city, until the spring of 1943, when engineers returned to plan the reconstruction of its ruined factories.
This type of narrative montage recalls Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The film is about a criminal trial, recalled in flashback, in which four witnesses take the stand and submit different versions of what happened. The film employs this technique to shed light on the unreliability of subjective statements.282 But unlike the testimony in Rashomon, the interviews from Stalingrad are strikingly consistent down to the smallest detail, from their ideas of heroism, fear, and self-actualization to their accounts of combat and the conduct of fellow soldiers. The extensive agreement among respondents indicates that the events they described were not after-the-fact inventions of Soviet propaganda. A reading of the Stalingrad transcripts invalidates any claim that the public statements of Red Army infantry consisted of Soviet clichés, isolated from the reality of war. Rather, one finds a language shared by foot soldiers and officers alike, informed by the same ideas and horizons of experience. At the same time, it is apparent that political officers emphasized specific modes of speech for talking about both oneself and the enemy. The language of the interviews was thus twofold: a description of the battle and a mark of ideological conditioning.
Following the group conversations are nine individual interviews printed in their original form and for the most part in full.283 The selection comprises soldiers of different ranks and forms of expression. It begins with the self-serving and confident accounts of Generals Chuikov and Rodimtsev. It also includes the minutely detailed report of staff officer Nikolai Aksyonov, the chatty narrative of the sniper and Hero of the Soviet Union Vasily Zaytsev (by then already a legend), and the artlessly delivered testimony of Private Alexander Parkhomenko. The only woman in the group (the commission interviewed few women in Stalingrad) is Vera Gurova, a medic in General Rodimtsev’s division. The last interview is with Captain Pyotr Zayonchkovsky, who, drawing on his work in enemy propaganda, provides interesting insights into Soviet perceptions of Germans at Stalingrad.
The book then switches sides, shedding light on the German perspective. The first part of this chapter contains transcripts from interrogations of imprisoned Germans officers that Captain Zayonchkovsky carried out in February 1943. The second part consists of excerpts from a diary kept by a German soldier in the Kessel. The materials for both parts stem from the Historical Commission archive. As with all the previous sections, short introductions provide background and context. Additional information can be found in the endnotes. I conclude with a chapter on the fate of the Mints’s commission after the end of the war and discuss why the documents remained under lock and key for decades.
The transcripts are presented with all their stylistic idiosyncrasies intact; only obvious typos have been corrected. The parentheses in the documentary text contain remarks from commission staff; brackets indicate comments and abbreviations by the editors. Except when Latin letters were handwritten in the transcripts, German names in the documents have been reverse translated from the Russian and could not always be reconstructed with certainty. For instance, the soldier referred to in Cyrillic as “Geynts Khyunel” (Гейнц Хюнелъ) is rendered as “Heinz Hühnel” but could also be spelled “Heinz Hünel.”
Interspersed among the transcripts are Soviet photographs, leaflets, and posters that illuminate the battle of Stalingrad and document the mind-set of their creators. Just as the interviews ideologically shaped the respondents while describing the war, the photographs are interventions, conscious attempts by the photographers to attune themselves and their beholders to the exigencies of war. With certain restrictions this also applies to the small-format portraits made by Red Army soldiers and frontline photographers. Alongside a physical impression of the eyewitnesses, they convey an expression of the pride felt by soldiers conscious of doing their part in a people’s war.
2
A CHORUS OF SOLDIERS
Soldiers of the 308th Rifle Division
THE FATE OF THE CITY AND ITS RESIDENTS
The German advance on Stalingrad had the state
d aim of annihilating the city and forcing the surviving population into slave labor. Yet Stalin forbade the evacuation of residents, ordering that the city be held whatever the cost. The following interviews—carried out between January 1943 and January 1944 with city and regional administrators, party officials, factory managers, engineers, and a professor at the city’s medical institute—explain how the city armed for its defense before being reduced to rubble and how, to cite one respondent, the “pulse” of Stalingrad changed over the course of the battle.
The Wehrmacht’s basic strategy in Stalingrad was the same one it used to attack Moscow and Leningrad the previous year: use aerial bombardment and artillery fire to destroy the city before occupying it in order to protect the lives of German soldiers on the ground.1 Luftflotte 4—a fleet of 780 bombers and 490 fighter planes—flew endless sorties over Stalingrad between August 23 and September 13, 1942.2 The fleet was under the command of General Wolfram von Richthofen, who had been the chief of staff for the Condor Legion when it introduced carpet bombing, a tactic that destroyed Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.3 Richthofen also commanded the bombing of Belgrade in April 1941 that killed an estimated seventeen thousand residents4 and was responsible for the attack on Sevastopol in the summer of 1942. The air campaign in Stalingrad, the most violent on the Eastern Front, marked what Beevor described as the “natural culmination of Richthofen’s career.”5 German planes dropped the first bombs on Stalingrad in October 1941 and carried out isolated strikes in early 1942. In the second half of July the full-blown campaign began; from that point on air raid sirens in the city sounded almost daily.6