Reinhold Busch - Survivors of Stalingrad: Eyewitness Accounts from the 6th Army, 1942-1943

The battle for Stalingrad still carries enormous resonance. Like Kursk or Anzio, the name alone conveys its meaning. One of the bloodiest battles in history, consuming over a million lives at a conservative estimate, it was also one of the most important, signalling a genuine watershed in the conflict: what Churchill called a climacteric.

Unusually, Stalingrads significance was clearly evident even at the time. For the Soviets its defence was as much symbolic as strategic. As well as controlling the approaches to the oil-rich Caucasus and sitting on the western bank of the mighty Volga river, one of Russias most formidable natural obstacles, it was the city that bore Stalins name. For propaganda reasons alone, therefore, its surrender was unthinkable.

Militarily, too, the battle for Stalingrad was profoundly significant. Where the Red Army had struggled to come to terms with the German doctrine of Blitzkrieg over the previous two summers, at Stalingrad it launched an audacious Blitzkrieg of its own, sending armoured columns deep into the Axis rear, hitting at the more lightly defended flanks of the salient where the Italians, Hungarians and Romanians held the line and cutting off the German Sixth Army in a shrinking pocket to the west of the city, effectively besieging the besiegers. It was an astonishing reversal, finally and conclusively demonstrating the truth of Stalins optimistic assertion from July 1941 that no army was invincible. After this success, the Wehrmachts spell was broken and the Red Armys generals hardly looked back. To paraphrase one of Churchills neatest aphorisms: before Stalingrad the Red Army scarcely had a victory, after Stalingrad it scarcely had a defeat.

The Germans, too, were well aware of Stalingrads importance. The city lay on the high-water mark of Axis expansion and its loss heralded an ebb-tide that would sweep Soviet forces, with few interruptions, all the way to Berlin. The associated loss of the Caucasus was also a grievous blow, denying Hitler access to the vital Soviet oil-fields of Baku, Maikop and Grozny, without Stalingrad, therefore, was highly significant both as a strategic and a military turning point in the wider history of the Second World War.

Far from being concealed from the German people, as is so often assumed, or wished away with a propagandists flourish, the defeat at Stalingrad was acknowledged for the catastrophe to Hitlers ambitions that it was. The news was announced on German radio to the accompaniment of the sombre adagio to Bruckners Seventh Symphony, and three days of official mourning followed. Two weeks later, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels would give his response to the crisis. In his famed Total War speech in Berlin, he cited the defeat at Stalingrad as a wake-up call to the German people; opening their eyes to the true nature of the war against the Bolsheviks, and to their historic duty to defend Western civilization. It was a duty whose importance would brook no half-measures, no compromises; instead, he declared, total war was the demand of the hour. In the aftermath, Nazi Germany would belatedly adopt a war economy, sacrificing most of the remaining civilian comforts for a strict prioritisation of the war effort. Too little, it would prove, too late.

Yet, aside from the propaganda and the posturing, Stalingrads profoundest consequences were human. The true death toll of the battle military and civilian, Soviet and German will never be known for sure; such was the slaughter that the proper retrieval, identification and burial of the dead was simply impossible. In total, it has been suggested that as many as two million people died in the battle. In addition, for the 90,000 or so Axis soldiers taken captive by the Soviets, their torments were not yet at an end. Condemned to punitive hard labour in the infamous camps of the Gulag, few would survive. Barely 6 per cent of them would ever see their homelands again.