Stalingrad: Reap what you Sow

By Michael H. Kater

For the Germans, the defeat at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943, turned out to be a watershed in more ways than one. Within his larger strategic scheme, Hitler needed this industrial city on the Volga River in the Southeast of Russia because it was to be instrumental in salvaging the area already conquered beyond the Crimea and was a key post for further expansion in the East. It was in this entire region and further east into the Donets Basin and the Caucasus that the German armed Wehrbauern settlement would be started, so that agricultural staples, heavy industry, and valuable oil would be secured. Beyond these immediate goals, Hitler was hoping to move his armies into Iraq and Iran for the control of oil in those regions. Thereafter, joining up with Rommel's forces who would push east from North Africa, the aim was to unite with the Japanese and expel the British from South Asia.

After the Wehrmacht's setback on three extended Russian fronts in late 1941, Hitler's Army groups in the South were making headway again in the New Year, conquering Sevastopol on the southern Crimea in early July, 1942. By the end of that month three German armies were moving east and southeast, and in early August they occupied the first of several rich oil fields near Maikop in the northern Caucasus. Further to the northeast, General Friedrich Paulus ordered the attack on Stalingrad on August 19. Paulus was assisted by Luftwaffe General Wolfram von Richthofen, who flew 1,600 attacks against the city, bombing it into a field of ruins. Forty thousand civilians died. "Stalingrad was important not only as a major industrial center and as a place where the Germans could halt all shipping on the Volga but as the major connecting point to any operations in the Caucasus," writes Weinberg. It also possessed valuable armament factories. However, it soon became obvious that the city would be hard to conquer completely, in the face of continuing Soviet resistance. Until November, there was house-to-house combat. "Streams of blood in the streets," noted Nobel laureate Thomas Mann in his diary, who from his exile in Los Angeles was keenly following the war, "much of it German." When the Germans finally controlled most of the nearly destroyed city, their army had suffered huge losses. Having regrouped, the Russians began a concerted attack on the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad on November 19, and three days later, after a successful pincer operation by three Russian Army groups, Stalingrad was encircled. This came on the heels of the Soviet relief of Leningrad in the North, which had been besieged by the Germans for seventeen months. By January 1943, after three months of winter fighting, the Wehrmacht in southern Russia had lost more than half a million men in killed and wounded. Hitler, who refused General Paulus and his 6th Army permission to break out of the city, was still building on Göring's promise that Stalingrad could be well supplied from the air, with 300 tons of provisions per day, but the enfeebled Luftwaffe managed merely a third of that. And even then the Führer could not make good on his promise to send relief troops under General Erich von Manstein, but still he forbade Paulus to capitulate. The Soviets started to invade the city on January 10, 1943, and the German forces inside were split in two. On February 2 Paulus, having just been promoted to field marshal, capitulated of his own volition, surrendering 90,000 men to the Russians, of an army originally up to 250,000 strong. The rest had fallen or died of disease and hunger. Of those taken prisoner, most perished soon after; only 5,000 eventually made it back to Germany.

The disillusionment and desperation experienced by the young soldiers before their certain doom is evident from their diaries and letters, as well as from the memoirs of the few wounded soldiers who were flown out by the Luftwaffe or those who eventually returned from captivity. They stand in grotesque contrast to Hitler's and Goebbels's decision to recast what was a major disaster for the nation as a giant heroic sacrifice. Instead of owning up to egregious military blunders and a deplorable defeat culminating in dishonorable unconditional surrender, as Paulus himself had been too cowardly to stand up to Hitler, Nazi propaganda proclaimed the event to have been a valiant action, in which every single German soldier in the cauldron of Stalingrad willingly laid down his life for Germany and its Führer.

As part of this larger deception, German families on Christmas 1942 were linked to a radio broadcast from Stalingrad, so that they could join the soldiers in singing "Silent Night." Those families did not know that the link-up was a fake; 1,280 soldiers died in Stalingrad on Christmas Day alone. Two separate reports on Christmas in and around Stalingrad tell us that one group of German soldiers had to dig themselves a new hole with a makeshift roof on Holy Night, during a snowstorm at minus 30 degrees Celsius. Lacking bread or potatoes, they made hamburgers out of horsemeat; there were no parcels or letters from home. The other group huddled nearby did have a bit of chocolate and candy, a few pieces of meat and bread. They consumed this an hour after Russian artillery had torn a comrade to shreds.

Although there was hope against hope to the very day of surrender, a growing sense of despair had begun during the advance on the city in the late fall of 1942, especially among the young soldiers just out of the HJ and still dependent on home. The lack of mail delivery seemed incomprehensible to the younger men, particularly at Christmas. And then there was hunger. Because of constant air-supply interruptions, rations of bread and meat had to be incrementally decreased, until by Christmas Eve sixty-four soldiers had died of undernourishment. Around this time, meat from the dying horses and the stray cats, dogs, and rats was becoming the sole staple, with minuscule portions at that. The men made soup from sawdust. Because of the lack of fresh water, thirst added to the agony of famine. Göring's planes were still dropping supply bags, but they often missed their targets, falling to the enemy instead. During January the German soldiers were drinking machine oil and cannibalizing dead comrades. Many of those taken prisoner on February 2 had not eaten anything for about a week.

The infamous Russian cold, setting in by early November, compounded the nutrition problem. The steppe in front of Stalingrad contained no wood for burning, and inside the city's walls combustible material was scarce, as was gasoline. Garments were deemed to be sufficiently warm only after several dead soldiers had been stripped of their uniforms; even then hypothermia proved endemic.

The cold did not destroy lice and fleas, which carried diseases such as typhus. One of the most common causes of death in the Stalingrad area apart from malnutrition was freezing. Sheer exhaustion after days and nights of sleeplessness was also widespread, weakening a soldier's will to live. Having been wounded would prolong his agony, unless he was lucky enough to be flown out of the encircled area. At one of two functioning airports, the lightly wounded kept stepping over more serious cases in an effort to reach a plane; they had to be restrained with pistols. A doctor reported in January that on the roads around Stalingrad lay the wounded, as well as those frozen to death and still freezing, who were blocking his car with their bodies. "Their screams begging to be run over or be rescued repeated themselves with variations over the entire route. Many were lifting their hands entreatingly, hidden in soaked bandages, some were shaking their fists, and others did not stir at all." By the end of the month approximately 40,000 wounded German soldiers were staggering from one field hospital to the next, never finding entry and finally collapsing in the city's ruins. The Russians bombed one of the central sickbays, resulting in 3,000 patients being burned to death.