Dan Snow's History Hit - The End of Stalingrad

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

Stalingrad is one of the most titanic and totemic battles of the Second World War. Millions were killed, the city itself was utterly shattered by fighting and the seemingly unbeatable Wehrmacht suffered a catastrophic rout like never before. But what made the Soviet victory possible; what happened to the men from both sides who fought in the rubble and snow of Stalin's city; and what were the consequences, both on the Eastern Front and around the world, of this savage clash of arms?To find out Dan is joined by Jochen Hellbeck professor of history at Rutgers University and author of Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich to discuss how the battle of Stalingrad ended and what came next.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. Eighty years ago, in the very early hours of the 2nd of February 1943, the shattered remnants of German and Axis forces in Stalingrad surrendered to the Soviet Union. A day or two before, the commander of those units, Friedrich Paulus, had surrendered to the Soviets, but he'd done so as a private individual, not as their commander. It fell upon his junior, his subordinate, who held out for a couple more days to surrender formally. 91,000 broken men, starving, injured, ill prisoners were taken into Soviet custody. Hundreds of thousands more had died during the fighting in the months that preceded this

surrender. Because it's such an enormous anniversary, Stalingrad is by some measures the largest battle ever fought. It's considered by many to be the decisive turning point of the Second World War. So we thought for its 80th anniversary, we'd build on a podcast that we recorded last year and bring you another episode on the fall of Stalingrad and its consequences both in the ruined city and in the wider world. As a reminder, Stalingrad was the city now called Volgograd. It's a long, thin city that sits on the River Volga in southern Russia, southwest of Moscow. It's the gateway to the oil-rich territory of the Caucasus. It was an essential industrial city in the Soviet Union. It was called Stalingrad. It was named after the Supreme Leader Stalin because he defended the city during the Russian Civil War. He'd cut his teeth there and made a reputation for himself. So he was as keen to defend it as Hitler was to capture it, to take it.

invasion, probably the largest in history, but it was pretty much doomed to failure, both because of the distances they had to cover, the terrain, the logistics, the plan that involved striking everywhere in the Soviet Union at once, both Moscow and St. Petersburg, Leningrad, and in the south to seize Ukraine's agriculture and the oil beyond. It was a terrible, bloody campaign that petered out around December in the snows outside Moscow. The Soviets counterattacked, stabilised their line, and the scene was set for another campaign in 1942. This time Hitler decided on narrower objectives, learning from the year before, and launched a huge campaign, a huge assault in southern Russia and Ukraine, trying to seize the rich agricultural land of Ukraine,

the coal, the industry down there, all sounds a bit familiar, and then on into southern Russia to seize the oil of the Caucasus. Just in 1941, the campaign seemed to go well, the German armies rampaged across Ukraine and southern Russia, despite astonishingly fierce and stubborn resistance in places like Sevastopol in the Crimea. By the time they'd covered thousands of kilometres and reached the Volga, reached the city of Stalingrad, they were at the very limit of their logistics. Many of the units were exhausted and needed resupplying over very, very long and vulnerable supply lines. The city of Stalingrad that they thought might fall into their laps proved a very

tough nut to crack. Five months they fought for it, hundreds of thousands of men fighting in cramped, appalling conditions. The German soldiers called it Rattenkrieg, War of the Rats, because they spent so much time in the sewers, underground, crawling below floorboards of houses as the Soviets fought back room by room, floor by floor. The front line was too complicated really to draw on a map. It was buildings, piles of rubble, dugouts, basements. Snipers picked off anyone who showed themselves above the ground and day and night the men fought, burrowed, mined, counter-mined, stabbed, hacked and shot each other. It has become the totemic urban battle in our history.

But in November 1942, something extraordinary happened. The Soviets launched a massive counter-attack on either flank of Stalingrad, that sighed through German-Romanian Axis units stationed out in the wide open countryside and eventually surrounded Stalingrad, cut it off from the outside. And the German army, once the besiegers, now became the besieged. In this episode, I'm very lucky to talk to Johan Helbeck. He's a distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University. He's a specialist in US and Russian German history. He's written a book on the Battle of Stalingrad that you'll hear about. And we'll talk about the climax of Stalingrad and its enormous legacy, both on the global stage, but some of the individuals who were caught up in this maelstrom of violence. Enjoy.

T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity until there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Before Christmas, you'll have heard the excellent episode with Ian McGregor. He's just written a fantastic book on Stalingrad. We talked about the battle in its widest sense. We talked about the build-up, the plan, and the siege itself.

He painted a picture of the city before the devastation that was unleashed on it in the autumn of 1942, and why it was such a key target for Hitler. By the time of late 20s, going into the 30s, that's when you get all the money pouring in to make this a Soviet kind of satellite city. 15 kilometers long, stretching like a ribbon along the river. In the south, you've got the old part of Tsaritsyn, which was like wooden shacks, two-story houses, mud streets, some cobbled streets as well. Still quite a lot of peasants living there. In the center is where we're going to talk about, you've got this new dynamic cities just sprung up, big, lovely apartment blocks, grand boulevards, tree lines, lovely parks, department stores in southern Russia, unheard of, where youalingrad because they were building in the north of the city, this giant complex of factories, which were part of Stalin's five-year plans, big industrialization improvements going on in agriculture. So that originally they were going to just build, and they were building

thousands and thousands of tractors and farming equipment for everything that was going on in the Ukrainian steppe and elsewhere. But obviously, as war came, as a lot of factories were across the world, they get retooled, and they're now making tanks and armor plating for ground attack aircraft, artillery pieces. So it wasn't important for lots of reasons, geographically with the river and the connections there, but also the fact that it was an armament center and it was named after Stalin. Perfect place. Hitler thought we have to capture that.

It was only meant to be a strategic place where they would capture the river, stop river traffic going up to supply the Red Army further north. And if they had to, they'd surround the city. They were never meant to take the city. It was simply to protect the eastern flank as the bulk of army group south was commencing this giant offensive to go down into the Caucasus and capture the oil,

which was the key. That was the key. That was Hitler's big plan for summer of 1932. It didn't work. And they didn't cap, well, they captured some of the oil wells, but not the main ones. And they got bogged down in the Caucasus and gigantic distances involved and logistics running out. So this 6th Army under Paulus, or this group under General Paulus, Stalingrad becomes the kind of, oh God, we've got to show something for the summer's work. Let's grab onto Stalin City. Really from early September 1942 onwards, the Battle of Stalingrad entered its urban warfare stage. the Battle of Stalingrad entered its urban warfare stage. Massive numbers of men, armoured vehicles were poured into this city and it became a savage block by block battle for Stalin's city of ever greater intensity. The Soviets developed a doctrine of staying as close

as they could to the Germans to mitigate their appalling losses from air power and artillery. If the Soviets were literally metres away from the Germans, then it'd be harder to call down strikes, high explosive bombs and shells on those Soviet positions. So they made it their business to stay as close as they possibly could. There was virtually no buffer between them, no noman's land. At night, the Soviets would attempt to bring across reinforcements across the Volga. Germans would try and sink the small boats coming across with machine guns on the bank of the Volga, but also dive bombers, Stuka dive bombers, and artillery called in by telephone and radio. Soviet units were just fed into what became a meat grinder on the west

bank of the Volga. Small groups of them just finding a toehold, defending it ferociously and counterattacking against the Germans where possible. The losses mounted for both sides, but for the Soviets they were easier to replace. The Germans were operating thousands of miles on the very eastern extremity of an empire that stretched from the vulgar didlantic coast of France. It was a huge strain on the German war machine to keep hundreds of thousands of men supplied on the very edge of their empire. As you'll have heard in the Ian McGregor podcast, and as you're about to hear in this podcast, the Soviets also were able to organise their reinforcements in two gigantic

strike groups that would unleash a terrifying surprise attack on the German Axis units in November of 1942. It was called Operation Uranus, a stupendously ambitious, very daring attack that would focus not on the city itself, but its lightly defended flanks in the countryside around Stalingrad. It was a stunning success. The ground was frozen hard in the steppe and the Soviet tanks and infantry were able to move at lightning speed. Within days, German, Romanian, Italian units were cut off inside Stalingrad. Hitler refused to allow them to try and escape, to try and attack back to the west towards friendly forces. He made them hold out. Hermann Goering, his strutting Reich Marshal in charge of the Luftwaffe, promised Hitler he could

keep the pocket, the so-called Kessel, the cauldron, resupplied by air. But the Luftwaffe fell terrifyingly short. Huge numbers of transport planes were shot down, intercepted, crashed in appalling winter blizzards as they tried to keep a lifeline open to the Kessel. All the time, the Soviets were squeezing the perimeters of that defensive position. Airfield after airfield was lost until the final plane took off from the last airfield in German control. People clinging to the wings, desperate to escape, as Soviet tanks smashed through the barbed wire and rolled onto the airfield itself. From then on, it was just a matter of time. With no supplies getting in, the Axis units slowly starved and ran out of ammunition. Still, the Soviets pressed in and the Germans were now defending, as the Soviets had done a few months

before, every room, every basement, every building they could cling on to. The last few German buildings had corridors filled with the dead and dying, administrative staff, cooks, all lying side by side with elite infantry and combat engineers, dying of disease, waiting for their inevitable capture by the Soviets. To talk us through this phase of the battle, the dying moments of the battle, let's talk to Professor Johan Helbeck from Rutgers University, who's going to tell us what it was like and what it meant at the time and what it's meant since. Thank you very much for coming on the pod. It's my pleasure. Let's start in November of 1942. Hitler almost kind of announces that basically they've occupied

Stalingrad. There's just a bit of mopping up to do. And indeed, they control most of the city centre. The weather's getting cold. Do people think on the German side, that's probably it for the winter and we'll complete this mess in the spring? I would say so. I mean, Hitler had increasingly stated

that Stalingrad would become German, was practically all German. So this was, in a way, common knowledge across Germany. And the Soviet counter-offensive took everyone by surprise, including the German commanders. I mean, they had military intelligence informing them about the buildup of the Soviet counteroffensive. But at the highest top of the command chain, you know, this information was disbelieved because they believed that the Soviets were at the end of their wits and there were no more human reserves on the Soviet side. And then let's talk about that counteroffensive. Why did the Soviets not just

keep adding defenders into the city of Stalingrad? Why did they keep them separate and build up a whole new armies, really, with which to launch this hugely ambitious counteroffensive. If it had gone wrong, it could have been disastrous for them. I mean, it was a very smart operation that actually, I think, assimilated a lot of the German tactics of the preceding year. So this very broadly conceived counteroffensive that essentially takes the enemy by the flanks, but assesses also the vulnerabilities of the enemy because the flanks were open, very exposed. And in the end, really goes very deep. It was called a deep operation to then really route

the enemy in a fundamental sense. I mean, this had been studied since September 42, when in fact, it was a very daring thing to envision because Stalingrad was about to topple in September. But the buildup worked, complete with engineering commanders that built dozens of pontoon bridges across the Don and Donetsk rivers. So it was an incredible feat also of engineering, very methodical. So I don't think that operation itself was bound to fail. It was rather, I think, the German crass underestimation of the Soviet enemy that actually is the failure that we need to look at. And can you set the scene for me in November on the steppe? What are the sort of temperatures? What are the conditions that the men out in the steppe, so in the wide open countryside around Strad, where this Soviet offensive will fall. What sort of conditions are the men experiencing there? Well, conditions were bleak. The German soldiers in 1942 were outfitted with better clothing than the year before when they sought to take Moscow and basically only had the summer uniforms. But

nonetheless, the conditions were extremely harsh. The German commanders were used to Soviet counter offenses of some sorts. And so this idea that the Soviets basically appear in bulk and seek to storm the German positions, especially north of Stalingrad, that was quite habitual. It was scary. Nonetheless, those attacks were warded off by the Germans. those attacks were warded off by the Germans. But this colossal size, you know, more than one million soldiers that build up in the steppes. And, you know, the size of the Battle of Stalingrad is enormous. We're not talking about a city and its outskirts. We're talking about flanks that are several hundred kilometers long. The sheer size of this operation, I think, just quickly led to the obliteration of the Germans.

I mean, there was actually no alternative to retreating. And holding out was, of course, the first step toward the destruction of the Germans. This gigantic assault in Operation Uranus, it's enormously successful. Is it immediately obvious to everybody that the strategic tables have just been completely turned it becomes fairly obvious very quickly i mean it depends who you're talking to so in germany the curtain falls as you know the german news media had been talking incessantly about stalingrad starting in august building up in september and. With the Soviet counterattack, suddenly there's like a news embargo in Germany. And so that in itself is telling.

I mean, actually experienced listeners and readers of the Wehrmacht reports, they can, of course, read between the lines. They can also read silences. And so there is a great deal of concern, especially with families who have their loved ones fighting in Stalingrad. And this embargo will not be lifted again until late in January when the German government,

Hitler and Goebbels, are seeking to prepare to sort of massage the impending disaster. Globally, the Soviets talk about the counteroffensive right away. Actually, Stalin in a message in early November, on November 7, on the revolutionary holiday, already hinted at that and essentially said, soon there will be a holiday, there will be

parties on our street. And so that was clearly a reference to things to come. to come. I guess the most open indication or the most direct indication of what a global turn of events Stalingrad is heralding is the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt in Casablanca and the so-called Casablanca Declaration in late January 1943 that was also signed on Stalin's behalf. So this is an Allied declaration that declares that the war will only end with Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender. So this formula of unconditional surrender could only be conceived with the knowledge that the Soviets are about to deal a resounding and decisive blow to the Germans. Even though Stalingrad was not explicitly cited in the declaration, it looms very large in Casablanca. How interesting. And had the Soviet counteroffensive

not gone in a month or two before, do you think the Casablanca Declaration might have been a lot different? Do you think there might have been different outputs from that conference? Undoubtedly, undoubtedly. I think so much was up in the air and so much was undecided and needs to be, you know, really tested by historians and by like a historical gaze that looks backward and doesn't assess things just from how they ended up. So in fall 1942, all bets were off in terms of how this would end up. Had Hitler taken Stalingrad, it's not to be ruled out that Stalin would have sued for some kind of peace with Germany. The relations between Stalin and the Western Allies,

particularly his British ally and Churchill personally, were very rocky. There was a lot of resentment on the Soviet side that the Western Allies were not honoring their commitments. The cardinal commitment, of course, being the opening of the second front in Europe. So the Western Allies in October 1942 had landed in Northern Africa, but this was not what they had promised earlier in 1942 to do actually during that year.

So there was a lot of distrust, some bitterness. Casablanca then was another, you know, very hopeful signal that the alliance would be working. But between Casablanca and then the actual D-Day landing in June 1944, again, lots of recommendations would be sounded and for good reason. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. To be continued... Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. let's come back from Casablanca to the ruins of the German army in Stalingrad itself they're surrounded successfully in operation Uranus then for about a month two months maybe they hold out an ever shrinking pocket a hellish ordeal what does the German government do they think there's any realistic chance they can salv salvage anything? Or is this quite, do they work out how to then start spinning this catastrophe, try and limit the damage from this catastrophe? What's going on just before the official surrender at Stalingrad? So there's a lot of behind the scenes thinking and strategizing going on. And I think Hitler should not be reduced to just this idea that Stalingrad must hold out at any cost, you know, Fortress Stalingrad, as he called it, because there were other considerations

as well. General Feldmarschall Manstein and his troops, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers who were at the Caucasus. And so a paramount concern was also how do we get those soldiers back? How do we prevent them from being trapped? One idea was to actually keep the Germans in Stalingrad, the 6th Army and other Allied armies fighting in Stalingrad for as long as possible to bind as many Soviet troops as possible to Stalingrad to prevent them from actually closing off an even larger contingent of German troops at the Caucasus. And actually that gambit paid off.

I guess that's interesting. We think of Stalingrad as one of the most decisive defeats in world history. It could have been bigger had other Soviet offensives and plans worked out. I mean, this was actually just part of a gigantic operational plan for the whole of the Eastern Front. Yes. When we talk about Stalingrad, we think primarily of the soldiers. We think primarily, actually, of the German soldiers who were being trapped and then decimated by hunger, disease, by the ferocious fighting. And then we think of the 110,000 soldiers who went into captivity and then the 5,000 to 6,000 who returned home years later. And that, of course, is one of the very many tragic parts of the Battle of Stalingrad. But it's far from the only one.

And so there's immensely higher losses on the Soviet side. And then there are the civilians of Stalingrad that we don't usually talk about when we think about the anniversary. And so I think that is a horrendous tragedy that starts with the German attack on the city and actually an aerial attack because the Germans, by 1942, they realized that entering a city with their tanks and infantry could become very costly to them. They had experienced in Kiev and in Kharkiv, the Romanian allies in Odessa, that once they took possession of the city, suddenly bombs would go off, killing scores of soldiers in hotels and other apartment buildings where the Soviet secret police had actually planted remote detonated bombs. And so that lesson was learned. And so Stalingrad was just

obliterated from the air before the Germans went in. And this is a city with a lot of wooden houses. And we don't know how many thousand people died. We don't know because the city was teeming with refugees. It was a city with a pre-war population of about 400,000 that had swelled up to upward of 700,000 on the eve of the German attack. 300,000 refugees from Ukraine, children homes evacuated from Leningrad. There was about a two-week-long aerial bombardment that took an unknown number of civilian lives. I mean, conservative estimates are 40,000. It could be much higher. lives. I mean, conservative estimates are 40,000. It could be much higher. It was followed by the Germans taking Stalingrad and essentially driving much of the remaining civilian population out into the steppes where they might die of hunger or actually deporting them to Ukraine and further

to Germany. And so I think we need to inscribe the battle of Stalingrad, the battle for Stalingrad into Germany's overall war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. I think this is absolutely important. In the end, in February 1943, 80 years ago, February 2nd, last few units, I suppose, Field Marshal Paulus surrenders, the German commander, and surviving units cut off from each other, surrender in their hours that follow. Was Hitler very disappointed by that surrender? Was he hoping for an Alamo-like sort of last stand, that at least he could help him in creating myths and perhaps useful propaganda for the rest of the war? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

for the rest of the wall? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I actually spoke with the former officer in Stalingrad, Gerhard Hindenlang. I spoke with him about 12 or 13 years ago. He was the one to transmit to Paulus the wire that they had received that Paulus on January 30 had been promoted to general field marshal. And so he brings Paulus the order and Paulus on January 30 had been promoted to general field marshal. And so he brings Paulus the order and Paulus reads it and immediately says, I cannot kill myself. I'm a Christian. So the implied language of the order is immediately understood that this was essentially a call on Paulus to kill himself so as to die honorably in the understanding of the Nazi party, but also the German military at the time. So he doesn't do that. He renders himself into captivity, actually does that in a quite dishonorable way by actually relinquishing

himself from the command, essentially declaring himself a private person and leaving the messy capitulations to a divisional commander, Fritz Roske. Paulus remains alive. Hitler actually believes that Paulus did kill himself. Hitler initially disbelieves the photographs that the Soviets produce up the capture and says this is a Soviet falsification, the capture and says this is a Soviet falsification, but is persuaded by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, that in fact the photographs are authentic, whereupon Hitler gets seized with anger and says, what a coward, what an idiot Paulus is.

Instead of becoming an eternally famous figure, he chooses a cowardly existence just to prolong his miserable existence for a few more decades. And then he says he will pay the price because he will be tortured by the NKVD. And so he's filled with contempt of Paulus and also completely steeped in his anti-Bolshevik, anti-Soviet vitriol. In the aftermath of the fighting, when the guns finally fell silent in this ruined city, investigators, I guess you might call them, went in and you've got access to this extraordinary archive that presents the battle in a completely new way, a very vivid and awful way.

Could you describe what it was like looking through those archives of accounts taken in the hours and days and weeks following the end of the battle? Yeah, for me, that was a jaw-dropping experience to walk into this archive and encounter folders with hundreds of interviews taken with Soviet defenders of Stalingrad during the final stages of the battle and in the immediate aftermath. So this was basically the first building blocks for a post-war Soviet chronicle of the war that actually ended up never being written because the whole project was directed by a Soviet Jew.

And then there was an anti-Jewish campaign after the war. And so I was very fortunate to be the first person to really use these records many, many decades later. So you get a very vivid three-dimensional account of it all, the fighting and the immediate aftermath. very vivid three-dimensional account of it all, the fighting and the immediate aftermath. You're with the soldiers in the bunker, the very soldiers who first encountered Paulus unshaven, unclean, lying on his bed, completely passive. And then they turned to Roscoe, who actually washed himself and his trim. Roscoe himself produced a memoir after coming back from captivity shortly before then shooting himself, probably because he was so traumatized by it all. But in this memoir, Roscoe writes that he offered the cigar to the Soviets. They took a puff and then they put it down, probably thinking it's poison. So

you get a very, very close up, vivid sense of who's sitting across from whom. What I find is enormously striking is actually enduring Soviet respect for the Germans. And so they don't dehumanize the Germans as the Germans frequently did vis-a-vis the Soviets. You really understand that the German-Soviet encounter happens like on a steep cultural gradient with the Germans further in the West, filled with prejudice and quite some arrogance toward their opponents in the East and those from the East looking up to the Germans as a cultured nation, as a civilized nation, but also as a very morally very problematic nation of mass murderers. What vision do we have now of this city as the Soviets re-enter it? Are there still some civilians cowering in the sewers? Is life possible there?

Yeah, I mean, against all odds, there is some life in the completely destroyed city. There was something like between three or five thousand civilians that were counted by the first municipal agents that went back in there. The city was just so devastated that the immediate impulse was to just leave it as is and rebuild Stalingrad in the vicinity. But soon enough, the idea was tossed and then the Soviet leadership was determined that Stalingrad should rise like, you know, a phoenix from the ashes. We should remember that Stalingrad should rise like, you know, Phoenix from the ashes. We should remember that Stalingrad had actually been a new Soviet city. It was planned as an industrial city, but also as a garden city, very modern neoclassical city.

And it was exactly in that spirit then that it was rebuilt with a lot of input by actually German prisoners of war. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. German prisoners of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Yes, we should mention that the Germans who went into captivity, they were put to work, rebelled in the city and some didn't return until 1955. What was the experience of the Germans? You know, it depends really, again, on who you're asking. It's very hard to talk about their experience just through one single perspective.

Yes, conditions were probably extremely harsh. We need to start with the fact that the Germans in late January or early February 1943 were universally starved and exposed to cold and disease. Many of them just couldn't survive the subsequent period, no matter how they would be treated. I read a lot of Soviet documents according to which German prisoners of war were to be actually fed the same rations as Soviet civilians at the time. So they were to be fed as opposed to how the Germans did not feed Soviet POWs systematically in 1941 and 1942, as a result of which there were 2 million Soviet POWs that died in German captivity within the first half year of the war. This was actually knowledge that the Soviets had. So they did feed the Germans knowing that the Germans had not fed the Soviets. But with the long marches to the camps, with the harsh conditions, with lots of feelings of revenge and

local camp authorities who might not obey the orders to give the Germans the exact same rations. Conditions were extremely harsh. But I did say, you need to see who you ask. I did interview in 2009 surviving veterans of the battle. One German commander who was flown out, actually enrolled in higher officer training courses. So he was one of the last ones to fly out. And he was overcome with guilt that he actually led his men, left them behind in the cauldron. And so he actually became a post-war general in the West German army. And then he received a phone call in the 1990s from his former orderly, his aide-de-camp, who had been imprisoned, had gone through captivity, and had then been released to East Germany.

And so only the 1990s could he call his former commander. They're very close, and yet they were politically worlds apart. One of them was a Bundeswehr general, the other one a communist. And when I talked to the communist in formerly East Berlin, he said, you know, the Soviets gave us life. He insisted on the larger picture. He was not going to dwell on the miserly bread rations, but basically the fact that they were allowed to live on. And so that was just a quite different perspective than the very personal guilt-ridden, this

trauma conveyed by the Western generals. So I felt very lucky to actually get multiple perspectives on this battle from people who had fought in it and as you've already said that germans were put to work literally rebuilding the city locals point at buildings you know the germans built that yes yes and often locals would also say that in an appreciative way right these? These are good buildings because Germans built them. The city is destroyed. People are beginning to gather information about the intensity of conflict there, the barbarism of what went on. What was the impact globally on that final surrender 80 years ago in early February 1943?

February 1943? There are military historians who will say that Stalingrad was not the decisive military history of the Second World War, and it probably wasn't. Operation Barbarossa itself, you know, this overly ambitious attempt to rout the Soviet Union, June 22nd, 1941, was doomed to fail, probably in hindsight. We can say that the attack on Moscow in November and December 1941 overshadowed Stalingrad in terms of its military significance. The Battle of Kursk in summer 1943, this huge tank battle, was the battle where the strategic initiative on the battlefield actually passed from the Germans to the Soviets. All of these are, I think, very valid points. Nonetheless, psychologically, Stalingrad was more important than Moscow or Kursk. Stalingrad was a global media battle, maybe the first global media battle

of its kind. It was followed the whole world over. So the Germans were glued to the reports coming daily in the newspapers, but also weekly in the Wochenschau and the newsreel. In British pubs, people starting in September and October 1942 were always waiting to hear the daily update about the battle in Stalingrad. And of course, for very different reasons. In the ghettos of Eastern Europe, people tied their own survival to the fate of Stalingrad, where the Stalingrad is still holding up. That gave them indication that they may actually personally survive. When Stalingrad was over, one of the first battles that actually donned itself the name of Stalingrad was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April and May 1943. So the Jews in the ghetto of Warsaw, young, radical, most of them communist

Jews who took the initiative and rose up, they modeled themselves on the fighters of Stalingrad. They took courage from the fact that the Germans actually could be overcome. This was the first big victory against Nazi Germany. This is very important. Proof of this is that they, in their last message out to the world before they then were crushed and sent to Treblinka and all gassed, proof of that was they referred to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as the Battle of Ghetto Grad. So Stalingrad, I think, is enormously important. And I just mentioned Treblinka.

Treblinka was overrun by the Red Army, actually by units that had fought in Stalingrad. And observers at the time, you know, Vasily Grossman, a news reporter, a very famous writer who was with the Red Army, he points this out in his 1944 reports that it is the Stalingrad Army, the Eighth Guard Army, formerly the 62nd Army, that is now liberating Treblinka. And so he essentially says, without Stalingrad, we would not have been able to stop the Nazi machine of death. have been able to stop the Nazi machine of death. And I think this is the larger significance of this battle that is very important to remember in the world today. And what do you think the effect on Stalin was and the Soviet high command? It must have enormously boosted their confidence that they knew now how to defeat the Axis forces? Oh, absolutely. You see that actually in the shoulder pieces that were given to the Red Army, you know, officers and their markings, they had been removed, torn from their shoulders during the revolution of 1917. It was a revolution against hierarchies, against

oppression in the military. It was a fraternal moment. And so all these shoulder marks were removed from the Red Army. Everyone was a comrade. And in 1943, in January 1943, just as the dimensions of the victory of Stalingrad are becoming clear, the Red Army is receiving its shoulder pieces. And they're saying this is in recognition of the fact that the Red Army is a first class army. And so, again, I see an attempt by the Soviet leadership to really model their Red Army on the example of other

armies of other nations fighting there, including the Germans. And so they're seeking for the recognition of the Germans that we're even able to extend defeat to you. This is a very, very big moment in Soviet military, but also political history. What about the German soldiers? They were feeling pretty invincible in the summer of 1942. They must have looked forward to the campaign of 1943 with abject terror now, because it must have felt like the tide was turning. Yes, but you can always provide explanations for why this defeat happened. And so the scapegoating is enormous in German military quarters, also among German survivors. So the immediate responsibility and blame is put on the German Axis allies, the Romanians and Italians who are

supposed to hold those flanks and did not hold them. Another question is whether German units could have held them against this overpowering Soviet enemy. That's a different question. But I'm just thinking about the morale in 1943 things are dire i mean i read a diary of a young girl i think she was in bavaria she was 12 years old and she listens to the wehrmacht report in late january this is before the battle is over she just reads these very ominous lines of bitter fighting very very heroic, but also fatalistic about, you know, the Germans being doomed, fighting with their last bit against this Asiatic wave, as it was called, the Red Wave. And she asked her father, are the Russians going to be coming to Germany? And so I

think this is also part of the larger significance of Stalingrad that some Germans were already apprehending their own defeat on German soil. For German soldiers, this did not necessarily mean or actually did not directly mean at all that they should stop fighting. Actually, it just gave them a different motivation to fight. The battle or the whole war became so much more existential for Germans in the aftermath of Stalingrad. So in a way, Germans fought with greater resolution, with more despair than ever before, because they saw themselves now as defenders and saviors of German civilian lives. And that also explains why the German death rate in World War II, the military death rate, just shoots up in the last year of the war. So there's to understand that now, in fact, what Nazi propaganda had been telling them that Bolshevism is, you know, deadly and infernal and satanic, they came to believe that. And they were kept being fed by, you know, Nazi images that suggested as much that

fed them with notions of Bolshevik atrocities. And so Germans fought with incredible commitment. Most Germans did. So Stalingrad helped to ensure both that defeat for Germany was inevitable, but helped to ensure that the remaining two and a bit years would be warfare of unimaginable intensity and savagery. I would agree with that, yes. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. If people want to find out more about your

wonderful book in which you go through those archives and paint a fascinating and disturbing picture of the battle, how can they do so? What's the book called? So the book is called Stalingrad, the city that defeated the Third Reich. I also would like to alert listeners to a website that I created with interviews and stunning photographs of the veterans, Germans and formerly Soviet ones. It's called FacingStalingrad.com. Johan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much, Dan. It's been my great pleasure. Thank you. you