Stalingrad

by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)

  November 29—We wait for some time on the highway, don’t know what to do next. I’m terribly hungry. There have been problems lately with food. What’s going to happen? Other neighboring units are cooking, and here I can’t even get a spoonful of soup. We kept going. Stopped in a ravine. Started looking for our company. In the next village it was a complete mess: Romanians, Russians, Germans. After a long search we found our company.

  November 30—Early in the morning we got to our platoon. We entrenched in the cold ground. Brutal fighting day and night. Russian tanks broke through by evening, and we had to defend against them. Air raid, mortar fire. I haven’t eaten in thirty-six hours. Now I’ve got 1/8 loaf of bread, 1/16 can of tinned meat, a few spoonfuls of pea soup and a sip of coffee.

  December 1—Spent the night in a trench: same rations. Mortars exploding constantly. Frightfully cold. We were on the front lines, then we came back. At the nearest village we slept in a barn. Right in the muck and manure. Everything is wet, terribly cold.

  December 2—Shelling in the morning. Some killed and wounded. I barely made it. All my stuff got stolen: All I’ve got left is what I had on me. We marched twelve kilometers, we’re dead tired, starving. Another whole day without food. I’ve lost all my strength.

  December 3—Again we march, again no water. Can’t get anything to drink. I feel terrible. I’ve been eating snow. Tonight we didn’t find any quarters. It’s snowing, I’m completely soaked, water in my boots. We managed to find a dugout. I’m staying there with six other comrades. We cooked up a little horsemeat in snow water. What will the future bring? We’re surrounded. 1/12 loaf!

  December 4—Heavy march, nineteen kilometers. Everything covered in ice. We got to Gumrak, spend the night in railcars.

  December 5—It keeps getting worse. So much snow, my toes are frostbitten. I am so hungry. This evening after a long march we entered Stalingrad. We were welcomed by exploding shells. We ended up in a cellar. Thirty of us. Absolutely filthy, unshaved. We can barely move. There’s very little to eat. Three or four cigarettes. A dreadful, savage group of men. I am so unhappy! All is lost. People are fighting constantly, everyone’s on their last nerve. The mail’s not getting through, it’s terrible.

  December 6—Same as yesterday. We’re lying in this cellar, barely allowed out in case the Russians see. Now at least we’re getting 1/4 loaf daily, a can of meat for every eight men, a little butter.

  December 7—Everything’s as it was. Lord, please help me get home in one piece. My poor wife, my dear parents. How difficult it must be for them! Almighty God, make this come to an end. Let us have peace again. That we may go home soon, go back to a human life.

  December 9—Our servings at dinner were a bit bigger, but we got only 1/12 loaf, 1/12 can. Yesterday was my wife’s birthday. I’m depressed. Life has lost all meaning. The arguments and fighting never stop. Hunger can have that effect.

  December 10—I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday. Just some black coffee. I have lost all hope. God, will this go on for long? The wounded are here with us. We can’t send them anywhere. We’re surrounded. Stalingrad is hell. We boil the flesh of dead horses. No salt. A lot of us have dysentery. Life is so terrible! What have I done to deserve such punishment? Thirty men are packed into this cellar, at two o’clock it starts to get dark. The night is long. Will there be a day?

  December 11—Today we got 1/7 loaf, some lard, and we’re meant to get some more hot food. But tonight I collapsed from weakness.

  December 12—Still in Stalingrad. We’ve been given a new unit. The food situation is still very bad. Yesterday I brought in some horsemeat. Today, unfortunately, there’s nothing. I keep hoping I can keep going. It should get better. There was quite a storm last night: artillery fire, shells. The earth shook. Our NCO went off to fight. We’ll be following him soon. We have people here with dysentery. I am so hungry. If only it were a little easier. If we weren’t sick or wounded. God help me. The guns are shooting constantly. You can hear the whistle of incoming shells. Today I wrote a letter. I hope that my family gets it soon. Right now I can see my wife so clearly before me.

  December 13—This evening we got rice flour and 1/16 can. I was happy to have it. Nothing new apart from that. I’m feeling very weak, very dizzy.

  December 14—I’m still feeling faint. No help to be had. There are a lot of wounded here who aren’t being looked after. All because of the encirclement.

  I smoked my last cigarette. Everything is coming to an end. The things I’ve gone through this past week—it’s too much. I’m always so terribly hungry. This past year in Russia was nothing compared to what’s going on right now. This morning I ate 1/7 loaf, a tiny piece of butter. They’ve been shelling us since last night. What a harsh existence! What a terrible country! I am putting all my hope with God. I have lost my faith in mankind.

  December 15—We’re needed at the front. We stumbled and crawled our way through the trenches and the ruins of Stalingrad. We crossed paths with a seriously wounded soldier being carried out. We arrived at the command post. Then we went down into a factory basement, and then most of our unit went out to fight. Only thirteen of us remained. I was the highest-ranking one there. There was dirt and debris all around. No way out. Everything shifting and cracking under the Russian artillery fire.

  December 16—I’m still here. They bring the wounded down here. In the cellar it’s dark both day and night. We built a fire right on the floor. At 4:00 P.M. the food delivery came: soup, 1/8 loaf, a little butter, a bit of canned meat. I ate all of it at once and lay down. Twenty-four hours until the next meal. On December 15 I sent a letter by airmail. I hope it gets there by Christmas. My poor, dear wife and parents.

  December 18—The day goes by, just like all the other ones. We eat in the evening. Once every twenty-four hours we get food, then there’s nothing. I had to drag in a wounded man. We searched for a long time before finding the doctor, who was also in the basement of a building that had been completely destroyed. I found a dead man when I got back to my trench. It was Rill, I talked with him three days ago. I’m sitting in this trench with another soldier. He’s a twenty-year-old from Austria, he has dysentery, the stench is unbearable. Constant shelling. My ears hurt, and I’m really cold. Fifty meters away is the Volga. We’re right next to the enemy. I don’t care about anything anymore. I can’t see a way out of this hell. The wounded aren’t taken away, we just leave them in the villages, inside the encirclement. All I can hope for is a miracle. Nothing else can help. Our artillery have gone completely silent, they’ve probably run out of ammunition. I’m starving, I’m frozen, my feet are like ice. Neither one of us says a thing—what’s there to talk about? We’re approaching the happy Christmas holidays. What wonderful memories I have of it, childhood. [ . . . ]

  My dear parents, I greet you from far away. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I’m sorry if I’ve caused you trouble. I never meant to. My poor Mama, what will you do? My sweet sister, it’s hard for me to think about the times we played together, from the bottom of my heart I wish you happiness in your future life. There is no one I love as much as you, my sweet wife, my blonde Mitzi. I would give anything to know that we were going to meet again. If that is not to be, let me thank you for all the happy hours you have added to my life.

  I don’t know whether these lines will ever reach your hands. Writing relieves me of the loneliness and emptiness. May God give you strength and comfort if something happens to me. But I don’t want to think about that. Life is so beautiful. Oh, if only we could live in peace! I’m still not able to come to terms with death, but that diabolical music of battle, bringing death, just keeps going and going.

  It’s day now, the sun is shining, but the shells are constantly exploding all around. I am completely exhausted. Is it possible to survive this? Everything is moving, like in an earthquake.

  Graves of German soldiers in Stalingrad, 1943. Photographer: Natalya Bode

  In Soviet hands the diary acq
uired a life of its own. The Russian translation was done by Major Alexander Shelyubsky, the director of military intelligence for the 62nd Army. This was similar to Zayonchkovsky’s position in the 66th; like his colleague, Shelyubsky was a historian by trade and spoke fluent German.15 During the battle of Stalingrad he drafted reports at several-week intervals on the “political and moral state” of the German forces that fought against the 62nd Army. The reports addressed specific divisions and commanders and, drawing on captured documents and prisoner statements, presented a detailed picture of the mood in the 6th Army. Shelyubsky appended his January 5, 1943, report to the diary of the German lance corporal.16

  Shelyubsky also spoke with the Moscow historians and provided his assessment of the enemy.17 The soldiers fighting against the 62nd Army were almost all from “elite squads” and “cadre divisions” consisting of “pure-blooded Aryans,” not from their Romanian or Italian divisions, who in Soviet experience did not fight as well.18 Until the beginning of October the German soldiers held the hope of “taking Stalingrad by storm.” They believed that the large German offensive initiated by the 305th Infantry Division in the industrial district represented a turning point: “let the thunder of victory roar!”19 “That’s how one could describe the mood in the division. It entered combat around October 14. In two or three days its losses were tremendous. That division was thrown against the Barricades works. After such a morale boost along the lines that everything is good here, that Stalingrad is ours, when they started to be worked over by us they simply didn’t understand what was going on. We tried to make them understand and dropped various leaflets.” This passage shows that Shelyubsky sought to gauge the mood of the enemy strategically and find ways to influence it.

  Shelyubsky explained how the pervasive fatalism in many letters in October 1942 gave way to desperation after the 6th Army was surrounded in November. He saw this development as an expression of the Germans’ deficient “moral” stability. In particular, he noted that the many thefts and other forms of assault on the civilian population had “become so routine for German soldiers and officers that prisoners of war tell about this without any embarrassment.”20 He was also struck by the Germans’ inability to withstand hunger:

  Another aspect that played a great role in the morale of the surrounded enemy has to be noted here: food. Germans don’t know how to starve. Our Russian soldier not only during the Patriotic War but also the Civil War and all other wars knew how to starve. Germans cannot do that: when they fight, they are used to stuffing themselves like pigs. That can be proven by their letters. It is almost disturbing: all they talk about is food. I have interrogated dozens of prisoners of war and so did my workers. There wasn’t a case where a prisoner did not start with food. Eating is their priority. Their entire brain is filled with chow. Toward the end the situation was very tough for them. The rations would be as low as one hundred grams of bread.

  Shelyubsky and other political officers of the Red Army read the German messages through Soviet-tinted glasses, projecting onto the enemy their ideas of what constitutes a soldier. In their view, a soldier’s will was firm and “healthy” when it served a higher purpose: the “fight against fascism” and the “liberation of enslaved peoples.” An army that did not espouse such aims and merely conquered, pillaged, and destroyed could produce nothing but moral cripples. The inability of Paulus and the other captured German generals to identify the army’s higher aims—they claimed that as members of the military they were not in charge of political questions—was interpreted by their Russian interrogators as weakness. The discipline of the Wehrmacht commanded the Soviets’ respect, but when it came to political conviction they saw the Red Army as superior.

  From Shelyubsky’s report the diary of the German lance corporal made its way into the Soviet media. On January 25, 1943, short excerpts were read over Soviet radio and appeared in Pravda several days later.21 The newspaper mostly keeps to Shelyubsky’s translation, but presents the diary as a fight to survive within the Wehrmacht, stressing the infighting between the soldiers and their frayed nerves. In place of the drama of the soldier left to his fate is the moral decay of the German army. Pravda even goes so far as to falsify a passage. In Shelyubsky’s original the lance corporal writes, “I see no way out from this horrible hell [ . . . ] I can only hope for God’s miracle.” The newspaper invents another perspective: “I see no way out of this horrible hell but capture.”

  As the end of the battle of Stalingrad neared, Shelyubsky, Zayonchkovsky, and the other enemy propaganda officers strengthened their efforts to convince German soldiers to surrender. They aimed to dispel the widespread belief among the Germans that Soviet captivity meant torture and death. The dogged resistance of the Germans, fueled mostly by fear of imprisonment, fanned the flames of hatred among the Soviets. As the Stalingrad transcripts document, there were scores of instances in which German soldiers were beaten or shot by Red Army soldiers after they surrendered.

  5

  WAR AND PEACE

  ON FEBRUARY 4, 1943, A THREE-DAY PERIOD OF NATIONAL MOURNING BEGAN in the German Reich. All cinemas and theaters were closed, and solemn music was broadcast over the radio. The reports from Stalingrad, Joseph Goebbels recorded in his diary, shocked Germans. “We must do everything to help the Volk overcome this dark hour.”1 The same day Pravda reported the Soviet victory and the demise of a German army once 330,000-men strong. Pravda extoled the “historic fight” for Stalingrad as the one of the greatest battles in human history, in terms of both the size of the armies and the scale of destruction.2 The army newspaper Red Star wrote, “Achieving such victory, especially in the conditions of modern combat, is possible only with highest military skill and with first-class troops. The Red Army has achieved such a victory.”3

  The Red Army’s burgeoning self-confidence had already become apparent in early January 1943, when a government decree reintroduced epaulets, which had been reviled since the revolution as symbols of the imperial Russian army. A secret NKVD report from the Don Front noted that some soldiers wondered why the army campaigned against the golden shoulder pieces only to reinstate them with great ceremony; others sensed the pressure of the Soviet Union’s Western allies and feared that the Red Army would devolve into a “bourgeois capitalist” military force. But many more soldiers seemed to welcome the decision, finding it only logical that the Red Army adopted some of the customs of their allies, as well as of the Wehrmacht, whose recognition they sought. Commissar Levykin of the 284th Rifle Division explained to the representatives of the Historical Commission the enthusiasm for the reform: “We didn’t register a single negative incident of the kind that had taken place in 1918 or 1919. The attitude has changed completely. Even before the epaulets arrived, troopers were already sewing the loops for them onto their uniforms. Some, jokingly, were saying that without epaulets they felt like plucked chickens.”

  Thousands of Red Army soldiers were promoted after the battle—including almost every officer interviewed by the historians—and regiments, divisions, and whole armies received Guards status. By June 1943, 9,602 soldiers in the 62nd Army (by then renamed the 8th Guards Army) had received medals for valor in battle. At the decoration ceremonies the political administration gave important speeches and cadre departments kept a record of every soldier who received a medal.4

  The wave of commendation ignited controversy about who deserved the greatest praise for victory. Vasily Grossman registered the dispute with his customary acumen. In May 1943, several months after being recalled from Stalingrad, Grossman met the commanders of the 62nd Army on the Kursk steppes, where they had been placed on reserve status. Here is his account of the meeting:

  Lunch on the terrace of Chuikov’s dacha. An orchard. Chuikov, Krylov, Vasiliev, two colonels—members of the Military Council. The meeting is not warm; they all are seething. Lack of satisfaction, frustrated ambition, insufficient decorations, hatred for anyone distinguished by more generous decorations, hatred toward the press. The
film Stalingrad5 is referred to with curses. Not a word about the fallen, about a monument, about memorializing those who did not come back. Each is talking only about himself and his accomplishments.

  The next morning at Guryev’s. The same picture. No modesty at all: “I did, I overcame, I, I, I.” Other commanders are mentioned without respect; some kind of womanish gossip: “I was told that Rodimtsev said something or other” [ . . . ] The overall idea is this: “Ours are the only accomplishments, the accomplishments of the 62nd, and in the 62nd itself I am the only one, the rest just happened to be there.” Vanity of vanities—all is vanity.6

  Stalin repeatedly tried to defuse the dispute, which continued to smolder long after the war ended. Following the victory parade of June 24, 1945, the Soviet dictator offered a widely noted toast in the ceremonial hall of the Kremlin “to the simple, common people, the ‘little bolts’ that are keeping active our great state mechanism in every branch of science, economy and military affairs. They are numerous, their name is Legion for there are tens of millions of them. These are modest people. No one writes about them, they have no ranks, no titles, but these are the people that hold us the way the base holds the top. I’m drinking to the health of these people, of our esteemed comrades.”7 Stalin’s gesture was a calculated attempt to deflate the egos of the marshals, generals, and officers in attendance. In addition to keeping watch over the conferral of distinctions, Stalin was careful to preserve his own spot at the top of the glory hierarchy. On June 27, 1945, Stalin received the rank of Generalissimus of the Soviet Union, a position created especially for him. During the victory parade mentioned above his deputy Marshal Zhukov rode on a dashing white horse, inspecting the troops. According to some observers, Zhukov’s horse was too white and his stance too proud for Stalin’s liking. Soon Zhukov was accused of “Bonapartism” and demoted to leader of Odessa’s military district.8