The battle of Stalingrad

[Smith_3]

The battle of Stalingrad began in August of the year 1942 when the sixth army of the german Wehrmacht attacked the city by the Volga and ended in the beginning of the year 1943. About 700.000 people, soldiers and civilians, died in this battle. The german sixth army, which consisted of approximately 260.000 troops, was caught in what is now know as „The Kessel of Stalingrad“ and completely defeated. The german survivors of the battle (about 100.000 soldiers) were taken prisoner by the Red Army and of those only 5.000 survived their time of imprisonment. Most died of disease or hunger.

The german Wehrmacht commited an astonishing number of the most gruesome warcrimes of WWII. This included direct attacks against the civilian population of the enemy territories, mass murders to quell guerilla attacks (often ten civilians were executed for each german troop that died of an attack), murder of prisoners of war and assisting the Waffen SS in mass executions of Jews and other „inferior“ races. There was also a systematic and buerocratized rape of women in the occupied territories. Young women were imprisoned in Wehrmacht brothels and were executed once they got pregnant. Millions of innocent people died because of the actions of the german Wehrmacht.

So, I ask you: The nearly 260.000 Wehrmacht soldiers that died in Stalingrad. Were they victims? Were they just soldiers, doing their duty and following orders, not to blame for the bad decisions of their leaders? Or were they vicious murderers who rightfully got what they deserved?

[spindoctor]

1. They were drafted

Does that answer your question?

[Smith_3]

2. Does it? Not sure, have to think about it for a while.

[denem]

3. Just following orders

:sarcasm:

[Xipe Totec]

4. Collective guilt is a repugnant concept (nt)

[tkmorris]

5. It is impossible to judge them as a group

Which is what you ask us to do.

Every man of the Wehrmacht that died was an individual. Some of them delighted in the abuses they visited upon the Russians. Some ordered it to occur. Some went along out of fear, knowing they would be killed if they did not. And some few were no doubt heroic in their resistance to it, doing all they could to limit pain and humiliation wherever they could. Virtually all of them died, their true actions there left unknown.

I will say this. The ability of ANY human being, with all of their prejudices and frailties, to judge any other, having their own complement of the same, is limited and uncertain. For this reason, while I am aware of the necessity to occasionally remove certain individuals from society, I cannot ever condone a death sentence, even for the soldiers of Germany killed at Stalingrad. I cannot in good conscience say that those who died "got what they deserved", nor would I respect the opinion of any man or woman who said they did.

[Smith_3]

6. Good response.

:thumbsup:

[Smith_3]

7. A different question:

Do you think it would have been morally wrong, for a german soldier at that time, to desert his unit? Do you think it would have been a betrayal of his comrades?

[tkmorris]

8. No I don't

Others may feel differently, but I have always placed my assigned my highest loyalties to my own principles. I have served in the military, and can say beyond doubt that when my comrades betrayed my own principles I regretfully parted ways with them.

I think it important to note here that I would be surprised if many German soldiers did desert during the siege; regardless of how they may have felt at the time there were few options open to them that didn't mean almost certain death. One might decide to die rather than violate a particularly important moral ideal, but I doubt that such a clear situation often presented itself.

[Smith_3]

9. They were probably glad that at least somebodys gun pointed in the same direction as theirs.

I don't think there were many desertations. There were some. But I doubt that the Red Army was willing to assist germans troops that were trying to leave their unit...

[NeedleCast]

13. Desertion would have been nearly impossible

and that's true of both side. The Red Army sent waves of men forward while officers stayed in the rear ready to kill anyone who turned back. While there are fewer historical account of the Germans doing this at Stalingrad, I'm sure it happened to them as well. To desert would have ment treck of of 100's of miles, in winter, through some of the most hostile country immagineable. No sympathy would have been given to German soldiers, deserters or not, and they would have been traveling across territory that had already been savaged by the effects of war. It was fight and die with the rest, or die alone (and probably horribly) in the middle of nowhere.

[treestar]

18. Exactly. That part is played up so much in military lore

Even the way the rightwingnuts admonish us that we can only "support the troops" if we "support their mission." That comraderie of those stuck at the bottom is what the war causers depend on.

[TheFarseer]

19. hard to desert when you're surrounded n/t

[NeedleCast]

12. Well Said

n/t

[treestar]

17. Yes.

I knew a guy who was in the German army at the end of the war (had become American). He was born there and raised in Nazi Germany. My father commented that given the year he was born, he too would have been raised in Nazi Germany and probably would have been in the Hitler Youth and exposed to all that. We all would have been Nazis had we been born there at the right time. We'd be aware of the defeat at Versailles, and have all that as being somehow unfair something we were brought up with, and we'd feel the resentment.

None of us is tested as to that. There were Germans who left and who fought it, a few, but we don't know we'd have been among them and it is too easy to assume we would have.

Luckily, there is some truth the to idea that "it can't happen here," since we are so used to speaking our minds. "Patriotism" doesn't seem to grab us the way it did the Nazis - the European countries have a longer history together and are more likely to be gripped, in the right circumstances" with that unreasoning patriotism. With Americans it only seems to last for a little while and require some sort of threat.

[pretzel4gore]

10. we're all soldiers...

Stalingrad make clear that politics, for all its dreary-ness, is vital, because the same cop who might abuse you also the one who'll risk life to save you....and like in the movie 'Crash' the cop can be a racist! There's a book about Stalingrad (renamed Volvograd since) i think it's named 'Escape from the East'(?) which describes the nightmare of the Red Army turning on the nazis, with Stalingrad the beginning. The Germans were trapped when Von Paulus was refused orders to keep a corridor open- hitler thought they could crush the Red Army in one swoop, and occupying Stalingrad was enough. Many of the last flights out of the last strech of working runway saw gangs of terrified men, the 6th army basically disintegrsted by then, trying to get a seat, with gun battles between them and mp's. So some planes took off with men clinging to the wings- imagine the effect that would have on lift! Many years later, an Israeli nurse was interviewed about seeing the survivors...when she was a girl, she said the villagers heard a awful, moaning sound for days before the 6th army captives were even seen. Thick columns of ragged men stretched out in a line 20 miles long took a week to go by. There were italian and Rumanian prisoners too. The girl said they, the village kids, screamed at the brutal guards- 50 years later she cried about the sight of dying men force marched through snow. The 6th army was actually several units put together, and it numbered closer to 600 thousand (the 'front' was initially 200 miles; some german units trapped were 100 miles from the city itself at first) it's almost impossible to imagine the scale of these disasters. The 2nd world war should never have happened. The nazis should never have seized control of a modern industrial state. The Russian Revolution should never have been hijacked. If anyone in history got away with vicious crimes, it's the political leadership of our side, the allies, who aided hitler and destroyed the Spanish Republic etc before the war. But they pooh pooh everything that says that, via their lying liar news media. bush is their leader today. They still should be punished for putting hitler in power, and for the suffering at Stalingrad, and for 911 etc

[NeedleCast]

14. Small Correction

Stalingrad was re-named Volgograd, not Volvograd.

[Rydz777]

11. There was a joke in Europe during the 1930's:

First man: "All our problems are caused by Jews and bicycles."
Second man: "Why bicycles?"
Third man: "Why Jews?"

I think of this whenever there is a question of collective guilt. Some years ago, I read a book called "Letters from Stalingrad," a collection of writings from the surrounded German soldiers to their families at home. These were letters that had to go through Nazi censors but were poignant nevertheless, men looking death in the face, all kinds of men, good, bad, simple, sophisticated - and on the other side were Russians, shot in the back by the NKVD if they didn't carry out suicidal orders.

Like Verdun in WWI, Stalingrad chills, and we never seem to learn.

[DFW]

15. My father-in-law was a survivor of Stalingrad

He was drafted off his farm at age 17 into the Wehrmacht. The horrors he
saw were so numbing that he never EVER talked about them in detail. At age
18, he was near a Soviet artillery shell that exploded and blew off one
of his legs below the knee. The rest of unit (city boys) froze to death
if they were not killed in the artillery barrage first. Being used to outdoor
work on his farm, he lived long enough to be picked up by a retreating German
unit. By the time he got to a MASH, gangrene had set in, and they had to
remove more of his leg. Before the infection was complete stopped, nearly
all of it was gone. At age 18, he was returned to his farm a cripple. Being
unfit for farm work, after the war, he studied banking, and had literally
hundreds of people we didn't know at his funeral. They were farmers to whom
he had extended credit on risky terms, because he sympathized with them as his
own people.

I met him because I fell in love with his daughter, many years later. He
hated all things military, got choked up with anger every time a picture
of Hitler appeared on TV in some documentary, and his greatest wish was
for all his grandchildren to be girls so they would never have to serve
in the military (he got his wish).

He was not a Nazi, a sadist, or anything other than a farm boy who was
ordered into a conflict he didn't agree with or understand. He was lucky
enough to later find a woman who overlooked his deformity and loved him for
the man inside. We are lucky enough to still have her with us at age 80.

At the end of his life, when delirium was eating away at his mind's last
defenses, he suddenly relived those moments that changed his life, calling
out to long-dead members of his unit to watch out for incoming shells
exploding all around them in the snow.


His story was one of what had to be the story of hundreds of thousands of
young kids on the German side, but it was the one I know from personal
experience. Generalizations are easy, and often, even accurate. I tell the
story of this one man because I knew him, and know that even accurate
generalizations cannot tell the story of any one individual.

[nemo137]

22. Thank you for that.

Sometimes, I think, we get too caught up looking for the grand scheme in history or the right comparison, that we miss the fact that the people on the ground are, well, people. I am sorry your father-in-law had to live through Stalingrad and the horrors that surrounded that, but I am glad you were able to tell us his story.

[DFW]

23. It's just one story out of many millions

When my father-in-law first met my father, my wife and I wondered what it
would be like. My father fought, of course, on the Allied side. Typical WWII
story--drafted in 1943, boot camp in Texas, shipped off to England and then
France in 1944, saw Germany briefly in 1945, and then back home. My father
spoke practically no German, and my father-in-law practically no English, but
they got along fine. My mom had a German nanny for part of her childhood,
before the Great Depression, and retained a slight passive knowledge of the
language, so there was some rudimentary communication when they met. The last
thing on their minds was the fact that 40 years before they finally met, they
would both have been under orders to kill each other.

[tuckessee]

16. The crushing of the AK's Warsaw Uprising would be a better comparison.

Stalingrad was an honest battle between professional uniformed combatants where both sides behaved with the same level of decorum.

The Rising of '44 more resembles the US's actions of today because it involved a heavily armed conventional occupying military smashing a lightly armed, organic, mainly civilian resistance while punitively levelling an urban area (just like Fallujah).

American military forces of today are no more than fancy, modern versions of the Dirlewanger or Kaminski Brigades.

http://www.warsawuprising.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising

[Smith_3]

20. I wasn't trying to make any comparison of anything.

[Thothmes]

21. Actually

the butchers bill is considerably larger. Information from Soviet arcives indicate the Soviets lost close to 1 million men in and around Stalingrad during the campaign.

[rug]

24. There are always choices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_J%C3%A4gerst%C3%A4tter

[DFW]

25. But there are not always informed choices.

In 1942, when he was drafted, my father-in-law was what today would
be called more or less a peasant. Your Franz was 35 in 1942, and an
educated adult. My father-in-law was a (nearly)uneducated 17-year old
son of a farmer. Franz knew what he was protesting against, and had the
chance to be informed. My father-in-law was accorded no such chance. Not
that he would have necessarily done the same--he was Catholic, but of the
kind that was used as cannon fodder throughout history by religious leaders:
a believer but not an informed one. There were millions of German kids in
the same boat. The Nazis tried to mold them into their own image, just as
Bush's military tries to mold our youth into the image Cheney wants. They
succeed with some, they fail with others, and then there are those who are
maimed or killed before they even know which way is up. With the war ongoing,
and a bleak future as a crippled mouth to feed when he returned to his farm
from Stalingrad, my father-in-law got himself educated, got a useful job,
and helped his people. I have already explained his reaction to anything
military or Nazi. At age 17/18 with only a rudimentary education and no chance
to obtain outside information (he had never been to Rome, or anywhere else,
before he was drafted off his farm), he was never given a choice. If the
German youth of 1939 had been blessed with the chance to inform themselves
as we did during Vietnam, Berlin in 1940 would have looked like Chicago 1968.

Plenty would have gone along with the Nazis anyway, just like Nixon won the
1968 election anyway. But plenty would not have gone along. My father-in-law
was one such man.