by Stalingrad- The City that Defeated the Third Reich (epub)
German prisoners of war in Stalingrad. Photographer: Georgy Samsonov
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Pages ii–iii, 14, 62, 349, 427—FotoSoyuz Agency, Moscow
Pages 98, 127, 135, 301—Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Volgogradskoi oblasti, Volgograd
Page 75—Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzei, Mosocwo
Page 110—http://denis-balin.livejournal.com/3324012.html
Page 260 (top)—http://dr-guillotin.livejournal.com/110602.html
Page 386—http://propagandahistory.ru/83Sovetskie-propuska-v-plen-dlya-nemetskikh-soldat/
Page 291—http://soviet-art.livejournal.com/987.html
Page 71—K istorii russkikh revoliutsii (Moscow, 2007)
Pages 41, 46, 64, 66, 85, 146, 149, 158, 165, 166, 167, 178, 191, 202, 254, 258, 263, 266, 332, 370—NA IRI RAN, Moscow
Page 381—P. A. Zayonchkovskii. Sbornik statei i vospominanii k stoletiiu istorika, ed. L. G. Zakharova (Moscow, 2007)
Page 11—Personal archive Tatyana Yeryomenko, Moscow
Pages 281, 304, 314, 352, 441—RIA Novosti, Moscow
Pages 34, 39, 48, 88, 93, 105, 116, 126, 129, 131, 132, 140, 169, 208, 259, 260 (bottom), 272, 303, 306, 317, 345, 364, 372, 373, 378, 392, 399—Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov, Krasnogorsk
Page 253—Soiuzkinozhurnal 1943, No. 8
Page 354, 355—Tsentral’nyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy, Moscow
Page 240—Volgograd State Panoramic Museum “Battle of Stalingrad”
Page 193—http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/104/lazarev.htm
Page 257—www.retro.ru
Page 102—www.stalingrad-battle.ru
MAPS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been a collaborative endeavor from start to finish, and I want to thank all the institutions and people that have helped produce it. I want to begin by thanking the directors and staff of the Russian and German institutes who jointly supported the work on the transcripts. On the Russian side, these are Andrei Sakharov and Lyudmila Kolodnikova (until December 2010) and Yuri Petrov and Sergei Zhuravlyov (starting in 2011) of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Sergei Zhuravlyov, in particular, was always on hand with help and advice, as were the institute’s archive specialists, Yelena Maleto and Konstantin Drozdov. On the German side, I am particularly grateful to Bernd Bonwetsch, the founding director of the German Historical Institute in Moscow. His engagement and diplomatic talent were indispensable. I also owe much to his successor team—Nikolaus Katzer, Victor Dönninghaus, Sandra Dahlke, and Brigitte Ziehl—for their steady support and energetic efforts. In addition I want to express enormous gratitude to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and its director, Frank Suder, for their generous and beneficial support of the project. For nearly three years the foundation funded a small group of researchers who sorted and studied the Stalingrad transcripts, along with many other documents from the time of the battle.
My research staff—Darya Lotareva (Moscow), Svetlana Markova (Voronezh), Dina Fainberg (London), and Andrey Shcherbenok (Moscow)—all did outstanding work in assessing and scanning the transcripts and making them available on the group’s intranet site. Svetlana Markova typed out many hundred pages and Darya Lotareva performed large parts of the archival work and researched the hitherto virtually unknown story of the Historical Commission’s origin. The entire staff discussed which documents should appear in the book and in what form. We met once in Moscow; all other communication took place via intranet and Skype. I owe all of them thanks for a very gratifying collaboration.
Omer Bartov set me on this path many years ago. I told him of my idea to examine Soviet and Nazi German ideologies in dialogue. “Why don’t you write on Stalingrad?,” he suggested.
During my research I spoke with Tatyana Yeryomenko, Natalya Matyukhina (née Rodimtseva), Bode Roske, and Alexander Chuikov, and I thank them for sharing memories of their fathers and for documents related to the battle of Stalingrad, some of which found their way into this book. In addition, Albert Nenarokov provided revealing details from the life of his mentor Isaak Mints not found in any of his published biographies.
Bernd Bonwetsch, Paul Clemens, David Glantz, Igal Halfin, Peter Holquist, Katinka Patscher, Jan Plamper, Lennart Samuelson, and Gerd R. Ueberschär read sections of the manuscript and supplied helpful input. For their useful comments and suggestions I want to thank Michael Adas, Svetlana Argastseva, Antony Beevor, John Chambers, Andrei Doronin, Mark Edele, Alexander Epifanov, Ziva Galili, Sergei Kudryashov, Jackson Lears, Yan Mann, Zohar Manor-Abel, Annelore Nitschke, Serguei Oushakine, Ingrid Schierle, Wulf Schmiese, Joyce Seltzer, Yelena Senyavskaya, Matthias Uhl, Lyuba Vinogradova, Amir Weiner, and Larisa Zakharova, as well as the participants at conferences in Moscow, Los Angeles, Zurich, Princeton, and Paris, where I presented different pieces of the project.
I want to acknowledge the support of Rutgers University, which granted me leave to complete this book, and Sylvia Nagel, who offered expert assistance on multiple occasions as the manuscript was first prepared for publication.
The book originally appeared in German in the fall of 2012. For the English-language edition I have reworked significant portions, incorporating newly published archival material as well as criticisms and suggestions from other scholars, many of them listed above. For work on the English edition I am heavily indebted to the work of several translators: Christopher Tauchen has done a masterful job, translating all Russian original passages into English. He received advice from Robert Chandler, the translator of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and an unsurpassed authority on literary Stalingrad. Vitaliy Eyber translated the Russian passages in the first chapter. Dominic Bonfiglio did not merely translate my chapters and sections from German into English; he actively intervened to straighten out my sometimes convoluted thoughts.
I feel lucky to be working with PublicAffairs. Its publisher, Clive Priddle, displayed strokes of genius on repeated occasions, including with the choice of the English title. His team, around Melissa Raymond, Maria Goldverg, and Chris Juby, has been exemplary. I am also grateful to the copyeditor, Chrisona Schmidt, for very effectively dealing with a manuscript that at one point consisted of three different languages.
This book would likely not exist, and certainly not in its present shape, were it not for the continuing presence of three very dear people. In 1984 my father, Hannspeter Hellbeck, encouraged me to learn Russian and study Russian history. He himself had learned the language as a seventeen-year-old soldier in World War II. Later he embarked on a career in West Germany’s Foreign Ministry, where he wanted to study Russian but reconsidered when he saw the packed classrooms. He instead became an expert on China. Among the books he gave me was the first German edition of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.
Katinka’s love, humor, and sense of cool, even as a mother, nurture and ground me.
Thinking of our young son in relation to the horrors described in this book, I hope that life, new life, will trump what Grossman saw as our fate.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: THE FATEFUL BATTLE
1. Evgenii Kriger, “Eto—Stalingrad!” Izvestiia, October 25, 1942; see also M. Galaktionov, “Stalingrad i Verden,” Krasnaia Zvezda, October 3, 1942, p. 4.
2. Jens Wehner, “Stalingrad,” in Stalingrad, ed. Gorch Pieken et al. (Dresden, 2012), pp. 19–20.
3. Richard Overy, “Stalingrad und seine Wahrnehmung bei den Westalliierten,” in Stalingrad, ed. Gorch Pieken, pp. 106–117, at p. 113.
4. In fall 1942 British postal censors reported that virtually every letter checked by them lauded the Russians. Philip M. H. Bell, “Großbritannien und die Schlacht von Stalingrad,” in Stalingrad. Ereignis-Wirkung-Symbol, ed. Jürgen Förster (Munich, 1992), pp. 350–372, at p. 354.
5. Meldungen aus dem Reich. Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1938–1945, 17 vols., ed. Heinz Boberach, (Herrsching, 1984), 12:4720; January 28, 1943.
6. Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobi
bor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, IN, 1999), pp. 173–177.
7. Soviet writer Vasily Grossman was the first to link Himmler’s visit to the death camp to the Soviet victory at Stalingrad. Grossman was with the Red Army when it entered Treblinka in August 1944. Based on interviews with eyewitnesses and former camp workers he produced a harrowing account of the Nazi death camp. Vasily Grossman, “The Hell of Treblinka,” in The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (New York, 2010).
8. Alexander Werth, The Year of Stalingrad: An Historical Record and a Study of Russian Mentality, Methods, and Policies (1947; Safety Harbor, FL, 2001), p. 438. A British correspondent reported from Stalingrad for the Daily Telegraph as early as January 18, 1943. Bell, “Großbritannien und die Schlacht von Stalingrad,” p. 350.
9. See https://archive.org/details/WartimeRadio1943.
10. Alexander Werth, “Won’t Survive Two Stalingrads,” Winnipeg Tribune, February 12, 1943, p. 1; Henry Shapiro, “All of Stalingrad Ruined by Battles,” New York Times, February 9, 1943, p. 3.
11. Werth, Year of Stalingrad, pp. 443–446. In spite of these constraints, Alexander Werth was able to conduct and reproduce verbatim in-depth conversations with Generals Vasily Chuikov and Alexander Rodimtsev, two famous figures at Stalingrad whose much more detailed testimony figures in the present book. Werth, The Year of Stalingrad, pp. 456–460, 468–470.
12. Nauchnyi arkhiv Instituta Rossiiskoi istorii Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk (NA IRI RAN).
13. To illustrate the breadth of the interview corpus, Chapter 1 features many excerpts of voices from soldiers whose full transcripts did not enter the volume. A comprehensive online publication of the Stalingrad transcripts is planned.
14. The best military histories of the battle are, from the Axis side, Manfred Kehrig, Stalingrad: Analyse und Dokumentation einer Schlacht (Stuttgart, 1979); from the Soviet side, A. M. Samsonov, Stalingradskaia bitva, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1989); and from the two sides in interaction, David M. Glantz, To the Gates of Stalingrad: Soviet-German Combat Operations, April–August 1942 (Lawrence, KS, 2009); Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad: September–November 1942 (Lawrence, KS, 2009); Glantz, Endgame at Stalingrad: Book Two: December 1942–February 1943 (Lawrence, KS, 2014).
15. See the diary entries and letters of Ursula von Kardoff und Rudolf Tjaden in Walter Kempowski, Das Echolot: Ein kollektives Tagebuch, Januar und Februar 1943, 4 vols. (Munich, 1993); Friedrich Kellner, Vernebelt, verdunkelt sind alle Hirne: Tagebücher 1939–1945, ed. Sascha Feuchert et al. (Göttingen, 2011).
16. Vasily S. Grossman, Gody voiny [The War Years] (Moscow, 1989), p. 5. A Soviet writer and journalist, Grossman (1905–1964) reported to the front voluntarily in summer 1941. As a war correspondent he reported for the newspaper Red Star (Krasnaya zvezda), including the battle of Stalingrad and the battle of Berlin.
17. Printed verbatim in Prikazy narodnogo komissara oborony SSSR. 22 iiuniia 1941 g.–1942 g. (=Velikaia Otechestvennaia, vol. 13) (Moscow, 1997), pp. 276–279.
18. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Im Auftrag des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte und mit Unterstützung des Staatlichen Archivdienstes Russlands, ed. Elke Fröhlich, pt. 2: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 5: Juli–September 1942 (Munich, 1995), p. 353; see also Bernd Wegner, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1942/43, in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 6: Horst Boog et al., Der globale Krieg, vol. 6; Die Ausweitung zum Weltkrieg und der Wechsel der Initiative, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Stuttgart, 1990), p. 993.
19. Lazar Brontman, Voennyi dnevnik korrespondenta “Pravdy”: Vstrechi, sobytiia, sud’by, 1942–1945 (Moscow, 2007), p. 57. Diary entry for August 30, 1942. See also Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY, 2012), pp. 74–75, 132–133.
20. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, p. 119.
21. For the Soviet military, “front” designated what Germans referred to as an army group.
22. Colonel general Andrei Ivanovich Yeryomenko (1892–1970) was appointed commander of the Southeastern Front and the Stalingrad Front on August 12, 1942. On September 28, 1942, the Southeastern Front became part of the Stalingrad Front.
23. Lieutenant General Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky (1896–1968) commanded the Don Front between September 1942 and January 1943.
24. For more, see Kehrig, Stalingrad, pp. 86–119.
25. “Das ist der Unterschied,” Das Schwarze Korps, October 29, 1942, pp. 1–2.
26. Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Munich, 2007), pp. 326–340.
27. Facsimile of the order at http://www.historisches-tonarchiv.de/stalingrad/stalingrad-kampf175a.jpg.
28. General field marshal Erich von Manstein (1887–1973) was commander in chief of the Army Group Don between November 1942 and February 1943. The 6th Army formed part of this army group.
29. The Turkic term “Kurgan” means burial mound. Mamayev Kurgan is named after the Tatar military commander Mamai, who is buried there. On military maps the elevation was labeled “Hill 102.0.”
30. Werth, The Year of Stalingrad, p. 465.
31. Between August 21 and October 17, 1942, the 6th Army recorded 40,000 deaths, as well as an estimated 100,000 deaths up until November 19. In addition, there were an estimated 30,000 deaths in the 4th Panzer Army. Glantz, Armaggedon in Stalingrad, p. 716; Rüdiger Overmans, “Das andere Gesicht des Krieges: Leben und Sterben der 6. Armee,” in Förster, ed., Stalingrad: Ereignis—Wirkung—Symbol, p. 446. 113,000 survivors: Manfred Kehrig, “Die 6. Armee im Kessel von Stalingrad, in Stalingrad,” in Förster, ed., Stalingrad, p. 109. Overmans estimated the number of Romanian allies in the Kessel as only 5,000 (Overmans, “Das andere Gesicht,” pp. 441–442). Soviet loss figures in G. F. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London, 1997), pp. 125, 127; S. N. Michalev, Liudskie poteri v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945 gg. Statisticheskoe issledovanie (Krasnoiarsk, 2000), p. 17–41; for higher estimates, see B. V. Sokolov, “The Cost of War: Human Losses for the USSR and Germany, 1939–1945,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9 (March 1996): 152–193. Sokolov contends that the precise numbers given in divisional and army staff reports, which Krivosheev uses for his analysis, embellish the horrendous actual casualty rates in the Red Army. These, he writes, can be established only indirectly.
32. Stalingradskaia popeia: Vpervye publikuemye dokumenty, rassekrechennye FSB RF: Vospominaniia fel’dmarshala Pauliusa; Dnevniki i pis’ma soldat RKKA i vermakhta: Agenturnye doneseniia; Protokoly doprosov; Dokladnye zapiski osobykh otdelov frontov i armii (Moscow, 2000), p. 404.
33. Christian Gerlach, “Militärische ‘Versorgungszwänge,’ Besatzungspolitik, und Massenverbrechen: Die Rolle des Generalquartiermeisters des Heeres und seiner Dienststellen im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion,” in Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit: Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik, ed. Norbert Frei et al. (Munich, 2000), p. 199; T. Pavlova, Zasekrechennaia tragediia: Grazhdanskoe naselenie v Stalingradskoi bitve (Volgograd, 2005), p. 521; S. Sidorov, “Voennoplennye v Stalingrade. 1943–1954 gg.,” in Rossiiane i nemtsy v epokhu katastrof. Pamiat’ o voine i preodolenie proshlogo, ed. Jochen Hellbeck, Lars-Peter Schmidt, Alexander Vatlin (Moscow, 2012), pp. 75–87.
34. For critical reflections on this, see Michael Kumpfmüller, Die Schlacht von Stalingrad: Metamorphosen eines deutschen Mythos (Munich, 1995); Wolfram Wette and Gerd R. Ueberschär, eds., Stalingrad: Mythos und Wirklichkeit einer Schlacht (Frankfurt, 2012); Wegner, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1942/43, pp. 962–1063.
35. See Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad (Gütersloh, 1954); Kempowski, Das Echolot; Feldpostbriefe aus Stalingrad: November 1942 bis Februar 1943, ed. Jens Ebert (Göttingen, 2006).
36. Enlightening in this regard is Bernd Boll and Hans Safrian, “On the Way to Stalingrad: The 6th Army in 1941–1942,” in War of Extermination: The German Military in World W
ar II, 1941–1944, Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds., (New York, 2000), pp. 237–271.
37. Stalingrad: Eine Trilogie, directed by Sebastian Dehnhardt and Manfred Oldenburg.
38. Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories, trans. Anthony G. Powell (Chicago, 1958), p. 289.
39. Feldpostbriefe aus Stalingrad; Es grüsst Euch alle; Bertold. Von Koblenz nach Stalingrad: Die Feldpostbriefe des Pioniers Bertold Paulus aus Kastel (Nonnweiler-Otzenhausen, 1993); Stalingrad (1993), directed by Joseph Vilsmaier. Recent publications accentuate the ideological conditioning of everyday life at the front: Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, “States of Exception: The Nazi-Soviet War as a System of Violence, 1939–1945,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 345–395; Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 143–154.