Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943

On January 9, Russians began demanding the German surrender via loudspeakers at the frontlines. The realization that an offensive would come prompted a mixture of dread and obsessive hope for imminent relief. The next day, Operation Ring began. For almost an hour, Soviet artillery bombarded German positions, and then an attack was launched at the southwest of the Kessel. Theoretically, they were assaulting four German divisions, but all were understaffed and undersupplied. By afternoon, Russian forces had broken through or outflanked the defense in this area. Russian attacks also occurred at the opposite end of the Kessel, although here the German lines held for two days before the Russians could break them. Beevor makes a point of the remarkable resilience of the German soldiers, who dealt 26,000 casualties to the Russians and destroyed half of their tanks. Russian anger at their losses was vented on prisoners, who were often summarily shot.

The German retreat was hampered by their lack of fuel, meaning that wounded soldiers who could not walk were left behind. The airfield on which many wounded were kept in hopes of evacuation and a key hospital were abandoned during the retreat. As the Russians overran them, almost all still within were shot. It was at this stage that most finally lost hope of rescue and several entire battalions began to surrender.

By January 17, the Sixth Army had been forced into the eastern half of the Kessel. For four days, relative quiet fell as Rokossovsky prepared his forces for the final push and Paulus prepared fruitless plans for a breakout. Hitler then evacuated some officers out through the air as he hoped to build a new Sixth Army from the remnants of the old one. Hitler sent a communique to the Kessel, which praised their sacrifice and demanded they continue fighting.

By January 20, the air bridge had collapsed due to the Russian capture of the main airfields. Wounded soldiers that awaited airlift had to be moved to the makeshift Stalingrad hospital which may have had up to 40,000 patients cramped into cellars under the city. By this stage, there were 100,000 German soldiers in Stalingrad, most of whom were sick. Discipline began to break down in the ranks, but resistance continued out of fear of what the Russians would do. Several German officers, including one general, shot themselves rather than be captured by Russians.

On January 26, a Russian assault broke into Stalingrad from the west, splitting the Kessel in two and reaching Chuikov’s 62nd Army in a highly emotional meeting for many. The rate at which Germans were surrendering increased further in this hopeless situation and most of those interrogated began to willingly give up information because of their anger at Hitler.

Hitler promoted several people—including Paulus to field marshal—in the last days of the Kessel. He was hoping this would prompt them to die by suicide rather than be captured as no German field marshal had surrendered before. Hitler wanted to create a military myth surrounding Stalingrad, in which the German defenders had nobly chosen death over surrender. This hope was dashed on January 31. The leadership of the southern pocket in Stalingrad surrendered. Paulus later claimed to have not been present at negotiations. The Russians immediately began sending all who could walk to prison camps and killing the rest. SS officers and Gestapo members were also killed on sight. Russians who were found serving in the German army were taken by the NKVD, but because records are still sealed, it is uncertain what exactly happened to them. Beevor theorizes most were killed or used as enslaved labor.

As the German high command was taken into custody, anything that could be used to die by suicide was confiscated. Paulus was asked to draft an order demanding the surround of the remaining pockets of resistance, but he refused and asked that German prisoners be taken care of. The Soviets said they would try.

When Hitler heard Paulus had surrendered, he felt personally offended. He believed firmly that they should have fought to the last man, and ordered Karl Strecker, the commander of the northern pocket, to do this. The Soviet army had rapidly redeployed to crush this last area of resistance, bringing 300 artillery pieces to bear on just over half a mile of territory. German defenses were shattered and Strecker allowed for a general surrender.

On the morning of February 2, the final surrender of German forces was announced. Celebrations broke out across the Red Army, which had throughout the campaign suffered over 1 million casualties, of which 485,751 were fatal. Stalingrad itself was almost entirely destroyed with just one landmark surviving: a fountain with carved children dancing.

Stalin was exceptionally happy to learn of the 91,000 German prisoners captured, especially the 22 generals. As the Wehrmacht counted their losses from the battle, they realized that all together the campaign had cost them around 500,000 men. In Germany, three days of national mourning were announced. Mass mobilization and efforts to increase factory outputs were created while the Nazi Party found a scapegoat for the campaign in upper-class generals, who they accused of being corrupt. In Germany, the stories of suffering within the Kessel were hidden but the Soviets took pains to spread these stories in the hopes it would demoralize the Germans. However, no anti-Nazi movements could gain enough traction to bring change.

Soon after the final surrender, Hitler met with Manstein to discuss the next steps. In the meeting, Hitler took some responsibility for the collapse but emphasized the faults of Goering and Paulus. He became focused on another offensive and the need for mass mobilization to support it.

In Russia, the government supported a large series of celebrations for the victory. Propaganda was continually broadcast and a genuine soaring of morale was notable across the country. Stalin had himself appointed Marshal of the Soviet Union in honor of “his” victory. The earlier disasters were presented as elements of a large trap that the Germans fell into or the consequence of leaders with tsarist sympathies. Across the Allied countries, leaders praised the bravery of the Red Army.

Despite the terrible conditions in Stalingrad, 9,796 civilians survived. As the fighting ended, more tried to slip back into the city and reunite with lost family members. Civilians in the area were put to work digging mass graves into which German bodies were thrown: Human remains were discovered for years after the war, despite clearing efforts.

Of the 91,000 German prisoners taken in the battle, almost half were dead by spring. Food was scarce in prisoner camps and reprisal killings continued. Hospitals that were set up were extremely unsanitary and the cause of many infections. Russians felt an extreme reluctance to feed Germans when food was scarce in the Soviet Union. After the battle, columns of prisoners had been taken on what Beevor describes as “death marches” (411), through freezing temperatures and with little food, in which a soldier’s will to live played an important part in his survival. Most arrived at the main camp of Beketovka, which was filled with small wooden huts that soldiers were crammed into. Roughly 50-60 people would die a day here, either through starvation, exposure, or execution if they protested. Soldiers were reduced to cannibalism to survive.

By the spring of 1942, some officers and soldiers were sent to anti-fascist re-education camps. Others were set to work in reconstructing Stalingrad or working in farms as forced labor. The Russian diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov said that no German prisoner would see his home again until Stalingrad was rebuilt.

In November 1943, a year after Operation Uranus, a plane flew over Stalingrad on the way to the Tehran Conference. The city below them was still ruined. The conference they were flying to was intended to decide on the Allied strategy for the next stage of World War II. At the conference, Winston Churchill presented the Sword of Stalingrad to Stalin, commissioned to honor his victory. However, relations were strained between the Allies, as shown by Stalin seeking to anger Churchill by suggesting the mass murder of German prisoners.

Historians have traced the Battle of Stalingrad to the Soviet rise as a world power. With this battle, they gained the power to demand a free hand in the East, allowing them to establish a European empire. After the battle, the Soviets created plans to replace the Nazi government of Germany with a communist one. One German general, Walther Kurt von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, even offered to make an army out of Stalingrad prisoners and use them to overthrow Hitler, though this idea was rejected. Several generals signed leaflets that encouraged rebellion and dropped them into Germany, something that greatly worried Hitler. By August 1944, Paulus signed a document requesting the surrender of Army Group North. When the war finally did end, many German generals mourned that Germany was split in two, while Russians generally felt proud of their victory but saddened and the cost. At Nuremberg, Paulus appeared as a witness and afterward wrote a memoir seeking to defend himself.

Huge numbers of ordinary German prisoners were convicted of hard labor under the Soviet’s broad definition of war crimes. Some senior officers were given roles in the government of Russian Germany, but many suffered from waves of Stalinist purges. It was 1955 before the final prisoners from Stalingrad were released from Russia. Chuikov, the defender of Stalingrad, later commanded the occupation forces in Berlin, and became a marshal of the Soviet Union, and then deputy minister of defense under Nikita Khrushchev.

Beevor concludes the book by observing that the thousands of Soviet soldiers executed in the battle never received graves, and are noted only in records as an anonymous casualty statistic.