The Battle of Stalingrad continues. Now for the minds
On February 2, 1943, one of the most brutal and bloody battles in human history ended - the battle for Stalingrad. In the hardest battles of July-November 1942, the Red Army managed to stop the German offensive, and in the winter of 1942 - 1943 to encircle the group of Nazis and their allies during the counter-offensive Operation Uranus. The 6th Army of General Paulus was securely sandwiched in the ruins of Stalingrad, and the Germans' relief attack "Wintergewitter" was repulsed.
The end of the battle was the surrender of the entire surrounded fascist group.
Field Marshal Paulus and another 25 Nazi generals, as well as over 90 thousand enemy soldiers and officers, surrendered at the final stage of the battle.
Field Marshal Paulus and his adjutant are escorted to the headquarters of the 64th Army.
Field Marshal Paulus and his headquarters surrender.
During the Battle of Stalingrad, the total irretrievable and sanitary losses of the parties (killed, maimed, missing) amounted to 1,12 million Soviet soldiers and officers. The Germans and their allies (Hungarians, Croats, Italians, Romanians) lost 1,5 million.
The defeat of Hitler's armies at the Volga had serious military and political consequences: Japan and Turkey refused to enter the war against the USSR; The governments of Italy, Hungary, and Romania began to frantically look for a way out of the war and attempt separate negotiations with the United States and Great Britain. This was the beginning of the disaster.
National mourning was declared in Germany, the spirit of Hitler's soldiers was broken: Stalingrad inexorably showed the impending collapse of the Nazi regime. The world received the victory of the Red Army at the Volga stronghold with great enthusiasm.
Dozens of films, hundreds of books, and thousands of studies are dedicated to the Battle of Stalingrad. In terms of its impact on minds, it has, perhaps, no equal in the history of mankind.
As the famous American actor Marlon Brando once said, “if there had been a battle on the scale of Stalingrad in American history, we would have educated dozens of generations by its example.”
It is obvious that such a large-scale historical event could not pass unnoticed by anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. Trying to downplay its significance is like covering the July sun with your palm. Understanding this very well, the falsifiers of military history took up the matter from the other end - with the humanization and ennoblement of Hitler’s hordes rushing over the mountains of corpses to the Volga, with an eye on the Caspian oil fields.
In modern Germany, for both internal and external use, the idea is being promoted that Field Marshal Paulus and his soldiers are tragic figures, sent to slaughter by Hitler’s bloody Moloch. At the same time, another idea is being diligently hammered into the mass consciousness: the Wehrmacht “just fought, fulfilling military duty.” All blame for genocide, looting and destruction in the East lies with the SS.
This is understandable. Everything can now be blamed on the SS, as a criminal organization convicted by an international tribunal, and at the same time presented as a foreign body that had little relation to Germany. A parasite that came from nowhere, you know, has attached itself.
One must think that soon the propaganda of democratic Germany will blame the SS for all the sins of the Hitler regime, will give this topic a good run-in, and then easily reject it, completely cleansing itself of its cannibalistic past. Like, with Hitler “everything has been clear for a long time”, the SS were on their own, and what was happening in the East during World War II is so, “a la ger com a la ger”, which, by the way, he said wrong a long time “friend of Russia,” German political scientist Alexander Rahr, learned about the initiation of a criminal case of genocide by the Russian Investigative Committee during punitive actions in the Pskov and Novgorod regions.
By the way, at the beginning of July 2020, the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case on the genocide of the civilian population of Stalingrad and the Stalingrad region, identifying those responsible for the massacres among both German military personnel and their allies, as well as their accomplices.
The first attempt to whitewash the Wehrmacht in the public consciousness was apparently the 1993 German film Stalingrad. According to the plot, a group of friends, Wehrmacht soldiers, end up from Rommel's Afrika Korps in total hell near Stalingrad. These soldiers are good. Other Germans kill civilians, these don't - they do their duty by fighting for each other and end up freezing to death in the snowy Volga steppe.
“Good” fascists from the 1993 film “Stalingrad.”
Anguish sobbing and powerful lisp about the fate of the unfortunate German boys, ground by the millstones of two totalitarian regimes (this, by the way, is the third direction of attack of the falsifiers) are guaranteed. Especially among uncomplicated ordinary people who draw knowledge from television and paperback books.
This was followed by the even more muddy film “Enemy at the Gates” and “Stalingrad” of the domestic production, presented as a tumult of events around the love story of the Stalingrad girl Masha and Wehrmacht Hauptmann Peter Kahn.
“Good” fascist from Bondarchuk’s film. It’s interesting that Thomas Kretschmann managed to star in both “Stalingrads”.
Is it any wonder that the universal human film filmed by Bondarchuk Jr. found a lively response in the souls of Russian citizens? Young ladies and housewives wrote heartfelt comments on social networks, boiling down to the opinion “fascists are people too,” and the film itself became one of the distribution leaders in the new history of Russian cinema, setting a recipe for success for other business-minded artists.
The apogee of efforts to humanize the enemy was a speech before the deputies of the Bundestag of Koli-s-Urengoy in the company of classmates with money from German funds, about what “tragic figures” the German soldiers who had their mouths full of Stalingrad were.
Kolya from Urengoy speaks in the Bundestag about the tragic figures of fascist soldiers.
Who was the average Hauptmann Peter Kahn really? A tragic figure? Hell no! No one drove all these German boys to slaughter with a whip or the threat of execution. They went to war voluntarily, with dreams of “Lebensraum” - huge living spaces in the East, inhabited by subhumans and potential slaves.
What did these St. Petersburg Kans from the Wehrmacht do at Stalingrad and beyond? They hanged, burned, robbed and raped no worse than the SS. Units and divisions of the Wehrmacht were involved in the fight against partisans, for public mass executions, executions of hostages, and burning of villages.
Grandmothers who survived the occupation recalled how the Germans and Romanians raked rags out of chests and took everything more or less valuable out of their houses in order to send the looted goods to their families. And the families, which is typical, willingly accepted what had been looted by their husbands and sons, drawing the attention of their breadwinners in their response letters to what things from the East would be useful to them in the household.
The symbol of Stalingrad is the Children's Round Dance fountain on the square near the station.
German aircraft bomb the crossing of the Volga.
Returning to Stalingrad. As communication with ordinary Germans on social networks shows, they are unaware of such facts as the death of 40 thousand civilians (refugees and Stalingrad residents) and the destruction of 90% of urban buildings within one day on August 23, 1942 as a result of the hellish bombing of the city by the “knights” of the Luftwaffe.
Germany well remembers the bombing of Dresden by British aircraft. Few people remember Stalingrad, destroyed by bombs, engulfed in flames and drenched in blood.
In addition, in Stalingrad itself, during the fighting, about 200 thousand more civilians died.
Stalingrad is on fire. End of August 1942.
The Germans do not know such names as “Dulag-205”, “Rossoshka”, “Nursery”. Meanwhile, these were camps for Soviet prisoners of war inside a ring of encirclement, characterized by inhumane conditions of detention. From December 5, 1942, the Germans condemned thousands of prisoners to starvation, completely cutting off their supplies.
Western propaganda willingly uses German prisoners of war for defamation purposes. Like, look: almost none of them survived - they were all devoured by the damned Stalinist regime!
If we turn to the documents, it follows from them that a completely demoralized mass of soldiers, entirely consisting of frostbitten people in an extreme state of exhaustion, surrendered to the Red Army prisoners. During sanitary processing, 200-300 grams of lice were removed from each German, Romanian, Italian, Croatian, and Italian carcass. It is no wonder that the sanitary losses of prisoners of war in such a state would be off the scale even with the most humane treatment, which was in reality.
But, on the contrary, who is to blame for this and what were these people doing away from their warm homes and families? Did Stalin force them to sit all the way in the ruins of Stalingrad?
German propaganda carefully retouches and washes away the blood from the figure of the commander of the 6th Army, Field Marshal Paulus: “He was the central tragic figure in this event.”
I wonder at what point Paulus became one? The future field marshal was one of the developers of the Barbarossa attack plan on the USSR. Until his capture on February 2, 1943, Paulus exemplarily carried out the plans of Hitler's command, except for his refusal to commit suicide in the basement of a Stalingrad department store, to which Hitler pushed him, specifically awarding the army commander the rank of field marshal.
Paulus' signature appears under the cannibalistic order of the Felgendarmerie of the 6th Army, which orders the arrest of communists and Jews for their subsequent transfer to firing squads. In fact, the order to shoot on the spot applied to any person: “in civilian clothes with a short haircut—probably a former Red Army soldier.”
Paulus also signed an order for the public executions of civilians who were helping and hiding Red Army soldiers who were surrounded.
The fact that Paulus was not strung up for war crimes in Soviet captivity and was treated humanely was used as an illustrative example for German soldiers: look, our prisoners are treated humanely.
Hitler, Paulus and the General Staff of the German Armed Forces discussing the Barbarossa plan.
In August 1944, Paulus was finally convinced of the inevitable collapse of the Hitler regime and began speaking on the radio with appeals to German soldiers and officers from the Free Germany Committee. Before this, Paulus did not recognize the “Union of German Officers”, formed from prisoners of war, refused to cooperate with the Soviet authorities and openly oppose Hitler.
Yes, Paulus played an important role at the Nuremberg trials, speaking as a witness for the prosecution of high-ranking Nazi criminals, which was a big and extremely unpleasant surprise for them.
Friedrich Paulus acts as a witness at the Nuremberg trials.
However, the fact remains: almost until the very end, Paulus remained loyal to the Nazi regime, because, you know, he was an Ordnung. And his 6th Army, except for its elitism, was no different from other armies of the Wehrmacht - gangs of murderers, robbers and rapists.
These “innocent soldiers” calmly watched as the residents of Leningrad and occupied Kiev died of hunger, as villages burned along with their inhabitants, as the frozen corpses of Kharkov residents hanging on the balconies of Kharkov residents dangled in the icy wind. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was tortured and executed by soldiers of the 332nd Wehrmacht Infantry Regiment, who willingly posed for a photograph in front of the gallows.
It must be said that the soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht left behind a lot of photographic evidence of their participation in the robberies and massacres of civilians, partisans, and prisoners of war. It makes no sense to deny - the archives contain a lot of documents found in the personal belongings of captured or killed German soldiers. What prevents them from being regularly used for counter-propaganda? Is it inconvenient to remind business partners about the crimes of their grandfathers on our land?
Summer 1942. Germans on the Stalingrad direction.
Returning to the topic of the Battle of Stalingrad. Unfortunately, despite the severity of the defeat inflicted on Nazi Germany, this battle did not become a turning point. In February 1943, the Red Army, building on the strategic success of Stalingrad, launched an offensive that historians call the “third battle of Kharkov.”
On March 2, 1943, Soviet troops liberated the city, but the force of the attack of the formations, exhausted in heavy battles, began to fizzle out. Meanwhile, Manstein managed to secretly transfer and concentrate a tank army, equipped with fresh SS divisions, in the area of Kharkov and Zaporozhye.
On March 12, the Soviet group that liberated Kharkov was defeated, and the retreat began. The divisions again fell into pockets, and the liberated territory was again occupied by the Germans. It was a heavy defeat, a tragedy in the spring of 1943.
The hero of the Battle of Stalingrad is the future Marshal and twice Hero of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov.
The Nazis were stopped at Kursk and Belgorod, where the summer general battle took place, which determined the course of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War - the Battle of Kursk. But that is another story.
Romanian prisoners at Stalingrad.
A German captured in Stalingrad. Now he's just a sweetheart and a tragic figure.
A group of “tragic figures fulfilling a soldier’s duty” in Stalingrad.
German soldiers frozen to death at Stalingrad.
The tank column of Paulus's 6th Army is preparing to attack Stalingrad.
The Volga is just a stone's throw away.
In the trenches of Stalingrad. There is no land for us beyond the Volga.
Sailors and infantry in the battles for Stalingrad.
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