Empire: World History - 399. Stalin: Hitler’s Downfall At Stalingrad (Part 5)

Episode Date: September 26, 2026

Antony Beevor wrote the definitive book on the Battle of Stalingrad. He joins William Dalrymple and Anita Anand to discuss how Hitler and Stalin’s armies faced gruelling winter conditions in the siege of the city, and how the battle became a decisive turning point in World War II. What was the experience of soldiers on either side during the brutal urban warfare? How did women survive stuck within the siege? Did Hitler obsess over capturing the city because it bore Stalin’s name? Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. Empire listeners can use code 'EMPIRE' to get a 10% discount on their first order at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/empire Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note-taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own method sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there, sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation. And that no longer need happen ever again. because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo. It records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can refer to afterwards.

I only picked up Plaud a few weeks ago and already it's changing the way that I work. With One Press, the device transcribes those real conversations and turns them into clear actions. It also has a brilliant feature called Ask Plaud, which calls up details of hazy, long gone conversations in seconds. Empire listeners can go to UK.plord.a.ai forward slash empire. That's UK.plaud.a.u.a.org and use the promo code Empire to get 10% off any plaud device. Starlingrad, one of the most brutal battles of all time. By its close, over a million soldiers would lie dead in the rubble of a ruined city. But what was the real reason that Stalingrad was chosen to host this clash of military titans. And how does Putin use this battle to his advantage

today? What's he counting on us not to talk about? To guide us through this monumental moment in history, we're joined by none other than the great Sir Anthony Beaver, author of Stalingrad, a book that has redefined the way we view the battle in the West. Anthony, a very warm welcome to Empire. Thank you very much. Now, last time in the last episode, we left. Stalin and he had his back to the Volga, the terror that he had unleashed on his people had gutted his own officer corps. Hitler's invasion had come within sight of the Kremlin towers and in the summer of 1942 he issues the order that become the iron law of everything else that comes next, not one step backwards. And the place where that order would be tested

past the breaking point of most armies is Stalingrad, along in Dunders. Along in Dunds, industrial city strung out for more than 20 miles along the west bank of the Volga. Renamed from Zaretsin, which you'll remember from one of our previous episodes, was a place there Stalin made his name in the Civil War, however you want to take that. But by the time this battle is over, more than a million people will be dead. An entire German army will have marched into captivity and almost none of it will ever march out again. So historians argue a great deal about what happened and how it happened, but most of them agree,

Stalingrad is the hinge on which the Second World War turns. Almost everything before that is Germany advancing, almost everything after it is Germany falling back. And for our younger listeners who perhaps don't know Sir Anthony's name or his book, for my generation of historians, Stalingrad had not only changed the way that we looked at Stalingrad. Indeed, we looked at the Second World War and how much of it was fought in Russia rather than the version we'd been fed as children where the kind of Battle of Britain and D-Day

were the key moments of the war. But it also changed the way that history was written. And I should say just before we go any further, that when I first started writing history books, I went to Sir Anthony and learnt his face. name a system of card indexes, which I still use to this day. He doesn't use it, but we use it. If you give them up now? Well, I don't anymore, no, Willie.

Very sweet of you to say so. Anthony, there is one school of thought that suggests that Hitler becomes obsessed with Stalin grad because it bears the name Stalin. I mean, how much do you think that carries any water? Well, there is an element of truth, yes, indeed, because in a way it became an Herzat's victory, a replacement for his failure to capture the oil fields in the Caucasus. And that is why Beria, Stalin's chief of secret police, started to refer to Stalingrad as a battle of Rams, i.e. two rams crashing together, one Stalin, the other was Hitta, and it was

very much the significance of the name of Stalingrad. So to remind everyone where we've got to in the story, the Germans reach the Volga on the 23rd of August, 1942, and the battle of Stalingrad opens not with infantry in the streets, but with the sky full of aircraft. That afternoon, Luftflotter number four, one of the primary divisions of the German Luftwaffe, generally assigned as the cream of the East European Air Force, including the highest scoring fighter unit of all time, begins the heaviest bombing raid on the entire eastern front. Wave after wave, close to a thousand sorties in a single day. Oil tanks along the river are hit.

The burning oil spreads out along the surface of the vulgar itself, so the river seems to catch fire. And by the time the raids cease, the figure most often given for civilian dead is around 40,000. If it holds, it makes the 23rd of August the deadliest day of aerial bombing anywhere before. Hiroshima. Anthony, one of the reasons that civilian casualty number is so horrendously high is that civilians were forbidden to leave Stalingrad. Can you tell us why they weren't allowed out? Well, tens of thousands had fled into the city from the west from all over the area,

the Don, Steppe and so forth. And as a result, not only were the sort of too many to evacuate, but also Stalin believed and passed the order to the NKVD who were manning the sites, the crossing sites and the ferries, to prevent the civilians from crossing over to the east bank. This was partly because he felt that the troops would fight better if there were civilians there and it would make them defend the city because at this stage the Germans had not actually reached the city. They were still outside. But in fact, of course, it meant that far more were killed than would have been in the case otherwise.

Was there also the thought process, Anthony, that, you know, he wanted the factories running until the last possible minute, you know, that actually he couldn't afford to let people run away? Well, the factories were important because, of course, one of them was actually producing tanks, T-34 tanks. I mean, some of them were being rolled out and even simply being manned by factory workers, not even by soldiers. and they were actually, they didn't have any gun sites, and they were just looking down the barrel to fire at the enemy. We should say, Anthony, which I don't think we have said, is that Stalingrad is a major centre of Soviet industry, one of the reasons, not just the name,

that Hitler wants to capture it, is it so important for the war effort. Yes, but one has to remember, actually, it was not a prime objective. The whole idea was not to capture Stalingrad, but actually to use it as they advanced down into the Caucasus to seize the oil fuel. They were, the original plan was they were just going to bombard it or bomb it, no more than that.

And it only actually then became a real target when it was obvious that they were going to fail in their objective of capturing the oil fields. And this is why it became, if you write, the Erzart's replacement for victory in the Caucasus. It was going to be a symbolic victory, really, over Stalin himself because it bore Stalin's name. Yeah, I mean, and these are two men who are, you know, egotistical enough for this to matter more than anything. Anthony, one thing that the aerial bombardment does is it sort of makes it almost impossible to capture the city, because if you've left a braille, you know, landscape, a pockmarked landscape, it's not the best place to, you know, drive your tanks into if you're Hitler's forces. You're absolutely right. It's a mistake which, in fact, was made on numerous occasions in the Second World War, but this was one of the most outstanding examples. If you smash a city to pieces, the rubble itself not only blocks the street, but actually provides the best defensive positions imaginable. The Russians, the Soviets, then use the rubble to bury anti-tank guns to conceal tanks, even within the rubble. And this means. made it a formidable position to attack for the Germans. And what happens next has very few parallels. The tidy German method of armour, artillery and aircraft, all working together with perfect

synchronicity, stops working, and the fighting shrinks. It moves indoors. It goes from room to room, cellar to cellar, even down into the sewers. And the Germans give it a name that sticks a Rattan Krieg, the War of Rats. Tell us about that. It was a vicious, terrible battle. As you say, fighting in the sewers, fighting in the rubble, fighting him from room to room. The whole place one has to remember was literally a cloud of dust of smash masonry.

Each side, it were almost unrecognizable because all of their uniforms were impregnated with the same sort of dumb-colored dust. The fighting took place with really many vicious little baffles. It was Triekov, the commander of the 60 Second Army, called the Stalingrad Academy of Street Fighting. And they had these little groups of, say, eight men using sharpened spades, knives, flame throwers. It was totally unlike any form of fighting. And the Germans were thrown. They were disorientated, partly because it was taking place. on different dimensions, but also because it actually lost all of their advantages, whether

it was in momentum of attack in terms of mechanised attack, their tanks couldn't operate in the same way. And as a result, it was almost like a return to the First World War. This is the thing that Putin often draws on. It's the enormous courage of a force that has so little. You know, actually, you know, these are beleaguered men who had very, very little. Hugging the enemy, I think that's an absolutely fascinating tactic. Tell us a little bit about that, because that is part of the courage that Putin draws on in the mythology of his new Russia. Well, General Treykoff, the commander in Stalingrad, realized that their real disadvantage was, of course, German air superiority, especially during the day. And so that's why he,

ordered his troops to dig their trenches within 50 meters of the German positions, knowing that that were making much more difficult for the Luftwaffe to attack Soviet positions. And because they would be much more likely, just as likely to hit German troops as a Soviet. So that was one aspect of it, but the real point was also to keep attacking at night as well, because that would exhaust the Germans. I mean, during the month of September alone, September 1942 alert, the six army at Stalingrad fired off 25 million shots of rounds of ammunition, purely because in many cases at night, they were terrified,

thinking that Russians' troops were creeping up on them, and the Russians were very clever about making provocations, pretending to make attacks. And this set off firing all down the line. A nightmare to fight in for both sides. Well, I mean, the whole conditions, the smell, I mean, the place, as people described it, when I had to remember there was black smoke everywhere coming from the burning refineries and oil reserves.

The smash rubble meant that there was this sort of brown, dun-coloured dust everywhere. There was no water. I mean, to give an idea of the pitilessness of the battle, German infantrymen would bribe Russian orphans to go and fill water bottles in the Volga because they could get no water otherwise by offering them a crust of bread or something like that. And as soon as the Soviet authorities realized that these children, Russian children, were helping the Germans in this particular way purely to stay alive, then they ordered their snipers to shoot the children.

One of the most affecting parts of your extraordinary book is the deadly river crossings, because every round of ammunition, every loaf of bread, every reinforcement that kept the 602nd army alive, had to come across the Volga by boat. So, I mean, if that's the case, that is a weak point, and that is something that will be exploited by hitless forces, right? You're absolutely right. I mean, for the Germans, the objective, really, was to try to cut off. the supply chain coming across the river. These were basically the Volga Flotilla, which obviously was a military organization, but also the local boatmen who had all been

Cress gang basically into providing the crossing supplies. The losses were appalling. But one also has to remember that actually it was also just as vital to evacuate the wounded. And I mean, we We interviewed some of the young women, old women when we saw them, of course. But I mean, they were the ones who literally had been dragging the wounded off the battlefield. But having to do it on their stomachs, they were under fire, pulling the wounded on, say, a cape all the way down to the rubber bank where these poor wounded soldiers were basically then dumped on boats and brought back to the other side. the bravery of the young women, Russian women in this particular battle were astonishing, whether it was the anti-aircraft gunners who were actually taking on German tanks. I mean, these were 18-year-old girls, 17-year-old girls sometimes students.

They were the ones also who were trying to defend the river crossings with either the anti-aircraft guns or also on the boats themselves. So one mustn't forget that aspect, in fact, of the fighting. By the start of November, 1942, the Germans hold something like nine-tenths of the city, and they still cannot finish it. Tricov's 60-second army is down to a thin ribbon of ground along the river, a few hundred yards deep in places

hanging onto the factory ruins and the landing stages. And in that ribbon, a sniper war grows. hunter, stalking hunter through the rubble. One Soviet marksman, Vasily Zipsv, is credited with more than 200 kills and becomes a legend the propagandists cannot resist. To the Germans, freezing and exhausted, it looks as though one more shove will end it. But that shove doesn't come. Tell us about what happens next, Anthony. Well, the sniper duels and all of these great stories were very largely a question of propaganda. Yes, there were certainly some star snipers. And in fact, they even talked about a doctrine of sniperism. But what I have to remember is also there were petty

rivalries between divisions. The reason why Zytsef was chosen as the star in the film enemy at the gates played by Jude Law, Zytezv was a real person. But the whole question of this sniper duel with the German sniper, played by Ed Harris, is terrible fantasy. But it was a very clever fantasy. It was partly because they were very resentful of the way that the 13th Guards Division, Guards Rifle Division, commanded by Rodimsef, was getting so much propaganda coverage. Both Treykhov and the Batup, the commander of the Siberian division, in which Saitsef was very resentful about this. And this, is why Zaytsef was actually sort of chosen as the star sniper. But it was an extraordinary

battle. By the way, there weren't any women snipers at this particular time. They came later. They started really from the beginning. There was one in Leningrad and there'd been one in Sevastopol. But the women's snipers didn't really start and they became very effective, though, but that was the following year. I want to ask you about the civilians, but just before that's just a thought that occurs to me. You know, with his terror and his purges and his putches, Stalin has removed a lot of very capable people from his armed forces. Is he sort of pulling strings, or has he left it to whoever Chekhov and whoever is left to come up with their own strategies? You're quite right. This actually is the turning point in a way, one of a number of turning points,

where Stalin suddenly realizes that actually it is time to give the experts, so the military experts are heard. And this is where General Zhukov, the commander-in-chief, the chief of general staff, and Vazilevsky, come up with a plan on the great country attack for Stalingrad. But also it is the time when the NKVD, the secret police of Beria, who had been such a terrible influence,

not only in the purges of the Red Army, But even during the early part of the war, when they had started arresting almost any general who retreated or who even asked questions, this had been the disaster, really, of 1941. And now by autumn of 1942, Stalin had really started to see that he must not interfere so much. And this makes a big difference. And the interesting thing is we're seeing this is where Hitler goes in the opposite direction. He is interfering more and more. Stalin is interfering less and less, and they are on totally opposite courses,

where Stalin is starting to become a very effective war leader, and Hitler is actually starting to become a complete disaster. Nevertheless, Anthony, your book is full of horrific descriptions of Soviet soldiers being shot by their own sides if they move back even an inch from their lines. And many of the Soviet casualties are actually NKVD, and own goals, so to speak. Indeed. I mean, the obsession, which had come down from the commander-in-chief,

from this whole idea of not one step back, Order 227, had an appalling effect. Inevitably, under such appalling conditions, such pressure, there were many soldiers trying to desert or even cross over to the other side, not that necessarily they were pro-German, but, for example, many Ukrainians whose families were cut off and the occupied territories. They didn't know whether their families had survived or not. So quite often they crossed over hoping that they would be able to go home and somehow find their own families. The execution squads quite often were given vodka to steady their nerves. In fact, this did not exactly improve their marksmanship. And so some of these victims who were executed weren't actually dead.

one of them, I mean, I remember when we found in the Russian archives, you know, it described how this guy had been shot, thrown into a showhole, earth chucked on top of him. He'd pulled himself out, he came back, and of course, the execution squad had to be called out again to shoot him once more. All together, certainly John Erickson was the first to come up with this particular figure. There were 13,500 executions during the course. of the whole of the Battle of Stalingrad. Now, that's not just within the city, that's outside as well, the Stalingrad campaign. But it is a staggering figure because that is more than a whole division. No British army, no American army, no French army would ever have survived at

Stalingrad. It was such a bitter, such an appalling battle that only the Russians, I think, after the way they had been through such horrors already in the past and famines and everything would actually have held on there. And I think that's something that we have to recognize. We're going to take a break in just a second. But I really want to know about what, you know, we talked about the men in uniform and how hard it was for them. But what about the civilians? You know, the ones who, you know, the women, children, wives, children, parents who weren't allowed to leave. There's no food coming in. I mean, you've, done a lot of interviews for your book. What do they talk about? How did they eat? How did they get

water? What was it like for them? Because I guess they're living underground most of the time, aren't they? Well, they are. I mean, in the end, they did actually allow some to leave really right at the last moment. But, I mean, altogether, we don't know how many were actually trapped in the city. We know that when the battle finally came to an end, the following year in February, the were only 10,000 left alive, and of those about 1,000 were children. Now, the children survived either by basically working for the Germans or they were sometimes adopted by Russian units. The very young ones were sort of adopted almost like mascots and they were fed and cared for.

Most of them were literally living a totally feral existence. They were having to live off crust, steal food even for. from soldiers on one side or the other. Some of them survived were from eating roots or barriers or whatever they could find in that particular way. To describe the state of these children at the end of the battle, most of them were unable to speak. I mean, they had become literally like animals,

like little wild animals. But for the women, and it was usually new women who were the civilians trapped in the cities, they had to survive somehow. In some cases, they resorted to prostitution. There were even cases of sort of, you know, one or two brothels being opened up in the ruins because there was no other way of obtaining food. But the vast majority had then been rounded up by the Germans and then sent back to Nazi Germany as slave labor. So this is why the figure was down to about, as I say, 10,000 civilians by the end of the battle. But I mean, you know, we don't know how many have been trapped

there as far back as August 1942. Well, with that horrifying thought in mind, we're going to take a break. Join us after the break when we talk about this story, but from the German side. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Think of some things that glow. Okay, fireflies, glow, glow sticks, the northern lights. They're very cool. But what if we could replicate that glow inside our bodies

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Better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Welcome back. So, Anthony, we've told this story from the Russian side, but what is going on with the Germans? Because I know you went rummaging around in the German archives a lot,

and you sort of let the men of the Sixth Army speak for themselves in their own letters home. What kind of thing did you find? What one found actually was the most fascinating material, especially in the German archives, but in the Russian too, is, of course, those who are not exactly part of the army. So in the German archives, it was the reports from doctors and from priests. And when we negotiated with the Ministry of Defence to get into the Russian archives the first time round, the colonel there, when I explained, he said, we have simple rule in our archive.

You tell us the subject. We choose the files. So I said, well, yes, I know, but that's not quite how it works in other archives. archives. I said to give an idea in the German archives in Freiburg, you know, the most interesting were the doctors and the priests. And he roar of laughter there. No priests in the Red Army. He said, I said, no, I know, but the commissar reports. And this was vital because Stalin was so certain that the generals were lying to him that he was not getting an accurate idea. He thought that the situation in Stalingrad was even more disastrous than it was. That as a result,

every night, a report, usually about 20 pages long or between, say, 14 and 25 pages or whatever, was flown back to Moscow every single night so that Stalin would know exactly what was happening. And this was gold from a historian's point of view, because there was no exaggeration, there was no propaganda at all. It was dead honest. It was both the real heroics and also the real humiliations, the real drunkenness of commanders, crossing over to the enemy, what were called extraordinary events. And were they happy that you got hold of these at it? I mean, did they slip through the net, or were they willing to give them to you consciously?

No, they were not giving them to us consciously. We were having to cheat. And the only way of cheating was, to begin with, they gave us all the files, but they marked the pages we were allowed to read. everything else was forbidden. To begin with, we were supervised, and then they got bored, and we weren't supervised, so we were able to read the forbidden stuff. And the intriguing thing was that this was in a way typically Russian.

It was a mixture of paranoia, first of all, and then naivety afterwards. So we're now, actually in November 1942. The Germans are certain that the 60th Second Army is all but beaten, and that certainly is the trap. while the whole world watches the street fighting, while Paulus, the commander of the German 6th Army, feeds division after division into the rubble. The Soviets are quietly doing something else entirely. Out on the open step, north and south of the city,

Zukov and Vazlyevsky are amassing over one million men for a plan so ambitious that when the Germans glimpsed pieces of it, they simply refuse to believe it. The plan is not to relieve Stalin. The plan is to swallow the army by besieging it whole. Its co-name is Uranus. Operation Uranus was astonishingly ambitious, particularly since the Red Army up until this particular time had not managed any effective assault and is certainly not a deep penetration and an encirclement of German units. So from this point of view, Stalin had back in

back in late September, early October, was desperate about how were they actually going to save Stalingrad. And to begin with, he just wanted one counterattack after another. But Schucoff and Vasilowski realized that this really demanded a much more radical solution. And this is when they came up with the plan for Operation Uranus. They organized with extraordinary cleverness, a way of concealing this buildup, this huge buildup of forces, both to the north of Stalingrad and to the south, where they were going to attack through the Romanian armies on either side of the 6th century, of the 6th Army, of Powdus's 6th Army, which was the largest army in the whole of the Vermarck. It was so large because it had had a part of half's fourth Panzer Army attached to it.

they were going to cut through all the way and meet at Kalach well behind German lines and basically cut off in a huge encirclement the whole of Paulus' six army. How did the Germans not see this, Anthony? Because you can't move millions of men around in the step without the Luftwaffe spotting it, you'd have thought. Well, they did it by concealment, and this was called Masgirovka. Maskyrovka is basically the concealment of your attack. plans to a large degree. They would, for example, would dig defenses at the very places where they

were going to attack. The Germans refused to believe that the Russians were capable. They knew the Russians were probably going to attack, and would, in fact, they guessed they're probably trying to attack through the rather weak Romanian armies on either side. But, you know, that was not enough. It never occurred to them, but they could actually go for a full encirclement. And that's exactly what they get. A quarter of a million men, the Sixth Army, sealed inside this ring of Soviet steel. The Germans have a word for it, don't they? The castle, the cauldron.

And the man who spent, you know, the whole of the 1930s shooting his own generals, is actually winning at last. I mean, that's the extraordinary thing. Mission Uranus, Operation Uranus, is the moment that Stalin learns that, you know, however briefly, get out of the way of your soldiers. Let them do what they do. Indeed. This was the moment.

and Stalin looked at the plans. He was in a way sort of involved, but not from the point of view, the actual planning, but of making sure that they had absolute full support. And everybody at every level was given total priority to make this work. From this point of view, then, we knew that, for example, Berrier would never have quite the same control over the army. And one of the commanders, in fact, is very interesting. Rokosovsky, Marshal Rokosovsky, as he became,

had actually been one of the prisoners tortured and beaten up by barrier, who was now, and it was even threatened by barrier, saying, listen, I can pull you back at any moment into my torture chambers. This was now no longer really the case. And Rokoskovsky proved himself. He happened to be of rather aristocratic descent. and also Polish, which in Stalin's view, of course, was about as bad as you could get, because Stalin hated the Poles above all, partly because of his humiliation, as you have already

covered it, in the civil war and the defeat on the Vistula. Now, inside the cauldron, Pallas can do the sensible thing. He can turn his army round and punch his way out to the West while it still has fuel and the strength to do so. and he asks Hitler for permission. But Hitler refuses. The sixth army will stand where it is and it will be supplied from the air. That promise comes from Herman Gering,

but it's a complete fantasy. They don't mean it. They make the promise, but they're not going to do it. To keep a quarter of million men alive and fighting through a Russian winter, the airlift would need to bring in several hundred tons of supplies every single day.

And of course, just look at those numbers. it never could and never did come close. The weather, the Soviet fighters, the flak, simply too many transport planes, cut the deliveries to a fraction of what they needed. And so you've got these men in the cauldron who are slowly but surely starving. And what did that, I mean, Anthony, for the troops themselves, is it that, you know, they see their rations being cut and cut and cut again? And what do they, you know, say or think about Hitler and, you know, the end of the war?

The whole idea of standing firm on the Volga was entirely Hitler's. The trouble was that Paulus had always been rather in Hitler's thrall, mainly because of one of the earlier battles, whereby Hitler had been proved right, and Paulus, who had thought that he was wrong, had realized that he should really be very careful. And I'm afraid, Paulus did not have the courage, really, to speak how it was, particularly. time, Manchstein, who was the commander in chief further south, was determined that they should try to break out, but he knew perfectly well that he was not able to be able to persuade Paulus to disobey orders. So as a result, the condition of the soldiers started to deteriorate

very, very quickly, and especially with the weather. So there was a combination of three things, and this was for me was fascinating, because by tier chance, I found that they, pathologist of the Sixth Army who'd been flown into Stalingrad in December to find out why soldiers were dying so rapidly, was living only a few hundred yards away from the archives I was working in. This was Professor Gurgensen, so I went to interview him. And he had discovered with his research that it was a combination of stress of cold as well as the shortage of food, which actually was upsetting their metabolism and was creating an accelerated starvation. So, as I say, it was the stress and the cold, which was important parts of it.

When he started cutting up the bodies for his autopsies, this became absolutely clear of what the real tragedy or the real disaster, which was taking place at this particular time. I remember Anthony's stories at school of, you know, the, beleaguered Germans being so desperate, so desperate, so desperate. So they're drinking anti-freeze and they're hacking off bits of their own horses. And did you find this to be true or is this part of the massive propaganda at the time? I don't think they were drinking antifreeze. That tended to be a Russian soldier's thing when they were short of alcohol more than German.

Oh, God, yes, certainly about eating the horses. Though what was even more appalling, of course, was that there were Russian prisoners. held within the castle, and they were not given any food at all, and they were reduced to eating each other to cannibalism, which was an appalling, basically a war crime. But I'm afraid that was the decision taken by the German chief of staff, Paris's chief of staff, General Schmidt, that they should not be fed while German soldiers were also starving. So then we've got this extraordinary moment when he promotes Paulus to field marshal, but it's actually meant as a death sentence, because the whole of German history, no field marshal has ever let himself

be taken alive. The message could not be plainer. Shoot yourself. But Paulus hold up in the basement of a bombed out department store called Universe Magd declines the invitation. I have no intention of shooting myself for this bohemian corporal, he says. Give us a little bit of the background to that. Well, Pallas knew perfectly well what Hitler meant at this particular time. And Hitler was absolutely furious when he discovered that Pallus had not shot himself. He regarded that as utterly cowardly as womanlike. And he said, yes, actually, even women were more courageous about being able to shoot themselves,

I think partly because he did know of a couple of women suicides in that way. And he was furious that Paolus should have actually decided to live and basically to carry out the surrender. And, you know, the interesting thing I always think about this is that Paulus is, you know, he's actually a man that the military could respect. He was brave, you know, he did what he could do. But in the end, you know, he's forced to surrender the southern half of the pocket that he's in. the north half holds out for two more days. And then he gives up on the second of February. Around 91,000 men will walk out of those ruins

straight into Soviet captivity. 22 of them will be Hitler's generals. And they are in a terrible state, Anthony. I mean, just describe what they look like and, you know, what happens to them? Well, most of them were frostbitten. Their feet above all were frostbitten. So they weren't walking out.

They were shuffling if they could even manage that into captivity. They were, as you say, they were covered in lice. Many of them had typhus. Many of them were going to die of typhus. And in fact, as they shuffled out, and this is one of the scenes which really struck me, a Russian colonel shouts in their faces, pointed the ruins around, saying, this is what Berlin is going to look like. And that very much summoned up the point that Stalingrad was the turning point and that Berlin was going to be the final destination of the advance all the way from the Volga, all the way to the Spry.

And that's realized even at the time, is it? People point to this as the turning point as it's happening. They realize the significance of the surrender. Oh, yes. and I think that we realize that when we see all around the world there is this influence, this effect that Stalingrad really is the turning point. But in fact, the geopolitical turning point had actually taken place much earlier, even though it didn't look like it at the time.

And I think that most historians accept that it was December 1941 when Hitler declares war in United States, and of course, when he fails to capture Moscow in December 1941. But of course, one disaster after another follows in the 1942, whether it's in Pearl Harbor, the loss of Singapore, everything in North Africa. I mean, there was one disaster after another, and yet it's only until we actually see the final defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad that everybody around the world suddenly realizes that this definitely means the end of, end of Nazism in the near future. Yeah, and what is so interesting about this is that, you know, Stalin, a man who didn't like

talking in public, you know, suddenly, you know, this is his moment to shine. He's being fated across the world as the architect of this victory, you know, made a marshal of the Soviet Union. And he's kind of fated and celebrated in poetry and song. You know, there's even Pablo Neruda does this canto de more a Stalin grad, a song of love for Stalin grad. I'm going to sort of read you a little bit of this, because it becomes just such a motivating factor to everybody who's fighting the Nazis, that this is, from now on, we're going to crush them.

So this is from Neruda's poem. Save me a fragment of violent foam. Save me a rifle. save me a plough and let them place it at my grave with a red ear of grain from your soil, that it be known if there were 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. He's good, isn't he, Neruda?

He really is. He's very good. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, psychologically, this is a massive deal. But it also, you know, the thing that, you know, happens next is that you have a whole bunch of victorious soldiers who are now cantering towards Berlin, thinking we're going to take Berlin. And they are in murderous mood. I mean, apart from feeling like they're victorious, they have suffered also. It's not just, you know, they have starved, they have had typhus, they have had lice. They're battle-hardened, but they're also very angry. Well, your absolutely right, hominagia Stalingrado of Neruda was repeated in many ways, in many other forms all around the world. It brought thousands into resistance movements right across Europe because people saw that at last they were going to be defeated, the Nazis. So from that point of view, yes, the effect was indeed enormous.

And yes, there was also this longing for revenge, which was a lot of revenge, which was a lot of. going to take place. But they weren't necessarily, it wasn't going to be an easy canter towards Berlin, because of course the German army was going to fight more and more desperately in retreat. And the viciousness would not in any way diminish. In fact, it would get worse, as we find with the Holocaust, because the idea that defeat might be upon them made Hitler even more determined to kill more Jews before the end. So, shall we say, it brings horror as well as triumph. Anthony, what was it about the Soviet uniforms and so on

that allowed them not to be as frostbitten as the Germans, or were they actually as fraughton? Is it just that they had better kit for the winter? They did have much better kit for the winter. Their padded jackets, the cotton padded jacket, were far better. There are wonderful pictures in your book of these guys, with the white sort of winter outfits on the ice? Well, those were the sniper,

those were the sort of basically the sniper uniforms, which were important indeed. But no, it was the padded jackets, but also the fact that they didn't have socks. They didn't wear socks. They wore foot bandages. And those were far better because their boots also didn't have iron studs in them. And those had accelerated the frostbite of the Germans,

far more. Anthony, I know when we've chatted before, you have told me that this is the exact moment that you think the Soviet Union became a superpower. That, you know, until this point, it was sort of a another country, but from here on in, this is where superpower is conferred. And that's something that probably explains why Putin keeps referring to Sardangrad in the war against Ukraine. I mean, tell us a little more about that.

Well, it was very much at the Tehran conference in November, 1943. So whatever it is, you know, eight, nine, ten months after the end of Stalingrad, that Stalin, with Roosevelt and with Churchill, meeting in Tehran, is the leader. He is the boss in a way because it is the sacrifices of the Red Army, the victory at Stalingrad, which basically puts him in the controlling position, definitely in the driving seat at Tehran. Churchill is very, very aware of this. He's tried to improve relations with Stalin. But of course, Stalin is absolutely embittered at the fact that there has been no cross-channel invasion, no attempt.

He has been blackmailing Churchill and Roosevelt has been very dishonest in the way that, that he's always more or less passed the blame onto Churchill. And Churchill is the one who has to deal with Stalin on this particular question. But interestingly, what Soviet intelligence is asking all of their German prisoners this time is what was the effect of the bombing on Germany? Because in fact, the bombing campaign, the strategic bombing campaign, which of course has been hugely controversial because of, A, the morality, or be the effectiveness with the RAF bomber command and also the Americans later bombing Germany,

that Stalin was well aware that actually this was our second front. This was what gave the Russians air superiority on the Eastern Front and made the whole difference to the war at this particular stage. But Stalin was never going to acknowledge it, even though he was well aware from his own people, that this is what is actually going to really change things on the Eastern Front. Anthony, we just draw the whole thing to a close now. And one thing we should be aware of is the vast scale of the casualties.

What numbers do you give for the casualties on both sides? Well, it seems the casualties on the German side altogether, It depends really whether you just talk about Stalingrad itself or the whole of the Stalingrad campaign. The whole campaign. Well, I mean, the whole of the campaign, we're going to be talking definitely well over a million just on the German side. Now, 800,000 of those probably in terms of eventual deaths. But, of course, many of them just died afterwards in captivity. I mean, of those who were captured, only 5% survived.

That is the survival rate amongst the ordinary soldiers. Interestingly, amongst the generals, 95% survived because they were treated so much better. And I mean, this is the paradox. Here you have a communist country looking after the generals and feeding them properly and forcing the ordinary soldiers into slave labor. in the forests, and they were known as Stalin's horses. Basically, they were worked to death, cutting timber, digging, and used for the most dangerous tasks available.

So we leave, you know, Stalin, Gradwood, Stalin coming out of the ruins, going on to Berlin, going on to, you know, sort of build an empire. And that is the thing that Putin refers to when he rehabilitates Stalin in many ways. going to be speaking to Fiona Hill, one of the West's foremost experts on Russia and Vladimir Putin. She served as the U.S. National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia, later as Senior Director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council during Donald Trump's presidency, internationally acclaimed for her calm, authoritative testimony during Trump's first impeachment inquiry in 2019, where she warned, and I urge you, if you haven't seen it, before you listen to our conversation,

go look it up on YouTube. She warned against Russian disinformation and defended the integrity of US intelligence. If you can't wait, you know what you do? You just head to EmpirePodukuk.com. There's EmpirePodukuk.com and become a member. Anthony, thank you once again. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnden.

And me, William Dhrmple. For 50 years, Canadians have wondered what the names of IKEA furniture mean, like Natopa, the guardrail for children's beds. Natopa means giving your favorite person room to grow. It means their safety and your piece of... No. In Swedish, Natapa means night monkey. Mom, he's back.

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