Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  STALINGRAD

  ‘My choice this year is, without any doubt, Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, a magnificent winter tapestry… it reads like an accessible novel rather than the superb history book which it really is’ Dirk Bogarde, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad is superb: a gripping and dispassionate account of alternating folly and endurance’ Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph

  ‘I have recently read and been hugely impressed by Stalingrad by Antony Beevor’ Ben Elton, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Stalingrad is distinguished not only for its exhaustive research and sheer narrative drive, but for its portrayal of the ordinarily human during one of the most atrocious battles of the century’ Colin Thubron, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A brilliantly researched tour de force’ Sarah Bradford, Sunday Times

  ‘Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor is the best battle history for many years – balanced, dramatic, dreadful’ Robert Conquest, The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Stalingrad by Antony Beevor cannot fail to leave one moved’ Victoria Mather, Daily Mail

  ‘As good a piece of war history as I have ever read’ Jeremy Paxman, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Revealing, profound and thoroughly unputdownable, Stalingrad is an extraordinary achievement which transcends its genre… It felt as if I was reading a classical epic drama of the scope of War and Peace’ Vitali Vitaliev, Daily Telegraph

  ‘A classic… Stalingrad is only bedtime reading for those who do not dream’ Amanda Foreman, Independent

  ‘This book is overpowering… Beevor’s description of the events of the battle remain with the reader long after the book has been closed’ Toronto Globe and Mail

  ‘This retelling of the Battle of Stalingrad has proved to be a surprising runaway hit. It is no small achievement to have reached such a wide audience with the pity of this particular war’ Economist

  ‘Truly powerful’ David Pryce-Jones, Daily Mail

  ‘Stalingrad’s heart-piercing tragedy needed a chronicler with acute insight into human nature as well as the forces of history. Antony ‘Beevor is that historian’ Philadelphia Inquirer

  ‘A wonderfully readable work of history’ Wall Street Journal

  ‘A masterly account of hubris and nemesis on a classic scale… he has written an authoritative and profoundly human study’ Patrick Skene Catling, Irish Times

  ‘The Stalingrad story is biblical in its extremes of barbarism and heroism, and Antony Beevor has told it superbly’ Andrew Roberts, Literary Review

  ‘Superb… a story you’ll never forget. There has never been a battle like this one, and there has never been a book about a battle such as this’ Australian

  ‘Antony Beevor has produced a compelling and extraordinary story, richly detailed and engrossingly written. Western scholars owe him a very great debt. We now have the real history of Stalingrad without myth or embellishment’ Richard Overy, author of Why the Allies Won and Russia’s War

  ‘One is convinced by his scholarship, and increasingly moved by the drama… he succeeds brilliantly’ Nigel Nicolson, Spectator

  ‘This brilliant tapestry’ Alan Clark, New Statesman

  STALINGRAD

  Antony Beevor

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

  Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Viking 1998

  First published in Penguin Books 1999

  This edition published 2007

  3

  Copyright © Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, 1998

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192610-0

  Contents

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  LIST OF MAPS

  PREFACE

  PART ONE

  ‘THE WORLD WILL HOLD ITS BREATH!’

  1 The Double-Edged Sword of Barbarossa

  2 ‘Nothing is Impossible for the German Soldier!’

  3 ‘Smash in the Door and the Whole Rotten Structure Will Come Crashing Down!’

  4 Hitler’s Hubris: The Delayed Battle for Moscow

  PART TWO

  BARBAROSSA RELAUNCHED

  5 General Paulus’s First Battle

  6 ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’

  7 ‘Not One Step Backwards’

  8 ‘The Volga is Reached!’

  PART THREE

  ‘THE FATEFUL CITY’

  9 ‘Time is Blood’: The September Battles

  10 Rattenkrieg

  11 Traitors and Allies

  12 Fortresses of Rubble and Iron

  13 Ρaulus’s Final Assault

  14 ‘All For the Front!’

  PART FOUR

  ZHUKOY’S TRAP

  15 Operation Uranus

  16 Hitler’s Obsession

  17 ‘The Fortress Without a Roof’

  18 ‘Der Manstein Kommt!’

  19 Christmas in the German Way

  PART FIVE

  THE SUBJUGATION OF THE SIXTH ARMY

  20 The Air-Bridge

  21 ‘Surrender Out of the Question’

  22 ‘A German Field Marshal Does Not Commit Suicide with a Pair of Nail Scissors!’

  23 ‘Stop Dancing! Stalingrad Has Fallen’

  24 The City of the Dead

  25 The Sword of Stalingra

  APPENDIX A:

  German and Soviet Orders of Battle, 19 November 1942

  APPENDIX B:

  The Statistical Debate: Sixth Army Strength in the Kessel

  REFERENCES

  SOURCE NOTES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  List of Illustrations

  SECTION ONE

  1. Autumn 1941. Soviet prisoners of war being herded to the rear

  2. July 1942. German infantry marching towards Stalingrad

  3. A village destroyed in the advance

  4. German tanks on the Don steppe

  5. August 1942. German artillery outside Stalingrad

  6. Dr Beck, chaplain of the 297th Infantry Division

  7. Paulus, Hitler, Keitel, Haider and Brauchitsch at the Wolf sschanze

  8. September 1942. Tanks of the 24th Panzer Division advancing

/>   9. September 1942. Red Army tank troops listening to a speech from Khrushchev

  10. The view which greeted Russian reinforcements about to cross the Volga

  11. German officer and soldiers attacking factory buildings

  12. Russian infantry defending

  13. October 1942. Round-up of Stalingrad civilians

  14. 62nd Army HQ. Krylov, Chuikov, Gurov and Rodimtsev

  15. Red Army assault squad in the ‘Stalingrad Academy of street-fighting’

  SECTION TWO

  16. One of Chuikov’s divisional commanders with a young woman signaller

  17. October 1942. German infantry occupying a destroyed workshop

  18. ‘Noble Sniper’ Zaitsev from the Siberian 284th Rifle Division

  19 and 20. November 1942. Operation Uranus: the encirclement of the Sixth Army

  21. Junkers 52 transport taking off

  22. December 1942. German artillery from Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army

  23. Trapped Sixth Army soldiers retrieve parachute canisters

  24. January 1943. General Rokossovsky

  25. January 1943. German infantry retreating through a blizzard

  26. January 1943. General Edler von Daniels marches into captivity

  27. January 1943. Goering on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s assumption of power

  28. January 1943. Field Marshal Paulus and General Schmidt after surrendering

  29. A German soldier booted and prodded out of a bunker

  30. Remnants of the Sixth Army marched off to captivity

  31. German and Romanian prisoners

  PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am particularly grateful to the Arkhiv Muzeya Panorami Stalin-gradskoy Bitvi (the Archive of the Panoramic Museum of the Battle of Stalingrad) in Volgograd for providing illustrations 10, 14, 18, 19 and 20.

  Helmut Abt Verlag, Bis Stalingrad, Alois Beck: 6

  AKG London: 24, 30

  Archive Photos, London: 12, 15

  Bundesarchiv, Koblenz: 2, 21

  Getty Images, London: 1, 3, 17, 22, 23, 25

  Imperial War Museum, London: 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 26, 28, 29, 31

  Methuen & Co Ltd, Paulus and Stalingrad: A Life of Field Marshal Paulus, Walter Goerlitz: 13

  Private collection: 27

  Topham Picturepoint, Edenbridge, Kent: 16

  Westdeutsches Verlag, Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht Gibt Bekannt, Martin H. Sommerfeldt: 7

  List of Maps

  1 Operation Barbarossa, June–December 1941

  2 Operation Blue, Summer 1942

  3 The German Assault on Stalingrad, September 1942

  4 Operation Uranus, November 1942

  5 Operation Winter Storm and Operation Little Saturn, December 1942

  6 Operation Ring, January 1943

  Preface

  ‘Russia’, observed the poet Tyuchev, ‘cannot be understood with the mind.’ The Battle of Stalingrad cannot be adequately understood through a standard examination. A purely military study of such a titanic struggle fails to convey its reality on the ground, rather as Hitler’s maps in his Rastenburg Wolfsschanze isolated him in a fantasy-world, far from the suffering of his soldiers.

  The idea behind this book is to show, within the framework of a conventional historical narrative, the experience of troops on both sides, using a wide range of new material, especially from archives in Russia. The variety of sources is important to convey the unprecedented nature of the fighting and its effects on those caught up in it with little hope of escape.

  The sources include war diaries, chaplains’ reports, personal accounts, letters, NKVD (security police) interrogations of German and other prisoners, personal diaries and interviews with participants. One of the richest sources in the Russian Ministry of Defence central archive at Podolsk consists of the very detailed reports sent daily from the Stalingrad Front to Aleksandr Shcherbakov, the head of the political department of the Red Army in Moscow. These describe not only heroic actions, but also ‘extraordinary events’ (the commissars’ euphemism for treasonous behaviour), such as desertion, crossing over to the enemy, cowardice, incompetence, self-inflicted wounds, ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ and even drunkenness. The Soviet authorities executed around 13,500 of their own soldiers at Stalingrad – equivalent to more than a whole division of troops. The main challenge, I soon realized, was to try to balance the genuine self-sacrifice of so many Red Army soldiers with the utterly brutal coercion used against waverers by the NKVD special departments (which very soon afterwards became part of SMERSH – counter-espionage).

  The barely believable ruthlessness of the Soviet system largely, but not entirely, explains why so many former Red Army soldiers fought on the German side. At Stalingrad, the Sixth Army’s front-line divisions contained over 50,000 Soviet citizens in German uniform. Some had been brutally press-ganged into service through starvation in prison camps; others were volunteers. During the final battles, many German reports testify to the bravery and loyalty of these ‘Hiwis’, fighting against their own countrymen. Needless to say, Beria’s NKVD became frenzied with suspicion when it discovered the scale of the disloyalty.

  The subject is still taboo in Russia today. An infantry colonel with whom I happened to share a sleeping compartment on the journey down to Volgograd (the former Stalingrad), refused at first to believe that any Russian could have put on German uniform. He was finally convinced when I told him of the Sixth Army ration returns in the German archives. His reaction, for a man who clearly loathed Stalin for his purges of the Red Army, was interesting. ‘They were no longer Russians’, he said quietly. His comment was almost exactly the same as the formula used over fifty years before when Stalingrad Front reported on ‘former Russians’ back to Shcherbakov in Moscow. The emotions of the Great Patriotic War remain almost as unforgiving today as at the time.

  The whole story of folly, pitilessness and tragedy is revealing in a number of unexpected ways. On the German side, the most striking aspect does not lie so much in the overt issue of Wehrmacht involvement in war crimes, still so hotly debated in Germany today. It lies in the confusion of cause and effect, especially the confusion between political beliefs and their consequences. German troops in Russia – as so many letters written from Stalingrad reveal – were in complete moral disarray. The objectives of subjugating the Slavs and defending Europe from Bolshevism through a pre-emptive strike proved counter-productive, to say the least. To this day, many German survivors still see the Battle of Stalingrad as a clever Soviet trap into which they had been enticed by deliberate withdrawals. They consequently tend to view themselves as the victims rather than the instigators of this disaster.

  One thing, however, is unarguable. The Battle of Stalingrad remains such an ideologically charged and symbolically important subject that the last word will not be heard for many years.

  A good deal of the time spent researching this book might well have been wasted and valuable opportunities missed if it had not been for the help and suggestions of archivists and librarians. I am particularly grateful to: Frau Irina Renz at the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart; Herr Meyer and Frau Ehrhardt at the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg; Frau Stang and other members of the staff of the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt library in Potsdam; Valery Mikhailovich Rumyantsev of the Historical Archive and Military Memorial Centre of the Russian Ministry of Defence and the staff of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence at Podolsk; Doctor Kyril Mikhailovich Andersen, the Director of the Russian Centre for the Conservation and Study of Documents of Contemporary History in Moscow; Doctor Natalya Borisovna Volkova, the Director of the Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts; and Doctor Dina Nikolaevna Nohotovich at the State Archive of the Russian Federation.

  I owe an incalculable amount to Dr Detlef Vogel, in Freiburg, who was a vital help in numerous ways at the beginning of my research and also lent me his collection of German and Austrian Stalingradbünde veterans’ publications. Doctor
Alexander Friedrich Paulus kindly gave me permission to consult the papers of his grandfather, General-feldmarschall Friedrich Paulus, and provided copies of subsequent family contributions to the subject. Professor Doctor Hans Girgen-sohn, the Sixth Army pathologist in the Stalingrad encirclement or Kessel, was most patient in explaining the details of his work and findings there, and the background to the deaths of besieged German soldiers from hunger, cold and stress. Ben Shepherd kindly explained the latest research into battle stress during the Second World War. I am also most grateful for the observations of Kurt Graf von Schweinitz on strategy at Stalingrad, as well as for his comments on the implications of military terminology used in signals in November 1942.

  For advice on Russian sources and other suggestions, I am indebted to Doctor Catherine Andreev, Professor Anatoly Aleksandrovich Chernobaev, Professor John Erickson, Doctor Viktor Gorbarev, Jon Halliday, Colonel Lemar Ivanovich Maximov of the Russian Ministry of Defence’s Historical Branch, and Yury Ovzianko. I also owe a great deal to those who put me in touch with survivors of Stalingrad in both Russia and Germany, or who helped and looked after me so generously in both countries: Chris Alexander, Leopold Graf von Bismarck, Andrew Gimson, Major Joachim Freiherr von Maltzan, Gleb and Harriet Shestakov, Doctor Marie-Christine Gräfin von Stauffenberg and Christiane van de Velde.

  In Volgograd I owed much to the kind assistance of Doctor Raisa Maratovna Petrunyova, the Vice-Rector of Volgograd University, and her colleagues, Professor Nadezhda Vasilevna Dulina, the Director of Historical and Cultural Studies, Galina Borisovna of the History department, and Boris Nikolaevich Ulko, the Director of the University Museum, as well as Nikolay Stepanovich Fyodortov, chairman of the Volgograd District Committee of War Veterans, and Lieutenant-Colonel Gennady Vasilevich Pavlov.

  Translations from the Russian are by Doctor Galya Vinogradova and Lyubov Vinogradova, whose assistance in negotiations over access to archives offered a model of skilled diplomacy, persistence and good humour. Their contribution, to say nothing of their friendship, helped transform the whole project.