It was quite a plunge, for this dude who knew nothing about the decisive WWII battle, to read 400 pages about its smallest details. Yet at no point did I feel that I was missing knowledge. On the contrary. My ignorance gave this read the air of a thriller.
I was educated by the Israeli school system, which understandably puts more emphasis on the Final Solution and the suffering of Jewish population than on front line action. Reading “Stalingrad”, I was shocked to find out though how involved the Wehrmacht had been in the elimination of Jewish populations at occupied cities and villages. I believed, or maybe I wanted to believe, that less of the German people were involved in carrying out the holocaust.
Reading Stalingrad, I got a good peek at the work of Hitler as a leader. In that regard, it was an eye opener for me, similar to the movie Der Untergang. As much as Hitler was the devil, his administration was still a regime, with its decision making processes, with officials and officers better and less liked by their peers and the Fuehrer, and with good and bad communication instances among the staff. It is nicely narrated side by side with Stalin’s regime management style. Specifically in decision making, it is clear in the book how Hitler relied mainly on himself and his deteriorating instincts, while Stalin, although still very involved, picked the best men for the job and did his best to trust them. The fate of the men not picked varied hugely as well; while Hitler would move them from office or deploy them elsewhere, Stalin would simply execute them. This reflects in a reverse manner in the simple soldier’s brave acts. The German soldiers, highly reliant on their superiors, seem practically lost when abandoned. They confront and observe the Russian privates, who keep fighting even on their own and in absurd circumstances, when all is lost.
Not enough can be said about the suffering of civilians under WWII occupation and re-claiming of territory. And it goes way beyond the Nazi mission of leaving cities ‘Judenrein‘. Everyone suffers. The Wehrmacht steals their livestock and crops as part of its restocking plan, and a re-occupying Red Army treats them as traitors. In the mean time, their young men fighting at the front, pushed further away from their home, are torn.
Beevor does a good job at portraying the advantage of the Germans in the summer, versus their complete inability to adapt to the Russian winter. The first advances of 1941 over a thousand miles seem almost too easy for the Nazis. They take more land than they can handle. Slowly, the delays in action force them to keep fighting through the winter. It is devastating to them, and makes it is hard to believe that they will have to fight into yet another one.
It is obvious that in his research, Beevor had access to plenty of correspondence between soldiers and their families. He even quotes from letters that have never reached their destination. Nor did the writer. Letters can add a personal touch to facts. Beevor uses them rather to give the reader a look into the morale of the soldiers and the issues with which they are most occupied.
Repetition throughout the book gives the feeling of reading a reference rather than a continuous work. In the first part of the book, Stalingrad’s demise and reduction to ruins is described over and over again. But it seems right and the reader is still tolerant here. It really feels like no words can describe the damage. This repetition occurs again though in the descriptions of snowy battlefields lined with corpses and hungry, sick live soldiers infested with lice. It causes some exhaustion.
Some facts are heaped up with no real context. It’s as if, whether they fit in or not, Beevor had a hard time giving up some of the facts he meticulously gathered. Some of these facts are nice to have, even with no real context, but some damage the book’s fluency.
Traitor stories from the Russian side are heartbreaking. A chapter about Russian traitors is inserted right at the right spot, when the Russian army is in a desperate situation. The reader is spared no horror, by details about the famous second line of NKVD, ready to shoot retreating soldiers of their own people. By stories of soldiers shooting their comrades who tried to run over to the German side. And with examples of extreme traitor punishment, like the battalion whose commander accused its soldiers of retreating, then put them in formation and shot every tenth soldier in the face.
Some of the horror made me appreciate the long way we came, where today we value each individual’s life. Back then it sometimes seems to be of no value. A drunk Russian commander ordered his subordinate to take his men, 300 cadets, to react to a German tank formation attack. Since the cadets had no weapons, it was simply a massacre.
This book gives great insight into one of the most important battles of the 20th century. Sometimes it heaps up more details than one would find interesting, but rarely does it miss any. Armed with the amazing facts of the battle as its plot, “Stalingrad” is one book I will not forget.
Scotch Water 