by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
Vasily Petrovich Prokhvatilov (Secretary of the Stalingrad Regional Committee of the AUCP[b]): [ . . . ] The collective farmers tried to aid every district that had been occupied by the Germans. I was in Kotelnikovo45 three days after its liberation. The Poperechensky collective farm is in that area. The workers there had saved nearly the entire herd by concealing them in a hollow, where the Germans didn’t find them. The workers there hid their grain in a pit silo and informed the Red Army when they arrived. Now this farm has seed for this year’s planting. They held on to twelve tractors. How did they do it? When the Germans were closing in it was impossible to get the tractors out, so the workers removed certain parts from their tractors to render them inoperable. Once the Germans had left, the operators returned with the parts and were able to get them running again in ten days. Now the tractors are all working again. The tractor fleet at this collective farm will be just fine because the people here are Cossacks. The Germans tried to win over the Cossacks, but nothing came of it. We learned this from the farm workers. [ . . . ]
In the Perelazovsky district I drove out to Lipovsky and spoke with the farm workers there. They told me of atrocities committed by the Germans and Romanians there. A few cows were still in the village. All the rest had been taken by the Germans, and this was a settlement of 170–180 households—not a small place. The villagers were particularly outraged by the POW camp. In Lipovsky there is a pig farm that borders a small river. Nearly all the farms had been burned down. The goat, sheep, and pig farms were all that remained, and these had been fenced in with barbed wire and used to keep prisoners of war. They fed them rye chaff. The day before I arrived there was a burial. Twenty-three Russian officers with frostbitten feet. The Germans couldn’t take them away, so they covered them with straw in a pigpen and set them on fire. Six Russian prisoners were being kept in a small hut, another five in a dugout in the yard. The locals helped them, and when the district committee secretary arrived they were brought to the hospital, most of them frostbitten, emaciated from the lack of food.
Grigory Dmitrievich Romanenko (First secretary of the Barricades district of Stalingrad): Of the many thousands of people who had been living in our district before August 23, we came across only 130—they were gaunt, frostbitten, stomachs bloated from starvation. Many of them said that if we’d taken another two or three weeks, they’d have starved to death or died from mistreatment by the Germans.
Ilya Fyodorovich Burin (Former mechanic at the Barricades factory, scout in the 38th [7th Guards] Motor Rifle Brigade): My family stayed in Stalingrad. I had no father, but my mother was killed there. When I got there I went home and found out that she died on September 8. She was in the kitchen cooking at four in the morning when the bomb hit. The building burned down, my mother was killed.
Public kitchen in Stalingrad, March 1943. Photographer: Georgy Zelma
Claudia Stepanovna Denisova (Secretary of the Yermansky District Committee): Right now the district has a population of sixty-two. Some people were kicked out by the Germans, some stayed behind. The ones that stayed were close to the Germans, they worked for them. They were allowed to stay here. It was a restricted area.
Now we’re going around block by block. We’ve counted the population three times, determining who’s who and what’s what. When appropriate, we report them to the relevant authorities.46
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): Anyone who couldn’t hide was driven westward by the Germans. Only those who could hole up in the nooks and crannies remained. It was easy to identify the people who worked with the Germans—they were the ones who had lost all self-respect. I met a great number of people while seeing patients, and I could recognize these unsoviet people at a glance.
They didn’t speak openly, they weren’t determined or direct, perhaps because they felt anxious and demoralized. One doesn’t get over this easily. These people are psychologically different from the rest.
Konstantin Vasilievich Zubanov (Chief engineer of the Stalingrad Power Station, StalGRES): When I was evacuated to the east bank they asked me to relocate to Moscow. It seemed like the thing to do—work in Moscow, get an apartment. For a certain sort of person this would have been great, but I had to turn it down. They need me here more than they do in Moscow. I couldn’t leave the station at such a difficult time. This station raised me when things were good, so I’ve got to do what I can for it during this difficult time. This is where I came up the ranks, starting as nothing and working my way up to chief engineer. My conscience tells me I have to repair the station and see that it returns to its prewar capacity.
Ezri Izrailevich Ioffe (Acting director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute): [The interview was conducted on February 1, 1944.] Our main difficulty is housing. The students are still sleeping two to a bed. Even though we have plenty of sheets, mattresses, and beds, we have nowhere to put them. [ . . . ]
There’s been a great influx of people in Stalingrad. The population has already reached 250,000, and about ten thousand more are coming every month, according to the “Rebuilding Stalingrad” section of Stalingradskaya Pravda. This influx of people causes serious problems for housing, food distribution, schooling, and medical care.
Residents returning to Stalingrad find shelter in the abandoned dugouts of the 62nd Army, 1943. Photographer: Georgy Zelma
Population growth is not being factored in when it comes to public services. The schools have begun running several shifts, with lessons running from 8:00 A.M. to midnight. The earlier grades are going only every second day. Though I must say that this influx of people is a sign of the city’s recovery. Many still live in varying conditions—in basements, trenches, bunkers, with dozens staying in a single room. But they are still coming, despite the obstacles. Very few are leaving, mostly those who are not from here originally. People come to fight for Stalingrad’s recovery. [ . . . ] The mood here is a cheerful one—we want to live truly and do good work. The victories of the Red Army have given us the elixir of life.
Dmitri Matveyevich Pigalyov (Chairman of Stalingrad Soviet Committee): There was this one telephone operator. Her switchboard wasn’t hidden. It was on the second floor. If a bomb comes, they’re all finished. Our command post was made of concrete. Sometimes you’d just sit there rocking, like on a boat, while these poor girls were up there sitting at the switchboard. They couldn’t leave, they had to connect people. When you called you could hear their voices trembling:
“Get me so-and-so!”
“Putting you through now.”
Red Army telephone operators at work in Stalingrad, December 1942. Photographer: Georgy Zelma
Her voice trembles, but she connects you. You hear her crying into the receiver, but she doesn’t leave her post without an order, she stays put. At the time this seemed an ordinary occurrence. Now that things have calmed down, you think back and it seems different. But at the time you’re saying: “What the hell’s wrong with you, sitting there crying?” Now you think about it and it’s just plain awful. Everything’s rumbling, and you’re safe under concrete, miserable. But what about her up there on the second floor? She’s a woman, after all, not some seasoned fighter. An ordinary woman, an ordinary telephone operator—what did you expect?
AGRAFENA POZDNYAKOVA
I discuss the interview with the cook Agrafena Posdnyakova separately because she is the only one who witnessed the German occupation firsthand. Posdnyakova shared her fate with approximately 150,000 to 200,000 other residents.47 Some were denied permission to leave in time, but most stayed to care for sick family members or were reluctant to leave their homes with winter drawing near. Very few gained an accurate picture of the occupiers; if anything, they dismissed Soviet reports of German atrocities as exaggerations.48
The destruction of the city wore on after the heavy aerial bombardments in the final days of August. The Luftwaffe continued its air strikes and Soviet artillery shelled the war-ravaged districts from the east bank of the Volga.
Residents—mostly the elderly, women, and children—sought shelter in cellars, sheds, foxholes, and drainage pipes.49 Indiscriminate grenade fire killed many during the street fighting, and the Soviet press published outraged articles about Wehrmacht soldiers who used civilians as human shields.50
The Germans built military administrations in the occupied districts and the surrounding areas. Major Hans Speidel, the commandant of Stalingrad, explained to his Red Army captors in February 1943 the goals of the German occupation: “complete destruction of the party and Soviet cadres, eradication of all the Jews,” the exploitation of the population, and the security of the soldiers occupying the city.51 In April 1943 the NKVD reported that “those involved in uncovering the Jews were mainly members of the German field gendarmerie and the Ukrainian auxiliary police. Traitors among the local population played a considerable role in this. To flush out and exterminate Jews, all dwellings, cellars, niches, and dugouts were checked.”52 Few Jews lived in the Stalingrad region, however. The Soviets counted 855 murdered Jews, refugees from Ukraine most likely; some were killed in sadistic fashion.53 Major Speidel explained to his interrogators that the Germans shot Jews and communists immediately because they did not know where to put them.54 The number of those murdered would have been higher, were it not for the last-minute evacuation of civilians.
The Germans required all city residents to register at local military headquarters. Anyone who could not produce a registration card risked being shot or sent to a concentration camp. Men fit for military service were preventatively incarcerated with other war prisoners.55 A special staff under the command of the chief quartermaster of the 6th Army organized the evacuation of residents deemed suitable for economic exploitation. Starting around October 1, the Germans mustered eight thousand to ten thousand residents each morning and sent them on a sixty-mile march—without food, water, or nighttime shelter from the cold—to the nearest railway stop, in Kalach. There they were sent by train to the Forshtat detention center, 180 miles west of Stalingrad, and were inspected by the German authorities.56 A Wehrmacht soldier described in a letter dated November 20 the lines of deportees walking toward Kalach in zero-degree cold: “On both sides of the road lie frozen women and children. They also lie in trenches and ditches where the refugees are seeking protection at night. Their only food is dead horses. Each such horse is stripped to the very bones.”57
The Red Army began its counteroffensive at the end of November. By then there were only fifteen thousand civilians in the German-controlled areas of Stalingrad.58 Their situation worsened rapidly in the following weeks. Since arriving in September, German soldiers had routinely looted households for jewelry and other valuables. In December soldiers began ransacking shacks and cottages, looking for hidden food and warm clothing. Cold, hungry, and exasperated, the invaders intensified their violent attacks on civilians. Units stationed in the barren steppe outside Stalingrad sent commandos into the city to get wood. They demolished whole dwellings without regard for the inhabitants. As the 6th Army fell back, officers and soldiers took up lodging in undamaged residences and threw the inhabitants out into the street. Some German officers confiscated the quarters of their Romanian allies; many of them raped female civilians.59
The chief inspector of the 71st Infantry Division for Stalingrad South ordered all remaining civilians to register on January 1, 1943. To receive a registration card, each resident had to give the local military headquarters four and a half pounds of grain. All in all, 2,500 residents registered, yielding the invaders four tons of grain. In some instances marauding soldiers robbed residents of their meager reserves on the way. The inspector, believing that only a small segment of the remaining population had reported for registration, ordered a second registration for January 10. This time, the charge was four and a half pounds of wheat or six and a half pounds of rye. Three hundred additional residents registered.60
In her interview Agrafena Posdnyakova described this mandatory levy along with other experiences and impressions of the German occupiers. Her husband and two of her children died during the battle. The story of how she and her four remaining children survived for almost six months of fighting and austerity is astonishing. I was unable to find written documents or photographs giving more information about the cook and her family. But here is how a municipal employee described other civilian survivors she saw on returning to her destroyed neighborhood in February 1943: “We were walking around our liberated district, along little paths, among the mines and encountered people who had lost their memory, who were afraid of the sound of their own voice. You would look at such a person—a boy’s figure, but the temples are completely white.”61
Ulitsa mira (Peace Street), Stalingrad, 1943. Photographer: L. I. Konov
COMMISSION ON THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR
Stalingrad, March 14, 1943
Agrafena Petrovna POZDNYAKOVA, an employee of the City Committee62
At first I worked for the city committee as a cleaner, and then I worked in the kitchen. It’s been five years already. My husband was a worker. We had six children. My oldest girl also worked for the city committee, in the library. She was in the Komsomol. My husband was a shoemaker. He worked at a shoe factory, then in a workshop for invalids. I lost my husband and two of my children during the fighting in Stalingrad.
The enemy started bombing on August 23, in the evening, of course. All of us were at work. It was a good day, everything was all right. In the evening we got back home—and before we’d even sat down, he dropped by for a visit.
I could have gotten out of the city, but all my children were sick at the time. That’s why we stayed here. When our people were here it wasn’t so bad, even with the bombs. We were getting bread, and when the bombs came we hid in basements. Sometimes we stayed underground day and night. There were times when it would quiet down a bit, and we’d jump out to grab something, to get some bread, or bake some, and then it was right back down to the basement. We went to the railway for water. Bullets flying overhead. It wasn’t easy getting water. It happened a lot that someone would go for water and not come back. We took the water from a tank, and it often came mixed with fuel oil.
We lived on Solnechnaya Street. It was a small two-story building. We were staying in the basement. On the evening of September 14 our basement was taken by the Germans. On September 17 everything was burned. The entire block was burned to the ground. We were driven out of the basement. Me and my family stayed in some trenches in the courtyard, but the house was intact.
Around eleven a fire broke out. It was just awful. Terrible. We stayed, had our supper in the house. We were getting ready to leave, taking some things, getting the children. The Germans closed the doors and shouted: “Sleep, Rus, sleep!” We had to pass the children through a window and then crawl out ourselves. We had to leave everything behind. All that was left of the place was the walls. We spent the night within those walls. That morning the Germans came and announced that we had to leave this place immediately. So we went back to our trench. We cleared it out a bit, got down, and stayed put. That’s where we were until September 26. There was heavy shelling on the 27th. My husband and daughter were killed, and we were covered in dirt. This boy here (she points) was wounded. We got dug out, and we left. We went to the basement of this girl, the one who’s come with me today. We stayed there until October 12, which was when the Germans drove us out of the area for good, out from the center to the outskirts of the city. Some left with bags over their shoulders, but I had this wounded boy, small children, and my own legs were also injured. We relocated to the outskirts of the city behind the Soviet Hospital, in the Dzerzhinsky district. We’ve been living there ever since. The Germans came and kicked us out of this place too. We went to the commandant’s office, we begged them. I’m sick, I’ve got children. They came to take a look and shrugged: you’ve got too many as it is. They’ll all die anyway.
They roughed us up pretty good, hit us, shot at us.
There w
as still a lot of grain in the elevator.63 The Germans were taking the grain from the elevator. There were these terrible trains of carts. The men moving the carts were Russian prisoners. If you asked one of them for something, they’d bring you a bag or half a bag of flour. We’d pay him two or three hundred rubles for it. There was a German for every Russian prisoner. We’d buy from one of them, and in an hour, hour and a half, another German would come [take it away] because he knew that we’d bought it. That did it: we were ruined. We had no money, no bread. While our people were here, until September [unintelligible] we were getting bread, flour, some white bread for the children. We somehow managed to keep going. Then we started eating horses. There was nothing to feed them with, so the horses started dying. Out on the road by the Soviet Hospital there were these barracks, terrible places. We’d go there, to the barracks, and ask the Russian prisoners. [ . . . ] You could tell the horse was going to die anyway. So he shot her. We took the meat and ate it. Later, when the Germans were surrounded, they were eating horses too. They left us the legs, heads, entrails. But by the end we didn’t even get that. They took everything, left us only hooves and guts. If they saw you had any horsemeat, they took it. Especially when the Romanians got pushed here from Kalach, when our guys took Kalach—we thought they were going to eat us all alive. They were starving. It was so cold, and they were practically naked. It was awful to see. These scarecrows were always on the move. They took anything and everything they came across.
Back when they first took Stalingrad, they could get what they wanted. They needed clothes, good shoes, gold, watches, and they got everything. In the German commandant’s office, for example, they offered transportation out of the city in exchange for gold watches, good boots, men’s suits or coats, good carpets. But of course we didn’t have any of these things. So the only way we could go was on foot. The Germans did other things too. They’d take what you gave them, drive you out of the city, and then leave you there to fend for yourselves. [ . . . ]