Stalingrad : the city that defeated the Third Reich

550 Pages·2015·23.77 MB·English

STALINGRAD
Attack. Stalingrad, 1943. Photographer: Natalya Bode

This book has been prepared as part of a joint agreement between the Institute of Russian History of the
Russian Academy of Sciences and the German Historical Institute in Moscow.
Copyright © 2015 by Jochen Hellbeck.
First published in Germany in 2012 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH.
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights
reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs,
th
250 West 57th Street, 15 Floor, New York, NY 10107.
PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations,
institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department
at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call [phone],
ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].
Book Design by Pauline Brown
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hellbeck, Jochen.
[Stalingrad-Protokolle. English]
Stalingrad : the city that defeated the Third Reich / Jochen Hellbeck.—First edition.
pages cm “First published in Germany in 2012 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH”—Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61039-497-0 (electronic) 1. Stalingrad, Battle of, Volgograd, Russia, 1942–1943. 2.
Stalingrad, Battle of, Volgograd, Russia, 1942–1943—Personal narratives, Russian. 3. Stalingrad,
Battle of, Volgograd, Russia, 1942–1943—Personal narratives, German. I. Title.
D764.3.S7H4513 2015
940.54'21747—dc23
2015002880
First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: THE FATEFUL BATTLE
A City Under Siege
Interpretations of the Battle
Revolutionary Army
Stalin’s City
Prewar Era
Army and Party in War
Commanders and Commissars
Politics, Up Close
The Hero Strategy
Good and Bad Soldiers
Forms of Combat
People in War
Historians of the Avant-Garde
The Commission in Stalingrad
The Transcripts
Editorial Principles
CHAPTER 2: A CHORUS OF SOLDIERS
The Fate of the City and Its Residents
Agrafena Pozdnyakova
Gurtyev’s Rifle Division in Battle
Vasily Grossman’s “In the Line of the Main Drive”
The Landing at Latoshinka
The Capture of Field Marshal Paulus
CHAPTER 3: NINE ACCOUNTS OF THE WAR
General Vasily Chuikov
Guards Division General Alexander Rodimtsev
Nurse Vera Gurova
A Lieutenant from Odessa: Alexander Averbukh
Regimental Commander Alexander Gerasimov
The History Instructor: Captain Nikolai Aksyonov
Sniper Vasily Zaytsev
A Simple Soldier: Alexander Parkhomenko
Captain Pyotr Zayonchkovsky
CHAPTER 4: THE GERMANS SPEAK
German Prisoners in February 1943
A German Diary from the Kessel
CHAPTER 5: WAR AND PEACE
Illustration Credits
Maps
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
1
THE FATEFUL BATTLE
The battle of Stalingrad—the most ferocious and lethal battle in human history
—ended on February 2, 1943. With an estimated death toll in excess of a
million, the bloodletting at Stalingrad far exceeded that of Verdun, one of the
costliest battles of World War I. The analogy with Verdun was not lost on
German and Soviet soldiers who fought at Stalingrad. As they described the
“hell of Stalingrad” in their private letters, some Germans saw themselves
trapped in a “second Verdun.” Many Soviet defenders meanwhile extolled
Stalingrad, a city with a prehistory of bloody warfare, as their “Red Verdun,”
vowing never to surrender it to the enemy. But, as a Soviet war correspondent
reporting from Stalingrad in October 1942 remarked, the embattled city differed
from Verdun: it had not been designed as a stronghold and it possessed
no fortresses or concrete shelters. The line of defense passes through
waste grounds and courtyards where housewives used to hang out the
laundry, across the tracks of the narrow gauge railway, through the house
where an accountant lived with his wife, two children and aging mother,
through dozens of similar houses, through the now deserted square and
its mangled pavement, through the park where just this past summer
lovers sat whispering to one another on green benches. A city of peace
has become a city of war. The laws of warfare have placed it on the front
line, at the epicenter of a battle that will shape the outcome of the entire
war. In Stalingrad, the line of defense passes through the hearts of the
Russian people. After sixty days of fighting the Germans now know what
this means. “Verdun!” they scoff. This is no Verdun. This is something
1
new in the history of warfare. This is Stalingrad.
Lasting six months, the battle also unfolded as a global media war. From the
very beginning observers on all sides were fixated on the gigantic clash at the
edge of Europe, heralding it a defining event of World War II. The fight for
Stalingrad would become the “most fateful battle of the war,” a Dresden paper
wrote in early August 1942, just when Hitler’s soldiers were preparing their
assault on the city. The British Daily Telegraph used virtually the same terms in
September. In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels read the papers of Germany’s enemies
attentively. The battle of Stalingrad, the Nazi propaganda chief declared with a
nod to the British daily, was a “question of life or death, and all of our prestige,
2
just as that of the Soviet Union, will depend on how it will end.” Starting in
October 1942, Soviet newspapers regularly cited western reports that extolled
the heroism of the soldiers and civilians defending the city against Germany’s
mechanical warriors. In pubs throughout England the radio would be turned on
for the start of the evening news only to be turned off after the report on
Stalingrad had aired: “Nobody wants to hear anything else,” a British reporter
3
noted. “All they talk about is Stalingrad, just Stalingrad.” Among the Allied
nations, people euphorically commented on the performance of the Soviets at
Stalingrad. This sentiment not only reflected the spirit of the antifascist alliance;
it also owed to the fact that the western Allied soldiers could not offer any
comparable feats: for over a year the British army had suffered defeat after
4
defeat.
In November, a Soviet counterattack trapped more than 300,000 German and
Axis soldiers in the Stalingrad pocket, or Kessel. German media abruptly
stopped reporting on the battle and did not resume until late January 1943, when
Nazi leaders realized they could not pass over the rout of an entire German army
in silence. They cast the battle as one of heroic self-sacrifice, fought by German
soldiers defending Europe against a superior Asian enemy. The propaganda of
fear, reinforced by appeals to German citizens to embrace total war, worked
imperfectly. The German security police reported that people spoke of the last
5
bullet, which they would save for themselves once “everything was over.” One
German official undertook particular precautions in the wake of Stalingrad: SS
Chief Heinrich Himmler visited the Treblinka death camp in eastern Poland in
early March 1943. He urgently instructed the camp authorities to exhume all the