August 27.A continuous cannonade on all sides. It has been fantastic since morning: our aeroplanes and artillery have been hammering the Russian positions for hours on end; everything in sight is being blotted from the face of the earth. All The soldiers are calling Stalingrad the mass grave of the Wehrmacht [German army]. Our regiment has failed to break into the factory. . beautiful Verdun, with new weapons. . On this sector also the Russians wont let you lift your head. If we lose this war, theyll take revenge on us for January 15. . The Battle of Stalingrad ended seventy one years ago on February 2, 1943 after exactly five months, a week and three days of incessant fighting. Records from the diary of a German soldier who fought at Stalingrad in 1942-1943, after being captured, and in 1953 returned home:<br>". . Hailed as the single largest confrontation of the war, the battle involved nearly 2.2 million military personnel, with around 1.8-2 million were killed, wounded, or captured. by Lawrence Tandy 21 Aug 2003, 22:24, Post Heziel Pitogo is one of the authors writing for WAR HISTORY ONLINE. Hellbeck interviewing Boris Serafimovich Kryzhanovsky, who was still a child when Stalingrad was bombed in 1942. From the testimony of Lieutenant General Alexander von 22-25 November. Diary of a German Soldier During Stalingrad. Will I really go back to Elsa without a decoration? After the elevator was taken the Russians continued to defend themselves just as stubbornly. The following entries in the diary of William Hoffman, a German soldier who perished at Stalingrad, reveal the decline in German confidence as the battle progressed. If in the The Soviets delay Operation Uranus to get their troops in position to attack, encircle 6th Army. . Ive had my fill. fiance, December 29, 1942. Then aged 24, he recalled the moment he and his colleagues stood around to listen to Adolf Hitler's address at the start of the operation that would result in almost one million deaths. . 'Again and again it is damn hard to get my own head around the fact that everything we are being ordered to do here is right.'. That has a tremendous impact.. People who are now sent from transport units to the infantry are as good as sentenced to death. Fritz is telling me about a conversation he heard: the soldiers prefer to The violence and the horror during the fighting for Stalingrad were ferocious. will there be a way out, of the cauldron. When we got to Stalingrad, there were 140 of us, but by September 1, after two weeks of battle, only 16 remained. Russian soldiers stood at the entrance to the basement of the. The weather is getting toward our generals boiled up in me. . I had a letter from Elsa today. And the reaction will be unequivocal: this battle for us is a symbol of the madness of war, its senselessness. In the interviews I was surprised to discover the source of this hatred. Stalin needed his peoples full investment in fighting the enemy, but he also feared its implications, namely, possible calls for more democratic rights inside the Soviet Union. by Oleg Grigoryev 21 Aug 2003, 22:03, Post contained an ultimatum. . Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 16:56 GMT 17 Jun 2021. In just the last two days, our battalion has lost 60 killed, January 15. . Nov. 3, 2010 -- August 26, 1916, Guillemont, Somme region, northeastern France: "In front of my hole lies an Englishman who fell there yesterday. . Just weeks before, in response to the Germans rapid advance toward Stalingrad, Stalin had issued the Not A Step Back order that forbade his soldiers to retreat under any circumstances. Soon her home was destroyed in the . Credit: Das Bundesarchiv / Wikimedia Commons. Get the week's best stories straight to your inbox. The soldiers look like corpses or lunatics, looking for something to put in their mouths. Wilhelm Hoffman was a soldier in the 267th Infantry Regiment, 94th Infantry Division of the German 6th Army who chronicled the Battle of Stalingrad in his journal, and is cited in many documentaries and books concerning that topic. July 29 1942. . "It is pure hell here." How wonderfully we could live if it werent for this damned war! . From the diary of Field Gendarmerie Sergeant Helmut We have entered a new area. The documentary 'Barbarossa: The Lost Diaries' will be coming soon via History Hit TV. We have never been through anything like this. 87th Artillery Regiment of the 113th Infantry Division, no. 'He has started to sing with a slurring voice, so great is his pain. Life in the Third Reich & Weimar Republic, Kriegsmarine surface ships and Kriegsmarine in general, Luftwaffe air units and Luftwaffe in general, German Strategy & General German Military Discussion, NSDAP, other party organizations & Government, The Dieter Zinke Axis Biographical Research Section, The Ron Klages Panzer & other vehicles Section, Panzer & other vehicles - Photo threads, Axis Documents, Feldpost numbers, Postcards & Other Paper Items, The United Kingdom & its Empire and Commonwealth 1919-45, The Allies and the Neutral States in general, German Colonies and Overseas Expeditions, The end of the Ottoman Empire 1908-1923, Translation help: Breaking the Sound Barrier, http://www.newindpress.com/Newsitems.as ld&rLink=0. . Its a happy thought that the end of the war is getting nearer. While the German army was penetrating deeply into Russia, he believed that victory was not far away and dreamed of returning home with medals. . Friedrich Paulus - the 6th Army's commander - led his men east across the endless steppe, finally reaching the outskirts of the city on 16 August. We havent eaten or slept in three days. He tells about the case that happened to him at the very beginning of the war in July 1941.<br><br>"We and the other Kamrads hurried to see who had caused us such damage, and . Three questions are obsessing every soldier and officer: When will the Russians stop firing and let us sleep in peace, if only for one night? We dont have a single officer, and the It is pure hell here. This is how soldiers and officers of Hitler's soldiers stormed the city in September 1942 in a bid to complete the conquest of Europe. They only differed in their interpretations of this resistance. On November 8, Hitler announced that the German Sixth Army had taken Sta- lingrad, but in fact, on November 19 and 20, the Soviets attacked German positions north and south of Stalingrad, and by November 23 they had surrounded the German forces. From the testimony of captured Private First Class Joseph . His commitment was so strong that he sent a huge number of troops to carry out the invasion. . To this day, the Russian state and the Russian people commemorate the battle intensely. Force of the 212th Regiment. Archival documentation tells me that at least some Soviet historians read the interviews, but it seems that they were at a loss about how to integrate individual, subjective voices, as they called them, into a mandated objective (communist) history of the war, and so the documents were overlooked and forgotten. Lots of wounded are being brought by. . Himmler was aware that the time of reckoning for Germany was drawing near. Diary of a German Soldier (161 results) enormous field post office of the adversary, along with diaries and other Russian cannon and machine-guns are firing out of the burning city. 'They tell the story of the campaign through the eyes of a German junior officer in a way in which it has never been told before. September 26. Stalingrad is hell on earthVerdun, beautiful Verdun, with new weapons. A question looms before us: what should be done? His secret journals have been found 80 years later and are to be turned into a documentary by History Hit, the streaming network set up by historian Dan Snow. Trapped inside this crucible were the 22 divisions and over 160 different units of the German 6th Army and part of the 4th Panzer Army, numbering to about 330,000 soldiers. . . The Nazis' eastward expansion was halted and the Soviets went on the offensive until the end of the war. . Credit: Museum of the Battle of Stalingrad, My Aunt Had a Dinner Party, and Then Took Her Guests to Kill 180 Jews, Germany Marks Munich Massacre With Memorial, but Still Avoids Taking Responsibility, How a neo-Nazi Group Recruited Her Majestys Soldiers. In his memoirs, Chuikov writes that he issued a sharp rebuke to his cowardly officers. knew that the Germans would not defeat the Soviet Union. A soldier prepares to throw a grenade. by Oleg Grigoryev 21 Aug 2003, 22:05, Post An extract for August 24 described the horrific aftermath of one fight his crews engaged in. A Soviet soldier waving the Red Banner over the central plaza of Stalingrad in 1943. At the beginning he seems hopeful and excited, towards the end his tone gets darker. A haunting sense of loss and defeat marks the recollections on the German side, whereas Russian storytelling about Stalingrad is imbued with a spirit of national pride and sacrifice. We shall obviously be seeing them next in the other world. November 18. We killed thousands of Russians and Jews with wives and .. Story When the Russian pincers snapped in November 1942, 300,000 soldiers of Hitler's army were trapped in Stalingrad, the legendary city on the Volga that they sought to conquer for the Nazi empire. .. The Western world cultivates an outsized memory of the June 1944 landing in Normandy as the opening chapter of Hitlers defeat. This is simply unbelievable. . The Russian artillery at the other side of theVolgawont let you lift your head. Michal Shapira spoke with Hellbeck following a visit by him to Tel Aviv University earlier this year. The book became a bibliographic rarity. We paid dearly for our victory. This is worse than any torture. Battle of Stalingrad, (July 17, 1942-February 2, 1943), successful Soviet defense of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), Russia, U.S.S.R., during World War II. Who were the interviewees of these Stalingrad transcripts? . . They evidently decided to bury us in this He didn't react when I ordered him to raise his arms. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. Fighting is going on inside the elevator. by tonyh 21 Aug 2003, 18:14, Post He wrote: 'I tell my men that this is about the reshaping of Europe, the absolute defeat of Bolshevism, the enemy of the people. They describe shocking violence. In this photograph, a Red Army soldier is seen marching a German soldier into captivity after the Battle of Stalingrad. A German newspaper described Stalingrad as the most fateful battle of the war that was in early August 1942, even before Hitlers soldiers began their assault on the city. . Entries from the diary of Officer F. P. of the 8th Light Small-Arms Force of the 212th Regiment: . It was the most ferocious battle in human history, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands. This damned war.. 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