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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
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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
10987654321
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 new in the history of warfare. This is Stalingrad.1
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, just as that of the Soviet Union, will depend on how it will end.”2 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 noted. “All they talk about is Stalingrad, just Stalingrad.”3 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 defeat.4
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 bullet, which they would save for themselves once “everything was over.”5 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 urgentl
y instructed the camp authorities to exhume all the bodies of the 700,000 Jews who had been killed there and cremate the corpses.6 For the next months until Treblinka was shut down, camp workers carried out their grim task while continuing to kill on a reduced scale. Himmler’s order grew out of an awareness that a time of reckoning for Germany was drawing near.7 While it would be another year and a half before the Red Army liberated the camps in Poland, the battle on the Volga disrupted the Nazi death machine. The Dresden newspaper was right, if for the wrong reasons: Stalingrad did mark a turning point in world history.
As long as the battle was raging, no foreign correspondents in Moscow were allowed to travel to Stalingrad. Secretive and distrustful, the Soviet authorities waited until February 4, 1943, before bringing in a first batch of international reporters—British, Americans, French, Czechs, Chinese.8 Among them was Paul Winterton, who aired this report for the BBC:
The streets of Stalingrad, if you can give the name to open spaces between ruins, still bear all the marks of battle. There’s the usual litter of helmets and weapons, stacks of ammunition, papers flattering in the snow, pocketbooks from dead Germans, and any number of smashed corpses, lying where they fell, or stacked up in great frozen heaps for later burial. Stalingrad can never be repaired. It will have to be rebuilt from the beginning. But even though all its buildings are wrecked there is life in it still. Along the narrow stretch of cement, which the Russians held through long months of assault, there is a city of dugouts—dugouts occupied by the soldiers who have not yet left, and by a few women who stayed behind to launder and cook for the men. There is a real party atmosphere among these people today. They are the proudest men and women I’ve ever seen. They know they’ve done a terrific job, and they’ve done it well. Their city has been destroyed, but they have smashed the invader by sheer stubbornness and unconquerable courage. These men and women fought and worked for months, with their backs to the river that they had sworn never to retreat across, facing an enemy who held the only dominating height in Stalingrad and who pounded them with shells and mortars, unceasingly by day and night. They clung to their narrow foothold, and their feet never slipped.9
Winterton opened with a panoramic account of the city and the detritus of war and then moved to what interested him and other journalists most: the defenders of Stalingrad. To Winterton, it was Russian “stubbornness and unconquerable courage” that decided the outcome of the battle; Alexander Werth, a reporter for the London Times, celebrated Red Army soldiers’ “extraordinary [ . . . ] individual achievements,” and for New York Times correspondent Henry Shapiro, Stalingrad symbolized the “triumph of men over metal”—Soviet men over German metal, to be exact.10 Valuable as these reports are as repositories of wartime views and emotions, they are also perfunctory and one-sided. The foreign correspondents were given only a quick tour of Stalingrad, and their Soviet guides were keen for them to meet the captured German generals rather than talk with Soviet citizens.11
The journalists touring the battleground in February 1943 did not know that more than a month earlier, a delegation of historians from Moscow had begun a large-scale project to document for posterity the voices of the Stalingrad defenders. They belonged to the Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War, which had been founded by Isaak Mints, a professor at Moscow State University.
The historians arrived in Stalingrad in late December 1942, and they took up their work on January 2, 1943. They visited various locations along the front line running through the embattled city: the steelworks in the north, General Vasily Chuikov’s command post, the Beketovka settlement at Stalingrad’s southern edge. In trenches and bunkers they spoke with commanders, officers, and soldiers of the Red Army. A stenographer accompanying them transcribed the interviews. The historians had to leave Stalingrad on January 9, a day before the Red Army began its final offensive, and they returned in February to resume their work just days after the Germans surrendered. In the following weeks and months, they conducted many one-on-one interviews, eventually collecting 215 eyewitness accounts: from generals, staff officers, troop commanders, simple foot soldiers, commissars, agitators, sailors of the Volga Military Flotilla, nurses, and a number of civilians—engineers, laborers, and a cook among them—who worked in the bombed-out city or were just struggling to survive there.
Their interviews bring the reader close to the battle and paint a vivid picture of the actions, thoughts, and feelings of the Soviet participants that is unique among known sources. Soldiers spoke off the cuff about their lives, delivering rich and colorful descriptions (some in vernacular idiom) with the immediacy of an audio recording. The interviewees talked about their hometowns, how they ended up in Stalingrad, and their assignments. Candid and firsthand, authentic and nuanced, they described moments of terror and exhilaration, discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet military leadership, boasted of the honors they received, and depicted the deeds of heroes and cowards. These interviews are also unique in that many of the participants fought side by side and mention each other by name. Regarded as a whole, the interviews convey a unity of place, time, and action, the likes of which are found only in literature.
The historians went about their work systematically. In some cases they interviewed dozens of members of a single division: the commander, the political representative, staff officers, regimental commanders, company leaders, and infantry. These include twenty-four soldiers from the 308th Rifle Division, a unit that suffered heavy losses northwest of the city before being reassigned to Stalingrad to protect the Barricades munitions plant. The historians also spoke with engineers in charge of planning the reconstruction of the Red October steelworks, and with more than twenty soldiers from the 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade who had captured General Paulus and the rest of the 6th Army command. Taken together, these individual perspectives give rise to a finely woven, multifaceted picture of soldiers in battle. Alongside this impressive specificity, the transcripts reveal shared spheres of experience and elucidate—credibly—how the Red Army operated as a combat force. The candor and complexity of the Stalingrad interviews sealed their fate, however. The historians were unable to obtain approval for publication from state censors during the war, and the documents they collected later disappeared in an archive.12 They are presented here in English for the first time.
Like the journalists who toured Stalingrad in early 1943, the historians around Isaak Mints were drawn to the city’s defenders. They hoped to find in their testimony answers to the question that observers around the world were asking: exactly how had the Red Army been able to prevail against an enemy who was considered superior in operational planning, soldierly discipline, and fighting skills? Which resources did the defenders of Stalingrad bring to bear that stopped the unbeatable Germans who had until now forced Europe to its knees? These questions occupy researchers to the present day. The perhaps most debated issue surrounds the motivation of Red Army soldiers at Stalingrad. Did they act freely or were they coerced into battle, even at gunpoint? Did they draw from traditional Russian values, or were they animated by specifically Soviet ones? How did love for the homeland, hatred toward the invader, and devotion to Stalin figure in Red Army soldiers’ willingness to fight and die? The wartime interviews that lie at the center of this book provide rich and at times startlingly new answers to these questions.
Featuring a panoply of Soviet voices from wartime, this book allows English readers for the first time to imagine Red Army soldiers and other defenders of the city as thinking and feeling individuals. As it gives these voices a forum, the book adds substantially to writing on World War II that—in part for lack of access to personal documents—portrays the Red Army as a depersonalized machine and often feeds on unverified clichés about “the Russian soldier.” The book also provides a corrective to the many studies on Stalingrad that present the clash largely through the eyes of the Germans who were trapped in the city. By contrast, the Stalingrad interviews show in compelling detail how Sov
iet citizens made sense of the battle and located themselves in it.
This first chapter presents a historical context to enable readers to better understand the transcripts generated by the Mints commission. It begins with an overview of the battle and its treatment by historians, followed by a short history of the Red Army and Soviet society that culminates with the war. It then observes political and military events at the Stalingrad front through a microscopic lens. The chapter also features the creation of the Historical Commission, its aims and methods, and its journey to Stalingrad. It closes with a discussion of the interviews included in this book and the form of their presentation.
These interviews were prepared for publication jointly by the German Historical Institute in Moscow and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Under my direction, a small team of historians spent two years accessing and inventorying thousands of pages of interview transcripts, internal commission documents, and other relevant sources. Space limitations dictated that only a portion of the interviews found entry into this volume.13 Ten of them are presented verbatim; many others are woven into veritable tapestries—they tell the story of the battle in the form a chorus of soldierly and civilian voices (Chapters 2–3).
As they talked about how they had experienced the battle of Stalingrad, many of the interviewees shared impressions and thoughts about their German adversary. The historians of the Mints commission were interested in this question, and they additionally collected documents that illuminated the personal horizons of German soldiers at Stalingrad. These documents, which include the transcripts of captured Germans who were interrogated in early February 1943 and the diary of a German soldier that was found on the battlefield, form the bulk of Chapter 4.
The final, fifth chapter covers the aftermath of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and follows the dramatic fate of the Soviet historians and writers who chronicled the battle.
A CITY UNDER SIEGE