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Stalingrad : the city that defeated the Third Reich PDF

550 Pages·2015·23.77 MB·English
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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 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 (800) 810-4145, 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

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"Just days after the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad, legendary Red Army sniper Vasily Zaytsev described the horrors he witnessed during the five-month long conflict: 'One sees the young girls, the children who hang from trees in the park... I have unsteady nerves and I'm constantly shaking.' He w
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