It
is seventy years this February since the ending of the siege of Stalingrad, the
denouement of one of the most savagely drawn out battles of the Second World
War.
Among
the many episodes on the German eastern front, Stalingrad has a legend all of
its own. Leningrad is characterised as a siege in which the inhabitants
stoically held out in the face of a blockade and subsequent harsh privations,
while Kursk was a ‘high-noon’ shoot out spectacle of tank warfare.
Stalingrad
was a version of hell on earth, a battle in which large armies became bogged
down in an attritional conflict fought from street-to-street and
house-to-house. Its evocations of mass suffering, starvation, disease and death
were apt signatures of the phrase: ‘Hell on the Eastern Front’.
It
was a pitiless contest over an evacuated city arguably fought more for reasons
of prestige and less for overall strategic advantage. At least initially. But
strategic blunder it ultimately became as Adolf Hitler, the supreme commander
of the German armed forces resisted attempts by members of his general staff as
well as the leaders of the encircled Sixth Army to break out and re-group with
other German armies poised to strike south to the Caucasus from the city of
Rostov.
It
had been Hitler’s objective to secure Stalingrad in order to cut the oil rich
Caucasus from the rest of the Soviet Union before conquering it.
The
epic struggles of Stalingrad, Kursk and Leningrad have to be reviewed in the
light of Hitler’s promised war of annihilation; an unmerciful and barbaric
confrontation between diametrically opposite ideologies.
In
Hitler’s view, German National Socialism did not only have to overcome Soviet
Communism, it was in the vanguard of racial warfare between Teuton and Slav.
Moreover, the ‘cancer’ of Bolshevism, led he believed by ‘world Jewry’, was
hell bent on undermining and finally enslaving the Germanic peoples.
It
was thus in the eastern lands that the genocidal einsatzgruppen mobile units operating behind invading German armies,
began the process of rounding up and exterminating those whom the Nazi ideology
designated as untermenschen or
sub-human.
The
invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union were key planks in his creation of a
Greater Reich in order to create new living space or Lebensraum.
Yet
these monumental encounters were not envisaged by the Fuhrer. “We have only to
kick down the door”, he had asserted before the commencement of Operation
Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, “and the whole rotten edifice
will come tumbling down.”
But
he had underestimated the Soviets who turned out to be a formidable foe. By now
fed up with most of his generals, Hitler was convinced that stiffened Soviet
opposition could be overcome. “What we now need is National Socialist ardour
rather than professional ability to settle matters in the East,” he berated
General Franz Halder as he removed him as Chief of the Army High Command.
The
fanaticism of the SS units as well as whatever resolve could be summoned by the
Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht, was more than matched by the Soviets in
whose ears rang Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s command: “Not one step back.”
Such
was literally the case as NKVD troops operating to the rear of advancing Soviet
forces were primed to shoot any retreaters. But it was not all about coercion.
The ‘Great Patriotic War’, the response to German aggression was conducted under
the spirit of a tremendous determination to re-conquer their invaded lands and
to exact revenge against the Germans.
Part
engaging drama and part tragic theatre, these elements coalesced to turn the
battle for Stalingrad into a morality play on the consequences of extreme
hubris as well as the triumph of dogged resistance in the face of a brutal and
unmerciful invader.
Here
tales of desperate troops being reduced to foraging for scraps of edible
material and even eating raw flesh off the carcasses of horses stand with
intriguing sub-plots such as the story of the ruthless Russian sniper, Vasily
Zaytsev, pitted against another German sniper.
It
remains famous for Hitler’s gesture of awarding Freidrich Paulus a
Field Marshall’s baton on the eve of the collapse of the encircled Sixth Army.
It was a signal to Paulus to commit suicide as no German officer of that
rank had ever been captured in battle.
Paulus paid no heed and instead signed the instruments of surrender before a
panel of Soviet military officers who were startled at having captured so many
senior German officers.
The
surrender of the Sixth Army was a catastrophe from which the German army would
not recover. For the German people, long used to victories, the sense of a
reckoning with fate as to the survival of their nation finally hit home.
The
response of their leaders sought to gloss over this stark reality. Hitler
remarked, “What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond
the life of the individual is the nation.”
Joseph
Goebbels, the propaganda chief in a speech at Berlin’s SportPalast, would
famously exhort the German people to embrace “Total War” as the method for the
state to follow if it was to survive the onslaught of the Soviets and the
Western allies who were gearing up for a land invasion of the European
continent.
The
Nazi state, which would not yield to the allied demand of ‘unconditional
surrender’, would end just over two years later with millions of Germans and
millions more of other nations perished.
The
intransigence of Adolf Hitler and, equally, the doggedness of Soviet forces
ensured that with the Battle of Stalingrad, the graveyard of German National
Socialism was well and truly marked.
(C)
Adeyinka Makinde (2013)
Adeyinka
Makinde is an author based in London where he lectures in law.
