SERIES - The Hell of Stalingrad was the tragedy of an army – and is intertwined with the Shoah

War correspondent Vasily Grossman described seeing the map in August 1942, which showed how German attacks had cut deep swathes through the Soviet positions in southern Russia. It was the second year of the war, fourteen months after the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Red Army had lost more than five million soldiers in the early stages of the war. With millions of newly mobilized recruits, it succeeded in repelling the German armies advancing on Moscow in December 1941. Now the Germans sought to deliver a devastating blow to the enemy with their second summer offensive.

The operation began on June 28 with a major offensive on the Russo-Ukrainian southern front. Its purpose was to give Germany possession of raw material sources that Hitler considered crucial to the war—the coalfields of the Donbass and the oil fields of Grozny and Baku. The German motorized troops advanced rapidly. However, their pincer movements largely failed because the Red Army divisions quickly withdrew, thus escaping encirclement.

Believing that the enemy troops were already disintegrating, Hitler split his attacking forces into two parts. Army Group A was to advance directly toward the Caucasus, while Army Group B was to turn northeast and practice flanking. The spearhead of Army Group B was Colonel General Friedrich Paulus's 6th Army. Supported by Italian and Romanian units, it was tasked with capturing the industrial city of Stalingrad on the Volga.

Hitler wasn't just interested in eliminating Stalingrad as a Soviet weapons factory and controlling the Volga. He was also counting on the psychological blow that the capture of the city, which bore the name of the Soviet dictator, would deliver. As a political commissar in the Red Army, Joseph Stalin had successfully led the defense of the city, then called Tsaritsyn, during the Russian Civil War, declaring it a "Red Verdun" that would never surrender to counterrevolutionary attackers.

In 1925, Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad and developed into a modern industrial city. Hitler now portrayed his attack on the city as a decisive battle between National Socialism and Bolshevism. On August 20, three days before the first German tanks reached the outskirts of Stalingrad, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the "Führer" had "played a particularly safe game" in the city: "Not a stone shall be left standing here." Hitler further suspected that there were "a million Bolsheviks" in the city, who were also to be exterminated. This estimate was exaggerated. Overrun with refugees from Ukraine, the city had a population of 650,000, 20,000 of whom were communists.

The Soviet leadership tried by all means to stop the advancing German tank units. When Rostov-on-Don had fallen into German hands almost without a fight a few weeks earlier, Stalin had issued Order No. 227, "Not a Step Back." He rebuked the Red Army: its retreat was shameful, the Soviet territory was not infinitely large, and the German attack must finally be stopped.

Anyone who retreated from the enemy without an explicit order would be considered a "traitor to the fatherland" and shot on the spot, Stalin ordered. This draconian order was to be implemented in Stalingrad, 400 kilometers east of Rostov. Stalingrad stretched like a ribbon 40 kilometers along the west bank of the Volga. For the city's defenders, "not a step back" meant that there was no retreat zone for them behind the Volga.

While the German 4th Air Fleet began a carpet bombing campaign that reduced large parts of the city to rubble, Stalin forbade the residents from leaving Stalingrad. "Where can we evacuate now? The city must be held. Enough!" he declared. "And pounded his fist on the table." This is how one observer described the dictator's reaction to the city's leaders' request. Only two days after the German bombing began was the evacuation ban for women and children lifted. 40,000 residents were killed in the two-week air raids.

Then the German troops launched their assault. On September 14, a regiment broke through to the Volga in the city center. In the street and house-to-house fighting of the following weeks, the Soviet defenders were pushed back to the riverbank. The 62nd Army, dug in on the steep bank, soon held only a few bridgeheads. It was supplied with soldiers and weapons via the river. The Germans had air superiority and bombarded the Volga.

Nevertheless, the attackers failed to fully take control of Stalingrad. German observers sought explanations for the unexpected Soviet resistance. An SS newspaper devoted its editorial of October 29, 1942, to this question. It was titled "That's the Difference."

Had the British or Americans defended the city, the paper stated, Stalingrad would have been conquered in a short time. "A person, no matter how perfidious a British colonial butcher or depraved a gangster from the Chicago underworld, is still subject to human laws in combat," it stated. "A person fights as long as his actions have a recognizable purpose." But not the Red Army soldier, the author of the article concluded.

As a representative of a "base, dull humanity," the Red Army soldier is incapable of "recognizing the meaning of life and appreciating it." Molded into a primitive fighting machine by the "Jewish commissars" in the Red Army leadership, the Soviet soldier, "once unleashed, rages into death in his own way, not asking about meaning and purpose."

Vasily Grossman, who flew into Stalingrad in September, described the battle quite differently. As a war correspondent in the ranks of the 62nd Army, entrenched in the ruins of the city, Grossman painted a vivid picture of the Red Army soldiers with whom he spoke extensively between combat missions. He portrayed them as simple people with coarse language, but with a keen awareness that in Stalingrad they were defending their homeland and their human freedom against the racial arrogance and cold-blooded cruelty of the Germans.

One of these soldiers was the Siberian accountant Vasily Zaitsev. The 284th Rifle Division, in which he served, was brought to Stalingrad on September 21. Shortly thereafter, Zaitsev had already made a name for himself as one of the best snipers in the city. When asked what motivated him to kill dozens of German soldiers, Zaitsev referred to the German violence, which he could only watch helplessly from his dugout.

In the factory district, he once saw German soldiers dragging a woman away, presumably to rape her, while a little boy cried desperately: "Mommy, where are they taking you?" Zaitsev continued: "Or you see the young girls hanging from the trees in the park, they were still children—doesn't that have an effect? ​​It has a tremendous effect."

Grossman did not idealize the Red Army. His notes make it clear that the Soviet soldiers' steadfastness was also due to Stalin's Order 227. Grossman spoke with Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov, commander of the 62nd Army, who freely admitted that on September 14, when the city appeared to be falling into German hands, he had shot the commander and commissar of a regiment in front of the assembled soldiers. They had abandoned their command post without orders.

Shortly thereafter, Chuikov shot two brigade commanders and the commissars who had fled to the eastern bank of the Volga. These executions, according to Chuikov, had an immediate effect. Grossman also witnessed the summary executions of ordinary soldiers accused of cowardice in the face of the enemy. Yet, in his eyes, this draconian violence did not adequately explain the stubborn Soviet resistance.

Internal Soviet police files confirm Grossman's observation. Contrary to what numerous accounts suggest, including the film "Enemy at the Gates" (2001), whose protagonist is the fictional sniper Vasily Zaitsev, the police units deployed behind the Soviet front did not indiscriminately kill Red Army soldiers retreating from the enemy. Repression within the Soviet troops was less severe than often assumed. This was not because the Soviet military leadership was humane, but because it wanted to protect soldiers as a vital resource for the war effort.

The Soviet counteroffensive came as a complete surprise to the Germans. Stalin's generals had already drawn up the plan in September: a deep envelopment maneuver carried out by two army groups, whose coordinated advances would encircle the soldiers of the Wehrmacht and its allies.

The Soviet buildup did not escape German reconnaissance, but the intelligence services did not attach much importance to it because they considered the Soviet Union's war reserves exhausted. More than a million Soviet soldiers participated in the attacks, which began on November 19, 1942, and led to the encirclement of the 6th Army within five days.

The commander of the 6th Army, Friedrich Paulus, considered a breakout of his encircled troops. Hitler opposed this and ordered the "Fortress Stalingrad" to be held at all costs. An airlift was to supply the encircled soldiers with food and ammunition. Paulus obeyed and cabled his encircled soldiers: "So hold on, the Führer will get us out!"

Bad weather and heavy Soviet shelling meant that air supplies to the Stalingrad pocket remained patchy. The initially more than 300,000 soldiers in the pocket soon ran out of ammunition and suffered from food shortages. In December, units of Army Group A under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein attempted to break through the ring around Stalingrad from the outside.

At the same time, the Red Army launched a counteroffensive with the goal of recapturing Rostov. This was intended to cut off the entire army group, including the 400,000 troops stationed in the Caucasus. Manstein aborted the relief attempt and hastily withdrew the Caucasus Army, saving it from the threat of encirclement.

Hitler continued to defy all requests from his generals to protect the lives of their soldiers in Stalingrad. A proposal for an honorable surrender of the German troops, put forward by the Soviets in early January, had to be rejected. When infernal artillery fire from 7,000 cannons and rocket launchers initiated the Soviet Operation "Ring" on January 9, the German defenders, who were not only increasingly starving but also running out of fuel and ammunition, could do little to counter the onslaught.

By the end of January, the pocket had shrunk down to the center of Stalingrad. In the early hours of January 31, Soviet soldiers of the 64th Army surrounded the "Square of the Fallen Soldiers." A German officer identified himself as a negotiator and offered to negotiate a surrender. Several Red Army soldiers were escorted to the basement, where they met the assembled staff of the 6th Army.

In one of the filthy basement rooms, they spotted Paulus. The army commander, whom Hitler had promoted to field marshal the day before, lay unshaven and apathetic on a bunk. He hadn't complied with Hitler's implicit suicide order; it was said that a German field marshal never surrendered to captivity. Paulus declared himself a private citizen to his officers, signaling that they should arrange the surrender on his behalf. Several hours later, the German soldiers in the southern part of the city center laid down their weapons. Fighting continued at the tractor factory further north until February 2.

113,000 German and Romanian survivors were taken prisoner by the Soviets, many of them injured or severely weakened. In total, the battle and the subsequent captivity cost the lives of nearly 300,000 German soldiers. On the other side, conservative estimates put the death toll at nearly 500,000 Red Army soldiers in the defense of Stalingrad and the subsequent offensive. The death toll may have been much higher.

The Nazi rulers responded to the demise of the 6th Army with increased propaganda and mass mobilization. After three days of national mourning, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels addressed the unsettled nation. In the packed arena of the Berlin Sportpalast, where wounded soldiers from the Eastern Front sat in the front rows, Goebbels called on all Germans to wage "total war."

Goebbels made it clear who this war was aimed at: not only at the advancing Soviet divisions, but also at the "Jewish liquidation commandos" following close behind them—that is, the commissars in the Red Army who allegedly intended to murder millions of Germans by shooting them in the back of the neck. "Jewry" was the aggressor in this fight, Goebbels said, and Germany would respond to this Jewish threat with the "most radical countermeasures." Only in this way could Germany and Europe survive this struggle for survival.

The blatant call to pursue the murder of the Jews even more vigorously was greeted with frenzied applause by the roused crowd in the Sportpalast. Goebbels' appeal was carried far beyond the walls of the Berlin Sportpalast. Relatives of soldiers missing in Stalingrad wrote chain letters to the families of other "Stalingraders," calling on all Germans to take revenge on the "six to seven million Jews in our hands" should Moscow's "Jewish rulers harm our captured soldiers." The beacon of Stalingrad, invoked by the Nazis, had an effect. The war raged on for two years, with even greater intensity.

The connections between Stalingrad and the Shoah have often been overlooked in the postwar period. For a long time, West German researchers maintained the image of an upright 6th Army abandoned by Hitler. Stalingrad was often portrayed as a German tragedy, whose three acts were broadcast in a successful television production in three episodes: "The Attack, the Pocket, the Downfall."

It was only the initiators of the highly acclaimed exhibition on the "Crimes of the Wehrmacht," which toured German cities starting in 1995, who drew attention to the "trail of blood left by the 6th Army." Units of this army had assisted in the mass murder of Jews in the Babi Yar ravine near Kyiv in September 1941. Shortly thereafter, the first commander of the 6th Army, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, issued an order declaring "Jewish subhumanity" to be Germany's main enemy "in the Eastern Territories."

To fulfill their "historic task" of "liberating the German people from the Asian-Jewish threat once and for all," its soldiers would also have to carry out actions "that go beyond traditional one-sided soldiering." Little is known to this day that the German advance on Stalingrad was accompanied by the establishment of occupation authorities who established commandant's offices in Stalingrad, shot communists and Jews, and initiated the deportation of the civilian population.

Vasily Grossman had already clearly identified these connections during the war. In January 1944, he reached the shtetl of Berdichev, west of Kyiv, with units of the First Ukrainian Front. Grossman was Jewish, and Berdichev was his birthplace. In the summer of 1941, he wanted to have his mother evacuated from Berdichev, but the Germans got there first. He hadn't heard from her since.

In Berdichev, Grossman's suspicion that his mother was no longer alive became a certainty. The few Jewish survivors he spoke with described the horrific events. Crying "Jew, destroyed!" soldiers of the 6th Army marched into the city, then expelled the Jewish residents into a fenced-in ghetto. On September 15, 1941, 12,000 of them were shot outside the city. Almost all of Berdichev's Jews fell victim to further "actions."

On July 21, 1944, the Red Army crossed the border into Poland, reaching Treblinka a few days later. The massive extermination camp had been destroyed on the orders of SS leader Heinrich Himmler to prevent the Soviets from obtaining evidence of the German mass crimes. But Grossman, who was among the first Red Army soldiers to enter the overgrown camp grounds, immediately began documenting it.

Based on forensic examinations and interviews with the few survivors and other eyewitnesses, he wrote his disturbing account of the death machine: "The Hell of Treblinka." Grossman's report contained numerous references to Stalingrad. Treblinka, he emphasized, devoured most of its victims in the fall of 1942, when Hitler dominated Europe and fought for possession of Stalingrad.

"The whole world is silent," Grossmann wrote in the report, oppressed and enslaved by the brown band of robbers who have seized power. London is silent, and so is New York. And only somewhere, many thousands of kilometers away, on a distant bank of the Volga, does the Soviet artillery thunder." The reference to London and New York contained a clear criticism of the Western Allies, who only fulfilled their promise made in June 1942 to form a second front in Europe two years later with the landing in Normandy.

The victory at Stalingrad, achieved largely single-handedly by the Red Army, according to the concluding statement of Grossman's essay, marked the starting point of humanity's liberation from fascism. Grossman learned from a captured guard that Himmler had come to Treblinka in February 1943 and ordered all the victims to be exhumed and cremated. What could have motivated the SS chief to do this, Grossman wondered, and gave himself the answer: "There was only one reason: the Red Army's victory at Stalingrad."

The Battle of Stalingrad was a historical turning point: It disrupted the Nazi killing machine and ultimately brought it to a halt. But Stalingrad also holds a special place as a multi-ethnic battle. Italians, Romanians, Hungarians, and Croats were on the Wehrmacht's side, while Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Tatars, Kazakhs, and soldiers of many other ethnic groups fought side by side in the Red Army.

The German military, and subsequently many German historians, repeatedly complained about the Wehrmacht's poor allies, whose lack of fighting spirit had led to the encirclement of the 6th Army. In interrogations with Red Army officers, Romanian, Hungarian, and Austrian prisoners of war complained about the Germans' racial arrogance.

Located not far from the Asian border, the city of Stalingrad, renamed Volgograd in 1961, is a suitable focal point for a comprehensive Europe-wide remembrance of the Second World War. However, the question today is whether and when enough Europeans will become aware of this significance.

Jochen Hellbeck is a historian and teaches Eastern European history at Rutgers University, New Jersey. His book "A War Like No Other: The German War of Annihilation Against the Soviet Union. A Revision" has just been published by S. Fischer Verlag.