Remembering the Battle of Stalingrad, 73 Years on
Seventy-three years ago, the hauntingly sombre adagio
to Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony was played on the radio in Berlin. Adolf
Hitler was in power and the German war effort had until then produced a
phenomenal sequence of triumphs that saw the Nazi push for lebensraum cover
all of mainland Europe, northern Africa and a swath of the Soviet Union.
However, morale-boosting reports from the frontlines had ceased to be published
in December 1942 and January 1943. And when the adagio was played, it was clear
that the worst for the National Socialists had come to pass.
see photos from Stalingrad
On January 31, Hitler publicly acknowledged Germany’s defeat
at the Battle of Stalingrad, which drew to an official close on February 2. It
would remain the single largest defeat of the German armed forces, with
the Sixth Army completely decimated following a three-month siege at Stalingrad
(now Volgograd). With dwindling supplies – including fuel and ammunitions – the
encircled Sixth wasted away in the worst of the Russian winter after Hitler’s
plan to support them with airdrops fell ominously short of its goal. By the
time Friedrich Paulus, the commander of the Sixth, had given up, the Germans
had lost 265,000 personnel of the Wehrmacht, of which no more than 6,000 would
return to the vaterland (in 1955).
Many historians consider the Battle of Stalingrad to be the
most decisive turning point of the Second World War. The other popular
contenders for this title – the tank battles of Kursk and the Battle of Moscow
– however, illustrate the overall significance of the Soviet Union’s
fight against Hitler’s aggression and its contribution to the defeat
of the Nazis. In 1939, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, signed
a non-aggression pact which Hitler subsequently violated in 1941 with
the launching of Operation Barbarossa. On June 22, the single-largest force in
the history of warfare (4 million soldiers) invaded the Soviet Union along a
2,900-km front. And while the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe blitz did bring the Nazis
quickly to the outskirts of Moscow, it was halted there by sheer exhaustion on
one side and a completely defensive strategy on the other.
Despite many industrial centres in Ukraine and
Belarus having been taken, and the bloody Siege of Leningrad (now St.
Petersburg) kicked off, the nation hadn’t fallen. Moscow and Stalingrad
still stood – the latter being particularly important for Hitler to secure
petroleum reserves in the area. It was also symbolically important because it
bore Stalin’s name.
After a series of bloody skirmishes, the Sixth Army reached
the outskirts of Stalingrad while the Soviet 62nd and 64th Armies had
holed itself up inside the city. Then, heavy bombing by the Luftflotte 4,
commanded by Wolfram von Richthofen, reduced the city to rubble and caused
immense civilian casualties. By the time a strategic aerial
assault of the city on August 23-26 concluded, Stalingrad was in ruins.
By early October, the Luftwaffe had complete control over the skies. And
between August and November, soldiers within the city were engaged in
continuous and bloody close-range fighting.
The fortunes turned when the Soviets launched Operation
Uranus on November 19, 1942, overrunning the Romanian units to the north
and south of Stalingrad and closing a ring with the Sixth trapped inside.
At this time, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein advised Hitler to order the
Sixth to stay put and not attempt to break out, and that he would be able to
liberate them by defeating the Soviet contravallation if the Sixth could be
supplied via airdrops. Despite Richthofen’s protests, the plan was approved –
and by its end, the Luftwaffe had lost over 500 aircraft and 1,000 bomber crew,
even as the Sixth didn’t receive enough supplies and began to starve.
Then, on December 19, von Manstein’s offensive on Stalingrad
was halted barely 50 km from the city. And it would’ve succeeded in
relieving the Sixth if not for von Manstein’s
earlier orders that Paulus not attempt to break out of the city.
By December 23, pressing Soviet forces prompted von Manstein’s Operation
Winter Storm to retreat, and Stalingrad was left to Paulus, Richthofen and
Hitler to save.
By January 30, 1943, the Sixth completely crumbled
within Stalingrad. On the same day, Hitler celebrated his 10th
anniversary of coming to power; on the same day, Paulus had been promoted to
Field Marshal to boost his confidence. The next day, however, Paulus surrendered
to Soviet forces in violation of Hitler’s orders; Hitler had expected
Paulus to commit suicide and so prevent a field marshal from being captured
alive; on that day, Hitler would admit to his first defeat.
As historian Lee Sandlin wrote in his essay Losing
the War (1997),
It was the worst calamity the German army had suffered since
the war began. It was too large for the government to conceal; they suspended
normal broadcasts on state radio and instead played solemn music. It was the
first official admission they’d made that the war wasn’t going perfectly, and
for the first time people openly asked one another on the streets what would
happen if the war were lost.
The adagio to Bruckner’s Seventh was only played twice
during the Second World War in Berlin. The second time, it would be as prelude
to the announcement of Hitler’s death by Karl Dönitz, on May 1, 1945.
For all its reprehensible war-crimes and torrid legacies of trauma, some battlefields of
the war were also beautiful in the poetic sense. The close of the
Battle of Stalingrad presented one such scene, immortalised in the words
of the Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda in his poem Nuevo
Canto de Amor a Stalingrado (1942). Roughly translated, it finishes thus:
Save me a fragment of violent foam
save me a rifle, save a plow for me
save me a rifle, save a plow for me
and let them place it at my grave
with a red ear of grain from your soil,
that it be known, if there be any doubt,
that I died loving you and you loved me,
and if I did not fight in your waist
I leave in your honour this dark grenade,
this song of love for Stalingrad
See also
Book review: new biography of Stalin Reviewed by Donald Rayfield
