There was little hurrah patriotism in the ranks of the German Sixth Army and no artificial Nazi propaganda and feelings concerning the likely outcome of this war were mixed. The average Landser (German equivalent to `Tommy’) was inclined to be cynical. He was well trained, hardy and frugal, aggressive in attack and steadfast in defence. The Sixth Army had only experienced victory thus far in Poland, France and the Ukraine. Set backs had occurred but not defeat. As the motorised formations poured across the sun-baked Russian steppe, once again the Volga River, the gateway to Asia, came into sight. They had defeated a Soviet spring offensive weeks before. Even the most pessimistic could consider a possible end to this war having reached the Volga. But as they penetrated the city of Stalingrad along its banks, Russian resistance stiffened.
The German army had changed in character since the start of the Russian campaign. Most men were indifferent to propaganda but many were becoming increasingly disillusioned with their inability to fight the Russian to submission. Unlike the western armies, the Russians fought to the death and did not surrender when encircled. The cream of the German officers and NCOs in the combat arms had died in the course of the previous year and more than a third had perished. Training times of six to 18 months meant they were virtually irreplaceable. Virtually all the World War I veterans, the youngest being in their early forties, were dead or worn out. Their replacements were younger, less compromising men, who had been educated under National Socialism or owed recent advancement to it. New officers and NCOs continued to lead from the front, but were less schooled in auftragstaktik, the creative mix of mission orientated tactics that encouraged initiative. The new men were less adept at thinking their way out of tough situations.
The will to fight was being eroded by fearsome casualties and increasing reports of heavy allied bombing of their loved ones, hundreds of miles away at home. The average Landser did his duty. He saw the atrocities, to their shame, being inflicted by the SS in rear areas but was still convinced he belonged to the best army in the world. They were now to be engulfed in the largest and most intense urban battle they had ever experienced.
The typical soldier respected and feared the Russian. Some of the younger and more ideologically orientated hated him. `I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy to fight against the Russian’, admitted Georg Buchwald, `he was the worst soldier I ever fought against’. German soldiers were dismayed at the profligate waste of life by Russian human wave assaults, conducted by `savage drunk’ Russian soldiers. The worse fear was to be captured. `We saw badly mutilated corpses of some of our men who had been overrun when they lay wounded in a dressing station’ Buchwald recalled. Not so unusual, war on the Eastern Front was truly total. At Stalingrad it surpassed all norms. Company commander Joachim Stempel with Panzer Grenadier Regiment 103 lost 17 men killed and 33 wounded from his one hundred strong company in three days. Replacements lasted barely 24 hours.
Stempel described seven days fighting through the northern factory area between 25th October and 1st November. At one stage he was the only officer left in his regiment, apart from the battalion commander. Multiple Russian counter-attacks occurred each day. White flares were fired to identify indistinct urban front lines to supporting Stuka dive bombers. Red flares went up in desperation if they had to bring down their own artillery fire onto their positions if Russian attacks threatened to overwhelm them. It was only possible to defecate in the helmets of dead men and throw them outside the holes they fought and lived in all day. Casualties occurred the moment they broke cover. Movement and the recovery of the wounded could only take place after dusk; even then food carriers were constantly ambushed and killed by Soviet stay-behind groups, as they tried to make their way forward. Vincenz Griesmer recalled the nightmare of being pinned down all day `when you have to look into the eyes of a dead comrade being used all day as a bullet-catch’. Snipers dominated no-mans land and few prisoners were taken.
The Germans had to adapt to a tactical situation completely beyond their experience. The traditional combined-arms battle with Luftwaffe and panzer support did not work effectively in man-on-man close quarter street fighting. Formal orders transitioned to hurried discussions around an air photograph huddled in cellars. Conventional infantry sections had to be reconfigured into urban assault groups, about which little was known. Soldiers became bewildered by the strange conditions in which they now fought. Leutnant Gottfried von Bismarck described fighting in a multi-storey block where the Germans held the ground floor, the Russians the first and Germans fought Russians between the third and fourth floors of the same building.
Soldiers jettisoned 60 to 80lb marching equipments to fight in skeleton harness order; it was only possible to squeeze through narrow openings carrying iron rations, ammunition and water. They fought from street to street, house to house and room to room with rifle and bayonet, Schmeisser machine-pistol, grenade and pistol as artillery pulverised streets and housing blocks all around. Some did not wash for weeks, shrouded in cloying brick dust, lice-ridden and denied hot food for days. Tinned sausage with maybe some bread and jam might come up with the ammunition re-supply. Tainted water was often the only option for men constantly pinned down by fire. By the third month of this, the body resistance and digestive systems of those surviving was impaired with dysentery and diarrhea rife.
With the onset of cold weather and sub-zero temperatures with the Russian encirclement, re-supply to the front line was tenuous at best. By 9th January the daily ration allowance could fit in a trouser pocket. There was 75 grams of bread, 24 grams of vegetables and maybe 200 grams of horse flesh, with 12 grams of fat and sugar and maybe a cigarette and 9 grams of fluids – if it got through. Soldiers were actually starving to death before the surrender.
The German soldiers could not believe that an army as large as 23 divisions could be surrounded by the Russians. Neither did the Russians. They thought they had netted about 90,000 rather than the actual 250,000 men that emerged from the pocket; lack of sufficient food accounted for many of the early deaths. German soldiers believed their Führer would get them out as he promised. He did not; and with that the Wehrmacht lost its aura of invincibility. Only 91,000 survived to surrender and half of these had perished by the spring. Only 5,000 eventually came back from Soviet captivity in the early 1950s.
