Lest we forget . . . Stalingrad

Sixty-five years ago today, the battered remnants of the Wehrmacht's Sixth Army surrendered to Soviet forces in the ruins of Stalingrad.

The Soviet victory came halfway through the reversal of fortune that ended the German string of successes in World War II and led to a series of Allied advances that culminated in victory in Europe in May 1945. The reversal encompassed the Second Battle of El Alamein in the Western Desert in October-November 1942; the Allied invasion of North-West Africa in November 1942; Stalingrad; victory in Africa in May 1943; and the turning of the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic in the second quarter of that year, leading to the withdrawal of German U-boats following catastrophic losses.

The Soviets took 91,000 German soldiers prisoner at Stalingrad, of whom only about 5,000 (or just over 5%) eventually came home to Germany by the mid-1950's after being released. The rest died of starvation, overwork or just plain cold as prisoners of war and slave labor. Exact casualty figures will probably never be known, but it's estimated that between 1.7 and 2 million German and Soviet soldiers and civilians died during the Siege of Stalingrad. That probably makes it the single most lethal battle in history - if any other comes close I haven't found it.

In years gone by I knew a German Catholic priest. He'd commanded a tank at Stalingrad, and was one of the lucky ones to be wounded and flown out of the besieged city before the Soviet victory. His description of life in the ruins was indescribably horrific . . . he could never speak of it without tears, his whole body shaking as he recalled his friends who never came back. He became a priest after the war out of a sense of atonement for the evils he'd seen, perpetrated by his countrymen (although he always maintained that neither he nor his unit had ever committed atrocities). He's dead now, and I hope and pray he's found rest and peace at last.

Stalingrad was almost completely destroyed in the battle, but was rebuilt. Today it's known as Volgograd. There will be many commemorations of the battle there this weekend, I'm sure.

Peter