by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
The commander again heard reports about the difficulties of storming the Central Hotel. His orders were to take it immediately, and he gave us five tanks for the job. We had four or five assault groups in our regiment. Maksimov, Babayev, and Kudryavtsev proved themselves again, and they were later given awards. When the tanks rolled up and started firing point-blank at the building, our assault groups broke inside, but even there the Germans continued to resist. About one hundred of them were killed, and sixty surrendered. We captured their hospital. I couldn’t believe it was a hospital. The orderlies were wearing new overcoats, absolutely spotless. I guessed that they were officers in disguise, though they did everything they could to show they weren’t officers and had nothing to do with defending the building.
Prisoners of war in Stalingrad, 1943. Photographer: Natalya Bode
This last remaining German stronghold in the center of the city fell at 4:00 P.M. on the 31st. Our artist did a sketch of the building.
Our regiment’s single greatest loss came on the 31st. A mine killed Captain Vasily Ivanovich Rakityansky,121 the regiment’s propagandist, a fearless soldier who had been wounded twice on the front line. He was a Siberian too. He’d been a second secretary in the Narymsk City Party Committee. He was a writer and a political worker. What he wanted most that day was to go with the men to the front line, and once they had taken the stronghold, he had a red flag ready to go. He’d set things up with the cameraman: Rakityansky was going to take the red flag and place it on the hotel. The cameraman was already getting ready to film when Rakityansky stepped on that mine. A pointless way to die.122 [ . . . ]
On February 1 the whole division moved from the center of the city to go fight against the northern group. [ . . . ] On the night of the 2nd we got orders to advance toward the airport and the parachute tower and then turn right toward the Barricades factory. It’s interesting to note that the soldiers started attacking even before they got the order. They could see things were going pretty well, that the Germans weren’t shooting much, that they were surrendering, and so they started attacking about half an hour before the order. By the time the regimental commander arrived, the fighting had already begun. The Germans were putting up a good fight, especially at the Barricades factory, but we attacked swiftly and in full strength. That day we took more than eight hundred prisoners. Throughout the fighting in Stalingrad we took 1,554 prisoners. At that point we were trying to take out isolated centers of German resistance. The Barricades factory was well defended. We captured regimental commanders, chiefs of staff. At the end we were interrogating the officers. I remember being in a bunker when they brought me this deputy chief of staff for their 113th Division, a major. We’d captured their deputy chief of staff for logistics and the commandant. These prisoners answered deviously, trying to be loyal. During the interrogations they didn’t remember everything right away, they’d get things wrong. But others would jump in to correct them, and they seemed sincere, as if they were trying to demonstrate their sincerity. One major was wearing a Red Army cap with a swastika. One soldier from our headquarters platoon pulled the cap from his head, ripped off the swastika, threw it at him, and tossed the cap to the side.
We also took the Barricades factory. That was the last stronghold of the northern group. The Barricades factory fell at 1:30 P.M. on February 2. Just after 3:00 P.M. all our operations had ended, and our division went to the banks of the Volga.
You can consider 2:30 P.M. a historic moment, the time when the guns stopped firing in the battle of Stalingrad. When I heard that on the telephone, I wrote this in my diary: “Glory to the victors! Today, at 2:30 P.M. on February 2, 1943, the last of the fighting in Stalingrad ended at the Barricades factory. The final shot of this great battle rang out at that historic moment. Today the guns are quiet. Stalingrad has been successfully defended, and thousands of Germans are plodding their way across the Volga. They have witnesses firsthand our ability to fight and win. I know that our descendants will remember this battle far into the future. Only now, as the pressure begins to subside, can I begin think of just how much we’ve done in Stalingrad.”
A few words on the prisoners. They were demoralized. At first we were looking them over one by one, but then we lost all interest. They were already saying “Hitler kaput,” to which one of our men remarked: “It’s not November [1942] for you anymore, now the whole bunch of you is kaput.”
One time we did a search of some prisoners. There were about seventy of them. I started talking to them through an interpreter. The regimental commander came and asked what I was talking to them about. I said I was asking them whether they’d seen the Volga. It turned out that most of them hadn’t. Then the regimental commander turned to them and said, via the interpreter, that today they would finally be crossing the river. And within half an hour there was a line of prisoners stretching across the Volga. [ . . . ]
We were in Stalingrad until March 6. We took a short break after the fighting, and then we started studying. Our task was to examine the German systems of defense. We gathered our intel from the field. The commanders climbed around all the enemy bunkers, trenches, and firing points to identify our own shortcomings and to arrive at some conclusions based on our combat experiences and to get something we could make use of down the line.
Red Army soldiers in the ruins of Stalingrad, February 1943.
All this intel was collected and summarized by the headquarters staffs. The staffs were working especially hard. I reported my information to the regimental commander, and the regimental commanders gave their reports to the divisional commander, and the divisional commander invited the division’s entire command staff—down to the battalion commanders—to come hear his detailed analysis of the information. The walls of the club were covered in maps and the organizational charts of regiments and divisions. The divisional commander himself gave a very interesting report on his own division’s combat ability. [ . . . ]
On February 25 I crossed the Volga for the first time in 156 days. I was up in front with the officers. When we reached the village of Krasnaya Sloboda, the first thing we were struck by was a house that was entirely intact. Smoke was coming from the chimney. We were so used to bombed-out buildings that seeing an entire house was a rare thing, it really stood out. We even stopped to take a look. [ . . . ]
Many of us received orders and medals for Stalingrad. Some were decorated posthumously. Three battalion commanders in our regiment were the first in the division to receive the Order of Alexander Nevsky for their struggle against superior enemy forces, for their experience and resourcefulness in tactical matters. The Order of Alexander Nevsky was awarded to Captain Kotov, Captain Nikiteyev, and Captain Ponomaryov.
February 10 was a momentous day for the division. That was the day the government issued a decree that awarded the 284th Division the Order of the Red Banner. We celebrated to mark the occasion.
March 2 was also significant. That’s when we learned that Colonel Batyuk was being promoted to major general.
But the most important day in the history of our division was March 5, the day we heard on the radio that we were being renamed: from now we were the 79th Guards Division. [ . . . ]
On February 24, the day I got the Order of the Red Star, I managed to get a car and go take pictures of Stalingrad, anything I thought worth photographing. At that time they were collecting the bodies of dead Germans. In the center of the city I met this civilian and I asked who he was. He said he ran the military department of the Stalingrad City Committee and that he was in charge of collecting the bodies. I asked how many they’d collected. That day they’d collected 8,700 German corpses in the city. I started taking pictures. There were piles of German corpses, two or three hundred, even six hundred piled on top of one another. Nothing in Stalingrad stood out as much as those mountains of bodies, those thousands of truckloads of bodies. I also photographed the bombed-out buildings, the field hospitals where wounded Germans still lay. I went into on German hospital in the Cit
y Theater. They were all mixed together: the sick, the wounded, and the dead. There was an awful stench. I found it hard to keep myself from finishing off the wounded.
When we left Stalingrad on March 6, we passed through what used to be the lines of the encirclement. Scattered over dozens of kilometers there were cars, tanks, guns of every caliber, mortars, and lots and lots of bodies. The battlefield was a vast cemetery with no graves. Again we were assured of just how great this battle of Stalingrad was.
Sometimes you’d see a village in an open field, and you’d think maybe you could make a stop. But as you get closer it turns out that it’s just a heap of vehicles that looks like a village. So there were cemeteries for equipment too.
We had a rally in the field on March 7, when we found out that comrade Stalin was being given the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. That made us all very happy. We’d said it before, that it would be nice to see him in uniform.
All of comrade Stalin’s documents and orders made a great impression on us. When things were at their worst, we knew that we weren’t alone. I remember in October—our worst month—I was walking at night with my orderly, Korostylyov, and we had to wait in a crater for the shooting to stop. I asked him, jokingly, whether he thought Stalingrad could hold out. He said: “I don’t think Stalin’s got it wrong.” He said this straightforwardly but with a strong belief that Stalin was thinking a lot about those of us who were in Stalingrad.
After the battle. Photographer: Sergei Strunnikov
We felt this especially strongly when we heard they were bringing out the new Medal for the Defense of Stalingrad and giving three cities the honorary title of Hero City.123
Our regiment’s clerk responded to one of Stalin’s decrees (from November, I think) like this: “Nothing brings order to my thoughts like this decree.” In that way comrade Stalin’s decrees brought order to both the activities and thoughts of our men. We always felt that he cared for us, and we could always sense his wisdom.
In Stalingrad I became a member of the party. In Stalingrad I became a captain and received the Order of the Red Banner.
[Signature:] N. Aksyonov, May 20, 1943
[Handwritten] Transcript read. Major Aksyonov, March 5, 1946
SNIPER VASILY ZAYTSEV
The name Vasily Zaytsev will be familiar to many readers thanks to the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates. Yet many parts of the story it portrays are fictitious, aside from the fact that Jude Law, tall and lean, bears no resemblance to man he plays. (The real-life Zaytsev had a stocky build.) According to the film, Zaytsev learned to shoot on wolf hunts with his grandfather. But as he told historians, he acquired his skills while hunting squirrels with his father, mother, brother, and sister. The goal was to shoot as many squirrels as his mother needed to make a fur coat for his sister. In the film, Zaytsev is “discovered” by a commissar, who feeds tales of the sniper’s accomplishments to the army newspaper. But the real Zaytsev was not discovered by a commissar; he followed the example of other Stalingrad snipers whose kill totals were widely publicized within the Red Army. Finally the film leads us to believe that the Germans, after repeatedly failing to kill Zaytsev, sent in their most experienced sniper, Major Erwin König, to go head-to-head with the Russian marksman amid the rubble of the Tractor factory. While Zaytsev claimed to wage a three-day duel with a German master sniper he referred to as “Major Koning,” there is no evidence that a sharpshooter by this name ever existed.124
Consistent with comments by Major Aksyonov mentioned above, the sniper movement in Stalingrad began during the heaviest fighting in October 1942. The use of snipers, like shock troops, was among tactics the 62nd Army command preferred in street fighting. The snipers in the regiment of Guards Lieutenant Colonel Metelyov, of the 284th Rifle Division, caused quite a sensation. According to Aksyonov, forty-eight snipers in the regiment killed 1,278 Germans.
The first sniper to make a name for himself in the regiment was Alexander Kalentyev. He had been trained as a sniper but worked as a liaison officer in the regimental staff. In a conversation with an army newspaper at the beginning of October, he explained that the widely published deeds of other Soviet snipers inspired him to follow suit. He approached the main line of battle and “killed ten Fritzes, my first pack of ten.” Kalentyev announced that he would multiply his total by November 7, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution.125 He managed to kill twenty-four enemy soldiers before a German sniper bullet struck and killed him.126 From the Main Political Administration Kalentyev and other Red Army soldiers on the Stalingrad Front received small journals for recording the number of soldiers they killed and the amount of equipment they destroyed. On the title page of each journal stood the words of Ilya Ehrenburg: “Unless you’ve killed at least one German in a given day, your day has been wasted.”127
During October sniper propaganda spread. Notable snipers vowed publicly to up their kills in honor of the anniversary of the revolution. Army leadership encouraged them to train other soldiers and create a sniper movement.128 Newspapers routinely published the snipers’ totals. An article from October 21 had as its headline nothing more than “66” printed in bold; it called for a “socialist competition” on the occasion of the upcoming anniversary. One headline pointedly asked, “Sniper Sytnikov has killed eighty-eight Germans. What about you?” Soldiers who had yet to make a kill were publicly shamed.129 The campaign proceeded in the style of 1930s shock work. Sytnikov mentioned that before the war he had been active in the Stakhanovite movement as a miner. When he heard about the competition for the anniversary celebration, he thought he could follow the Stakhanovites’ example and exceed his previous kill targets.130 In the 1930s the Stakhanovites were celebrated as “excellent people” (znatnye lyudi) of the new socialist era. A variation stuck in Stalingrad: any sniper with more than forty kills was considered an “excellent shooter.”131
The political apparatus not only prodded soldiers to distinguish themselves in “socialist competitions” but also fanned the flames of hatred toward the Germans. The hate they cultivated bore much fruit. In his interview Aksyonov commented that every soldier and commander in Stalingrad “burned” to kill as many Germans as possible. He believed that this hate was the foundation for the sniper movement in the 284th Rifle Division. Anatoly Chekov, a sniper in the 13th Guards Division, made it clear in his October 1942 interview with Vasily Grossman that hatred was what drove him. Chekov recalled his feelings after he shot his first German: “I felt terrible: I had killed a man! But then I thought back to our own dead and started slaughtering them without mercy. [ . . . ] I have become a beastly man: I am killing them, hating them as if my entire life is supposed to be like that. I have killed forty people—three in the chest, the rest in the head.”132 Zaytsev too reported that his main driving force was hate.
Zaytsev’s name first appeared in the army newspaper on November 2. He was described as a new arrival on the Stalingrad Front who quickly became one of the most accurate marksmen in the army, someone who sets off “each morning at dawn to ‘hunt Fritzes.’” It approvingly cited his kill total—116 Germans dead—and the fact that he took other soldiers under his wing.133 Four days later, with the upcoming anniversary of the revolution in view, the newspaper reported that Zaytsev already had 135 kills. It also recorded the totals of his students who fulfilled “their obligations honorably”: one had killed twenty Germans; another, twenty-five; a third, thirty-three.134 After the anniversary, the newspaper urged the snipers to continue their “fierce competition” with unabated force.135
By the time the battle of Stalingrad was over, Zaytsev had killed 242 Germans, more than any other sniper in the 62nd Army.136 On January 15, 1943, he suffered an eye injury and spent three weeks in a military hospital. On February 22, while visiting an eye specialist in Moscow, Zaytsev learned that he was to be honored as Hero of the Soviet Union. Before the award ceremony—President Mikhail Kalinin would confer the title in the Kremlin on February 26—he received a letter from Profess
or Mints inviting him to the Institute for the Study of the Great Patriotic War. Zaytsev thought he had to deliver a lecture on the sniper movement in Stalingrad and was nervous when he arrived poorly prepared, especially because the editor in chief of Pravda, Pyotr Pospyelov, was present. As he wrote in his memoirs: “I’m answering questions, talking about my comrades, without looking in my notebook where the theses of only the first part of the report are. An hour passes by, then another. I start wondering why no one is asking me to begin my lecture. Finally, they come to the conclusion that my report has scientific value. I am dumbfounded: what value, I haven’t read out a single thesis from my notebook!”137
Because no stenographer was on hand to record the interview with Mints, Zaytsev was invited to the institute again in April 1943, when the following transcript was produced.138 In August 1943 a supplementary interview took place. A revised text of the interview was published the same year in brochure form.139 Zaytsev’s testimony is the only eyewitness account of the battle published by the Historical Commission. There are considerable differences between the published and unpublished versions of the interview. The brochure’s editors abridged or reworked many passages without indicating the changes. They either embellished or eliminated sections in which Zaytsev came across as less than heroic. For instance, in the original interview Zaytsev claimed to shoot his first German soldier at a distance of 250 feet. In the brochure it became 2,500 feet. Or consider Zaytsev’s standoff with the German sniper (the climactic scene in Enemy at the Gates). In Zaytsev’s telling, he shot his opponent after he had put down his weapon. The brochure portrays the episode differently: the armed German “loses his head” when Zaytsev jumps out of the ditch and fells him with “holy Russian bullets.”140