Hitler's 1941 Invasion of Russia | Part 5: Christmas In The Cauldron

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Hey everyone, happy new year and thanks for tuning into Anthology of Heroes, the podcast
where we explore the stories of heroic figures who altered the course of history.
Anthology of Heroes is part of the Evergreen podcast network.
I'm your host, Elliot Gates, and this right here is the final part of our five part series
on Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's doomed invasion of Russia, beginning in 1941.
If you've been listening since part one, we watched as the invasion shook and paralyzed
the Red Army initially, before eventually Stalin and the Stavka retake control.
We've seen the march on Moscow and the Caucasus come to nothing, and we followed the Wehrmacht's
6th Army into another bone-chilling winter spent in Russia, this time in the industrial
city of Stalingrad.
The previous episode and this one too are all about Stalingrad, because it's in this
city where the Wehrmacht will meet its end, and Hitler's dream of a thousand-year-rike
will come crashing back down to earth.
If you haven't listened to the other episodes of this series, because you just want to hear
about Stalingrad, that's no worries, but definitely do start on part four rather than
this one, because we're already well and truly in the thick of it by now.
Just like part four, I'll be interspersing letters from German soldiers that were sent
home from Stalingrad in between scenes.
Just a quick note, because I'm currently travelling, this episode, like the last one,
was recorded in different locations, so there'll be three times in the episode where the sound
of my voice changes noticeably.
I did my best to try and normalise it, but you can still tell, so sorry about that.
We'll be back to normal for our next episode around late March or so.
Anyway, we left the last episode just as Stalin and Zhukov began their long-awaited counterattack,
Operation Uranus.
As a warning, this episode mentions rape and sexual assault in passing reference.
So here we go.
It was folly, part five, Christmas in the Cauldron.
Pulling the tarpaulin off their artillery pieces, for 80 minutes across the front line, Russian
Kachusha missiles roared in fury, the oddly symphonic noise they made led to the Germans
nicknaming them Stalin's organ.
And as the symphony broke the early morning silence, it was clear that neither the Wehrmacht
nor their allies were prepared.
For the first time since the war began, and probably for one of the first times in his
life, Stalin almost smiled as Zhukov read the initial reports of the advance.
Puffing on his pipe cheerfully, he sensed that this would be decisive in every sense
of the word.
For the first few days, the sheer scale of the invasion was hidden as a thick, milky fog
rolled in across the frontier.
In his memoirs, German soldier Gunter K. Koshori describes a fog around this time saying that
it was so cloudy that they could actually hear Russian soldiers laughing and chatting
ahead of them, but they couldn't see them.
So hearing all these noises, Gunter's squadron killed the engine of their vehicle and just
stood silent.
The grinding of the tanks got closer and closer until barely a few meters away from them they
stopped.
Gunter held his breath, as the Russians, clearly suspecting something, shot a yellow flare
into the sky, but the fog was so thick it was barely visible.
Hearing Russians talking, Gunter and his squadron waited, hearts pounding.
Then after what seemed like an eternity, the tanks slowly veered left and the sounds got
quieter and more distant.
As winter went on, snow drifts began to form and the Wehrmacht found themselves spending
more time digging their panses out rather than driving them.
Paulus, now so reliant on Hitler to guide him, did nothing.
Communicators were coming in thick and fast from the Romanian divisions on the flanks,
no calls for reinforcements and resupplies, but so preoccupied with taking Stalingrad,
these concerns seemed distant and unimportant to him, until they weren't.
By the time Paulus appreciated the seriousness of the situation, the route had already started.
Germans and Romanians alike, Cutter from HQ, ran in all directions into the blizzard.
At first the injured were evacuated on sleds, but soon the snow got thicker, they were left
behind.
Russian soldiers found themselves completely alone on the Russian steppe, as the blizzard
peacefully lulled them into eternal sleep.
For every Russian involved in the counterattack, even for new recruits, morale was through
the roof.
For two years they'd endured the humiliation and degradation of invasion, and of the people
being killed and raped with impunity.
Over that time, Soviet propaganda had drip-fed hope, telling them to imagine how sweet the
day would be when they, they personally, liberated the motherland from the Hitlerites.
And now that day had arrived.
Many veterans remembered this counter-thrust as the greatest day of their lives, topping
even their march on Berlin two years later.
The zippy Russian T-34s advanced with such speed, the Red Army sometimes burst in on
German headquarters that were still staffed.
Those German staff officers that fled would have missed the full-hardy order of Adolf
Hitler sent to all divisions, quote.
Thanks for Army to stand firm in spite of danger of temporary encirclement.
Wehrmacht field hospitals, if you could even call them hospitals, overflowed with casualties.
Lines of dying men trailed out into the hospital and off into the snow.
The groans of the dying were heard long before anyone laid sight on any building.
Men with leg or spinal injuries dragged themselves, sometimes miles, through the snow in hope
of treatment.
Amputations were mostly performed with no anesthetic.
Only conscious, the patients had their limbs held down as an exhausted doctor hacked off
an arm or leg with a bone sore.
Like a horror movie, torrents of blood flowed from the tents into the crisp white snow.
Fleeing German officers torched their precious fuel depots to keep them out of Russian hands
and bridges became the ultimate bottleneck, where in some instances German commandos blocked
the crossing, refusing to allow retreat.
On the 22nd of November at 7pm, Paulus sent a message to the Führerbunker that began
with Army surrounded.
He and his 290,000 men were on the cusp of being completely cut off.
The Soviet ring was closing.
The Red Army was just over 40km, 25 miles from their HQ.
As news of their rescue reached them, Chuikov's battered defenders roared to life, emerging
from their caves and counter-attacking with everything they had.
The German Army was now being hit from both directions and isolated breakthroughs had
already started.
The Romanians were in pieces, but the 6th Army inside Stalingrad still had time for
a fighting retreat before the ring closed.
Paulus would have no doubt noticed the grim irony that he and his men may yet follow Napoleon's
route, retreating out of Russia.
But even now, when it was so clear that the counter-offensive had failed, Hitler refused
to even consider retreat.
He ordered the defenders to take up defensive positions, the modern equivalent of yelling
shield wall during ancient warfare.
With these new defensive postures, he coined a new term that would be a harbinger for the
destruction of the 6th Army.
He ordered the Wehrmacht to create Fortress Stalingrad.
Deluded and disconnected, the Führer likely babbled on about the magnificence of the heroic
Aryan soldiers standing tall in the den of Bolshevism.
Eagley, he began planning air drops into Fortress Stalingrad.
Supplying an army of this size by air alone was a huge endeavour.
There were almost 300,000 soldiers in Stalingrad, soldiers that were already living on starvation
rations.
Paulus calculated that if the Führer really did want to hold out, he'd need at least 700
tons of supply per day to be air-dropped in.
The Führer, on his own volition, cut that number to 500.
And by the time it got to Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, it had been whittled
down to 350.
They wouldn't even get close to any of these figures.
Throughout the next few months, the Luftwaffe would manage about 73 tons of supplies per
day.
While the brave crusaders of Europe held the line against the evils of Bolshevism, the
Führer announced, a relief army would be assembled.
The army would swiftly cut through the paltry enemy forces, a corridor would form, and the
Aryan heroes would be resupplied.
Operation Winter Storm would be Germany's finest hour, he insisted.
And after the army was saved, they would hit back even harder, with Operation Thunderclap.
Take a guess at who came up with these names, eh?
His field marshals barely argued back.
You almost get the feeling that they're just apathetic at this point.
They now conclusively understood.
Independent thought was not what Hitler wanted from them.
Apart from worms like Joseph Goebbels, few men seem to really believe in the myth of
Hitler anymore.
Where before they'd seen a proud, youthful leader who had raised up their exhausted nation
in a time of need, they now saw a deluded, aged egomaniac with a god complex.
In wake of their input being disregarded, some members of Nazi High Command pursued their
own passions.
Hermann Göring amassed a huge collection of stolen artwork from occupied territory, and
Heinrich Himmler sent off men to look for Mjolnir, Thor's hammer, hoping that this
mythical Aryan weapon could somehow turn the tide.
Even officers began to openly mock Hitler, derogatively referring to him as Grofaz,
a German acronym that meant, sarcastically, greatest commander of all time.
But not Paulus, Hitler had picked him well.
And even now, as his Fuhrer refused to allow him to break out, Paulus' faith never waned.
Following the confidence of his man, he assured his soldiers,
Hold on, the Fuhrer will get us out.
And most still believed he would.
The winter chill was growing increasingly bitter, but the idea of retreating blindly into the
open steppe was worse.
Like it or not, they were safer in Stalingrad, waiting for the Fuhrer's relief army.
By the 7th of December, rations, already minimal, were cut by between one-third and one-half.
Those airdrops, which Hitler had banked everything on, were sporadic and scarce.
Just getting the planes off the ground was a mission in itself.
Just to get the engine started, ground crews needed to light a fire underneath.
And once the planes made it to Stalingrad, often the Russian artillery was so intense
they were forced to drop their cargo from the air.
For the planes that did make it, the odd arrival of bits and pieces would have been almost
comical if not for the loss of life they caused.
In one instance, the precious crates were eagerly prized open by hungry hands, only
to find the contents of the entire delivery were just pepper and majeurum.
In their bunkers, in their dugouts and in their caves, Wehrmacht soldiers gathered,
like cavemen, staring for hours at a crumpled photo of a wife or lover.
To pass the time, they carved wooden frames from splinters and made a little nook in the
earthen walls to hold the photo.
One bunker was particularly popular for the troops, thanks to the talent of one officer
who would hold down an old piano which he played beautifully.
As the sounds of Russian artillery grew closer, soldiers sat silent, listening to the beautiful
melodies of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven, transported, if only for a few minutes, to somewhere else.
Flights out of the city became rarer and rarer.
Between the blizzards, the frieze and the Russian artillery, the few landing strips
of Wehrmacht held were out of action more often than not.
The female nurses still left in the city were forced upon many of the last flights out.
As the soldiers lined up to watch the women clamber aboard, it was only natural to feel
envious, even jealous.
But if Russian soldiers ever got their hands on German women, well, they'd be put through
exactly what those German soldiers put Russian women through.
With Christmas just around the corner, Kurt Ruber, a pastor, wanted to give the soldiers
something to remind them of home and of God's grace, even as they languished in such a
wretched place.
On an old sheet with a charcoal pencil, he sketched what would come to be known as the
Stalingrad Madonna.
In it, the Virgin Mary sits knees to chest, wearing an oversized shawl, cradling baby
Jesus close to her chest.
Around the edges of the picture are written, light, life, love.
Fortress Stalingrad, Christmas in the Cauldron, 1942.
Ruber was slightly embarrassed as his decrepit bunker became a de facto chapel, and many
soldiers who entered wept upon seeing his drawing.
With no hot water, lice, or radio problem, ran rampant, as did the creatures that carried
them.
Driven indoors from the cold, the men slept surrounded by them.
One soldier awoke to find a swarm of the vermin eating away at one of his frostbitten
toes.
Another noted that when a man died, a literal sea of lice could be observed leaving the body
on mass and moving to a new host.
Men took to using spatulas to try and scrape the little beasts off their beards and hair.
In between the mice, the lice, the excrement, rotten food, and corpses, typhus soon followed.
The only thing keeping these men together, keeping them following orders, was the hope
of the Fuhrer's Relief Army.
Irrespective of their feelings towards Hitler, no one thought the Fuhrer would just leave
the 6th Army to rot.
Morality aside, from a military perspective, it was incredibly wasteful.
The 6th Army was one of the last elite armies the Wehrmacht had left.
Surely Hitler must be doing everything he could to get them out, if only for them to
defend the home front.
But Hitler had other ideas.
Even a mind as warped as his was finally coming to terms that there was no longer any hope
of victory.
The Relief Army he'd promised had barely made headway through the Russian Wall.
Taking Stalingrad had always been about ego.
Conquering the city of his rival's namesake was the ultimate prize, but if he couldn't
have that, he'd settle for a glorious last stand.
The Fuhrer imagined the rippling figures of his Aryan children standing atop a mangled
pile of Russian corpses, machine gun in hand firing down to their last bullets before the
subhuman Slavic Horde overwhelmed them.
This he decided was the ultimate ending, an ending every citizen could be proud of, an
ending he could stomach.
Dearest Father, the division has been trimmed down for the big battle, but the big battle
won't take place.
You will be surprised that I write to you and in the care of your office, but all I have
to say in this letter can only be said among men.
You will transmit it to mother in your own way.
The word is out that we can write today, for one familiar with the situation that means
that we can do it just once more.
You are a colonel, my dear father, and a member of the general staff, so you know what this
means and I won't go into explanations which might sound sentimental.
This is the end.
It will last perhaps another week, I think, than the games up.
I do not want to look for reasons which one could marshal for or against our situation.
The reasons are altogether unimportant and pointless, but if I am to say anything about
them it is this.
Do not look to us for some explanation of the situation, but to yourselves and to the
man who is responsible for it.
Be on guard so that a greater disaster does not overtake our country.
The hell on the vulgar should be a warning to you.
I beg you, don't brush off this experience.
And now a remark about the present.
Only 69 men are still in fighting condition.
Blair is still alive and so is Hart Leib.
Little Deggan lost both his arms and will probably be in Germany soon.
We still have two machine guns and 400 rounds of ammunition.
One mortar and ten shells.
Besides that, only hunger and fatigue.
Without waiting for orders, Berg broke out with 20 men.
Better to know in three days how things will end than in three weeks.
Can't blame him.
And now to personal matters.
You can be sure that everything will end decently.
It is a little early at 30, I know.
No sentiments.
Handshake for Lydia and Helen.
Kiss for mother.
Be careful old man, think of her heart trouble.
Kiss for Gerda.
Regards to all the rest.
Hand to Helmutfather.
First Lieutenant, respectfully gives notice of departure.
It's just two days until Christmas, the Wehrmacht soldiers had tried their best to make their
miserable lives a little more festive, even if just for the day.
One division slaughtered their last pack horse to make Christmas sausage.
Another carved little Christmas trees from wooden splinters.
Others still saved up the pittance of food they were allocated in hope of giving a final
gift to a friend.
Cigarettes, boots, picture frames, any intact articles of clothing were passed around.
This in fortress Stalingrad was in full swing, complete with a sip or two from an officer's
bottle of wine that he'd saved for the capture of the city.
Stalin, though, was never one for festivities.
Early in the morning, a Russian tank division had managed to punch right through the boundaries
of Tatsun Sky Airfield, the 6th Army's lifeline.
Under the cover of yet another blizzard, tanks advanced virtually unopposed to the edge of
the runway and began taking pot shots at the precious Luftwaffe supply planes.
Visibility was low, but there were so many targets the tanks fired blindly into the storms.
It was pandemonium for the air marshals who would receive no warning that the enemy was
so close to the base.
As frantic messengers warbled over the airways, planes took off left and right, crashing into
each other and clogging the runway.
Any craft that got airborne was ordered to make for their backup airbase, which was little
more than a patch of tarmac in the snow.
By the evening, the Russians had taken the vital airbase and destroyed about 10 percent
of the total Luftwaffe's fleet.
Stalin now had his foot on the last major blood vessel pumping life into fortress Stalingrad.
Christmas had been a somber affair for the Germans, but for the Red Army, things were
slowly improving.
With the Volga now frozen solid, soldiers could cross with impunity, and many took advantage
of the saunas that had been set up on the other side.
De Laustin scrubbed clean their returns in high spirits.
On the note of spirits, General Chukhov also took the opportunity to get out of Stalingrad
for the day.
Returning in the evening, steaming drunk, he stumbled across the river and fell through
a thin section in the ice.
The rock nearly sank to the bottom, but a comrade pulled him free at the last moment.
Letters to Russian wives showed that soldiers knew the tide had well and truly turned.
Darling, wrote one soldier, we are pushing the serpents back to where they came from.
Our successful advance brings our next meeting closer.
New years came and went, and though Paulus's diary entries show that he knew their fate
was sealed, he tried his best to keep his troops motivated.
The men were now so weak, so malnourished that even if the order was given to evacuate,
few divisions had the strength to do so.
In the grips of starvation, soldiers dragged themselves from their hovels to hear Paulus
read Hitler's newest speech to them.
In it, he talked of glory and of how he was doing all he could to bring them home.
He concluded with quote, your staunchness will come to the most glorious feat in the
history of German arms.
The men were relieved to hear that the Fuhrer had not forgotten them and that any day now,
Panzers would berth through the lines with armfuls of ham, water, fresh clothes, medicine
and ammunition.
With nothing but a prayer keeping them going, no one thought too deeply into what glorious
feat Hitler was referring to.
Generals who visited the horrific front lines couldn't believe the skinny cavemen they
saw were once the proud men of the Wehrmacht-Sichthame.
They told Hitler what they'd seen and begged him to see reason, get these people out while
he still could.
There was no honour in forcing these men to die so needlessly and cruelly.
General Zeitler, in solidarity with the soldiers, reduced his own rations to match that of a
frontline soldier and lost 26 pounds, 12 kilograms, in just two weeks.
Hitler, disgusted at Zeitler's withered frame, ordered him to resume eating normally and assured
Zeitler to show solidarity they would instead ban drinking champagne and brandy in the bunker.
On the morning of January the 13th, 1943, Wienerik Bayer nervously cleared his throat
and combed back his dark hair.
The 25-year-old officer stood in the parlour of the Wolfsden, waiting for an audience with
Adolf Hitler.
Hours ago he had been at Stalingrad.
A logistics officer, Bayer was responsible for the distribution of ammunition across
the front, but that morning he had been handpicked for a special mission by Marshal Paulus himself.
He was being sent to meet the Fuhrer in person and obtained permission to allow Paulus and
the Sixth Army to surrender.
So far Hitler had refused to see reason, he had ignored facts, figures and logistics,
but Paulus knew the dictator was prone to following his emotions.
Paulus figured that the same facts coming from the mouth of a young, handsome staff officer
who had lived through Stalingrad might be the chink in the Fuhrer's armour.
Hitler represented the next generation, the one that the Fuhrer always claimed to be building
a world for.
It also didn't hurt that he had a Knight's Cross medal for bravery and was visibly malnourished,
but not to the point that would sicken Hitler and make him turn away.
Taking off his belt and pistol, he made sure his medal was nice and high on his turtleneck
as he was waved into a large meeting room when numerous generals and staff officers
sat in gloomy silence.
Going over the table was Baer's supreme commander, his Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.
Baer had met Hitler once before many years ago in France.
At that time he had been enraptured by the Fuhrer, he thought the man a genius and his
energy and dynamism kept him hanging on his every word.
Now he looked aged and haggard, and before Baer could get a word in the Fuhrer began
his lecture.
Maybe he welcomed him and acknowledged the problems faced in Stalingrad, but as he demonstrated
on his map, the Reich had many problems and Stalingrad was just one of them.
Baer had been warned against this.
The dictator's strategy when receiving bad news was to just fill a buster until the messenger
gave up.
Patiently, Baer stood listening as the dictator motioned at various flags across the Stalingrad
front.
After the flags, the Fuhrer said represented a division, thousands of men, but Baer knew
many of these flags were just down to single digits of men who could still hold a rifle.
He felt the anger inside rising as Hitler spoke vaguely of the numerous SS divisions
that would soon arrive to rescue them, divisions that once again Baer knew were nowhere near
the front.
The Fuhrer finished his lecture and with a smile moved to escort the young officer to
the exit, but Baer didn't move.
Hitler had his moment, now it was his turn.
Just like Paulus told him to do, he told the Fuhrer simply that they were starving.
The soldiers at Stalingrad had no food and little ammunition.
When he pointed out that the airdrops had all but ceased, a representative from the
Luftwaffe moved to cut him off, but Hitler waved him away.
When he spoke about desertions from behind Hitler's back, the head of their Wehrmacht
waggled his finger at the young man, indicating that he better shut up now, but Baer plowed
on.
Finally, after upsetting almost every member in the room, he finished and knew straight
away he had failed at his mission.
Hitler immediately retorted with a well-oiled speech about the imminent arrival of the SS
divisions.
He counted that the 6th Army had been complaining about dwindling supplies in early December,
but yet here they were holding out two months later, and he repeated over and over, Stalingrad
must hold out.
Baer left the map room dejected, only to find his pistol and belt stolen.
Sensing his deep frustration, two staff officers approached him and quietly asked him if he'd
like to join a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.
For this to be discussed so openly shows just how far faith had fallen in the disgraced dictator.
Fearing for his safety, Baer said no.
Later that afternoon he found out that he was forbidden to fly back to Stalingrad.
Hitler feared his defeatist attitude would not help Paulus's low mood.
Instead, Hitler sent Paulus a transmission that read,
Capitulation is impossible.
The 6th Army will do its historic duty at Stalingrad until the last man, in order to
make possible the reconstruction of the Eastern Front.
The time has come for me to send you greetings once more, and to ask you to greet all the
loved ones at home.
The Russians have broken through everywhere.
Our troops, weakened by long periods of hunger, engaged in the heaviest fighting since the
beginning of this battle without a day's relief, and in a state of complete physical
exhaustion have performed heroically.
None of them surrenders.
When bread, ammunition, gasoline, and manpower give out, it is God knows no victory for the
enemy to crush us.
We are aware that we are the victims of serious mistakes in leadership.
Also, the wearing down of fortress Stalingrad will cause the most severe damage to Germany
and her people.
But in spite of it, we still believe in the happy resurrection of our nation.
True hearted men will see to that.
We are Prussian staff officers, and know what we have to do when the time comes.
When thinking over the course of my life once more, I can look back on it with thankfulness.
It has been beautiful.
Very beautiful.
It was like climbing a ladder, and even this last rung is beautiful, a crowning of it.
I might almost say a harmonious completion.
You must tell my parents that they should not be sad.
They must remember me with happy hearts.
No halo, please, I have never been an angel, nor do I want to confront my God as one.
I'll manage it as a soldier, with the free, proud soul of a cavalryman, as a hare.
I'm not afraid of death.
My faith gives me this beautiful independence of spirit.
Be especially loving with my parents, and so help them get over the first grief.
Put up a wooden cross for me in the park cemetery, as simple and as beautiful as uncle's.
This is my last great wish.
In my writing desk is a letter which I recorded my wishes during my last leave.
So once more, I turn to all of you, dear ones.
My thanks once more for everything, and hold your heads high.
Keep on.
I embrace all of you.
As Bear walked dejected from the Führerbunker, he couldn't know that the time for rescue
had already passed.
The Stavka had just launched Operation Ring, the final envelopment of Fortress Stalingrad.
The Red Army had now fully encircled the city.
All they needed to do was close the ring.
The Skeleton soldiers from the Legion of the Damned fought back with the last of their
strength.
Just three days into the operation, Russian casualty figures topped 26,000 dead.
Now that victory was assured, Zhukov and others resorted to the same human wave attacks that
they'd used at the commencement of the invasion.
Just like in the past, the commanders couldn't give a damn about how many men died, meeting
the objective.
When the Red Army came across their defeated foes, even for veteran soldiers, it was a
shocking sight.
Rake-thin men dressed in rags, salad faces covered in bites and sores, with blackened
hands soaked in yellow antifrost bite ointment.
Like rats on a sinking ship, Wehrmacht soldiers with enough strength to walk made for the
Potomnik airfield, one of the last functioning airstrips the Sikha armies still held.
Soldiers rushed onto the runway, trying to jump onto landing planes to get first dibs
at any food on board.
Soldiers scheduled for evacuation were forced aside as men clambered to escape.
As the crowd surged forward, airport staff fired warning shots in the air to try and
re-establish order.
One wounded soldier noted, quote, Here was the greatest misery that I have ever seen
in my whole life.
An endless wailing of wounded and dying men, most of them received nothing to eat for days.
No more food was given to the wounded, supplies were reserved for fighting troops.
As the Russian divisions began to close in on Potomnik, many soldiers and officers rechecked
their bearings.
They were supposed to be heading towards an airfield, but from the distance they saw
a sizeable town.
It was only when they got closer they realized this town was really just hundreds of burnt
out and abandoned vehicles that ringed the airfield.
An enormous junkyard.
The husks of German personnel carriers, tanks and planes had been left once the fuel ran
out.
The area had become a dumping ground for discarded equipment and discarded people.
Inside were the bodies of countless injured troops who, like their vehicles, had been
abandoned in the rush to the airfield.
Many all-missing limbs and with no bandages available had been patched up with paper.
With the Russians felt any pity for these men, it quickly evaporated when they found
the Russian prisoners left behind.
Virtually all were dead, and those that weren't were so far gone that when given a bit of
sausage or bread, their bodies couldn't process it and they died from shock.
The last few planes to make it out of Potomnik were ordered to reroute to a new airfield
that had not even been set up.
Gumruk, eight miles to the east, was still having the radio beacons powered on as planes
appeared in the sky and jerked down onto the patchy runway.
The fall of Potomnik finally seemed to be the straw that had broken the camel's back.
The scales had now fallen from the eyes of even the most zealous Hitlerites.
Hitler wasn't coming to save them, they were being left here to die.
The Stalingrad pocket had now been torn in two, with Paulus on one side and another
commander holding the other.
General Hoob, a prominent Wehrmacht officer, escaped the cauldron on one of the last planes
out of Gumruk.
Paulus prepared to go down with the ship.
Perhaps on the same plane as Hoob, Paulus sent his final letter to his wife, along with his
medals and wedding ring.
What was the thought running through his mind at this point?
He had served the Fuhrer loyally, he had obeyed every order, every instruction, no matter
how difficult they were, and what had it got him?
An icy bunker in Stalingrad, a city that, up until his operation began, he had not even
heard of.
A sad-looking swastika, hanging limply in front of a bombed-out department store, was
the last vestige of Nazi power in Stalingrad, as all inside countered down their final days.
In a deep depression, Paulus was approached by a major who begged of him advice, asking
what he should do as they now ran out of reserves.
Paulus, with a vacant expression on his face, replied, quote,
Dead men are no longer interested in military history.
As the last few bullets of the 6th Army were fired in respect to the Fuhrer's orders,
Hitler had not only given up on the men, but had moved on to a new plan.
On the last flights leaving Gumrak, Hitler ordered that one man from each division should
be saved so he could rebuild the famous 6th Army from the ground up.
Historian Antony Beaver coined this, the 6th Army's Noah's Ark.
To initiate this plan while he was refusing to let the very same men's surrender is
perhaps one of the coldest, cruelest decisions he'd made up to this point, it shows that
Hitler had as little regard for Nazi life as he did for the enemy's life.
On January 30th, 1943, exactly 20 years since the Nazis took power, Joseph Goebbels gave
a speech to the German public.
In a Berlin auditorium decked out with swastikas, the German public tuned in for the latest
news of the war.
Housewives across the right cranked the volume knob on their radio, hoping for news of their
brothers or sons.
But Goebbels would disappoint them, mentioning Stalingrad just once in a list of the many
fronts of airmarked were now stretched across.
No amount of party rhetoric could hide his concern as he spoke about the need for total
war.
The time to sacrifice, he said, was coming, a 14 hour work days and a food rationing.
Up until this point, German citizens had been shielded from the horrors of war.
Cream, silk, chocolate and tin.
In Britain these were scarce, but Hitler had always wanted to keep the German public content.
But now he had no choice, there was no more surplus.
For them to have any hope in the war, the whole economy needed to be reorientated for
the war effort.
The citizens of the Reich were soon to experience the horrors of war, just as Russian citizens
had.
As the nasally voice of Goebbels crackled through the frigid barracks of Stalingrad, the wounded
soldiers groaned as if hearing his voice was somehow worsening their injuries.
Turn it off, men yelled, as Goebbels continued.
The epic struggle of our soldiers on the Volga should be a reminder for everyone to do their
best for the struggle and the freedom of Germany and of the future of our people, and at the
same time in the broader sense for the preservation of our whole continent.
As the protests and yells got louder, officers scrambled to turn off the radio.
One man said the speech was like hearing his own funeral oration.
The very next day, Marshal Paulus was promoted to Field Marshal.
Paulus was no fool, and immediately knew what the promotion meant.
A Nazi Field Marshal had never been taken prisoner, and Hitler didn't expect that
to change now.
The destruction of the 6th Army was near, and if Ural wanted to make sure he got the
symbolic end that he desired, Paulus was to kill himself.
Field Marshal Paulus dressed in a shabby Yushanka Russian hat called the final staff meeting
with his generals, and for the first time in his life, voiced defiance at Hitler's
order, quote,
I have no intention of shooting myself for this bohemian corporal.
One of his last orders was to forbid German soldiers from standing still above trenches
and waiting for enemies to shoot them.
Enough people had died, this farce had to come to an end.
Within a few hours the Russians were at his door.
Stalin had been in a mad panic to ensure Paulus was caught, but he didn't need to worry.
The Marshal wasn't going anywhere.
Russian translators told him the city had fallen, and that he was now their prisoner.
Neither Paulus nor his staff objected.
Looking over their pistols they followed the Red Army soldiers out of the bunker where
a photographer was waiting.
Eyes cast downwards, thin with a patchy beard.
The twitchy Field Marshal Frederick Paulus was led outside, bundled into a staff car
and whisked away.
Stalin had his prize.
The Siege of Stalingrad came to an end in early February 1942.
After Paulus' capture, a few of the most dedicated soldiers fought to the last bullet
just as Hitler ordered, but by the second, organised resistance had all but stopped.
The bloodiest battle in world history had lasted a little over five months and claimed
the lives of somewhere between one and two million men, women and children.
Once the prisoners were counted, even the Red Army were stunned to see just how many
soldiers they had captured.
Stalin was exuberant to learn he just bagged himself 91,000 prisoners, including 11 generals.
Adolf Hitler was livid, but not at the fall of the city he expected that.
He was beyond words with anger and fury.
He couldn't understand why Paulus had not killed himself.
To Hitler, Paulus was the symbol of the Sikthami and allowing himself to be captured had completely
ruined his idea of a glorious last stand.
I mean this seriously, until his dying day he would curse Paulus in a fury but more astounded
that he had chosen not to fall on his sword.
In a meeting with his generals that took place a few days after the fall of the city, Hitler
anguishes that he should have picked up these defects in Paulus' character.
He asked what should he do now?
How could he even ask such a thing?
So in the future, whenever a fortification is besieged and the commanding officer receives
a demand to surrender, he's going to ask first, what shall I do now?
Hitler continues,
How easy it is to do such a thing.
The pistol, that's quite easy.
What kind of cowardice it must be to even flinch from that.
Ha!
Better to let yourself be buried alive and in such a situation where he knows full well
that his death is a requirement for holding the next pocket, because if he gives an example
like that, you can't expect the men to continue fighting.
As a dictator ranted, one of his generals noticed how deranged and sick the furanel looked.
Quote,
His left hand trembled, his back was bent, his gaze was fixed, his eyes protruded but
lacked their former luster, his cheeks were flecked with red.
Back in Stalingrad the last few Wehrmacht soldiers were escorted out of their subterranean
caves into the chilly February air.
No use to death, fire, noise and decay, everything was now still.
For the men that had lived through the five hellish months of the siege, the quietness
of the city and the calm of the Volga must have seemed almost surreal.
One Russian soldier yelled to a group of prisoners, motioning to the ruins of the city,
he said to them,
Quote,
You see this?
This is what Berlin will look like.
And he'd be right.
The tide had finally turned.
Stalingrad, the Russian campaign in general had been one front too many and the Reich
was collapsing like a house of cards.
By the end of 1943 the Red Army would push the Wehrmacht back to the Dnieper River and
the Allies would occupy Italy.
By 1945 there would be in Germany.
With enough trauma for ten lifetimes there was little doubt about how German civilians
would be treated by the Red Army, as one marching song went, Quote.
Soon the war will end, soon Hitler will be kaput we vow, soon our temporary wives will
be bellowing like a cow.
O you pigeon-toed Hitler, you'll surely pay for your sin.
In what world the girls will be asking, who made off with all our men?
As the end drew closer an increasingly delusional Hitler would dream up counter-attack one after
the other.
Alone in his concrete bunker, manic and giddy, he'd spend hours shifting flags and pieces
around maps of Europe while his generals, almost out of pity, let him live in his fantasy
world.
With each punch the Wehrmacht grew weaker and weaker, eventually resorting to conscripting
children and old men to fill their ranks.
On the 30th of April 1945, Hitler and his wife of 40 hours, Eva Braun, sat down for
lunch in their bunker.
Around the table was the remainder of their staff, including Joseph Goebbels.
When the meal ended, Hitler and Eva said goodbye to their staff members, with the Berlin defenders
having less than 24 hours of ammunition remaining, and it was the end of the line.
After about an hour and a half, staff heard a single gunshot, and entering Hitler's bedroom
they found the lifeless body of the dictator and his wife.
Hitler had shot himself in the temple with a Walther PPK, and Eva had taken a cyanide
capsule.
With Hitler dead, Berlin was ready to surrender.
Giorgi Zhukov was in prime position to be the general that would accept the surrender
of the city, but Stalin, whose paranoia had now resurfaced, wouldn't allow it.
Fearing Zhukov's popularity could eclipse his own, he permitted another Red Army general
to gain the ultimate glory in his stead.
Once the war was over, Zhukov remained an important part of the Soviet apparatus, before
he would, again, fall foul of Stalin and his successors.
After a few stints in various government positions, he retired from politics for good in 1957
to fish and write his memoirs.
Following a decade of declining health, Giorgi Zhukov died of a stroke in 1977.
Vasily Chukov, the stone of Stalin-Grad, fought loyally until the end of the war, pushing
the Eastern Front all the way back to Berlin.
Unlike Zhukov, he was permitted to be present when the city finally surrendered.
After the war, he would continue serving in the Soviet military for many years.
He was heavily involved in the planning behind Russia's most iconic statue.
The Motherland Calls was the name given to the 85-meter statue constructed in the memory
of the heroes who fought in Stalin-Grad.
Built atop the heavily contested Tata burial ground within the city, at the time of the
construction, the statue was the tallest in the world.
A proud-looking woman, symbolizing Mother Russia, beckons the citizens of the Soviet
Union to her aid, with a sword raised and her dress billowing in the wind.
Always dancing with death, the stone would finally succumb to sepsis from an old war
wound and die in 1982.
He was buried in Stalin-Grad, atop the burial mound that he'd fought so hard for, where
his grave is still regularly visited today.
First Marshal Friedrich Paulus was kept as a prisoner of the Soviets for eight years.
By the time he was released in 1953, his wife, who had not seen him since 1942, had passed
away.
Once he returned to a now-divided Germany, he announced he'd renounced most of his
Nazi worldviews.
At a conference in Berlin, Paulus answered a question that no doubt many German citizens
had been pondering since the war ended.
There are still many people today who wonder how Germany, which no doubt possessed a highly
trained army, could be defeated in two wars.
The question cannot be answered in military terms.
The governments responsible for this have both put their armed forces in front of insoluble
problems.
Even the best army is doomed to fail when it is required to perform impossible tasks.
That is, when it is ordered to campaign against the national existence of other peoples.
Paulus would spend his remaining years working as a kind of military historian, preaching
his belief that the peoples of Europe should mend the risks that had been torn apart by
Nazi Germany.
This, he proclaimed, was the only way for Europe to avoid being dominated by the growing
power of the United States.
Friedrich Paulus died in 1957 and was buried next to his wife in Dresden, East Germany.
Kurt Ruber, the pastor who sketched the Stalingrad Madonna, would die in a POW camp in mid-1950.
His original sketch made it back to Berlin where it is still visited to this day.
Copies of it can be found in churches in the UK, Germany and Russia as a symbol of reconciliation
between the three nations.
Herman Göring, Hitler's most zealous follower, would survive the war, ending up as one of
the highest ranking Nazis rounded up for the famous Nuremberg Trials.
Göring, like many others of Hitler's cabinet, proved slippery, but with such troves of evidence
against him, was only a matter of time until prosecutors made some of them stick.
Göring was sentenced to death, but took his own life the day before the sentence was to
be carried out.
Joseph Stalin's intense paranoia would seem firmly retaining the reins of power until
he died of a stroke in 1953.
Stalin's legacy is much less black and white than Hitler's.
While Germans today rightfully regard Adolf Hitler as a monster, in Russia Joseph Stalin
certainly has his admirers.
When I visited Moscow a few years back, I saw an old babushka tearfully kneeling in
his grave above a few long stemmed roses.
Likewise, when I travelled to Transnistria, a little Russian exclave on the side of Moldova,
I was shocked to see portraits of Stalin right next to Putin in many shops and businesses.
It's not within the scope of this episode to try and summarise Stalin's legacy, but
there's a quote that's usually attributed to Churchill, although I'm not sure he actually
said it, that might help us to understand the thought process of Stalin's admirers.
Stalin took Russia with horse and plough and left it with atomic bombs.
It's May 2, 1945, and Hitler's capital, Belen, lies in ruins.
The destroyed streets are still quiet and sad.
In the bombed out ruins of the Reichstag building, Russian troops sought through the mountains
of paperwork until one stack catches their eye.
Removing the classified packaging wrap, they find letters, hundreds of them.
The letters were from many different hands but all came from one destination, Stalingrad.
Only bound and ordered were the last words ever penned by the soldiers of the 6th Army
of the German Wehrmacht.
Within these letters to their wives, sons, parents or friends, the troops of the 6th Army
penned their final, most enduring thoughts.
Over the course of this episode, you've heard these letters and learnt what these men reflected
on their last days or hours on Earth.
You heard that some went into darkness full of anger and fury, but the majority reminisced
and thought introspectively about what their life had been.
The saddest part of all this is that none of these letters reached the person they were
destined for.
Filled with dangerous anti-Nazi rhetoric and sentimentality not appropriate for Aryan men,
the letters were collected, personal information was stripped out, and the overall tone of
the letter was classified to gauge the attitudes of soldiers toward Nazi leadership.
Seeing these letters made me reflect on how easy it is to get swept away with the pace
of life and how some of the little moments, a road trip with your friends or a family
dinner, events we barely noticed at the time could well be the ones that stick with you.
Over the last four episodes we've followed Hitler's 1941 invasion of the USSR.
The Great Patriotic War, as it's called in Russia, remains one of the most important
events in Russian history, and the Siege of Stalingrad, now renamed Volggrad, was the
climax of that event, a time when military doctrine and superior technology smashed
against raw grit and stubborn resistance.
In this series I've tried to summarize what's a very complex topic and for the sake of flow
I've omitted a lot of detail and some very colourful characters I would have liked to
work in.
YouTube channels, books, podcasts, even people's careers have been dedicated to understanding
the intricacies of this invasion, needless to say this series is meant to be an overview.
If you'd like to learn more I've put you in the direction of Antony Beaver's fantastic
book Stalingrad, which has been my go-to for this episode.
If you'd like to listen rather than read, check out the podcast The Battle of Stalingrad
by Des Latham, which is a blow-by-blow account of the battle, and if you're more visual
and really want to see the messy front line waxing and waning day by day, check out the
YouTube channel TIK History.
I really appreciate this is a very sensitive and comparatively recent topic compared to
what we usually cover, and if you've listened through these 4 episodes and noticed I made
some mistakes, please do let me know and if required I'll add the correction on our website.
I hope you've enjoyed our very first series for Season 6, and if you have it would be
very appreciated if you could leave me a 5-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcast.
Likewise, hey, share the podcast with your friends if they're needing something to listen
to while they wait for the next hardcore history to drop.
This episode, like all others, is dedicated to our amazing patrons, and an extra shout-out
to our Justinian tier members who are Angus, Claudia, John, Seth and Tom.
If you'd like to join them in supporting the show for just a couple of bucks a month,
please follow the link to our website, it's in the show notes.
This will be the last episode before our extended break for Season 6.
For more information on that, check out our Season 5 Wrap-Up episode.
I really hope you've had a wonderful holiday period, and I'll catch you on the next one.
Thanks guys, cheers.