Stalingrad
I nearly missed it. Not until I switched on my computer late in the day, did I realise the date: Thursday 2 February. The year we are in, I knew, 2023. And then I suddenly remembered. It has been 80 years since the most important event of the Second World War took place: the surrender of the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad.
In July 1942 General Paulus had been in command of 220,000 troops fighting in Stalingrad. Encircled in November, their situation become critical. More than 100,000 German soldiers perished in the battle. At the end of January, Paulus had to ask Hitler for permission to surrender. Hitler’s reply was two-fold. First, he promoted Paulus to the rank of Field Marshal; secondly, he commanded him to fight to the last man.
Paulus presumably wanted to be loyal but under the circumstances he had no choice. To save his men he had to capitulate. With the remaining 91,000 troops he surrendered, 80 years ago. I remember press reports at the time that after the surrender Hitler ordered a day of mourning, but I could not find anything about it in my brief survey of history books.
Why do I regard it as the most important event in the war? Hungary was then a German ally. Living in Budapest at the time, I could watch the state of the fronts with the respective flags on my map. Up to that point I could see only German victories, in Europe at least. The flags until then moved in only one direction. This time it was different. Stalingrad did not need any more flags.
The fall of Stalingrad I regard as the most important event in the Second World War. I believe it should be remembered — and not only at the 80th anniversary. The French do remember it. There are dozens of (Rue, Avenue, Boulevard) de Stalingrad in French cities and even a Place de Bataille de Stalingrad in Paris.
There are also many books, fiction and non-fiction, about the battle. Two of them, I feel, should be read by everyone in the West. For those whose main interest is military history, Stalingrad by Sir Antony Beevor is a must. The narrative is superb. It could almost be a novel.
There are actually several novels about it, which are of course works of fiction. One of them, Life and Fate, is an epic work by Vassily Grossman, a Soviet war correspondent who actually visited the battles while they were being fought. It is a panorama of Soviet life in 1942-43, often compared with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In particular it shows that the KGB was still, in spite of the war, prosecuting imagined enemies of the people. There is also a hint about Stalin wanting to develop an atomic bomb: having been an outcast, a nuclear scientist emerges to become a highly regarded citizen of the Soviet Union.
Grossman worked on the book for ten years. He submitted if for publication to a magazine, Znamya, in 1960. Publication was refused. Interestingly, a new phenomenon took place. The manuscript was arrested, not the author. The KGB believed that they had managed to arrest all the copies. Fortunately, copies given to friends survived. One of them was smuggled out to the West and published there in 1980. Publication in the Soviet Union had to wait for Gorbachev’s glasnost. It was published in 1988, both in a periodical and in book form.
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