by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
I’ve got to say that this letter is typical. It describes the mood of the German soldiers. We have a great number of letters and diaries from dead soldiers, and I use this one as an illustration.
A few words on the enemy. The 6th Army’s main attack force was the 14th Panzer Corps, which included the 16th Panzer Division and the 3rd and 60th Motorized Infantry Divisions. The 14th Panzer Corps was led by Lieutenant General von Wietersheim.185 [ . . . ] I want to emphasize that all these divisions were made up of Germans only. Also, there weren’t any Sudeten Germans. The Germans in these divisions were exclusively from northwestern and western Germany, Westphalia, Saxony, Brandenburg, Prussia. The soldiers were between twenty and twenty-five years old and had spent many years in the Hitler Youth school.186 That was what ensured their morale and political reliability.
One shortcoming of our September operation, for which there is of course no objective excuse, was the severe lack of cooperation between our tanks and infantry. One small example will confirm this. Private 1st Class Johann Weingrann, of the 79th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, 16th Panzer Division, said the following about his capture on September 25: “The Russians broke through our defenses. Their tanks came in the evening. We were in our bunkers. The tanks stopped for a while and then moved back. After some time, before morning, the tanks returned. There wasn’t any infantry, and it was something like two hours later that the infantry arrived and took us prisoner.”
A second shortcoming was our disposition in depth, which led to massive and unnecessary losses. Finally, there were cases of divisions failing to take up position until it was light. [ . . . ]
Our air force was weak. Throughout September the Germans ruled the skies unchallenged. Our planes were not up to much; there were few and they accomplished little. They rarely hit their targets. There were times when they bombed not only our own forward positions but also our divisional command posts. On September 7 nine of our planes bombed the command posts of the 64th and 231st Divisions.
On September 13 the army moved into an active defense. But by the end of September our section of the front was extended some twelve kilometers because we were given more divisions, including both the 38th and the 41st Guards Divisions. These Guards divisions were formed somewhere near Moscow out of brigades of paratroopers who had already fought behind enemy lines. They had exceptional personnel. They fought the Germans near Kletskaya,187 and they literally fought like lions. When they were assigned to our army, they had 5,000–5,500 men each. They got reinforcements sometime in the last week of September. These reinforcements had not been specially chosen, so these Guards units saw a lot of self-inflicted wounds among the reinforcements, and there were some who crossed over to the Germans. I’ve seen how hard that is on the Guards. It’s hard for them to see their Guards banner being soiled by these incidents, which they had absolutely nothing to do with. That shows you how important it is not to put just any reinforcements into a Guards unit. Perhaps they ought to create some sort of Guards reserve regiment.
I’ve got to say, there still isn’t any real system for reinforcements in the Red Army like there is in the German army. In the Russian army, ever since 1812, our regiments have had two active battalions—the first and third—and one—the second—in reserve. The Germans do the same thing, but they also have special reserve battalions that supplement a particular division. That way, a soldier gets to know his division even when he’s in the rear. He’s trained by officers who are in that division, he learns their traditions, and by the time he gets to his unit, he already knows it, and this has a significant impact on the unit’s cohesion. We don’t have that.188 Perhaps it’s too much to have divisions keep a reserve regiment in the rear, but in any case it’s essential that a soldier knows where he’s going. Let’s say you have a wounded man, an officer who winds up in an army hospital—it’s a big hassle for him to get back to his division. But when a German is wounded, he goes back to his reserve regiment in the rear, and after six months he’s back in his own unit, his own company. We ought to give this serious consideration. We do not have a clearly defined system of reinforcement. [ . . . ]
I’d like to talk about the Germans’ morale and political reliability. As I said earlier, this was stable at the beginning, for a number of reasons. But the Germans were taking very heavy casualties in September, and to a certain degree this put them in a state of extreme fatigue. They were constantly hoping that once they took Stalingrad, the 14th Panzer Corps would spend the winter in France. They lived by that hope. It should also be mentioned that the fighting in September and October made them very receptive to our antiwar propaganda. We found our leaflets on the prisoners, on the dead. The German prisoners told us that one of the leaflets—“Daddy Is Dead”—left a particularly strong impression. It has a picture of a four-year-old girl. She’s holding a letter, and there’s also a dead German soldier. One prisoner told me that one of his comrades sent that leaflet home with someone he knew.
In general, the social propaganda, whose goal was to denounce Hitler’s regime, didn’t do much good,190 but our antiwar propaganda was more successful. With the anti-war propaganda they can come to their own conclusions—and you know how dull and narrow-minded the Germans are.
“Daddy is dead.” “Blame Hitler! He did it!” Soviet leaflet disseminated in Stalingrad.189
In mid-October I made broadcasts from a field radio near the Volga and the Dry Ravine. We made those broadcasts from a bunker 180 meters from the Germans. As soon as the loudspeaker started up, I would see movement along their communications trenches. The Germans rushed to get closer to the loudspeaker. As a rule, they stopped shooting during the broadcast. They started shooting again afterward.
There was a very interesting case in that same sector in the middle of November, before the encirclement, which I ought to talk about. On the morning of November 19, Lieutenant Duplenko, the commander of the 2nd Battalion, 197th Rifle Regiment, 99th Division, noticed a soldier climb out of the German trenches, curse, and throw his rifle to the ground. A while later two more soldiers climbed out and did the same thing. Then Duplenko went and yelled: “Fritzes! Over here!” The Germans came about forty meters and stopped. Duplenko left with two submachine gunners to meet them. They arrived. The Germans offered him a cigarette. He took one of their cigarettes and then started communicating in gestures. Then he grabbed both of them by the hand and started moving toward our trenches. The Germans went about twenty meters. But this sergeant of some kind came out of the German trenches and started shouting something at them. They started freeing themselves, saying: “Rus, night . . . ,” and walked away. Duplenko left. No one shot at anyone else. Preparations were made for that night. That regiment’s intelligence chief and Lieutenant Makarov, the instructor who was responsible for working with enemy troops, lay in wait for the Germans. Since this might be a provocation, two dozen scouts and submachine gunners were put in position. What happened that night was most unexpected. The Germans didn’t come straight along the front—this was on the bank of the Volga—but rather went down to the Volga and then started to make the climb. They were unarmed. Our sentry held out his hand to the first German—and there he was. And then the reconnaissance company’s commissar gave the order to shoot. Apparently they’d been asleep and had had a shock when they woke up and saw Germans. The Germans ran back. The next morning we found eleven duffel bags with blankets and all of their things. [ . . . ]
During our offensive in October the Germans took especially heavy losses. This was confirmed by prisoner statements and a number of documents we have in our possession. So, for example, the captured rifleman Johann Schmitz—from the 8th Company, 8th Motorized Infantry Regiment, 3rd Motorized Division—said that on the 18th, 19th, and 20th, the 8th Regiment took heavy losses, mostly from artillery. According to Schmitz and other POWs, the companies were left with around twenty-five to thirty men. The Germans were surprised by how determinedly our units fought. An unsent letter was found on the body of a Sergea
nt Steinberg, who had written: “The Russians who defend this sector are especially fierce and determined. They really understand the importance of this city and what consequences its fall will bring.”
Among the sergeants you can find fairly well educated Germans, often with higher education, usually with a secondary school degree.
So that’s how things were before the encirclement. In mid-November, when the Germans were hit at the Don and to the south of Stalingrad, the ring started closing in on the 6th Army. From November 19 the Germans were frantically moving units from Stalingrad to the Don. On November 20, 21, and 23, I saw lines of German vehicles with infantry moving west. On November 17 the 16th Panzer Division, except for some small individual units, was pulled out and sent to Kalach to prevent our forces from closing the ring. That evening and night of November 22 I witnessed the constant explosions in the German rear. At the same time the Germans were launching fierce barrages, particularly at our left flank. I wasn’t able to get to the front line myself. You had to go four hundred meters across the steppe, which was impossible. It was like that until 5:00 A.M., and then it went quiet. By 8:00 A.M., when our scouts moved up to the German trenches, no one was there. On our army’s left flank, along a line some eight to ten kilometers west from the Volga, the Germans had all left. On November 23 the 99th Division just walked into Tomilin, Akatovka, Vinnovka, and Latoshinka, and that day they met up with units of the 62nd Army. It was only after that meeting near Rynok that the 99th Division met stubborn German resistance as they attempted to take a dominant height. Nevertheless, the height was taken. They didn’t have a single fatality the entire time.
[ . . . ] On our right flank the Germans were their usual selves. It was a hasty withdrawal: they blew up stockpiles and vehicles, torched bunkers, buried things in the ground. In the Dry Ravine, for example, we dug up a stockpile of uniforms, boots, and so on. German battalions and rear units had been there. I visited most of their bunkers. That was the first time I’d been in a German bunker. We found shocking things there, things that summed up the nature of German plundering only too well. One example should be enough. I get that the logic of victory and the logic of war might lead someone to take a feather bed or some warm things, maybe a mirror. But why on earth would you bring a child’s stroller down there? And to top that off, the nearest village was ten kilometers away. Or baby clothes—I’ve seen them myself, in a bunker. It’s like something out of the Bible. The clothes you can at least send back to Germany, but what are you planning to do with a stroller?
I heard things from civilians. A peasant woman’s ragged old shirt is hanging out to dry. A German comes and stuffs it in his pocket. He’s got no use for it, but his need to loot and steal is so out of control that he’s got to take everything, regardless of whether he needs it or not. [ . . . ]
As evidence of the Germans’ confusion and panicked withdrawal in November, we have both the statements of prisoners and some captured diaries and other documents. Here I quote excerpts from the diary of the soldier Heinz Gossman, Field Post 12387 Z.
November 21. Yesterday they woke us suddenly at 3:00 A.M., and at 5:00 A.M. we started our withdrawal. The Russians have broken through in the Italian and Romanian sectors. The Italians and Romanians abandoned everything and took off, and now we’re the ones who have to take care of their mess. At 5:00 P.M. the Russians cut the road we needed to get out. At 6:00 P.M. we were surrounded. Three guns, our only means of defense, were destroyed.
8:00 P.M. After a two-hour siege we eventually found a way out. Any vehicles that were out of fuel were destroyed.
November 22. 6:00 A.M. Finally the road is clear again. We can dare to go. The road is covered with the bodies of horses left by the Romanians. Nearly all the animals have frozen to death. Scattered everywhere are guns, ammunition, vehicles, and everything else that the units had. After being shelled three times we made it to the crossing at the Don. At 1:00 P.M. we made it safely to Karpovka, but here the Russians are pushing up from the south.
The diary entries of Corporal Horeski, who was killed at the end of November, were to the point:
November 23. Running from the Russians from one place to the next.
November 26. The Russians have broken through, we’re moving on.
November 27. Stopping at the ravine. Building bunkers again.
November 28. The bunkers were almost finished, but then we left in the morning. Everything’s shit.
December 1. Surrounded again. Not much food, the supply routes are cut off.
December 2. We’re not getting any mail and we can’t send any. Hoping we can get out of this trap.
The Germans, as I mentioned earlier, were destroying their equipment and stockpiles. Sergeant Rudolf Bormann, from the 4th Company, 267th Regiment, 94th Infantry Division, said so in his statement. They burned a depot near Orlovka with an enormous amount of food and clothing. They destroyed food stores that were there for Christmas, including a lot of wine. Whatever wine the officers couldn’t drink was destroyed.
The diary of Private 1st Class Heinz Werner from the 24th Panzer Division, who was captured at the time of surrender, contains the following:
November 22. Because of the lack of fuel, at one airfield we blew up twenty of our own planes.
November 23. Most of our vehicles and tanks were blown up this morning.
In the early days of the encirclement the Germans were literally thrashing about like rats in a sack. They were throwing everyone into the front line: supply personnel, clerks, even sick and lightly wounded soldiers from the hospital in Kalach. Soldiers from the 1st Cavalry in the Romanian division, who had fled after their defeat and wound up in the encirclement, were also seized and sent into the German units, three to five men per company. Among the prisoners were clerks, supply personnel, and other noncombatant staff. Somehow we got hold of the master of ceremonies from the largest variety show in Berlin. He said: “You know, captain, I’ve never found myself in such a comic situation as I have here with you.”
However, the German commanders managed to quell this panic and confusion by early December. General Paulus issued an order saying that the army’s task was to hold Stalingrad at all costs—that this city would play a decisive role in the outcome of the war. His order ended with the words: “Hold on. The Führer will get you out!”191 This order was quoted in an address written by Hitler in a pseudo-Napoleonic style: “Comrades, you are locked in and surrounded. This is not your fault. I will do everything to free you from your situation, because the battle for Stalingrad has reached its apogee. You have hard times behind you, and it will only get harder. You must defend your positions to the last man. Retreat is not an option. Anyone who leaves his post shall bear the full force of the law.”192
In this way the Germans managed to secure a defensive perimeter and establish some relative order by the beginning of December.
Turning now to the question of atrocities. On November 26 I was told to go to the 99th Division in the area of Akatovka-Vinnovka-Rynok to conduct propaganda work and to document atrocities. I should mention that on November 1–2 elements of the 300th Division conducted a landing operation on the west bank of the Volga.193 This operation did not end well. Some died on the river but the rest managed to get to shore, where all of them were either slaughtered or taken prisoner. I visited some of the German bunkers in the area. This was not the precise location of the failed landing, and this confirms that the bodies I found there were not of men who had died in battle, but of men who had died as a result of brutal torture. For instance, there was the body of a Red Army soldier whose skin had been pulled off his right hand together with his fingernails. His eyes were burned out, and there was a wound on his right temple from a hot iron. The right side of his face had been covered in some kind of fuel and set on fire. I have the report and a photograph.
If I may digress, I’d like to highlight two things. First of all, when I got to the place where the bodies of these tortured men were, some of them had alre
ady been buried, and I had to dig them up. We had buried the bodies of these heroes in a pit, and there were no grave markers. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case. We don’t respect the dead, and despite strict directives from GlavPURKKA and the People’s Commissariat of Defense, our treatment of corpses is disgraceful. We haven’t been able to develop a proper respect for the dead.
Now I’ll move on to the work we did to demoralize the enemy forces during the encirclement. Beginning in December, such work was conducted on a large scale. [ . . . ] Verbal propaganda took up a particularly large part of it. We spoke to the Germans every day using field radios and megaphones. The main document we used in our propaganda was an appeal to German officers and soldiers that was signed by General Yeryomenko and General Rokossovsky. This was the first appeal to their officers. The document said, for example, that there were many times in military history in which brave men and officers found themselves in a hopeless situation and surrendered. This wasn’t an act of cowardice, but of good judgment.