Voices from Stalingrad

First-hand Accounts from World War II's Cruellest Battle

Jonathan Bastable

• Publisher: Greenhill Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781784384432
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Seconde Guerre mondiale

This history of the pivotal WWII Battle of Stalingrad reveals newly translated firsthand accounts from Russian and German soldiers as well as civilians. In August of 1942, the German Army and Axis Powers invaded the city of Stalingrad in Southern Russia. The ensuing battle was one of the most protracted and bitterly fought conflicts of the Second World War. More than five months later, Germany was forced to retreat in what would be a major turning point in the war. Voices from Stalingrad presents a vividly intimate account of the battle. It is largely told through the personal accounts of the German and Soviet soldiers who fought, the Russian civilians who watched the destruction of their city, and Western onlookers such as diplomats and newspaper correspondents. Many of these voices are gleaned from newly-discovered archive material, and from rare sources and reminiscences in Germany and Russia, including KGB sources. No previous work about Stalingrad places such emphasis on the experience of ordinary fighters and civilians. Further supporting the accounts—many of which have never been published or are totally unknown in the English-speaking world—are numerous archival photographs from both sides of the front.

1

FROM REDBEARD TO BLUE

The war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was a clash of ideologies, a tussle between empires, and a continuation of the age-old struggle between the European West and the Asiatic East. It was also a collision of two psychopathic personalities. At the nub of the war on the eastern front was the rivalry between the criminally xenophobic person of Adolf Hitler and the morbidly paranoid figure of Joseph Stalin. The battle between them took on a grandiose and fearsome life of its own at Stalingrad in 1942. It became a monster that consumed as many as two million men.

Years before he came to power, Hitler had made plans for a crusade against the barbaric Bolshevik east. It is all set out in his early autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle’). Hitler wrote the book in 1924, while serving a prison sentence for attempting a coup in Bavaria. It consisted of a queasy mix of anti-Jewish and anti-Communist rants, self-pitying or self-aggrandizing reminiscences, and dull lectures on German politics. It was an indigestible recipe for a book, and even Hitler’s closest friends and allies admitted in private that they had not been able to finish it.

But for all its ghastliness as a piece of writing, Mein Kampf does express the fullness of its author’s philosophy. And with a true politician’s instinct, Hitler reduces his theories to a series of easy slogans. Among the catchwords is Volk, which means The people’ but contains the quasi-mystical notion that the Germanic peoples represent the peak of humanity’s cultural evolution, and so have a special destiny to rule over lesser nations. Then there is Lebensraum —Tiving space’ — the idea that there was not room enough in Germany for the energetic Germans, that the nation needed to expand. A third slogan is Drang nach Osten — roughly ‘the urge to the east’ — which is the proposition that the natural annexe of Greater Germany lies in the fertile farmland of Poland and the Western Ukraine. Add to all this such martial contentions as ‘the German people owes its existence solely to its determination to fight,’ and you have a programme for robbing the Slavic peoples of their ancestral territory. Once Hitler was at the helm, war with Russia was always going to happen.

Hitler was happier performing to an audience than writing books (even Mein Kampf was dictated to his doggish underling, Rudolf Hess), and in his speeches he occasionally came out with an arresting turn of phrase. In 1936, for example, while addressing a gathering of the Nazi party faithful in Munich, he made this strangely intimate remark:

I follow the path that Providence has ordained with the assurance of a sleepwalker.

That single sentence says a great deal about the man. The path of fate is laid out in advance — so whatever Hitler does on that path is by definition right, and the idea that he might make mistakes becomes a logical impossibility. Meanwhile, the sleeping Hitler sees only his dream, which is both his inspiration and his own creation. There is no question that he is responsible for what he does in his dreaming state, or that those actions might be morally wrong. However nightmarish the sleepwalker’s vision, he has a perfect right to live it out.

THE TWO DICTATORS

Hitler was democratically elected Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. At that time, Joseph Stalin had been master of the Kremlin for some years. It has been pointed out that there are some striking parallels between the lives of Hitler and Stalin. Both had experience of war in their youth — Hitler was a lowly infantryman on the Western Front in World War I; Stalin was a commander in the Russian Civil War. Both men served time in prison for their revolutionary activities in the countries that they came to lead.

Intriguingly, both were from national minorities. Hitler was an Austrian, not a German; Stalin came from the Caucasian province of Georgia, and Georgian was his native language (he spoke Russian with a marked foreign accent all his life).

Once they came to power, both men were tyrants — and both used their great personal power to boost the standing of their respective nations. Stalin, for his part, inaugurated the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union by means of ‘five-year plans’, and in so doing made the USSR into a modern superpower. In February 1931 he said:

Those that lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. Old Russia was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans, she was beaten by Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian Pans, she was beaten by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all for her backwardness. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they will crush us.

Stalin was right to link the necessity for modernization to the threat of war, to all the wars that Russia had fought and lost. And his guess that he had a decade to catch up was spot on, as the German invasion was to come ten years and four months after he spoke those words. By then, Stalin had succeeded in dragging the new Soviet state into the 20th century. The first five-year plans effectively put the country’s economy on a war footing, though the war was yet to come. Factory cities were built in the ore-rich regions, and these new cities were populated by enthusiastic young migrants. Entire new industries were planted and took root in Siberia. Medieval farming methods were abolished — the tractor drove out the horse-drawn plough — and agriculture was brought under state control. A modern army and air force were created.

But these changes came at immense cost. When the mass of Russian peasants were herded into large state-run collective farms, they lost their livestock and their right to sell privately. The better-off peasants resisted the process fiercely, and so felt the full force of the Socialist state’s determination to industrialize. Millions of these ‘kulaks’ were liquidated; a famine was engineered in the western Ukraine to break the resistance of the Ukraine people to Soviet rule and to collectivization.

The educated classes — the intelligentsia — were also seen by the new regime as a brake on the process of modernization, as reluctant bystanders to the historic triumph of the working classes. In the Great Terror of the 1930s they were arrested in their hundreds of thousands. The process became a kind of mass psychosis, in which Stalin’s own suspicious and vengeful personality was magnified and let loose on the populace. ‘Enemies of the people’ were deemed to be at work in every factory and office. People denounced their neighbours, and the arrestees, under torture, denounced anyone they could think of, thereby providing a fresh crop of enemies for the secret police — the NKVD — to gather in. Victims of this process were shot or else shipped to the gulag, where they worked as slave labourers on immense industrial projects such as the building of the White Sea Canal.

Disastrously for the conduct of the war that was yet to come, there was a mighty purge of the armed forces in 1937 and 1938. Officers were arrested and eliminated in their thousands. Almost half of the entire officer corps was shot or deported to the camps. Among the victims were many of the highest-ranking soldiers: 60 out of 85 corps commanders, 110 out of 195 divisional commanders, 220 out of 406 brigade commanders. No foreign enemy could have caused such attrition: Stalin had decapitated his own army on the eve of war.

Soon after the purges, a system of‘dual command’ was introduced in the Red Army: every officer, from the highest general to the lowliest lieutenant, was to be shadowed by a ‘commissar’, a politically minded officer who would act as the ideological conscience of the commander. Commissars were first used in the Russian Civil War, when many officers in the Red Army were former Tsarist soldiers — good at their jobs, but not necessarily committed to the Bolshevik cause. The need for political overseers had died away in the 1920s, once the state ideology permeated through the officer corps. So the reintroduction of the commissar system now was a measure of the distrust Stalin felt for his own armed forces.

Hitler’s revival of Germany meanwhile was, one might almost say, spiritual in character. He aimed to change the German people’s idea of itself, and — to the immense detriment of Germany and the peoples of Europe — he succeeded brilliantly. Many Germans of Hitler’s generation were bitter about their country’s defeat in the Great War. They saw the peace terms imposed by the Western Allies at Versailles as a stain on their national honour. Hitler’s impassioned rhetoric seemed to acknowledge those old hurts, but he also had a practical remedy to hand. As soon as Hitler took power, he got down to rebuilding Germany’s armed forces, the Wehrmacht. Rearmament was in direct contravention of the Versailles treaty, but Allied governments turned a blind eye, not wanting to provoke the irascible new leader of Germany. This allowed Hitler to increase the number of men under arms from barely 100,000 to almost four million between 1932 and 1939. At the same time he, like Stalin, devoted resources to the construction of a powerful air force and large numbers of tanks.

There was one man who quickly realized that it was not just the number but also the nature of Hitler’s new soldiers that gave cause for alarm. As early as 1934 Winston Churchill said: ‘Germany is now equipping itself with the technical apparatus of modern war, and at the same time is instilling into the hearts of its youths and manhood the most extreme patriotic, nationalist and militarist conceptions.’ Not just a new generation of footsoldiers, then, but fanatical Nazi stormtroopers — eager for glory and conquest. Churchill’s insight was shrewd, but at this time he was out of government and out of favour. Hardly anyone heeded his warning.

THE ROAD TO WAR

Hitler tested his strength, and his future enemies’ will to resist him, in an incremental series of aggressive foreign-policy adventures. First, he withdrew Germany from the League of Nations and refused to continue paying reparations to the victors of the Great War. In 1935 he wrested the coal-rich Saarland from French control; in 1936 he sent troops into the demilitarized zone west of the Rhine, bringing his army up to the Dutch and Belgian borders. In March 1938 he annexed Austria to Germany. Hitler claimed he was merely bringing ethnic Germans back under the protection of the Reich, and that he was doing so at those peoples’ own request. The same argument justified the takeover of the Sudetenland, German-speaking borderlands of Czechoslovakia, in September 1938.

This gradual expansion was achieved more or less peacefully, with the acquiescence of the Western powers. After the Sudetenland, Hitler declared that he had no more territorial claims in Europe, and many people across Europe breathed a sigh of relief. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, went to Munich and extracted a promise from the Führer that his appetite was sated, and got him to put his signature to it. Chamberlain came back triumphant from Germany, and waved that flimsy paper above his head. ‘It’s peace in our time’ he announced.

But time was running out. Hitler thought nothing of breaking the undertaking he had signed with Chamberlain, and in 1939 he began to put pressure on Poland to allow a corridor across its territory to the German-speaking city of Danzig on the Baltic coast, and to the little enclave of East Prussia beyond it. The Poles refused to cede any territory to Germany, and so Hitler threatened to take a chunk of Poland by force.

But first he had some business to conclude with Stalin, who for years had been railing against Hitler’s land-greed and the Western powers’ cowardly policy of appeasement. Hitler needed to reassure Stalin that his drive to the east represented no threat to the Soviet Union. The two leaders did not meet in person, but their respective foreign ministers, Joachim Ribbentrop for Germany and Vyacheslav Molotov for Russia, negotiated a non-aggression treaty that was signed in August 1939. This was a stunning event: The sinister news broke upon the world like an explosion,’ wrote Churchill. In the House of Commons Chamberlain said with almost comical understatement that: ‘I do not attempt to conceal from the House that the announcement came to the government as a surprise, and a surprise of a very unpleasant character.’

But the most outrageous and sinister part of the treaty remained secret. Hitler and Stalin had agreed to share out the lands that lay between their two empires. When Hitler invaded Poland from the west, Stalin was to take possession of the eastern half of the country. Stalin would also be free to occupy the three free Baltic states — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — and in the south he would grab the Romanian-speaking province of Bessarabia (soon to be renamed Moldavia). This cynical division of the spoils made war in Europe not only inevitable, but also imminent.

A week after the pact was sealed, German troops marched into Poland. This provoked Britain, which had no means of helping the Poles, into making an impotent declaration of war. Stalin waited a couple of weeks until the Germans had completed their blitzkrieg campaign, then sent his troops across the western border of the USSR. Within a few days Russian and German troops faced each other along a new frontier running north to south across what had been Polish territory. Poland itself had effectively ceased to exist.

Stalin could now relax. It seemed that the war would play itself out in Western Europe. In 1940 he watched from the Kremlin as Hitler unleashed his shiny new war machine on Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. He observed from a distance the air battle over Britain and the subsequent bombing of British cities. True enough, Stalin took some military precautions in 1941, as reports came in that Germany was planning to break the non-aggression treaty, and he was alarmed and angered by an obvious build-up of German forces on his western borders. But like Chamberlain and other leaders in the 1930s, Stalin did not want to rile Hitler, especially now that the Wehrmacht had been tempered in battle and had all the resources of Europe behind it.

In the middle of June 1941 Stalin received a frantic message from his most reliable foreign spy, saying that the Germans were definitely going to invade in one week’s time. It was a golden piece of intelligence — but Stalin refused to believe it.

BARBAROSSA — ‘REDBEARD’

The German attack on Russia was launched before dawn on the morning of 22 June 1941. It was the largest invasion in the history of warfare. Some four million men smashed through the Soviet defences at three points along the lengthy Russian border. Army Group North struck across the Baltic states towards Leningrad; Army Group Centre headed due east from Warsaw towards Minsk, Smolensk and, beyond them, Moscow; Army Group South, backed up by Hungarian and Romanian forces, punched its way into the Ukraine. This vast onslaught was code-named ‘Barbarossa’ — Redbeard — in honour of Frederick I, the great German king who led the Third Crusade against Saladin in 1189. For Hitler, this was a no less glorious and sanctified undertaking. He was going to rid the world of the heresy of Bolshevism.

Stalin, for his part, was shocked to the core by the treacherous attack. He seems to have had some kind of breakdown, for he disappeared into his apartment and did not emerge for days. In effect, he deserted his post as commander-in-chief. To the dismay and bewilderment of the Soviet people, it was foreign minister Molotov who made the radio announcement on the first day of the invasion, informing them that the country was at war. But within the fortnight Stalin somehow pulled himself together, and emerged from his dark hidey-hole. On 3 July he addressed his people in a radio broadcast. Erskine Caldwell, an American living in Moscow, was up early to hear the speech. This is what he wrote in his diary:

At 6.30 am practically every person in the city was within earshot of a radio, either home set or street loudspeaker. Red Square and the surrounding plazas, usually partially deserted at that hour, were filled with crowds. When Stalin’s speech began, his words resounded from all directions, indicating that amplifiers were carrying the message to every nook and cranny of the city. This was Stalin’s first speech to the people through a microphone since 1938. His intervening ones had been delivered either to government gatherings or for recording machines.

Stalin’s guttural Georgian consonants would have grated on Russian ears had he not been so feared and revered. His tone was flat and his delivery was halting, but his first words were emotional, replete with the paternal condescension of the tsars of old: ‘Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighting men of our army and navy. I am speaking to you, my friends ...’ He began with a great lie. He said that ‘the enemy’s finest divisions had already been smashed and met their doom on the field of battle’, adding the contradictory admission that ‘the enemy continues to push forward’. Then he summed up the Germans’ war aims as he saw them, or as he wanted his simple people to understand them:

The enemy is cruel and implacable. He is out to seize our lands watered by the sweat of our brow, to seize our grain and oil, secured by the labour of our hands. He is out to restore the rule of the landlords, to restore tsarism, to Germanize our people, to turn them into the slaves of German princes and barons.

All this was true, given a little poetic licence. But everything Stalin had said up to this point was a preamble for his call to arms, his summons to destroy the enemy or, failing that, to destroy everything in his path, to ‘scorch the earth’ of Russia and make life hell for the invader.

In case of a forced retreat, all rolling stock must be evacuated, the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, a single pound of grain or gallon of fuel.

The collective farmers must drive all their cattle and turn over their grain to the safe keeping of the authorities for transport to the rear. All valuable property, including metals, grain and fuel, that cannot be withdrawn, must be destroyed without fail.

In areas occupied by the enemy, guerrilla units, mounted and on foot, must be formed. Sabotage groups must be organized to combat the enemy, to foment guerrilla warfare everywhere, to blow up bridges and roads, to damage telephone and telegraph lines, to set fire to forests, stores and transport. In occupied regions conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and his accomplices. They must be hounded and annihilated...