The Hinge of History

Stalingrad.   A name and place forever linked with the Red Army’s defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht, which marked the end of the German advance into Russia. Winston Churchill deemed the denouement of World War II’s epic battle as the ‘hinge of history’.  Indeed, the front line of the war that swung east into Russia would now swing west in a two-year German retreat to Berlin and the Führer bunker.

Happenstance often dictates events, but Providence itself seemingly selected this city for a major role in history.  For nearly four hundred years, this river port situated on the Volga River on the Russian steppe was known as Tsaritsyn, the scene of many pitched battles for its control during the Russian civil war between the Bolsheviks and White Army loyalists.  

In 1925, the victors rechristened the city as Stalingrad in honor of Joseph Stalin.   In 1942, that name would draw Hitler to the city for the prestige of conquering his hated nemesis’ namesake, while cutting the Russian’s vital river supply route.  Instead, Hitler met disaster.

Sowing the Seeds of Hubris

Hitler’s arrogance, hatred and brutality sowed the seeds for his own demise. An inflated hubris lofted the former Austrian vagabond to stratospheric heights after a decade of triumphs that began in Germany.

Hamstrung by a power vacuum created by disparate and splintered political groups, the German people—still in the throes of the humiliating the Versailles treaty—grappled ineffectively in addressing an economic depression that devastated the nation. Hitler ultimately seized the reins of power by force of his personal will and oratory magnetism, backed by political maneuvering and his storm troopers’ stick.  

The Führer righted the economic ship of state—primarily by borrowing and spending associated with a military buildup—while he wronged his political opponents by jailing them in concentration camps or murdering them without trials.   His megalomania persona absorbed mass adulation primed by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine; charged by Albert Speer’s Nuremburg Hosanna Field; and glorified creatively in film for the masses in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. 

His dictatorial powers over Germany ensured, Hitler then secured a series of foreign policy, then military victories.   In goose-stepping succession, his Wehrmacht occupied the Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles treaty; his Reich annexed Austria; thereafter, his brinkmanship bluffed the feckless French and British into a policy of appeasement that led to Germany’s absorption of Czechoslovakia.  The Führer capped it off with a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II, which temporarily avoided a two-front war against Germany.

In war, his Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg smashed Poland, sped through the Low Countries, defeated the French, and ran the English out of Europe.  In 1941, Operation Barbarossa consisting of 3 million men invaded the Soviet Union and achieved spectacular successes when his troops routed and dismembered whole Soviet armies.  A huge expanse of the U.S.S.R. fell under German dominion.  

But like Icarus, whose flight took him to close to0 the sun, Hitler’s hydrogen inflated hubris rose to heated heights destined to ignite into flames.

The Abyss.

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.  And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”   Friedrich Nietzsche.

At the outset of his war with Russia, Hitler declared that the conflict in the East would be a war of annihilation.  His Einsatzgruppen—innocuously translated means ‘deployment groups’—followed in the wake of the advancing German armies.  They inflicted ruthless atrocities upon the Soviet peoples, which included deaths to or enslavement of Red Army prisoners of war; executions of political commissars and intellectuals; first shooting en masse, then wholesale deportation of Russian Jews to concentration camps for mass extermination.  Einsatzgruppen reprisals for partisan acts of sabotage included 800 shot in Kiev for a single act of arson, and the execution of 400 after a communication installation was damaged.

Initially, the Red Army fought ineffectively against the German invaders just as the Russians did in their inept campaigns in World War I.   Their botched invasion of Finland in late 1939 underscored the endemic malaise of the Soviet people and their military.  But the German’s brutal maltreatment of a vanquished people galvanized dispirited ethnic groups, many of whom loathed Stalin and his Bolshevik regime, into a resolute force.   They understood that the devil they knew was better than the devil that occupied their country.   As the war in the East dragged on, the Red Army fought with increasing determination.

Operation Blau.

Despite Soviet resolve, the 1942 German offensive titled Operation Blau started well as the Wehrmacht advanced 350 miles farther into southwest Russia.  Germany’s elite forces consisting of the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army spearheaded the drive to capture the Russian oil fields in the Caucuses and to secure the lower Volga River in order to strangle that strategic river’s supply route. 

Stalingrad was not a per se German objective at the start of Operation Blau.   But as the Sixth Army moved East, Hitler saw an opportunity to destroy the city that bore his hated Bolshevik leader’s name.  It fit within the Fuhrer’s modus operandi of liquidating his despised enemies, first in Germany, then in conquered countries, particularly the Jewish people.

A half-million residents remained in Stalingrad when the Sixth Army approached the city.   Stalin believed that his troops would fight with greater resolve when defending the urban population.  To ensure that resolve, Stalin issued Order 227, that decreed “Not a single step back.” Retreating soldiers would be treated as traitors and shot.   As Stalin later boasted:  “It takes a brave man to be a coward in the Red Army.“

The Battle of Stalingrad began in August of 1942, when the Luftwaffe bombed and destroyed much of the city with the resulting deaths of thousands of civilians.    Renowned for its prowess of mobile warfare, or blitzkrieg, the Wehrmacht entered a city of bombed out buildings that served as rubbled citadels for Russian marksmen.  Thus began street-to-street fighting where the German army—akin to a fast-moving boxer—ceded its advantage by locking horn in tight quarters with desperate, cornered Red Army soldiers who dug in for a savage fight for survival.  

The commander of the troops defending Stalingrad General Chuikov set the tone for the battle when he exhorted his troops to get up close to the enemy:  “Every German soldier must be made to feel that he is living under the muzzle of a Russian gun.”  Fighting in defense of the Motherland, the Soviets possessed an inherent advantage over the invaders who were more than 1500 miles from Germany.

The defenders exemplified their grim tenacity when 40 soldiers in a grain elevator pinned a German battalion and inflicted heavy casualties for a full week until the last Soviet defender was killed.   Writing home, a soldier prophetically wrote that if the Russians continue fighting like this, we will never return to Germany.  

As September wore on, the brutal fighting shook all the leaves from the trees leaving a city devoid of green in a moonscape of shattered buildings.  Opposing armies engaged in a relentless carnage of in-tight fighting that crept forward building to building, floor by floor, finally room by room.  

A BBC broadcaster reported:  ‘The Wehrmacht conquered Poland in 28 days; in 28 days in Stalingrad, it captured several houses.  France was defeated in 38 days; in Stalingrad, it took the Germans 38 days to advance from one side of the street to the other.’   Describing the ferocity of the battle, German General Hans Dorr reported that ‘fierce actions had to be fought for every house, workshop, water tower, raised railway track, and for every heap of rubble.’

Under heavy fire, the Red Army continually ferried reinforcement across the Volga River and deposited men on the opposite banks of the river to join the fight.   At times, only one gun was allotted for two men with the survivor expected to gather a weapon from a fallen comrade.  Dying defenders scratched the word Stalingrad in the blood stained ground.  Men on both sides ceded free will to the fate of the grim reaper as men fell on both sides with daily casualties rate accumulating in an ever increasing, grizzly toll.

“The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses….. Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.” German Lieutenant Weiner, 24th Panzer Division.

The carnage continued unabated for nearly three months as the Germans pulled men securing their flanks to finish the job.   They captured 90 percent of an obliterated city until they themselves were caught.  Hitler—whose dogged determination served him from obscurity to the Führer of Germany, then mastery over most of Europe—grew myopic to realities that ran counter to his conviction that his iron will prevailed.   His hubris caused him to ignore intelligence reports of a Russian build up on his thinly held flanks primarily guarded by Rumanians and Italians whose armies lacked the weaponry and resolve of their German allies.  

Red Army Counteroffensive.

Operation Uranus involved two separate Soviet pincer movements—a tactic employed by the Germans in so many victories—that crossed the Volga and attacked from both south and north of Stalingrad.   The Red Army’s twin prongs routed the Italian and Rumanian armies—costing each well over 100,000 casualties of dead, wounded and captured—that knocked them out of the war as an effective fighting force on the Eastern Front.   The two separate Soviet forces met 50 miles behind enemy lines cutting off the Germans from supplies of food, oil and ammunition. 

The Führer’s hydrogen inflated hubris finally ignited with incendiary results for his troops fighting in Stalingrad.  His iron will could not countenance retreat. Hitler denied Sixth Army’s Major General Friedrich von Paulus’ request for permission to breakout out from his encircled position.   Hermann Goring, whose inflated arrogance matched his bloated girth, possessed a disdain for the Russian untermensch that matched his Führer.  He promised to supply the cutoff army by air.  Yet, even on a rare good day, his Luftwaffe never came within even half of the daily 750 million tons of supplies that the Sixth Army required. 

Appointed to command in part because he followed the Führer principle, Paulus obeyed and stayed put, ultimately sealing his army’s fate.   Erich von Manstein’s distant panzer army lacked the strength to relieve Paulus, particularly when the Sixth Army failed to assert pressure by attempting a breakout from its’ entrapped position.

Cutoff from food and supplies while enduring frigid temperatures that at night averaged 5 degrees below zero and often much colder, the pride of the German Army that gained victories in France, the Balkans and the Ukraine, slowly starved as it consumed the Russian onslaught.  The trapped Germans now called Stalingrad the kessel, or cauldron, with Red Army cannonade and guns supplying a steady barrage of heat.  Its ammunition rationed, the Sixth Army could only slow the Russian advance as it tightened the noose.   

For over two months of bitter cold, the Sixth Army held on knowing that capitulation meant a march to Siberia or worse.  Wood to burn for heat proved nearly non-existent having been previously consumed when Luftwaffe bombing ignited much of it at the onset of the battle.  Seeking shelter both from bombardment and the brutal cold of a Russian winter, soldiers hunkered down in the basements of demolished buildings where human excrement accumulated in rancid, disease-laden waste.   Starving men ate horses and dogs.   German command established roaming patrols to seek out and execute cannibals.    The frigid cold, fatigue and hunger while fending off repeated Russian assaults slowly turned a disciplined army into hopeless, desperate men.

The loss of the last airfield that feebly supplied the army sealed the Sixth Army’s fate.  By the end of January, the Russians cut the German kessel in two.   Despite the inevitable end, Hitler promoted Paulus to Field Marshal to spur continued resistance, which included a cryptic order to commit suicide as no German Field Marshal had ever been captured alive.   A disgusted Paulus refused to put a bullet in his head stating that he had no intention of committing suicide for that Bohemian corporal.  The new Field Marshal and his staff, along with the south pocket of his shattered army surrendered on January 31, 1943, the day after the ten-year anniversary of Hitler’s ascendancy to power.  Three days later, the north pocket capitulated.

The gruesome numbers included 200,000 Germans dead, killed by enemy fire, frostbite, exposure or typhus.  The latter proved the most insidious, a dreadful disease induced by famine and infectious disease transmitted by vectors such as lice, ticks, mites, rats fleas, and characterized by a purple rash, headaches, fever, and delirium.  A large number of soldiers committed suicide rather than surrender.

Abandoned or obliterated war hardware included 750 planes; 1550 tanks; 8000 field guns and mortars; 480 armored cars; 61,000 trucks and 234 ammunition drops.   Germany’s best army was no more.  It was a catastrophe of the first order.

An estimated 91,000 survivors of the epic battle surrendered.  A bedraggled and starving mass of men staggered out of Stalingrad in a three-mile long line. Emaciated and utterly exhausted men bore no semblance to the military parades in Nuremberg or those marching past the Arc de Triomphe in Paris—a telling sequel to the victorious army that rolled through France, the Balkans and an enormous swath of the Soviet Union. 

The Romans of yore declared Vae Victus—woe to the vanquished.  The moaning from this long surrender column of men could be heard from a distance as they made the forced march to slave labor camps in Siberia.  Given German war atrocities, they could expect little mercy from implacable Russian guards.   Soldiers too exhausted to continue their march were shot along the way.  Upwards to half the captured men totaling 45,000 died en route to captivity.  Nearly that same number died at Siberian labor camps.  Only five thousand returned home to Germany some 12 years after the end of the war.

Unquestionably, members of the Einsatzgruppen and SS were men guilty of horrible war crimes.   But most of the German soldiers at Stalingrad were no different than typical soldiers who bore arms for other countries.  They had no say in the decision to declare war, but instead were ordinary men who served their country when called.  Ironically, their only guilt was being German.

The Cost of Victory.

The Russians did not officially tabulate their numbers dead at the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad.  Numbers vary.   Estimates of Soviet civilian and military casualties of dead, wounded and missing ran close to three-quarter of a million.   All totaled, the Soviets lost over 20 million—some say as high as 28 million—dead by the end of World War II.

The Red Army’s victory over a seemingly invincible foe was attributable to Hitler himself whose same iron will, audacity and ruthlessness that secured his victories led to arrogance, overreaching and blunder.  His declaration that the confrontation in the East would be a war of annihilation proved just that, a carnage that sucked both sides into the abyss.   

In his novel War and Peace written 75 years prior to what the Russian’s call the Great Patriotic War, Leo Tolstoy wrote that the victor in battle is not determined by numbers, weapons and tactics on a battle map but rather by the individual soldier’s will to fight and die for his country.   Hitler’s war of annihilation sowed the seeds of resolve and self-sacrifice in a beleaguered nation rarely seen in history.  Stalingrad stands as a Soviet ‘triumph of the will’. 

After that epic battle, a deadly war of attrition continued, which the Germans could not win—especially with the Americans’ entry into the war with its manpower and industrial might and a looming second European front.  The Red Army ground on towards Berlin in two more years of carnage.

Iron, Steel and Irony.

The Hinge of History swung a swath of death and destruction in both directions that ended with results that no on predicted when the war began in 1939.

Hitler saw himself as a man of iron will.  Yet in the final analysis, history proves that he was instead a man of irony.   The war of annihilation he unleashed upon the world turned inward against Germany with so many of its’ cities utterly destroyed on an awful par with Stalingrad. 

The Führer’s war of conquest for Lebensraum—or living space—for his Deutsche Volk instead resulted in a substantial reduction of German borders.  His objective to destroy Bolshevism instead led to expanded Russian borders and Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe.   Hitler’s desire to eradicate Europe’s Jewish population at a horrific cost of six million dead ultimately paved the way to the establishment of Israel as a recognized Jewish homeland nation.  

The Soviet Union’s war leader who changed his name from Jughashvili to Stalin–meaning Man of Steel—died in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev’s administration subsequently acknowledged Stalin’s enormous evils that included the induced famine in Ukraine that resulted in the deaths of four million, and the purges that included the executions of millions of innocents and the sentencing of millions more to slave labor camps in Siberia. 

In an act to ‘de-Stalinize’ the Soviet Union and to repudiate the evils Stalin embodied, the Russians once more changed the name of that fateful city, this time from Stalingrad to Volgograd.