Antony Beevor (1998) Stalingrad.

‘Time is blood.’

Stalingrad won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson History Prize, and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature. Why does Antony Beevor’s account of a battle fought over 80 years ago still resonate?

‘The Great Patriotic War’ ideology derives from Stalingrad’s epic scale of the suffering and dead first appeared in Pravda. Around four million ‘German’ soldiers pushed into the Soviet Union. Around a quarter were Austrians, Romanians, Hungarians, Ukrainians and Italians.

‘The vastness of Russia devours us,’ wrote Field Marshal von Runstedt.

Operation Barbarossa was a sweeping success. Stalin had refused to believe in the invasion plans. Countless sources had informed him, over eighty warnings in eight months. Beria and the NKVD persecuted those that spread such anti-Soviet propaganda, while logging more than ‘thirty-nine aircraft incursions’ in the days leading up to the invasion.

The Luftwaffe took soviet aircraft out on the ground. Less than five percent survived. Nazi air dominance was assured.

Soviet tanks and troops could move safely only at night. Four million volunteers were pressed into service. Many without weapons or uniforms faced the Panzer division.

In the first weeks of war the Red Army lost most of its officers, 3500 tanks, 6000 aircraft and over two million men. The German encirclement of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, added around another 665 000 Russian prisoners of war to the 300 000 and 100 000 already in pockets of resistance at Uman in August. Most of them would starve to death. The last of little or no provisions were made to feed them. German troops scavenged from civilians. When winter came—temperatures dropping to almost 30 degrees Centigrade below zero—also stealing clothing and leaving men, women and children starving and freezing to death. Ukrainian patriots committed acts of sabotage and volunteered for the Wehrmacht, which made up most of the invading army. Untermensch who made up most prison guards and in Nazi death squads operating in conquered territories.    

Neither Hitler nor Stalin was concerned with the hundreds of thousands or tens of millions of mostly Soviet casualties that would follow. Stalin’s jibe at the Teheran conference in 1943—before an ‘iron curtain’ at Yalta in 1945 was brought down across much of Eastern Europe—he would shoot tens of thousands of German officers had Churchill storming away. Stalin was amused. He brought him back to the bargaining table, conceding it had been a joke. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill could argue with the Soviet war effort. Churchill had presented Stalin with a sword on behalf of King George V in appreciation.

Soviet casualties  — 9 million dead and 18 million wounded — gave Stalin leverage his Western allies lacked.  

The Katyn Massacre, occurred in 1940 when approximately 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia were executed by the NKVD under Stalin’s orders, ironically, was uncovered and used a propaganda tool by Goebbels to show how their former allies behaved during the invasion and breached international guidelines of how to behave during war.  

Hitler’s hubris was a belief in his own genius. A photoshoot in Paris with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop seemed to the German people confirmation of this. He demanded Moscow and the Caucasus oilfields at the same time. But this was a war in which around 600 000 horses were mobilised. Oxen and camels used. Men could only march on their stomach around 20 to 40 miles per day. 2 500 miles from home.

A news blackout in Germany meant the general population knew little of what was happening in the East and in Russia. Field Marshal Paulus sent young Captain Winrich Behr, panzer division and winner of the Knight’s Cross to report the seriousness of the situation to their general commander in his Wolfsschanze two days before the Soviet offensive.

Hitler’s plans for a counteroffensive were based on magical thinking. Field Marshal Keitel had attempted to silence Behr’s frank admission of overextended supply lines. An exhausted and starving army out of fuel and food, frozen and running on empty.

Behr saw clearly Germany would lose the war. Hitler ‘had lost touch with reality. He lived a fantasy world of maps and flags’.      

 Ironically, his aristocratic general staff, who had pledged allegiance to him, Beevor notes, were the only group capable of disposing or assassinating him. Anti-Nazis such as The White Rose group were a minority and were dealt with as brutally as the NKDV dealt with supposed traitors.

‘Enjoy the war, the peace will be much worse.’

Berliner’s gallows humour was recognition the war was lost. Stalingrad had provided the perfect killing ground for Nazi ideology. The Untermensch had died in their millions. But they’d fought on. A posting to the East for German soldiers now meant a freezing hell covered in lice with little or nothing to eat and an almost certain death sentence. No surprise those Nazi officers that found posting away from Stalingrad—no common soldier would find himself so lucky—spoke of being reborn.

Soviet propaganda was almost true. ‘The morale of an army depends on the socially just and progressive order of the society it defends’.

The German Sixth Army refused to believe they were encircled. Generals could not contemplate that their counterparts had learned from their battlefield defeats. Ration strength was weighted in favour Germans and Austrians in terms not just of food, but weapons and fuel. Around, the Red Army targeted 12 000 Romanians of an army of almost 300 00. Army General Zhukov had to plead with Stalin to put off the operation for a day or two and wait for freezing fog to clear. A breach in their defence and Sixth Army cut off from supplies.

Over 50 000 of the Sixth Army already dead.

Hitler refused to believe in defeat or retreat. Aircraft drops provided a fraction of what supplies were needed to fight on. These also dropped off as Soviet planes won the skies.

91 000 prisoners, including 22 German generals, paraded in Moscow for journalists.

Unranked German soldiers, like their Russian counterparts, were starved and beaten. Soldiers took pot-shots as they were marched away. The NKDV were waiting and searching for traitors in their ranks. Fewer than one in ten would make it home. Ukrainians and those born in Eastern Europe that fought against the Motherland summarily executed.

Chances of survival was dependent not just on nationality—Austrians in German uniform no longer called themselves German—but on rank. Over 95% of the common soldiers and NCOs died. Ironically, respect for social hierarchy and rank allowed senior officers the best chance of survival.

Starvation, typhus, jaundice, diphtheria, dropsy, tuberculosis and in warmer weather malaria, did not respect rank. Cannibalism was a feature of Nazi and Russian camps.

Infestation of lice and given.   Like Napoleon’s 1812 campaign, winter was the best general. Horses gnawed on bits of wood. Civilians cut lumps from frozen animals and relied on their guts to feed themselves. The miracle was they could. 9 796 civilians, including 994 children, survived amid the ruin of Stalingrad. The Stalingrad Party Committee reported only nine children were reunited with their parents.

‘Most of the children had been living in the ground for four of five winter months. They were swollen with hunger. They cringed in corners, afraid to speak, or even look at people’.

Soviet snipers killed them as the Germans used them to fill their water bottles from the Volga.

When the fighting was over and the mines cleared, priority was given to rebuilding NKDV headquarters. Stalin and Putin’s nomenclature remained the best fed and best equipped to re-establish a bureaucratic and brutal new world order. Read on.   

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